British Fascism: Difference between revisions

The BUF sought to heal relations between Protestant and Catholic Britons, and in particular it sought to appeal to Catholic Irish living in Britain. The BUF declared support for complete religious toleration. BUF Leader Sir Oswald Mosley emphasised the "Irish Connection" and the BUF held both Protestant and Catholic religious branches. Mosley condemned the Liberal government of David Lloyd George for being responsible for allowing reprisals between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. As a result of the BUF's conciliatory approach to Catholics, it gained a substantial support amongst Catholics, and several BUF leaders in Hull, Blackburn, and Bolton, were Catholics. Support by Catholic Irish in Stepney for the BUF increased after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War that involved clerical traditionalist and fascist forces fighting against an anti-clerical government.

On racial issues, the various British fascist movements held different policies. Mosley's BUF believed that culture created national and racial differences (a policy closer to the views on race by Italian fascism rather than German Nazism). Initially the BUF was not explicitly anti-Semitic and was in fact based upon the views on race of Austrian Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz and Scottish anthropologist Arthur Keith, who defined race formation as the result of dynamic historical and political processes established within the confines of the nation state and that the defining characteristics of a people were determined by the interaction of heredity, environment, culture, and evolution over a historical period of time. However, Mosley later prominently asserted anti-Semitism, invoking the theory of German philosopher Oswald Spengler, who described that Magian Jews and Faustian Europeans were bound to live in friction with each other. In contrast to the Nazis, however, Mosley's anti-Semitism was largely conspiratorial rather than racial, with Mosley often stating "he was against the Jews not for what they were, but for what they did".