Behind the Bastards - Part One: Mosley: The British Hitler Who Inspired the Christchurch Shooter

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

In Episode 55, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's boiling my crabs? I'm Robert Evans. And this is, once again, behind the bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. How'd you guys feel about that intro? I loved it. Good? Good? My favorite. Thank you. What's boiling my crabs? What's boiling my crabs? Let's make that a thing we always say everywhere. It's gonna be

my new t-shirt. I like it more than the last time, whatever it was, I figure what it was. That was the what's itching my rashes. Yeah, no, that was a rough one. This one's good. This is palatable. It belongs on not just a normal shirt, but exclusively on sleeveless shirts. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's just what crabs make me think. The artwork's gonna be key, but this is happening. Yeah. As you listening have probably guessed by now, my guests for today's episode are Katie and Cody, Katie Johnston, and Cody Johnston and Katie Stoll. Sorry. Of the some news network, how are y'all doing today? So good. Honestly, hi. Hey. Are you doing okay? Did you say honestly, you're high or honestly high? I was saying hello, but I see how that would sound like I was saying. It

does sound like you're saying. I'm doing high right now. It really did. I mean, we're in the city of Los Angeles where conservatively 90% of the city is high at any given time. 100%. You walk around and there are two predominant smells. One is marijuana and the other is skunk, at least in my neighborhood. It's one or the other. And they're similar. They are similar. They are similar because we have bad drivers partly because of all of the marijuana. Today, we are talking about a fellow named Oswald Mosley. Finally. You'll know about Oswald Mosley. Ask me again in an hour. Y'all's about to. So let's tear into this submarine sandwich of knowledge. Let's eat this crab. Let's eat this crab. Let's crack this crab open, fish out its delicious butter-drenched meat,

cover our table and our shirt in crab goo. I got my bib on. Got my bib on. And I always rip the bib at some point. You throw out the shirt. Well, it's like kind of a napkin. It gets all oily. You're having a real good crab feast. You don't keep those clothing. I just walk naked out of the crab restaurant. Just burn my shirt in there in their furnace. Then Google the next crab restaurant you can find. You can only go. You have to do it again. That's the key with a good crab restaurant. You get one shot. You better do it right, y'all. But who is it? Glorious. It's a great four and a half hours. All right. Let's talk about this fascist. For slightly shorter than you would spend at a crab restaurant. Much shorter. We'll do a four-part episode that's just me at a crab

restaurant and that will be the bastard. So you'll be the bastard. I am the worst version of myself when I'm eating crab. Boy, nobody needs any of that. All right. Sir Oswald Arnold Mosley was born on the 16th of November, 1896. He was the oldest of three children. His family was one of those wonky ass noble families that the British still have for some reason. So at birth, Oswald Mosley became the sixth baronet of Eppdale Hall, Staffordshire. His mother, Maude, gave birth without the benefit of her husband, Waldy's presence because he was quote, a rake gambler and a heavy drinker. Yeah. Nevertheless, Waldy bragged to anyone who would hear about the birth of his air. Maude wrote in her diary on the day of Oswald's birth. Thankful. It's a boy. Oswald went by Tommy

as a little kid. He was ill often and as you might have guessed by all the names and titles, he grew up very wealthy. Tommy. Tommy. That's short for Oswald. Yep. Everything the British do is wrong. So I'm going to say something right now, right here. I've gotten a lot of shit on the Twitter, on the twats, the tweets for my mispronunciation of British town names and city names. And I feel like with all of the evil that colonialism did, the one way we can make it right is by forever mispronouncing the names of small towns in the United Kingdom. I couldn't agree more. Stuff which went upon. Exactly. Exactly. So that's just how it's going to be this episode. I always call London Landon. Landon. Landon. Yeah. Because then it sounds like a sleazy ex-boyfriend

and not like the city that ruled the world for 200 years. Fucking Landon. Fucking Landon. Oswald's family was so rich that they had an ancestral manor, Aptale Hall. Their wealth had been built up in the 16th century by his ancestor, Nicholas Mosley, who the book Blackshirt describes as, quote, one of the swindling sheep farmers who at the time were expropriating the common lands of the English people. So that's where his family money comes from. Stealing common lands from sheep farmers. Okay. That adds up. Seems wealthy. Steals from people. Seems like that's the only way families get wealthy. A reverse Robinhood, if you will. A reverse Robinhood. A sheriff of Nottingham. The more successful and more socially accepted. Yeah. Because you know Robinhood died

in a ditch somewhere. Right. And the sheriff of Nottingham's descendants now were like behind Brexit. Oswald Mosley's great-grandfather, Sir Oswald, later leased out their property in Manchester for a huge sum of money. For reasons which are unclear to me due to my lack of knowledge of 19th century British leasing laws, the Mosleys wound up in a long-running dispute with the Jewish businessman of Manchester. According to the book Blackshirt, quote, in the 1880s, although Jews played only a minor role in money lending, Walter Tomlinson, a local journalist, noted that the identification of Jews with extortion at Ursury was extensively believed in. Mosley's grandfather was at the forefront of the campaign against Jewish emancipation.

So his granddad was one of the big, I don't want Jews voting guys. Anyway, here's what they thought of the Jews. Four paragraphs in. Here's what his granddad thought about the Jews. I don't know why I was surprised. It took longer than I expected. Oswald's grandfather wound up being his chief male influence as a boy. His dad, Waldi, is generally described as a piece of shit. Oswald later described his father as a hard-writing, hard-drinking, hard-living Tory Squire, much given to expletives. He will be the most likeable person we talk about in this story. On one memorable occasion, Oswald's father drunkenly drew his pistol and started shooting out electric lights in Piccadilly

Square. Again, seems like a guy I would have gotten along with. He also cheated on his wife constantly, which is not cool, and she left her husband when Oswald was quite young. And he's doing it this because he's rich and he can get away with it too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what you do. You shoot out lights. I mean, I'm down for that. That sounds like a great night out. Good for her though. That's uh, you know, back then people couldn't leave their husbands that often. Yeah, good for her. Mosley would later describe his childhood with his mom and grandfather on the family estate as idyllic. The property was a self-contained economy

as English estates were in this period of time. There were farmers and servants who all worked to serve the rich people and all bought and sold from each other. It was essentially a we-independent nation. Mosley later wrote that he and his family had, quote, little need to go outside the closed and charmed circle, and we children never did. Our time was divided between farms, gardens, and carpenter shops, where the bearded Pritchard presided over a core of experts who kept all things going as their forebears had done for generations. We were very close to nature. This is uh, fascinating. Yeah. Uh, because I know like a little bit about him. Yeah.

