*That includes only those pro-fascist articles noticed in selected British newspapers over a period of 16 months. Newspapers searched for pro-fascist content include the Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Illustrated, the Observer, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror, the Daily Herald, the Daily Mail and a number of regional newspapers including…
[ 23 April 1930 ] On 23 April 1930, British and Gurkha troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd in Peshawar killing at least 20, according to the official estimate, and as many as 400, according to Indian sources.1 A large crowd had gathered at the Qissa Khwani Bazaar to protest the arrest that morning of…
[ 29 March 1938 ] Speaking in the House of Lords on 29 March 1938, Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang, not wishing to appear too pro-Nazi, began his defence of Hitler’s recent seizure of Austria, cautiously. He reasoned that it had been ‘inevitable,’ and that Prime Minister Chamberlain, by not taking retaliatory action, had…
[ 13 March 1938 ] Late in the evening of Sunday 13 March 1938, Hitler gave an interview in a hotel room in the Austrian town of Linz to a journalist in whom he had complete confidence to dutifully report the Nazi propaganda line as to why a day earlier his troops had marched into…
[ 10 March 1938 ] On Thursday 10 March 1938, the newly appointed German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was on the second day of a four day diplomatic visit to London. Earlier in the day, he lunched with the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, at the Foreign Office, having being forced to run a gauntlet…
[ 1 December 1937 ] The left leaning Daily Herald, was arguably the most progressive of Britain’s mainstream newspapers in the thirties. Unlike The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, it would often carry articles and editorials which were mildly disapproving, and even occasionally sharply critical, of Britain’s policy of appeasing Hitler. At the same time,…
[ 12 March 1935 ] On 12 March 1935, William Crozier, the editor of Britain’s most progressive mainstream newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, reprimanded Robert Dell, the paper’s Geneva correspondent, for allowing his heartfelt distaste for the Nazi regime in Germany to influence his reporting. ‘It simply won’t do, in my opinion,’ he warned the journalist, ‘to…
6 September 1920 General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, despised Irish republicans. In 1919, he observed in a letter to his predecessor, General Sir William Robertson, that ‘Ireland goes from bad to worse’, recommending that ‘a little blood shedding is needed.’ On 1 September, the following year, he was still deriding…
30 November 1923 On 30 November 1923, forty aircraft from five R.A.F. squadrons began round the clock bombing sorties against two villages near the town of Samawah in southern Iraq. The air strikes continued for two days, resulting in the almost total destruction of the villages and a death toll officially estimated at 144 men,…
19 December 1937 On 19 December 1937, Constable Sydney Burr, based at Haifa in the British mandate of Palestine, wrote home to his parents describing the extrajudicial executions of Arabs suspected of participating in an insurgency against British rule. After expressing his disappointment at the ‘military courts’ which were ‘being so lenient and want too…
