‘Britain Led The Fight Against Fascism’ by Donal Kennedy

Humphries is a very aggressive interviewer who rarely lets any assertion go unchallenged but he apparently saw no reason to ask Brown for evidence.

In fact British Governments had no quarrels with Mussolini for most of the Duce’s ascendancy, happily cooperated with Hitler on his accession to power,

and helped General Franco’s revolting regime to establish its tyranny . A former member of the British Cabinet was described in the 1930s a “the leader of the First Fascist Movement in Europe” and did not dispute the description, given as a compliment.

When Fascist Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935 it had the acquiescence, even the support, of Britain and France. The Italians used poison gas,”a

weapon which other colonial powers such as Britain,France and Spain had used against ‘primitive’ people during the 1920s”. The League of Nations,

in which the Great War victors, Britain and France, were top dogs, imposed sanctions on the Italian importation of mules and camels, but not cars

and trucks, and Italian war supplies passed through the British-controlled Suez Canal, unhindered. One delegate at the League of Nations called

for military sanctions against Italy, and pledged his nation’s forces to their implementation.He was dismissed as a “firebrand” by Britain’s Anthony

Eden. His name?    Eamon de Valera.

Winston Churchill, not then in the British Cabinet, admired Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia.

The following year a British officer with a dishonourable record,Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard, whose crude propaganda had been laughed to scorn by some MPs in 1920 flew General Francisco Franco from the Canaries, where the Republican Government had posted him to keep him out of mischief, to Morocco, from which he launched his murderous assault on the Spanish people and nearly forty years of fascistic dictatorship. Pollard was no maverick, for he served  with MI6 in the British Embassy when Franco at last reached Madrid, Some of his lying propaganda, though already discredited in 1920, keeps resurfacing with supposed scholars and commentators nearly a century later.

When Hitler came to power in 1933 and captured the files of the German Communist Party, British agents delightedly accepted an invitation to copy them in the building where unfortunate captives were still being tortured. MI5, MI6 and Special Branch officers continued to watch every movement, read every letter, bug every phone of anyone  on the membership list who arrived in Britain for as lomg as they lived. In the case of Eric Hobbawm they did so for over 80 years.

The ex-Cabinet Minister hailed as the “Leader of the First Fascist Movement in Europe” was Lord Carson.

In November 1931 the Dublin Branch of The British Union of Fascists marched with the British Legion on Remembrance Sunday. A few years ago HISTORY IRELAND reproduced a photograph from THE IRISH INDEPENDENT printed at the time. Apparently the Legion and Fascists, if not exactly in step, were not in disagreement.

As early as December 1922 BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE carried a bitterly anti-Irish article, contrasting the diabolical Sinn Feiners with the noble Fascisti who had just taken over in Italy.