And uh, what we're going to be talking about and like, yeah, all right, you grow up like that. You grow up in that insular kind of, it's like a fake community, like you're the center of attention and you would look at it like, oh wow, like it's a very small number of people and they all work together and it works great and like I'm happy. And there's no social mobility whatsoever. Yeah. We should do that everywhere. This should be the whole world. Wow. That's, yeah. I also, I have to say, I think that having an army of servants who exist only to serve your family, uh, is maybe not close to nature. No, I wouldn't say you're correct on that.

It depends how you define nature. It does depend on how you define nature. It's natural. But yeah, it's happening. It isn't. If it happens, it's natural. So I'm sure your whims being catered to, uh, in a beautiful environment does sound idyllic. It feels natural. Feels natural. You grow up that way. Um, without any other outside influences or awareness of what the world actually is. Yes. Now, young Mosley did not seem to reflect it all upon the fact that this idyllic situation relied entirely upon an incredibly strict social hierarchy with no mobility whatsoever. Since Oswald grew up without the benefit of his father, his beliefs about masculinity were largely

formed by a mix of British pop culture at the time and his grandfather's example. The book Blackshirt describes this well, quote, he thus idealized the male role and appropriated those components of masculinity he feared would otherwise be used against him. It was tradition that family quarrels should be aired publicly and each father challenged a son to a boxing match in front of a simple servants. Boxing, vintzing and hunting were part of an aggressive upbringing in which being the winner was all important. The combination of this hyperbascularity, which was a defense against feelings of dependence and the lack of boundaries, which gave little consideration to others' feelings, ensured that Mosley was always in too much of a hurry. A rush towards

life with arms outstretched to embrace every varied enchantment of a glittering, wonderful world. A life rush to be consummated. It was Mosley's writing at the end there. Life isn't meant to be rushed, man. It's not. I have to say, though, father-son boxing matches are a good idea. Is this like trial by combat? It's just like, yeah, you disagree with what your dad says, you gotta fight him. You gotta fight your dad. Yeah, you're wrong until you're tall enough. Yeah, that's the way the world works. Until you're tall enough to be right. Yeah, are you tough enough to fight your dad and win? Are you tough enough to beat up your dad? Then you're right. Then you're right. You're the man of the nuts now.

As a young man, Oswald attended West Down School and Winchester College. He loved fencing, which we will not mock him for because so do I. By the time he was 14—I don't need that laughter, Sophie. By the time he was 14, he was already six foot two, his adult height. Mosley was described by his contemporaries as extremely good-looking, which caused him some issues at West Down School. Mosley described public school life as filled with boredom which was, quote, only relieved by learning and homosexuality, neither of which he was good at. It was just sort of British private school life. A lot of young kids fucking each other, you know? It's what you do. But he wasn't very good at it?

He was not. He was not inclined to homosexuality. Did he want to be good? I don't think so. I think that's what he was saying, because he just wasn't into that. It was just his way of saying, like, no, thank you to that. I'm not very good at this. I'm not good at book learning or fucking my fellow students. These are not my talents. I tried. I studied hard. I just wasn't very good at it. I just wasn't very good at it. I'm really studied. Antisemitism was a prevalent part of Oswald's childhood, although the evidence suggests this

was not much more of a factor in his young life than it would have been in the life of any of his peers. During World War II, when he was interrogated by the advisory committee on internment, Mosley told his interviewers that his first experiences with antisemitism had come, quote, in my youth, where most of one's friends and relations would not have Jews in their houses. He described this sort of antisemitism as, quote, old English growth and, quote, a whimsical brutality that was much kinder than German antisemitism. Oh, that's rough. Yeah, that's pretty bad. A whimsical brutality. Whimsical brutality. Those words don't go together.

No, they don't. Man, they really do for people like that, though. We just whimsically beat the Jewish men in town with sticks when they come out at night. It's just the same old, you just, like, find another way to say it. Yeah. Like, no, we'll spin it like this. What the Nazis are doing isn't okay, but when I chucked a brick through that synagogue window, it was with a smile in my heart. It was whimsy. I was whistling. It was whimsy. I whistled. Yeah. Come on.

I tried to light that Torah on fire the same way Winnie the Pooh would have. Yeah. Like, it was whimsical. Carmingly so. Carmingly so. We're British. We're British. Come on. It's fine. I'm from Stratfisher.

Stratfisher. Our accent's much more palatable. Much more palatable. That was not a British accent. No, no. We should not try today. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna just, we're just gonna. That's the accents of Pritchard, the guy who ran the specific part of her. Yeah. In January of 1914, Oswald Mosley entered the Royal Military College of Santerst.

It was a violent place and cadets were taught, quote, impeccability on parade and hooliganism off duty, which is something about military life that has not changed. Free time was spent in London starting fights and flirting with girls, which is something else about military life that has not changed. Mosley admitted that the fighting was seen as much more important than the flirting. He was apparently unpopular and got kicked out due to a violent incident Blackshirt describes this way, quote, older cadets decided that an arrogant Mosley needed to be taken down a peg or two and went to his room to punish him for his insolence. John Masters in Bugle and Tiger created the legend

that Mosley detested by his brother officer cadets was thrown out of a window. In fact, in seeking recruits for retaliatory action, he slipped on a ledge and fell, slightly injuring a leg. Skirmishing continued all weekend as a result of which 15 cadets, including Mosley, were packed off to reflect on their ill behavior. His friend Robert Bruce Lockhart believed Mosley bore grudging in society because of this incident. So. So he was unlikable and people didn't like him. And people didn't like him. And when he tried to like get involved in the fighting at school, he fell off a window. Yeah. Yeah. So he's sad. He's really fooling himself and hated, you know, Jews. Yeah, definitely hated Jews. And although probably not more than anybody else in the

Royal Military Academy at Sanders. Sure. That is like one of those things about European history is that pretty much everybody was pretty anti-Semitic. And then like the Holocaust happened and most people were like, oh, maybe we should maybe we should peel back on that a little bit. Yeah. Oh, boy. Didn't know. Didn't know the path that led to. Yeah. It's interesting, too, just like this. So many of these stories involve like, oh, yeah, he's like rich and like really, really arrogant and was just a little more racist than everyone around him. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. You wouldn't have noticed. Right. And he was like a kind of like an ass about it, like an arrogant person about it. And so he was unlikable. So people kind of bullied him a little

bit. And then he went, then he did all the stuff. Then he did everything we're about to talk about. Right. It's like, yeah, yeah, you fool yourself and then you're bullied. And then you turn into a monster. And then you turn into a monster. When August 1914 came around, Mosley found himself sent back to Sanders to finish his training. August of 1914, of course, is when, you know, the whole World War One thing with all the trenches. There was a first World War. There was. There was. What? Yeah. Yeah. The second one was kind of, you know, it was one of those things, like the new Star Wars movie where, you know, you have a perfectly good thing and then they like reboot it with a new cast. Right. You know, and this better special effects and stuff. Right.

