BRITISH ARISTOCRACY SUPPORTED HITLER AND FASCISM

JANUARY 10TH 2025

I recall it was The wealthy British racist aristocracy classes who supported Hitler and fascism…It served their interests quite nicely. Britain’s fascist past is intimately entangled with royals and peers who developed and even institutionalized intensely specific variations of fascist irredentism, occultism, and antisemitism.

A more familiar homegrown fascist nowadays is Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, a sixth Baronet whose family could trace its aristocratic roots all the way back to Ernald de Mosley of Bushbury in the 12th century. If aristocracy has a core, it is the preservation and perpetuation of an elite lineage, which is ultimately about the ‘purity’ of the blood. Long before the advent of more modern race theory pseudo-sciences, this outlook of the English aristocracy provided the fount for the plantation system and racial segregation practised from Ireland to the Caribbean and the American South.

The earlier aristocracy would model control of heredity and the policing of mixing that eugenicists and fascists would later seek to impose upon entire national populations. Fascism, in short, broadened the practices and ideas of aristocracy and attempted to develop them for a new century.

By the First World War, the British aristocracy owned up to four-fifths of all the land in the UK – something which could be traced back to land enclosures from the 13th century onward, which had helped to deepen aristocratic power in British society. More recently, these elites had tenaciously resisted all manner of self-determination and democracy, from the extension of the franchise to the working class in England to home rule for Ireland. Today it is estimated that one-third of the great estates held by the National Trust as ‘historic homes’ are linked to colonialism and the slave trade – with some using forced labour on their premises, notably Churchill’s Chartwell estate. Yet the rise of industrial tycoons as a rival power base and a Great War that devastated their ranks pushed the aristocracy into ‘survival mode.’

There is an embarrassment of aristocratic fascists to choose from when re-examining this history (from those who attended Hitler’s birthday parties to others who guided German bomber planes from their estates in England). The following figures have been selected to grasp the range of fascist ideas homegrown in the UK.

The Ideologues

The most familiar is undoubtedly Viscount Rothemere, Harold Harmsworth, in many respects the pioneer of the kind of propagandistic boulevard press that continues to cripple enlightened discourse to this day. Founder of the Daily Mail (as well as several other publications), he typifies a view of fascism as a wave of the future and the foundation for a new order to replace parliamentary democracy and self-determination. Enthusiastic about Hitler (whom he met several times) until 1939 and supporter of Mussolini (who he called the “greatest figure of the age”), “The fact,” he wrote, “is that quite a large number of people now possess the vote who ought never to have been given it.”

Equally opposed to female suffrage. His notoriety today in this regard revolves mainly around his full-throated support for the British Union of Fascists in 1934 (“Hurrah for the Blackshirts”)