My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyfight, and even the dames of the Primrose League forget their hero's sage advice tokeep out of unnecessary trouble. If in still honouring this principle we lay a primroseon the hallowed memory, do not let us then be accused of anti-semitism.When it came to the question of world war the matter became deadly serious, andeach side held its opinion and principle with passionate conviction. The Jewsnaturally wanted to aid their fellows who were being persecuted in Germany. Inaturally wanted to save the lives of young Englishmen and to prevent unnecessarywar— despite any minority being persecuted anywhere — which was my whole life'sprinciple; so it came to a head-on clash. In my view it became the business of theseJews to make a war and my business to stop the war. That was the whole reason of thequarrel. If I had been a Jew, or if many Englishmen had been suffering persecution inGermany, I might possibly have felt and acted as they did, but as an English soldierfrom the First World War I had dedicated myself to the maintenance of peace; neveranother war except to save the life of Britain.Therefore, we came to a fierce quarrel which is now over. Never even at the height ofcontroversy did I say anything nearly so offensive about Jews as, for instance,Aneurin Bevan said about his Conservative compatriots. Never at any time did I orour movement attack Jews on account of race or religion; never, therefore, were weanti-semitic. The principle of never attacking Jews on account of race or religion wasmaintained throughout our policy statements in East London and in our whole policyeverywhere. It is also quite untrue that we organised provocative marches andmeetings in Jewish areas. Never once during this period did I enter Whitechapel,which has a Jewish majority. It will scarcely be contended that we should have deniedourselves access to areas of East London with large majorities of English peoplewhere our vote averaged 19 per cent.At the height of the quarrel I reaffirmed this position in Tomorrow We Live: 'We donot attack Jews on account of their religion; our principle is complete religioustoleration, and we certainly do not wish to persecute them on account of their race, forwe dedicate ourselves to service of an Empire which contains many different racesand any suggestion of racial persecution would be detrimental to the Empire we serve.Our quarrel with the Jewish interests is that they have set the interests of their coracialistsat home and abroad above the interest of the British state.'An outstanding example of this conduct is the persistent attempt of many Jewishinterests to provoke the world disaster of another war between Britain and Germany,not this time in any British quarrel, but purely in a Jewish quarrel.'That bitter quarrel is now over and I sometimes wonder whether the Jews will fall intothe error of carrying the bitterness of the past to the point of inhibiting the present andendangering the future. It is not an English characteristic, for of the English in theirmoments of genius can be said with truth what Rosebery said of Napoleon: 'To him itwas always today, there never was a yesterday'. I have utterly condemned atrocitiescommitted on the Jews in Germany, horrors which could never have happened onanything approaching that scale in time of peace; for these Jews lost their lives as adirect result of war, just as did all the twenty-five million Europeans who died. Wewill regard these terrible matters and other atrocities of war in detail. At this point Imay state simply the traditional English view that vengeance breeds vengeance, and284 of 424