Everyone talks about that one, but the other one exists. The other one exists. And it was like more groundbreaking. Right. But you got up the ante. But you got up the ante. You know, and now there's a couple of tanks in the first one. Everybody's got tanks in the second one. Right. Right. You know, there's pretty big bombs in the first one. There's the biggest bomb ever in the second one. Exactly. You know, it's just a little derivative. Yeah. I hope they don't make it a trilogy. I don't know. I mean, I'll watch it. I mean, I'd want to see what they do. I know you'd watch that movie. With all the new CGI available? Absolutely. Fair, fair, fair, fair.

I mean, we just got to hope it's like, you know, J.J. Abrams or someone great. Right. Right. Yeah. Not like some Michael Bay bullshade. We don't want Michael Bay direct. Yeah. It was a Snyder, a Zack Snyder. I mean, I mean, let's be honest, the only one who could really direct World War III would be Paul Verhoeven. Okay. I want to see Paul Verhoeven's World War III. Kind of think we already have. Okay. When the war started, Mosley found himself sent back to Sanders to finish his training. He wound up in the 16th Queen's Lancers, the Cabell Reunion. He saw action on the Western Front and acquitted himself well. Eventually he was promoted and transferred to work as

an observer for the Royal Flying Corps. He was one of Britain's first pilots, although he did not distinguish himself with particular competence in this field. During a training exercise, when his mom and sister were watching, he attempted to impress them and accidentally crashed his plane. They did he slip and fall off a window ledge? I kind of, with a plane. Mom, are you looking? Watch this. Watch this, mother. Mother, are you watching? Mother, mother, mother. Probably killed like 16 stable boys when he crashed, but they just never wrote it down. Oh, sure. They're stable boys.

The amount of stable boys we had, we'll get more. We actually have a lot less stable boys for some reason, starting in like 1915. Very few stable boys. The accident injured him badly. It left him with a limp he would carry for the rest of his life. Mosley went back to the Western Front after that, still injured, and eventually passed out from pain at his post during a battle. After that, he spent the rest of World War I doing a desk job. Sorry, it's just like everything he does. It's just like, I'm going to press so many people and he falls on his ass. He sounds delicate. So we're going to get to what happens after World War I, which is really where the story starts to pick up. But first, you know what? I want to pick up is a product, maybe a service.

You could you recommend some to me? You know what? These people will recommend some to you. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives

a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found

himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Thank goodness. Yes. You guys, you guys land on any products you're gonna service yourself with. All of them. Nail it. Yeah, all the services and products. All the services and

products. I like the ones that were mentioned. Yeah, those are particularly appealing. Those are my favorite of the products. Yeah, I actually wasn't sure about them, but then after listening to it, I was like, oh, I have been convinced on those products and services. Do you know what that technique is, Cody? Advertising. Katie knows. I waited till you started to say A before I was like, yeah, I know. How do you both know that? I was gonna say marketing, but advertising is also. I think we're both been around to college a couple of times. Amazing. Yeah, I popped in and out. Popped in and out. Speaking of people who popped in and out, after Oswald Mosley popped out of World War One and then the war ended, he married Lady Cynthia Curzon, the daughter of the Viceroy of

India. He's that kind of guy. He was elected to parliament straight away as a conservative MP for the district of Harrow or Harrow. I don't care because of the bingo famine. Let's just say that. He was 21 years old when he was first elected because as the scion of a wealthy noble family, political office was basically seen as his due. Now that he was in politics, Mosley's ideology was quite simple. Always do my utmost in all circumstances to prevent it, the first world war ever happening again, which is a solid motivation. Nobody wants a world war. Nobody wants a war, especially not a guy who saw it. Yeah. He fell in his ass a couple of times in that war. He did some fighting too. He was in the trench. He had friends die. Yeah, he was 6'2". He was 6'2".

That's a bad height to be in the trenches. Yeah, you're real tall. You see everything that's happening. He had seen enough death on the Western Front that he considered it his duty to quote, conceive a nobler world in memory of those who died. So that's so far a good path. Let's read the next paragraph. In 1924, Mosley switched his political allegiance to the Labor Party. This was, coincidentally, the same year that the Labor Party first came to power in the House of Commons. From 1926 to 1930, Mosley was the MP of Smithwick. He developed a reputation as a young brash political wonderkind. But in 1929, the stock market crashed. Britain was hit very hard. Unemployment, which had been at 10% in 1929, shot to 22.2% by 1932, when the British

economy looked to be on the verge of collapse. The great reserves of gold and jewels the empire had spent the better part of two centuries plundering had all been spent to win, or sort of win, the Great War. Now England appeared to be staring over the edge of a cliff. Oswald Mosley had sacrificed for his country, and he had seen many of his friends die for it. Since he was an ambitious young man with access to political power, he saw it as his duty to save his nation. And as he looked out into the rest of the world for suggestions on how he might do that, his eyes were invariably drawn towards Italy in the accomplishments of a little dude named Benito Mussolini. Hell yeah. You guys, you guys heard of this dude? A little bit. In passing. In passing. Yeah. He was

handsome. Very good looking guy. Hell of a jawline. Yeah. Yeah. Mussolini's Partito Nazionale fascista had just come to power in 1922. Nowadays, we think of Mussolini as basically a cheap Italian ripoff of Hitler, faintly ridiculous for all his evil. But that's purely a view brought on by hindsight. To people in the early 20s, Mussolini's relatively peaceful rise to power seemed almost miraculous, as stood the apparent instant turnaround of the Italian economy. In England, much coverage of Mussolini and his bold new idea, fascismo, was positive. On November 18, 1922, the Times of London called Mussolini a masterful man and credited his program with bearing the stamp of his strong character. Like most conservatives, the editors of the Times thought

Italian fascism was a reasonable reaction to political turmoil. Quote, the rise of fascismo is the result, the natural result of the progressive degradation of the representative system as it has been witnessed in Rome. So, even progressive papers were reticent to entirely condemn the hip new ideology. The Daily Telegraph's yearly review of major world events in 1922 didn't even mention the fascist coup that had just swept Italy. Just wasn't seen as that big of a deal. Italian fascism had inspired British imitators as soon as it appeared. The British Fascist Party was formed in 1923. The national fascist split off in 1924, and the imperial fascist league kicked off in 1929. None of these groups gained more than a few dozen

members, nor did they manage anything more impressive than some graffiti and a few tiny marches. In the mid-1920s, it would have seemed preposterous if you'd suggested to anyone that Oswald Mosley, the widely admired young politician, would become a fascist himself. In 1924, English socialist author Beatrice Webb called him, quote, the most accomplished speaker in the House of Commons. But after the crash of 1929, Mosley came to believe that radical change was necessary to save Britain from economic collapse. His first plan was written down in the Mosley Memorandum, a document that suggested hardcore protectionist economic policies in order to protect domestic industry from foreign trade.

