My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleycentury and even in time of war, Bonaparte said that the moral to the material was asthree to one; in the twentieth century, in time of peace the moral is far stronger still.Action and will are both necessary, but both have their limits; action can be too dearlybought, and it was. To affirm this truth is not to admit any shadow of justice in thecase of those who, before the war, condemned the crimes of fascism and condoned thecrimes of Soviet Russia, when it paid their squalid policies and sustained theirEuropean crimes to strain at the gnat and swallow the camel.There are more ways than one of killing liberty. Free expression of opinion in anyorganised form was openly denied by the State in the fascist countries, but to a largeextent it was covertly denied by subtler means in Great Britain before the war, and hasbeen entirely denied for all effective purposes since the war. It is possible either to killfreedom by force or to smother it by the power of money with the connivance of theState. There is not much freedom left to the individual with a new opinion, when thePress, radio and television are denied to him; when public meetings are his only formof expression, and the State, while denying him the right to keep order, refuses tokeep order itself. Complete the process with Labour majorities on local councilsrefusing the use of public halls under their control, and a Conservative majority inParliament using the police, not to keep order at outdoor meetings, but to ban themeeting and to stop the proceedings the moment organised opposition threatensdisorder; then the triumph of democracy in England has disposed of what Mussolinicalled the rotting corpse of liberty even more effectively because less blatantly.Hypocrisy rules in quiet triumph: 'the coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with asword'. Freedom of speech in face of the established parties joins the economicfreedom of the individual in face of the capitalist combines, which in time-honoureddefinition long since granted the 'liberty' to sleep on a bench in the park to a man whocannot afford a room at the Ritz.We must start at the beginning of this development and cover the process in properstages, before we contemplate in all its exquisite perfection the present system for thecomplete suppression of unorthodox opinion whenever it attains an effective,organised form. Disorder had often prevailed at public meetings in Britain for yearsbefore I was born. Our New Party experience showed that under the existingdispensation the police were unwilling to keep order. None of these things mattered tothe established parties, which had a big Press to support them, and who in the case ofthe Conservative Party confined their large meetings to ticket-bearing supporters whodutifully assembled over large areas to hear their leaders. We were a new movementand we were entirely dependent upon the spoken word at public meetings to find thesupport which did not yet exist. It was perfectly clear that we were to be denied byorganised violence this sole opportunity for political progress. What were we to do?—Pack up and go home?—Or organise ourselves to defend our meetings? A few of myvalued associates chose the first alternative, I chose the second.We had a programme slowly and laboriously created during my Labour Party days—no foreign invention—which we were convinced could save the country in conditionof crisis that might at any time deteriorate into national disaster. It seemed to me anabsolute duty to give our people the opportunity to understand it and support it. To becapable of thought, but not of action, would be to me contemptible, a denial of everyprinciple. What I later described in The Alternative as the thought-deed man—theman capable of both thought and action—must become a living reality, an embodied244 of 424