Mosley's fall from grace

I READ the letter of Fr Brocard Sewell 0.Carm. in defence of Oswald Mosley with astonishment. disgust and, above all. concern.
What Fr Sewell digs up about Mosley in the early 1920s is irrelevant. The fact is — and Fr Sewell is careful to ignore it — that in the thirties Mosley openly espoused racialism, and anti-semitism, and supported Hitler, and used the tactics of street violence in support of the vicious policies he had come to believe in.
There is nothing Christian about that. Such policies are anti-Christian, and were condemned with utter clarity in the 1930s by Pius Xl, and are condemned even more universally today.
The good things Mosley did in the twenties only highlight the evil things he did in the thirties.
Michael Knowles London. E5
SIR OSWALD Mosley publicly renounced Fascism in 1947. His postwar policies were very different from his pre-war proposals.
Fascism is dead. So are most exFascists. May one who was a Fascist for two years before the war describe what the word meant to him?
It did not mean the establishment of an extreme right wing nationalist reactionary police state. It meant the fusion of socialism with patriotism and the reconciliation of capital with labour in the Corporations, industrial democracies in which there would have been more frequent, free and effective elections than today.
Members of Parliament would be elected as miners, doctors, farmers etcetera and not as conservatives. socialists, liberals — or fascists. Parties might have become irrelevant, but there was no proposal to ban them. It was different on the continent where they had not our English traditions of freedom and tolerance. There some parties and opinions are proscribed even today. None are in England.
Unless some better means of reconciling capital with labour is devised. Communism is inevitable. It might be acceptable if willed by the majority and administered with tolerance, goodwill. humanity and respect for the rights of dissident minorities.
Those were and are my views. My Israeli brother-in-law, once in the lrgun and a former Lieut-Colonel in the Israeli Army, does not hold them against me, perhaps because he also has been a soldier.
We both understand that every man has a right and a duty to stand by his own people and to speak up for whatever, rightly or wrongly, seems to him to be the right and the truth.
G. D. Wheeler London, SW I HAVING only just recovered my breath after reading the letter from a Catholic man who was proud to have been Oswald Mosley's secretary and then the outrageous defence of Mosley by a Catholic priest. I am writing to express my horror and amazement that there are people alive today who, even if not old enough to remember pre-war activities have not learned from history the barbaric consequences of fascist ideology.
Did the millions who gave their lives to rid the world of fascism die in vain?
Mrs Barbara Oakley