During her golden age, England had relied heavily on foreign export. This had caused the depression to bite them harder than most because the collapse of their major trading partners essentially wiped out British industry. While most of the empire's political leaders wanted to essentially write out the depression until they could get back to selling British goods all over the world, Mosley wanted to reform the entire economy into a state of autarky. In other words, he wanted British people to only buy and sell from other British people, cutting them out of the world economy to render them immune to the destabilization of its booms and busts. He wanted England to basically close its borders for the most part, definitely didn't want to admit any

people from outside of England, and he wanted its economy, its agriculture production to be entirely self-deficient. Now, this was also a really common idea at the time. This was like Hitler's big idea too. Yeah, just like the basic foundation of nationalism, protectionists, and you keep everyone out and you do your own thing. Like maybe like how Mr. Mosley grew up, but bigger. But bigger for all of England. Yeah, because his life was so perfect when everything was protected and insulated. Yeah, he just wanted to put Britain first. Maybe he wanted to put Britain first. Oh, Cody. Oh, Cody. Did he want to Britain first? Oh, I bet he did. Is that where he wanted to put? Spoilers. We'll get to that. Is that what he wanted to put?

Stop jumping ahead. Spoilers. It just sounds like everything else. It sounds like every other iteration of this cycle. Sounds like fascists are all the same four guys. Yeah, kind of just seems like maybe. Well, they might be all reincarnated. A bunch of losers with a bunch of loser ideas that never changed. That's another fan way to put it. Most of Mosley's contemporaries considered his ideas kind of crazy, but Mosley's other plans were more reasonable. He wanted to institute a massive public works program spending 200 million pounds over three years to create thousands of new jobs for England's unemployed masses. These jobs would include a mobile labor corps to rebuild the nation's slums. This was actually pretty reasonable. It's essentially the same thing as one of the

linchpins of FDR's New Deal, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which is why my granddad didn't starve during the Great Depression. He's building parks and stuff. Great idea. So Mosley has some good ideas and some bad ideas, like any politician. Well, actually, the fact that he had good ideas makes him a little bit unique. The ideas thing, really. Mosley saw a decent amount of support for this idea, but his plan for how to make this happen set a lot of people on edge. I'm going to quote from Brett Rubens, the death of British fascism. To combat unemployment and to deal with the economic crisis in general, Mosley believed that political power needed to be more centralized. He argued for the creation of a new cabinet led

by the Prime Minister and other top MPs, which was to be advised by a think tank of economic experts. This cabinet was to utilize all of the resources of the nation to fight the economic disaster. Now, that was radical, but not entirely without precedent. Britain had done something similar during the Great War with Lloyd George's Supreme War Council. Mosley was basically saying that the nation needed to treat the Great Depression the way they would treat a major war. It was not a popular idea among parliamentarians, but many British people thought he was right on the money. So Mosley remained popular with the people, even as Britain's political elite rejected his ideals and sought to heal the nation's export trade and revive the economy that way.

The Labour government sought to balance the budget, which required a massive cut to employment benefits and other entitlements. Can you guess how that went for the Labour government? Mosley was infuriated that the Labour government had basically ignored his ideas, and in the spring of 1930 he resigned from the Labour party after giving a huge speech in front of parliament where he said that Britain's must, quote, get away from the belief that the only criterion for British prosperity is how many goods we can send abroad for foreigners to consume. His words were met with raucous cheering, which helped further convince him that what he needed to do was create his own party to solve the nation's problems. He grew even more popular

after this speech in his resignation, and many of his fellow parliamentarians even began to see him as something of a hero. In 1931 Oswald Mosley announced the formation of a new political party, which he called the New Party since he was not the most creative man in the world. He convinced several other members of the Labour party to resign and join him as well. Some of these guys got cold feet and jumped ship instantly, but enough people stayed the course that they were able to give the new party a go. The new party's goals were based around the principles Mosley had already outlined. He wanted to create a small six-man council who could pass legislation at will in order to make necessary economic changes faster.

The new party advocated strong import controls. Mosley also created the New Party Youth Club in order to get young men interested in politics, his politics. At first, a lot of British liberals and progressives joined a party they assumed was meant for them. In 1931, due partly to the failure of their austerity measures, but largely to the existence of the new party, the Labour party got fewer votes than the Conservative party. This pissed off quite a lot of people. Quote from the death of British fascism. Following the declaration of the results, an angry mob formed outside the town hall. They shouted at Mosley, calling him traitor and Judas. The son of the defeated Labour candidate charged the steps and accused Mosley

with ruining his father's chances. In response, Mosley turned to John Strachey and said, that is the crowd that has prevented anyone from doing anything in England since the war. One of Mosley's friends would later state his belief that this was the moment British fascism was born. He's just so angry that people won't let him do exactly what he wants to do. Yeah, he wants to do the thing. He has this idea. He has this idea. Let him do it. And people don't agree entirely with it. They agree with parts of it, but they don't agree with all of it. They're supposed to agree entirely. Spoken like a true rich kid.

Yeah. They need to agree with everything. When you do agree with everything he has to say. He's 6-2. He's 6-2. Bravo, come on. So, the guy in charge of the Labour Party, a fellow named McDonald, chose to make nice with the Conservatives in order to retain some power for Labour in government. This meant the new party suffered attacks from both screwing over Labour and was cut out of power while Labour moved closer to the middle. As 1932 started, Mosley's party was a miserable failure and his political career seemed to be near its end. Before the 31 elections,

he'd promised to resign from public life for a decade, if he lost. But he did not actually do this. Instead, he decided that the failure of his party in the election left fascism as the only option remaining. It's just all he's left with. What else are you gonna do? What else are you gonna do? You lose an election. You gotta. Go to fascism. You gotta. He's given me no choice. Yeah, no choice. Like, that's amazing. Just every, like, from the very beginning, oh yeah, you confidently do a thing and then you lose and then you get a little worse. You get a little worse. You get a little worse and then get to where you need to be. Get to where you need to be, which is where he is in January of 1932, when he visits Italy at Benito Mussolini's explicit

