Book Review - Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars

More of an in depth history of Britain between the wars.

Pugh's book is very thorough and well written. At times, his prose is very thick and somewhat hard going to read as he is a historian and writes in a dense scholarly matter. However, the writing is lively and active and it is not boring.

"Hurrah for the Blackshirts" is less of a story of Oswald Mosley, William Joyce, and others of that ilk and more of a socio-political history of Britain between World War I and World War II. Pugh goes into depth on various economic matters, political matters, bringing up hundreds of names and people in passing. Large sections of the book discuss current events of the time with little to no reference to any fascists at all. In fact, there is a chapter of the book that details British policy in India at this time which seems totally out of place. Pugh seems to realize this as well, seeing that he's thread-jacking his own book, he kept putting in throwaway references to Mosley through this particular chapter with such phrases like "Mosley disapproved of this" or "Mosley agreed with that."

Luckily, the book gets back on track in the final chapters (the best) which really focus on the fascists. William Joyce (the Infamous "Lord Haw-Haw" is only mentioned in passing with other fascists but Pugh really focuses on Oswald Mosley and much can be learned about him here. While making no conclusions, Pugh portrays him as a self-absorbed playboy more concerned with building up his personal legend than actually trying to make fascism happen in Britain.

A personal observation of mine though is that, like most 'mainstream' historians, Pugh totally ignores the pseudo-religious background to most of the fascist movements of Europe. This has been written about by such writers as Dusty Skylar and historians such as Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke. Even art historians such as Johnathan Meades talk of it. The Nazis especially were highly influenced by their strange own occult beliefs that convinced them of the demonic in-humanness of their victims and allowed them to slaughter them all the more because of it. 

 Pugh sidesteps these beginnings although refers in a number of occasions to the "romantic nationalist ideas" of National Socialism and fascism in general. While Pugh and others may see the idea of the Aryan descending directly from heaven and inhabiting Atlantis among the "beast-men" as ridiculous (which it is), these ideas did in fact make these fascists do what they did. 

Himmler and Hess were fundamentalist believers in their occult view of the world, a view which, while ludicrous, made them do the crimes against humanity which they did. Simply pretending that the pseudo-occult motivations of the Nazis and other fascists didn't happen because its too weird is just Pugh being careful among his fellow mainstream historians.