Oswald Mosley

Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet (November 16, 1896 – December 3, 1980) was a British politician principally known as the founder of the British Union of Fascists.

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• We have lost the good old British spirit. Instead we have American journalism and black-shirted buffoons making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers.
  • In 1927 after his Labour Party meeting in Cambridge was broken-up by pro-Fascist undergraduates. The mention of "ice-cream sellers" was a reference to Italian immigrants who had opened ice-cream parlours.

• Together in Britain we have lit a flame that the ages shall not extinguish. Guard that sacred flame my brother Blackshirts until it illuminates Britain and lights again the Paths of Mankind.
  • 'Comrades in Struggle' (June 1938)

• A fight between several parties of the British people: Nothing of the kind! A fight between two or three big money combines, that and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the party machines, in an electoral battle today determined purely by principle and by the number of active workers...British Union could fight and beat today the old parties over the whole electoral field. But you know and I know, the battle is nothing of the kind. The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people...they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.
  • Speech in Earls Court (July 1939).http://www.oswaldmosley.com/audio/earlscourt.m3u

• Living financially and economically on American charity, selling up the house to the Yanks when he won't pay any more charity out. Are you content to be occupied and protected by American aeroplanes? Are you content to be in the position of an old women, jipped by her young relations? You who were the greatest power on earth fifty years ago, and still can be! Why do I say, 'you still can be'? Because my friends I know you, I know the British people. I know that twice in my lifetime in the world war I fought in, in the world war the younger men fought in. We the British have put our effort, our energy of valor, of heroism, unequalled in the history of mankind.
  • Speech on 21 Novembver, 1960.http://www.oswaldmosley.com/audio/300million.m3u

• [Fascism] was an explosion against intolerable conditions, against remediable wrongs which the old world failed to remedy. It was a movement to secure national renaissance by people who felt themselves threatened with decline into decadence and death and were determined to live, and live greatly.
  • Excerpt from My Life by Oswald Mosley (1968)

• I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics.
  • Letter to The Times (26 April, 1968), p. 11.

• ...the old axiom that 'all power corrupts' has doubtful validity, because it derives from our neglect of Plato's advice to find men carfully and train them by methods which make them fit for heroes.
  • Excerpt from Beyond the Pale by Nicholas Mosley

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You go to bed one night. You wake up in the morning and you find the great champions of yesterday, side by side on the same front bench, arms round each others’ necks – dear old pals in the same national government. That’s the honesty of the front benches. They’ve always been all the same.

About Oswald Mosley

• Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong 'un and they will find it out.
  • Stanley Baldwin, 21 June 1929. "They" were the Labour Party which had recently won a general election.
  • Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary: Volume II (1969), p. 195.

• He is too 'logical' and if he had his way would attempt to presently 'Russianize'...our government.
  • Thomas Jones, 22 May 1930.
  • Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary: Volume II (1969), p. 250.

• No rising star in the political firmament ever shone more brightly than Sir Oswald Mosley. Since by general assent he could have become the leader of either the Labour or the Conservative Party. What Mosley so valiantly stood for could have saved this country from the Hungry Thirties and the Second World War.
  • Michael Foot

• The greatest comet of British politics in the twentieth century...an orator of the highest rank. He produced, almost unaided, a programme of economic reconstruction which surpassed anything offered by Lloyd George or, in the United States, by F. D. Roosevelt...He has continued fertile in ideas...A superb political thinker, the best of our age.
  • A. J. P. Taylor

• Did he not appear to you to be a public man of no little courage, no little candour and no little ability.
  • Lord Chief Justice Hewart