request. The two men both had backgrounds as socialist politicians and were both frustrated with dealing with their nation's tedious political bickering. Mosley took to Mussolini at once, seeing him as a kindred spirit and a man's man. This meeting convinced Oswald Mosley, quote, the age of democracy, was over. Yeah, there we go. That's where, that's where it's at. That's where it's at. When he returned to England, Mosley wrote a loving article about Mussolini's regime for the Daily Mail stating, quote, oh, we're going to be talking about the Daily Mail today. Yes. Stating, quote, no time is wasted in the polite banalities which have so irked the younger generation in Britain when dealing with our elder statesmen. Mosley wrote

that the Italian mind was hard, concentrated, direct, and modern now. The efficiency of fascism compensated for, quote, the right to blather. He believed British politicians love too well. It's efficient, so why do we need free speech? What was that going to get us? It's just going to waste time. It's just waste. It's just practical, you guys. This is just make sense. Mosley rebuffed multiple opportunities to reenter the political mainstream, including invitations to work with former Prime Minister David Lloyd George and invitations from Winston Churchill. He also rejected the decision of many of his new party comrades who joined the Communist Party after the disastrous 1931 elections. If there was one thing Oswald Mosley hated,

it was communism. He believed that class conflict could only end in violent revolution and instead felt that fascism would do a better job of providing a quality of opportunity. Communists wanted to destroy capitalism. Oswald just wanted to reform it. No, no, buddy, you got it wrong. That is the tagline of this podcast. Nothing has ever changed or ever will change because people are just kind of dumb. Yeah. A lot of the time. Petty, lazy, dumb. Petty, lazy, dumb. Stubborn. Scared of not having as many nice things. Mosley knew that Italian or German fascism wouldn't just work if it was transplanted in England. He decided that in order to save his nation, it would be his duty to create a new and uniquely British form of fascism. Oh, sure. Yeah.

It's all the same. It's all the same. What have we just, what have we, I know this got 70 million people killed, but what if we, which is like, what are the British flavors? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, sticky toffee pudding. Sticky toffee pudding. What if it makes his poison bubblegum? What if it's peppermint bubblegum poison? What if we throw a little bit of lime in that bubblegum? Yeah. The poison didn't work because it was lime. We need to make it lemon poison. These fascists keep killing all the Jewish people. What if we tweak the flavor a little bit? What if we change the uniform slightly? Oh, now they're killing Muslims. Okay. Oh, shoot. Okay. What if, okay, what if, okay, what if we change it slightly again?

What if we, look at this flag. This is a nice flag. I like flags. This is a different flag and the last guy's used. I like devoting things to flags. Some of us are going to use the same flags. Yeah, we might use very similar flags. We might like wink at other flags. Now, part of why Mosley was so drawn to the idea of British fascism was his military background. During his time in the service, Mosley has developed a love of discipline, even brutal discipline. One of his friends, Harold Nicholson, said at the time that, quote, Tom cannot keep his mind off shock troops. The arrest of his political enemies, their internment in the Isle of Wight and the role of drums around Westminster. He is a romantic.

That is a great feeling. He keeps his mind off arresting his enemies. Such a romantic. Such a romantic. Such whimsical brutalism. Whimsical brutality. I see the problem here. You guys think words mean the wrong things. No, they know that they mean the wrong things. Yeah, the problem is that we think words mean things. Right, exactly. We put actual meaning into words and they don't give a shit about anything. He's a romantic, Cody. That's his failing. Yeah, he's too much a romantic guy. For his own good. Well, because you know what, when I'm taking a lady out on an eye state and I really want to impress her, first thing I do, show her my shock troops. Then I imprison my enemies on the Isle of Wight and then a little bit of neck and

in the back of the car. Well, it's an aphrodisiac. Ladies love seeing the political enemies of a guy get locked up on the Isle of Wight. Yeah, show her your Isle of Wight. Since they're all British, it would definitely be an Isle of Wight. Oh, absolutely. That phrase runs deep. This is the 1930s. In October, 1932, Oswald Mosley officially founded the British Union of Fascists, or BUF. He wrote a book a few years later titled BUFF. Yes, he was kind of buff. Give that to him. He wrote a book a few years later titled Fascism, a hundred questions asked and answered that explained why he decided to use the same word as the Germans and Italians rather than invent a new term that might have been more palatable

to English ears. Quote, Fascism is the name by which the modern movement has come to be known in the world. It would have been possible to avoid misrepresentation by calling our movement, which he capitalized the MN, by another name. But it was more honest to call it fascism and just let everyone know exactly where we stood. It is up to us to defeat misrepresentation by propaganda and explanation of the real policy and method of fascism as it will operate in Britain. In the long run, straightforward dealing is not only honest, but also pays the best. So, he was an honest, straight forward fascist. Fascists hate propaganda. He was a fascist you'd like to have a beer with if you weren't, you know, would you?

Then you would not. No, then you definitely wouldn't. Well, he wouldn't let you in his house. But yeah, yeah. You know what, we'll let you in. This is a bad ad lead and that shouldn't be how we do this. No, no, that was good. Maybe put like a river of something a little nicer in between. What's a product we can advertise for that's on the table right now? Altoids, curiously cool mints. I noticed that your Altoids, Katie, come in a nice silver container that you could also store your weed in. Absolutely. Or some pills of MDMA. Taps of acid. Yes. I could store a lot of things in this little. Cops probably aren't going to search your Altoids container. Yeah. They're less likely than a jar labeled acid. Unless they listen to this podcast. Unless they listen to this podcast.

Fucking A. There are other drugs you can keep in there though. There are. Don't limit yourself. A little bit of alcohol in there. Cops, if you like this show, don't listen to that. Most cops love this show. That's a big part of our listening base. Same with us. It's weird. It's weird. Yeah. All cops are behind the bastards fans. Is that the phrase? That's exactly it. I see that on a lot of t-shirts and punk shows. Yeah. They seem like they cross out a lot of the words. But I know what it means. The sentiments there. It's like how you don't put the of or the V. Exactly. Exactly. All cops love behind the bastards. All cops are. I think we put enough daylight between that anti-Semitism stuff. I super agree. And services.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So after establishing the British Union of Fascists, Mosley right away published a book called The Greater Britain, which he hoped would polish the bad reputation fascism had gotten over all those deaths from the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of Guernica and all the people that the Nazis had put in concentration camps, all of that stuff. In The Greater Britain, he assured the English people that fascism did not necessarily mean totalitarianism or a loss of liberty. British fascism would be a dictatorship.

