AHC: Make Oswald Mosley the British Hitler
- Thread starter TPL99
- Start date
It's kind of a cliche (along with fascist France), and the issue is that the circumstances that allowed Hitler's rise to power in Germany wouldn't really exist in a post-WWI UK, even if the Central Powers had won.
I'd say your best bet is try to get Mosley and Churchill together in a Beaverbrook-backed United Empire Party and have it displace one of the major parties. It nearly happened in OTL, after all. It'll be a lot more pleasant and a lot less fascist than the NSDAP, but I could see such a party coming to power if the Depression goes ahead and the economy goes south.
The difficulty is that with a CP victory, we have no idea about whether radical nationalist crazies would arise in the UK: you'd need a Treaty of Versailles in reverse, and that would be targeted more at France than Britain, if only because Imperial Germany had no means of invading the British Isles.
I think it would be hard for Moseley to choose fascism (and it was a deliberate choice) without a continental model or two. What would be scary is that if Moseley did manage to remain part of the political establishment, the Imperial Fascist League might have become the main fascist organisation in the UK instead of the BUF, who the head of the IFL regarded as "kosher fascists" for being "too soft on Jews".
I think Andrew Marr summed up Mosley's lack of success best, by saying that the Fascist accoutrement that Mosley lifted directly from Germany and Italy were very un-British and really explicit militarism doesn't really square well with the poor regard that Britons have held their army in historically.
You can't get Mosley as a british Hitler. The 2 are very different in very different circumstances.
We have an excellent timeline on here somewhere (I cant remember it for the life of me but I believe it was created by the writer of Fight and Be Right?) which has Mosley remain a prominent figure in the Labour Party and it goes a long way to show how unlike Hitler, Mosley had far more agreeable elements to him and far less radical goals.
We have an excellent timeline on here somewhere (I cant remember it for the life of me but I believe it was created by the writer of Fight and Be Right?) which has Mosley remain a prominent figure in the Labour Party and it goes a long way to show how unlike Hitler, Mosley had far more agreeable elements to him and far less radical goals.
Hitler came to power in a nation that had been humiliated and where many people believed that, rather than losing in battle, it had been stabbed in the back by a coalition of civilian leaders, Jews, and Communists. A Communist uprising and the return of millions of soldiers had led to the creation of paramilitaries like the SA. The new government and democracy were not acknowledged as legitimate by much of the population. When the Great Depression happened there were fears of a Communist uprising, as many of the unemployed joined the KPD (German Communist Party). Hitler was able to build on this and then managed to gain power through backroom deals. Few, if any of these factors were in England. Mosley and Hitler also came from different circumstances, with Mosley being a noble and a member of Parliament before turning to Fascism and Hitler being a poor ex-soldier who had no power or influence before he became a Nazi.