Lebensraum for Oswald

On Ridley Road, a poor, predominantly Jewish street in London's East End, mounted police and a muttering crowd waited for a scene that might have come from a newsreel of the 1930s. A generation ago, Sir Oswald Mosley and his Jew-baiting Blackshirts often strutted down Ridley Road; their visits almost always ended in savage street fighting.

At a Mosley rally on the same street last week, the script was little changed. First came some 30 members of Mosley's neo-Fascist Union Movement, chanting: "Jews out! Jews out!" When Leader Mosley appeared, the jeering crowd surged toward him and knocked him to the ground. Struggling to his feet, the 65-year-old sometime M.P. mounted an open truck amid a hail of rotten fruit and heavy English pennies (which were seldom so wasted in Depression days). Before he could open the meeting, the brawl was on. Within minutes, Mosley was led away under heavy police escort, while grim-faced bobbies arrested 54.

Back to Arminius. Mosley, a still shrill ghost who returned to Britain from self-imposed exile in France and Ireland in 1958 (he had been detained in England early in World War II), is having a minor revival. Neo-Fascists have about as much influence as neo-Druids would have, but in an economically and politically uneasy Britain, Mosley's clumsy thrusts at the Jews and colored immigrants whom he blames for "economic crises" no longer seemed merely eccentric. The Ridley Road riot was the third such outburst that Mosley's men had provoked in three weeks (total arrests: 155). Another free-swinging battle erupted in Trafalgar Square last month during a rally held by the National Socialist Movement, a minuscule offshoot of Mosley's group, whose members wear storm trooper uniforms, parrot Goebbels' anti-Semitic slogans, and hang pictures of Hitler on the walls of their seedy Bayswater headquarters.

A third fascist group is led by Andrew Fountaine, a wealthy landowner who envisages a northern Europe community from which Jews and Negroes would be excluded; the group uses as its symbol the sun wheel emblem of Arminius, leader of the Germanic tribes that were said to have preserved Aryan "purity" by defeating the Romans in A.D. 9. Mosley still leads Britain's biggest fascist party, but police doubt that all three groups among them total 5,000 members.*

Let Him Drown. Britain's Hyde Park tradition of letting a man say what he pleases has been getting a nervous re-examination because of these incidents, but since nobody can figure out just where to draw the line on limiting freedom of speech, the prevailing view, in the words of London's Evening Standard, is that instead of making a martyr of "this pitiful and eccentric figure," Britons should ignore Mosley and "allow him to drown in his own paranoia." That seems to be the government's intention. At week's end, Home Secretary Henry Brooke declined requests to suppress fascist rallies, even though they seemed likely to result in violence.

* Though bitterly anti-American, Mosley financed British-style fascism on a fortune inherited by his first wife from her grandfather, Chicago merchant prince Levi Z. Leiter. After her death he married Diana Mitford, whose blonde sister Unity was Hitler's good friend. In the '20s, before his fascist days, he was seriously reckoned as a future Prime Minister.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.