Yes, the one that was moderated and accountable to the people via a legislative assembly. Who did he want to be the dictator? I mean, you think he wanted to be the dictator? I think he did. Yeah, he wanted Oswald Mosley to be. He's probably the old big man on top. He'd be up for Tommy being on top. Yeah, Tommy on top. Now, Oswald Mosley assured people that his fascism did not require violence to gain power. If the BUF could just gain enough seats in parliament, they'd implement the changes he suggested in a perfectly legal manner. What if they couldn't? What about the queen? I guess he's the king still. I'm not going to talk about that. Oh, he's got a job for the queen and the king. It was a king at

this point. It was a king at this point. Yeah. So Mosley tried to convince the people that embracing this idea and adopting it gradually was a smart choice because fascism was the new way of things worldwide, and Britain might as well get a head start if they wanted to compete. This was basically him cribbing a concept from an essay by Benito Mussolini, the doctrine of fascism, which said this, quote, if the 19th century was the century of the individual, liberalism implies individualism, we are free to believe that this is the collective century, and therefore the century of the state. In other words, the 20th century would be the fascist century, and there was no sense fighting it. Given where the global balance of power stood in 1932, it's easy to see how a number of people

could have come to this conclusion. Mosley told his people that both left and right wing had failed them. The right wing could guarantee stability, but it could not create progress. The left brought progress, but instability. A fascist middle was necessary to unite the two. Like, they're like two ways, but what if there was more than two ways? A second plus one. Second plus one way. Almost fourth way. I think those are the only two ways to describe it. Okay. I think we got it. We nailed it. Quote, fascism is not dictatorship in the old sense of the word, which implies government against the will of the people. Instead, Mosley believed that fascism rested, quote, on the enthusiastic acceptance of the people and could not endure without their

support. So that's good. That's also essential. It's a whimsical fascism. A whimsical fascism. Yeah, you want that support? Yeah, it's Winnie the Pooh fascism. I get hung up on, so this Britain first, this isolationist kind of idea, but taking so much, like putting Mussolini on a pedestal and like celebrating other places. Well, you got a problem with Mussolini, Katie? No, he's hot. You know, I've only read Italian history up until about 1934, but it seemed like he was a pretty cool guy. I've only read German history up until about 1929. A lot of good speakers around that time. They're really engaging speakers. Really good to hear. I'm excited for what comes next for

them. Yeah, no spoilers, guys. I wonder what else they have to say. So, well, because also, because that whole, what you're saying about how like, yeah, Britain first, but then you support like Mussolini, all these people, that's just what they do. Like there's literally a Hitler quote that's like, yeah, I'm not saying we're better than anybody. I think we should be like our own thing and like Japan, they do their own thing. China does their own thing. We all just sort of do our own thing better. China does Japan's thing. Sure, sure, sure. He was not a fan of China doing its own thing. I don't believe he said that in that quote, but yes, yes, yes.

It's just so interesting. We respect what they're doing and we want to steal it, but we want them to be far away from us. Oh, yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Now, in Mosley's vision of British fascism, his equivalent to the German Fuhrer would be the minister, a single man who would have basically all the power in Britain, but who would be subject to a vote of confidence every five years. If the people stop supporting this dictator, the king would be able to appoint a new one who would then have to go about earning the support of the masses so that he could win a confidence vote. That seems like a lot of checks in balance. A lot. There's one. That's a lot. That's a check. For fascism, yeah. Yeah. If you got

none, one, that's a lot. That is a lot. Five years is a good amount of time for a dictator. It doesn't seem like a ruler's best interest to have a dictator. But what if we have another ruler who's like, all right, you don't like that dictator? What about this dictator? Exactly. So you might see how reasonable people, though, could get suckered into the British Union of Fascists. Considering this is before that whole World War II thing starts in democracy, people are seeing some flaws in it. I mean, I understand that there are people who can fall into movements like this. It's a little more understandable in 1932 than, say, 2019. Sure, yeah. I definitely agree with that. Yeah, exactly. As moderate as Mosley's new take on

fascism may have seemed on the surface, it quickly turned into the battle fascism we all know and hate. The first signs of this were obvious from the way Mosley and his fellow Fascists react to the disruption of their meetings and Mosley's speeches. The first signs of this were obvious from the way Mosley and his fellow Fascists reacted to the disruption of their meetings and Mosley's speeches by people who will call, I don't know, not fascism likers. That's a catchy title. Fasc opposites. Fasc opposites. Fasc opposites. Great. Starting with the announcement of the BUF, party gatherings were often disrupted by hecklers, Mosley communists and other assorted fasc opposites. Shout it over Mosley until they were ejected from the gathering. For a little while,

Mosley grinned and bore it. But after a few months of this, he decided to form a paramilitary organization dedicated to stopping these sorts of disruptions. Whoa. This is where things go off the rails. It took a couple of months. The BUF had established a youth league right away, of course, which initially just encouraged its young members to be athletic and play sports like rugby. The young men wore no uniform and therefore did not set off any alarm bells as a military force. Initially, a government study later revealed most Britons viewed Mosley as, quote, a colorful eccentric and fascist occasions as entertaining spectacles. But as disruptions of fascist events grew more frequent, Mosley reformed the youth auxiliary into something with

sharper teeth, the soon-to-be infamous black shirts. Yes. Hell yes. They wore black shirts. Good for their teams. Good for their sports teams. You need colors for your sports teams. Exactly. You were jerseys. Exactly. Here's the death of British fascism, quote, Mosley stated that the black shirts stewards and originated with his resolve to not succumb to disruptors. Mosley claimed that as the movement gained momentum, so did its resistors. Rather than allow his meetings to be shut down by a disruptive, organized minority, Mosley created the London Defense Force to train and recruit more black shirt stewards. He claimed that the creation of the black shirts was entirely out of defensive necessity, a result of increasing hostility to his movement. However, there is

evidence that this force had an offensive capability as well. The press accused black shirts of unprovoked attacks on communists and, later, Jews. The Times testified to black shirts verbally provoking a group of young Jewish men in London in the summer of 1933. The daily worker of January 23rd, 1936, charged Mosley's black shirts with raiding its offices, turning over cars and causing extensive damage. Were the black shirts also Mussolini's? Brown shirts. Oh wait, Mussolini's. Shoot, I forget which one Mussolini had. It was black shirts. It was a black shirt. Yeah. Yeah. Brown shirts were Hitler's. They all got their fucking shirts. Today is Fred Perry. I mean, he could have gotten a bit more creative. Yeah. Yeah, they all got their

and Punisher logos. Right, right. Yeah. And they're like little LARP shields and stuff. Little LARP shields and stuff. From 1933 to 1937, Oswald Mosley averaged 200 speeches a year, each of them accompanied by a large group of black shirts. These young men lived in Chelsea, London at a barracks called the Black House. At the height of the BUF, more than a thousand men lived there full time. They trained in jujitsu and lived under military discipline. From 1932 on, they were a constant and very visible presence at rallies. Now the black shirts received a major endorsement in the public consciousness in 1934. When Lord Rothmere, a conservative newspaper tycoon, embraced the BUF and its paramilitary auxiliary, Rothmere ran a little newspaper you

may have heard of called the Daily Mail. There we go. On January 8th, 1934, the Mail published an article titled, Hurrah for the Black Shirts. I'd like to read a few quotations from that article, which was written by Lord Rothmere himself. He's counted as Viscount Rothmere in this, which is a word I know how to pronounce, even though it's spelled viscount, which is dumb. That's actually probably right. I don't know. I mean, I don't know either. I don't, Viscount Rothmere. I know how to pronounce. Because he's not good enough to be a full one. He could assist one in certain areas. Quote from Hurrah for the Black Shirts. I wonder if the Daily Mail is still a great newspaper. Anyway, because fascism comes from

