Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Oswald Mosley Trivia [Jonah Goldberg]
Mark H. - Careful pulling on the thread of Mosley trivia because you will find so much interesting and weird stuff, we'll spend the rest of the day talking BUF and Mitford sister arcana. (See here, here, here and here for starters.)
Other fun facts:
A former prominent member of the Fabian Socialists, Mosley had the support — for a time — of among others George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Harold Macmillan and John Maynard Keynes. AJP Taylor was more sympathetic of the leader of the British Union of Fascists than some might expect of such a famous Marxist.
From my you-know-what: “I am not, and never have been, a man of the right,” Mosley proclaimed in 1968. “My position was on the Left and is now in the centre of politics.”
Oswald Mosley appears in the Superman title Superman: War of the Worlds.
Mosley's sister-in-law Jessica Mitford, one of the Mitford Sisters (natch'), was a committed Communist who wrote The American Way of Death (which by many accounts is a good book I have yet to read). When Hungarian freedom fighters were slaughtered by the Soviets, Mitford said they were "fascist traitors" who had it coming. Jessica married the Stalinist California lawyer Robert Treuhaft (this NYT obit is hagiography), for whom Hillary Clinton worked as an intern.
Anyway, we could go on like this for quite a while. Indeed, this whole post is basically Steyn-baiting.
04/01 09:12 AM
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