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This chapter considers the membership strength of Britain's interwar fascist parties, and other areas of related interest such as the social-class and occupational profiles of fascist 'joiners'. Reliable material on the membership in the official fascist sources, in particular, is extremely scarce. Fascist newspaper sources are less useful, however, if we are attempting to arrive at an estimation of a fascist party's membership strength. Membership figures put out by the fascist press are notoriously unreliable. The significance of the National Fascisti and the IFL lay in areas other than the number of members they attracted, though. Both parties had pitifully small memberships. Social-class and occupational analyses of fascist memberships undoubtedly help us to arrive at a greater awareness of the nature of fascism, not least because they impel us to focus on the structural or objective determinants of recruitment.
This chapter describes a number of points that are in need of clarification. Firstly, there is no necessary or natural correlation between fascism and anti-semitism. Secondly, the analyst and student of fascist anti-semitism needs to be alive to the fact that there are numerous strains of the antisemitic virus, ranging from the common-or-garden anti-Semitism to the more virulent racial-biological kind with its potentially genocidal implications. Thirdly, a tradition of anti-semitism existed in Britain long before the advent of domestic fascism, much of it potent and highly articulate, as Colin Holmes's admirable Anti-Semitism in British Society, from 1876 to 1939 demonstrated. The anti-semitism of the Imperial Fascist League was of a very different order from that of the BF. The IFL advocated a doctrine of racial anti-semitism and Nordic supremacy that would set it apart from the great majority of its contemporaries on the interwar fascist fringe.
Culture was at the centre of the fascist political project in interwar Britain. British fascism was a cultural phenomenon as much as it was a movement for political or economic change. With regard to the former, British fascist culture developed within the broad European-wide cultural critique of liberal rationalism and positivism that originated in the 1890s, and was thus an organic element of it. Culture was imagined in a number of ways by British fascists. Indeed, like fascism and its ideology, it did not project a single uniform identity. True culture, for the fascists was meant to convey a sense of the eternal and enduring. Fascist culture was meant to convey and reinforce the idea of a harmoniously integrated society, united in its pursuit of prescribed political goals.
The British fascist imagination during the interwar period was racked by a morbid dread of impending national dissolution. A veritable kaleidoscope of nightmarish new forms and practices appeared on the fascists' mental horizon as a result of the sexual revolution. Many fascists believed that this revolutionary wave had burst the dam of conventional decency and moral restraint, unleashing a tide of sexually promiscuous behaviour and decadent sexual perversity on modern Britain. Fascism and literary modernism were also contemptuous of 'mass culture' and the alleged 'Americanisation' of British culture. In addition, the supremacy of elites in culture and other areas of society was deemed unavoidable. Fascists accused rationalism of presiding over a fundamental divorce between intellect and emotion. By elevating mind and reason to a privileged position of authority within the human condition, rationalism was charged with denying man's subjective nature.
In the fascist mind Bloomsbury 'intellectualism', together with changing trends in leisure and sexual behavior were decadent phenomena which heralded the dissolution of culture. However, in the view of many of Britain's fascists between the wars, the supreme paradigm of decadence and the ultimate symbol of the destruction of culture in the modern age was the city. Consistent with its fascist ideology, however, its views on the countryside were of an even more extreme kind. In fascist ideology, particularly that of the 'mature' Mosleyite variety, 'true' culture was indelibly bound up with the countryside and the soil. Apprehension about the machine and the machine age was prevalent in British fascist discourse. Fascist unease about the machine, industrialisation and mass production was not only shaped by perceptions of the Industrial Revolution, Fordist industrial capitalism and Bolshevik productivism.
As with other contemporary cultural forms in Britain, such as literature and music, the visual arts were caught in the throes of change during the interwar years, which was both profound and deeply unsettling to established mores and conventions. British fascism, though, unlike Italian fascism which incorporated aspects of modernism into its cultural and artistic programme, including Futurism and Cubistart, almost wholly repudiated intellectual modernism in the visual arts. Artistic modernism was accused of failing to respect the rules of harmony in art. Again, it is tempting to detect a sub-text of fascist ideology here and interpret this as a yearning for an ordered and harmonious social structure purged of the alleged discord created by class conflict. To Britain's fascists, artistic modernism, with its creative use of distortion, disintegrative images and general disdain for the traditional discipline of the art form, made a virtue of deformity.