Italy, short-sighted people in this country think they show a sturdy national spirit by deriding it. If their ancestors had been equally stupid, Britain would have no banking system, no Roman law, nor even any football, since all of these are of Italian invention. The Romans invented cool stuff, so Italian fascism, sweet as hell, yo! I love logic and reason as well. I've debate me, you cowards. The socialists, especially who jeer at the principles of and uniform of the Black Shirts as being of a foreign origin, forget that the founder and high priest of their own creed was the German Jew Karl Marx. Gotta put that Jew right in the front there. Though the name and form of fascism originated in Italy, that movement is not

now peculiar to any nation. It stands in every country for the party of youth. It represents the effort of the youngest generation to put new life into an out-of-date political systems. That alone is enough to make it a factor of immense value in our national affairs. Black Shirts proclaim a fact which politicians dating from pre-war days were never faced, that the new age requires new methods and new men. I don't have it all on here. It's only a chunk of the thing. Look at this thing. But we get the idea. You get the idea. There's like an article next to it. Crazy newsreel. Crazy newsreel is the, that's the next article, woman through the ages. Oh boy. She just isn't from Britain, by the way. No, I know. She just

was thinking that too. No, but you can import things from other countries. Yeah. Like roads. Just not the, but not the people. Not the people. Under no circumstances, Katie. Absolutely not. They're not wearing, no. They're not wearing the right shirt. Not okay. Steal the best from other cultures. Just not any people. Just not their people. Well, they're not sending their best, so. They're not going to send their best. Of course not. Unlike Oswald Mosley, who trains his best at Jiu Jitsu. Yeah. So they can destroy newspaper offices. Exactly. Among other great ideas. He's 62.

He is 62. Among other great ideas, Lord Rothmere declared Mussolini to be the greatest man of the 20th century in another one of his articles. Didn't, did not age well. Quick jump there. By the way, he's the best. He's the best. He's, he's the best person that in 1932, I'm confident will arise in the next 78 years. Curious to see how his position evolves. I mean, have you read the Daily Mail? The Daily Mail, for reference, after the Christ Church shootings, just provided a free download of the shooter's manifesto to anyone who wanted it. It's awful. I just avoid. Yeah. I didn't catch that part.

Are there any good publications that are daily? Like Daily. The Daily Zeitgeist. The Daily Zeitgeist. Solid podcast. Okay, that was a setup. Yeah. Yeah. The Daily some more news. Like we got The Daily Caller. No. No. The Daily Wire. It's almost like releasing a bunch of stuff every day on a thing that you can't like do any really great analysis. And maybe, you know, the best you can hope for is reporting. That's, that's not nonsense. And even then, a lot of the times people are going to get it wrong. Wait, so like sensationalist, like instant reactions to stuff isn't responsible news?

It might be. I mean, newspaper has put stuff out every day. I just mean, I've noticed quite a lot of daily publications that are like, I roll a word. Oh yeah. They're all bad. Except for the Daily Zeitgeist. Except for the Daily Zeitgeist, of course. I mean, literally, they got Daily Wire, Daily Caller, Daily Mail. Daily Prophet. The Daily Shoah. That would be Harry Potter. Do you do not want to be listening to that? Is that a Harry Potter thing? Yes.

That was a Harry Potter thing. The whole thing was a setup for Harry Potter. We are talking about British people. Well off the lines. Yeah. I'm sure once JK Rowling hears this, we'll get a couple of tweets about what Mosley was, his wizarding. Mosley was bad because he was secretly trans or something like that. But I want to know her thoughts on the Goblin Bankers anyway. Oh boy, that is something I did not catch as a nine-year-old. Yeah, you don't. It sneaks up on you. I derailed this enough.

Yeah, it's fine. It's fine. In 1930, when the Nazis had gone from 12 to 107th seats in the Reichstag, Lord Rothmier had penned an article for the Daily Mail stating, the Nazis represent the rebirth of Germany as a nation, which was not entirely inaccurate to be fair. Fun fact, the Daily Mail online is today the world's largest English-language newspaper website. But I'm sure they've gotten a lot better. I wrote all this before I said this. They're garbage. And don't go there. While Mosley's rallies grew more and more violent, and the Blackshirts got better and

better at doing violence, Lord Rothmier continued to praise the British Union of Fascists. When Mosley was accused of wanting to establish a, quote, system of rulership by means of steel whips and concentration camps, Rothmier called his critics tired alarmists and panic mongers. The support of Rothmier and the Daily Mail let thousands upon thousands of new Britons to join the BUF. This meant Mosley gave more speeches to larger crowds, which led to more vicious Blackshirt beatings of protesters and disruptive elements. Early in the BUF's history, Mosley had tried to dispatch his hecklers by making fun of them. He was a great public speaker, some say one of the best in the history of English politics,

so this worked for a while. But as time went on, the Blackshirts took more and more of that responsibility and used more and more violence to do it. According to the death of British fascism, quote, brutality on both sides of the podium abounded in this period. Although Mosley claimed he forbade his Blackshirts to use weapons of any kind, the Constitution of the Blackshirts outlined careful rules for keeping order at BUF meetings. It's stated, interrupters will be ejected only on the instructions of the speaker when the persistence of an interrupter prevents those in his vicinity from hearing the speech. Ejection will be carried out with a minimum of force necessary. In my life, Mosley recalls the slogan he used to inspire his protectors,

we never start fights, we only finish them. Both hecklers and Blackshirts regularly carried weapons, from brass knuckles to razor blades. Mosley was proud that never once was one of his meetings broken up, but this was only possible due to the intense violence deployed by his Blackshirts. Mosley would later write that these devoted young men saved free speech in Britain. The Communist Party was the largest organized opposition to the BUF. Their newspaper, The Daily Worker, cheered when four Blackshirts were hospitalized after an ambush in Edinburgh. This built and built until a planned BUF rally on June 7, 1934 in Olympia. This rally was planned to bring more than 15,000 fascists together. 12,000 of those people were actual audience members.

