My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyvoluptuary laughing on the ruins of his country's greatness, mocking his own idealsand the trust of his companions, nor the ideologue spinning idle dreams of imperialpanoply for a people who had lost the will even to hold what their fathers had won.My duty was to awaken the will to live and to live greatly, to dedicate myself to anational renaissance.At the point of this decision I was confronted by three facts. The first was thatmovements of national renaissance in the entirely different forms suited to the twocountries in which they occurred had been founded years before in their disintegratingsocieties, and that one of these movements had long since won power and the otherwas clearly about to win it. The second fact was that precisely the same conditionshad evoked these two movements as were present, though in far less acute degree, inour British situation; the origin might be defeat in war, or merely economic declinethreatening collapse, but the results of unemployment and mass suffering in varyingextent were the same. The third fact was that the response of the old world, and ofcommunism in particular, to the foundation of these movements had been exactlysimilar to our New Party experience. When they emerged with new policies, theywere not met by reasoned argument but by organised violence. In our case it was clearbeyond a shadow of doubt that the initiative in violence came not from us but fromour opponents. We assembled to hold peaceful meetings and to present a reasonedcase, and others attacked our meetings for the purpose of breaking them up. Theyattacked and we defended.Among all the profusion of falsehoods which these events generated, I most resentedthe imputation that I took pleasure in violence because I had to organise the blackshirtmovement for protecting my meetings. It was almost suggested that at my greatmeetings I preferred a fight to a speech. The charge was obviously ridiculous—whyon earth should I?—for the meetings attracted by far the largest audiences everassembled in Britain. A politician who wanted to assault his audience rather thanpersuade them would clearly be certifiably insane.Apart from what has been said and written about my capacity for speech, I have aproved statistical record of persuasion in most diverse places and conditions, to whichmy opponents have never yet produced an equal. The reader of this record will haveobserved that I became the youngest M.P. by winning Harrow with a majority of11,000 as a Conservative, and in the two subsequent elections reversed this verdict bydefeating the Conservative candidate in this stronghold of that party by largemajorities. After that came the challenge to the Chamberlains' fortress in Birmingham,which they had held for sixty years, and the capture of every seat in the centre of thecity for Labour after five years' intensive effort under my leadership. Then followedthe two elections in the neighbouring constituency of Smethwick, with greatlyincreased Labour majorities; and finally the winning of over 10,000 votes at Stokeon-Trentin face of the 1931 landslide, while the rest of the New Party candidatesaveraged about 1,000 votes apiece.Why should a man with this electoral record suddenly take leave of his senses andwith much trouble and some expense assemble the largest audiences seen in Britain,not for the purpose of persuading them, but of beating them up? For sheer absurditythis line of attack upon me was an easy winner among all the foolish and grotesqueinventions I have known in politics. The whole allegation can be met with the two240 of 424