My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywere some who would have added stature to any Cabinet and adorned any university.Their names were not well known because the smother was then operative to preventtheir fame when they emerged, and threat to livelihood inhibited the open appearanceof others. Our movement in these conditions became ever more like the iceberg withthe main weight below the surface.A recent book by John Harrison, The Reactionaries, apparently ascribed fascisttendencies to the following writers: Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewisand D. H. Lawrence. In this case the title and the theme were a contradiction in terms,because writers cannot both be fascists and reactionaries. A movement of the Righthas nothing to do with fascism, which can be described as revolutionary but not asreactionary.The vilely libelled mass of our members were the very flower of the English people.They were men and women with the vision to see the doom coming to the values andposition of their country and with the will and courage to resist it. Most of them werecertainly men of feeling and of action rather than of the study, the type of the soldierrather than of the scholar, giving precedence to sword over gown, but it is such menwho, in union with creative thinkers, build all movements of reality.In the rapid advance of our movement there was little time for academic sterilities,and even too little time, admittedly, for the serious discussion which is necessary tothe advance of thought and development of policy. In that period time was always tooshort, and everything was too hurried; disabilities which subsequent experiencerepaired. I remember one of our best men, who after a spectacular R.A.F. careerproved to have an extraordinary capacity for street leadership, saying to me: 'I haveread little you have ever written because my work keeps me too busy, and I haveheard little you have ever said, because at the meetings I am always looking round forthe next Red who might have to go out, but—I feel with you'—and his regard was atribute to the capacity for translating new thought and morality into feeling which canhold and inspire men with a dedicated passion. In the same way, I was always pleasedbeyond any other praise at the end of a speech when some fine old Englishman wouldcome up to me and say: 'You have been saying what I felt all my life'. He meant thatthe speech had touched some deep chord in the eternal being of England.This will no doubt be regarded as absurd by some who are called intellectuals andwho possess every qualification for that title except an intellect. Yet this is notsentiment, or worse; it is reality, the force which moves men. Leadership should beequally at home in the study of economics, in the homes of the poorest duringmoments of sorrow or happiness, in the merry scenes of English pubs and in thephilosophic debates of universities. It must be interwoven with English and now withEuropean life, both understanding and creative, both appreciative of the present andaspiring to new heights. Our action and also our thinking were continually developing.Even in the turmoil of pre-war politics fresh thought was added to the originaleconomic concepts born within the Labour Party, but because fascism was so much anational creed, the new ideological development had little relation to contemporarythinking in the movements of the Continent.Contrast has been the essence of my life, and it is good, provided it is expressed intwo poles of an harmonious whole serving the same overriding purpose rather than in267 of 424