The remaining 3,000 were Blackshirts, in and out of uniform, waiting throughout the crowd to break up the Communist resistance they knew was coming. The Communist Party had asked its local leaders to buy as many tickets to the meeting as possible, having their members send in ticket requests along with lurid letters of support for fascism. The plan was that anti-fascist demonstrators could hide themselves in small groups throughout the mass of audience members. After Mosley introduced himself, they'd start chanting slogans like fascism means murder, down with Mosley, until they were physically removed. Other groups would cut the lighting cables. These interrupters would all wear Blackshirts to confuse the Fascists, and they'd

stagger their disruptions in order to make sure that, as soon as the Fascists cleared one group out, the next would start up, completely derailing the planned meeting. This plan worked brilliantly for the first hour or so of the meeting, until the Blackshirts managed to ferried out basically all the Communists. They removed 30 people in total. 21 of these people were arrested outside by the police for obstruction, public disturbance, and refusal to cooperate. In the end, Mosley was able to finish his speech. He made as much hay as he possibly could out of the demonstrators, showing up that same night on the BBC. He claimed that Communists had attempted to shout down free speech, and asked the audience,

Now I put it to you, to your sense of fair play. Would you have handled these reds very gently when you had seen your men kicked in the stomach and slashed with razors, your women with faces streaming in blood? Now, there was zero evidence that anything like that had happened. In fact, one of the other panelists interviewed had been at the speech, and denied seeing any weapons in Communist hands at all. Instead, he said that he'd seen interrupters struck in the head and the stomach all over the body with complete absence of restraint. He called it the worst violence he'd seen short of the war. To their credit, the BBC would not have Mosley on as a guest again for more than 20 years. The media sided with the interrupters, widely panning Mosley's Blackshirts

for their violent response to what amounted to minor acts of disruption. Geoffrey Lloyd, a conservative MP, attended the rally, and later told the Times of London he was, Appalled by the brutal conduct of the Fascists last night. Five or six Fascists carried out an interrupter by arms and legs. Several other Blackshirts were engaged in kicking and hitting his lifeless body. Oddly enough, Mosley's biggest supporter in the mainstream was David Lloyd George, a liberal. Shortly after the meeting, George wrote an editorial and stated, It is difficult to explain whether fury of the champions of free speech should be concentrated so exclusively, not on those who deliberately and resolutely attempted to prevent the public

expression of opinions of which they disapproved, but against those who fought, however roughly, for freedom of speech. Lloyd George believed that people who showed up at a political meeting with the intent of disrupting it have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles them rudely. With whimsical brutality. So much use of this phrase free speech, none of which were written by me, by the way. This swing towards greater violence occurred right alongside another event that would further radicalize Mosley's Fascist party. Three weeks after the Olympia rally was the Night of Long Knives, where Hitler's Nazi party consolidated power by murdering at least 85 political rivals. Many people who had been on the fence about

this Hitler fellow and his Nazism leapt right the fuck off that fence after the Night of Long Knives. But Mosley and the BUF backed their fascist brothers to the hilt. Blackshirt, the BUF's official newspaper, claimed that the men Hitler murdered were guilty of the greatest fascist crime, disloyalty to the leader. But what about free speech guys? Well, not once you're in charge, free speech until you get in charge, and then never again. Oh, okay. That's less catchy though. Just below it. Yep. Your hand got a lot lower in between those two. And I'm not on violence, I guess. Man, they love beating people up. They do love beating people up. It's a lot of fun. So, uh, this is the move that finally lost Mosley the support of Lord Rothmere. He pulled the

Daily Mail support of the BUF in the very next issue. Brave. Yeah, brave man. Brave. He only supported him for like, say he's a coward. Couple of years. Couple of years. Just a couple of years until all the things that he said became clear that he meant them. Yeah. Oh, you meant the things. Oh, I see. Oh, I should be taking you literally this whole time. Mummy. Mummy. Mummy, are you watching? Apologies, British people. Sorry. At the time, Mosley claimed Rothmere had only chickened out on his fascism due to pressure from a cabal of Jewish advertisers. It was one of the first stirrings of public anti-Semitism from Oswald Mosley, who up until this point had walked a fine line of supporting the Nazis and being a fascist without actually

blaming the Jews for all the world's wars. That would change rather dramatically as time went on, but we'll have to tell that story on Thursday and we come back for part two of Oswald Mosley's life story. I can't wait. Good luck, Tommy. You guys think it's gonna end well? Yeah, all stories have good endings. They do. They do. I feel like he's gonna be a cool guy. I think he's gonna be a cool guy with good opinions, uh, who goes about bringing those opinions to fruition in healthy, productive, kind ways. I feel the same way. I think he's gonna get married and settled down. I do, too. I think he's gonna find a wife, maybe a couple of wives. Maybe a couple of wives. Maybe a harem who's legally obligated to never leave the palace. He seems like that kind

of guy. He does seem like that kind of guy. I can't tell if you're- There are so many possibilities of how this story goes. Let's plug some plugables before we pretend to go away until part two. Yeah, I won't see you for another day or two. We're gonna go and we're gonna come back. That's how we do this show. Yeah, we just keep driving back and forth. See you in a couple of days. You can check us out online. We've got a podcast, even more news podcasts. We've got a Patreon, patreon.com slash some more news, which- Yeah. And the YouTube show. Our YouTube show is called Some More News. It's on YouTube. You can Google it. Also, Some More News, Twitter. My personal Twitter is Dr. Mr. Cody. Mine's Katie Stoll. And I think those are all the things we

can plug. You can plug whatever you want, first off. David Thrones is coming back a couple of weeks. I don't think a lot of people have heard of that. Oh, it's a great show. You should catch up on it. Yeah, you should check that one out. I don't want to ruin anything but the Scott Dragons. But to be fair, the dragons are computer generated. Oh, well, so sorry. This is disappointing. This is a real bummer. I thought they were cloning. Sorry. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter. I write okay. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. We have shirts, tpublic.com by shirt, by two shirts, by three shirts, by four shirts, five, six shirts, seven, eight, nine. We don't have

that many designs. Ten? You would be buying multiples by ten shirts. You don't have an all cops are behind the bastards pants shirt. You've got to have a grab bib shirt. Put a little parentheses in there. We're working on that one, Cody. All right, good, good, good. I feel like that one's going to go over real well. Yeah, people will love it. That'll be my new driving shirt instead of the save lives do crime shirt. You're just promoting your podcast, man. It's fun. You haven't heard it? I thought you love it. That's what the shirt's about, man. This is the episode. Go go hug your family or some shit. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Boland. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.