The TLS has recently run a number of essays on books that cover fascism in the interwar period, which thus fall within this blog’s very sternly enforced remit.
Fintan O’Toole writes about Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc’s history of fascism in Ireland, including “the IRA’s collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War (on the time-honoured but idiotic grounds that ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’).”
The book also discusses the Irish Blueshirts, fascists who opposed the Irish government, which they believed “a crowd of Spaniards, Jews and Manxmen” O’Toole aptly notes, “I have yet to discover what the Irish fascists had against the Manx, but the point is obvious enough – it is the far right that generates the alien threat and not the other way around.”
Charles Darwent reviews Andy Friend’s study of the Artists International (swiftly renamed the Artists International Association, to avoid unwanted if accurate associations), a leftist anti-fascist organization. Though the book covers the period up to 1943, the essay doesn’t mention how the AIA dealt with the pact. I guess I have to read the book.
Catherine Taylor writes about Sally Carson’s recently reprinted Crooked Cross, a 1934 novel about how the rise of the Nazi government affects a family in a small Bavarian mountain town. I picked up a copy earlier this year when I was in Britain and read it then. It’s so prescient, it’s difficult to believe it was written before the Hitler government had long been in power. Indeed Carson died before the Nazis’ horrors could be fully revealed: she passed away on June 21, 1941, as the Germans were just invading the Soviet Union.