*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 JANUARY 1879 On 23 January 1879 hundreds of Zulu warriors, injured during the battle at Rorke’s Drift the previous day, were murdered by British troops. RORKE’S DRIFT – THE BATTLE Almost everyone has heard of the heroic defence of the missionary outpost the previous day, made famous by the 1964 film Zulu starring Michael Caine which…
[ 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…
[ 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…
30 August 1848 Lord Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writing about the political debate over how Britain should respond to the Irish famine of the 1840s, observed that ‘an extraordinary and universal importance attaches to the views of The Times.’1 The political elite would therefore have taken due note when, on 30 August 1848, the…
4 August 1930 On 4 August 1930, the R.A.F. commenced a nine day bombing campaign, deploying over 70 aircraft on 1,835 hours of sorties against Afridi villages, deemed to be unfriendly. Most of the settlements were located in the Bara Valley in the remote North West Frontier region of British India, although the surrounding valleys…
31 July 1947 On 31 July 1947, ‘seven (British) armoured cars roared through the main street of the all-Jewish city of Tel-Aviv… with machine guns firing into shops and passing traffic,’ killing at least five and wounding fifteen others.1 This indiscriminate act of violence was in retaliation for the brutal lynching of two British soldiers…
26 July 1848 On 26 July 1848, at the height of the potato famine in Ireland, from which over a million died, The Times published an editorial which was far from sympathetic. The Irish were not only deemed undeserving of the totally inadequate relief measures organized by a reluctant British government, but they were also portrayed as…
6 July 2018 On 6 July 2018, Prime Minister Theresa May slammed down Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson’s suggestion to give members of the IRA the same legal protection from prosecution that he proposed for members of the armed forces implicated in terror killings, intimidation, torture or other offences. Williamson had written secretly to the prime…
4 July 1879 On 4 July 1879, British infantry used their overwhelming fire power to decisively defeat the Zulu nation at the battle of Ulundi. The battle itself, in which fifty Zulus were killed for every Redcoat, is occasionally recalled, but the even less glorious aftermath, in which the victorious troops immediately set about slaughtering…
