The World of Fight and Be Right: Fight and Be Right, #2

By Ed Thomas

In Fight and Be Right, Ed Thomas charted the alternative political career of Lord Randolph Churchill. But what about the strange world that resulted from his dramatic entry and departure from the political stage?

From the ruined streets and totalitarian oppression of Syndicalist London to the Russian 'Robots', and from the Jewish homeland in Australia to Longwood, Florida, home of the American motion picture industry, The World of Fight and Be Right explores a completely different, yet strangely familiar, 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sea Lion Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386325529

Book preview

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

The World in 1940

The Federation of Workers’ Republics

Syndicalist Pamphlet- The British Revolution

Interview- Herbert Morrison

LONDON: COWLED COLLEAGUE

GLASGOW: THE DAMNED UNITED

Europe

Interview- Alphonse Capone

Interview- King Charles of Poland

LISBON: PORTUGAL’S GETTYSBURG

ON THIS DAY: NORWEGIAN INDEPENDENCE

ITALY: VOLTE FACE

BERLIN: AERIAL MONSTER

Interview- Pavel Florensky

The Middle East

Interview- King Abdul of Arabia

THE WAR: TURKISH DELIGHT?

TRIPOLI: FOURTH SHORE

Africa

Interview- Harold Macmillan

HMAS CAPETOWN

Interview- Simon Peter Dodd Ford

DOUGLASS: THE PUBLIC FORCE

Interview- Albert Kesselring

Asia

Interview- Chou Enlai

FORMOSA: INVASION

MANCHURIA: FROM MUKDEN’S RUINS

MANCHURIA: THE PISTOLS AIMED AT JAPAN

ASIAN THEATRE: THE WHIRLPOOL

TOKYO: POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE

The Americas

Interview- Francisco Franco

BROADWAY: NEW PRODUCTIONS

PATAGONIA: STANDOFF AT THE WORLD’S END

Interview- Padre Pro

Australasia

ALTNEULAND: Iron Lady

World Rulers, 1900-1940

Foreword

When I picked up my laptop in spring 2008 and thought I know, I’ll write something about Lord Randolph Churchill, I had no idea that I would end up, 150,000 words and eight years later, typing a

preface to an updated second volume in the saga. But then projects do sometimes take on a life of their own.

It took me a long time to write Fight and Be Right; and there were several periods of quite severe writer’s block. My way of solving this was to focus on creating something, anything, as long as it contributed somehow. Sometimes this meant making maps– other times it was focusing on the consequences, decades on, of a decision that I have just had someone make in the main narrative.

I kept this up until, having completed the main work, I suddenly realised that I had so many maps, flags, poster, newspaper articles and other information that I could fill a whole other book with them. This is the result.

I don’t pretend that this is a complete picture of an alternative world of 1940. There are a wide range of gaps, some deliberate, some not, and as all the articles are written ‘in character’ there are biases, mistakes and inaccuracies of which the reader must take account. I do hope, however, that what is here is not only convincing, but provokes thoughts of how this world might evolve in the future.

Thanks must go to Scott Switaj, who designed the alternative flags and iconography and ensured that they made sense, Sapiento, who designed the planes featured in this book, Russell, who designed a tank for me, and Rick O’Callaghan, Maverick, Faeelin, V-J, I Blame Communism and many others who gave advice and inspiration for various aspects of the world and its development.

Without their thoughts and comments, and the comments of everyone who contributed to the alternatehistory.com thread, the world of Fight and Be Right would be a far less interesting, and probably a far more implausible, place.

The World in 1940

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Benny Moss is one of the foremost journalists and writers of our time.

Born and raised in Italy, Moss came to the USA in 1908, and with his good friend Generoso Pope founded a series of Italian-language newspapers. He moved to the West Coast in 1915 and became increasingly involved in mainstream journalism, travelling to Mexico with American troops in 1917 as a war correspondent.

During the 1920s he became famous nationwide for his reporting on organised crime, and his 1926 book Omerta became an international bestseller.

He has written and published several other successful books, most recently the Pullitzer Prize-winning March to Washington, chronicling William Borah's successful 1936  Presidential Campaign.

After four years as a war correspondent in London, in 1937 he joined FACTS Magazine as a roving reporter, and since then has interviewed many of the world's most influential figures.

He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children.

Now, from the pages of FACTS Magazine and the Benny Moss' pen, come profiles and interviews with twelve of 1940's most influential and interesting men and women of the world...

The Federation of Workers’ Republics

Syndicalist Pamphlet- The British Revolution

Pamphlet-1.jpg

THE BRITISH REVOLUTION

by

P.M. ROXBY

CANADIAN WORKERS PARTY

367 Northwood Drive, Toronto, Ontario

The Author

P.M Roxby was born in Britain in 1905, and was educated originally for the church. For many years past he has been associated with the revolutionary Syndicalist movement, both as speaker and writer. Colleague Roxby has spoken in all parts of the Federation and participated in the British revolution in 1938. He currently writes for the Federal Ministry of Information, and is spokesman for the Conglomerated Typesetters’ and Printers’ Union on subcommittee 3 of the Federal Historiographical Revision Committee . His published works include; At the Crossroads of History, The Papacy and Integralism, The Jesuits: A Study in Counter-Revolution, Angolan Neo-Feudalism in Context and Through Syndicalist Eyes. He has also written extensively on historical questions.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

THIS pamphlet deals with the evolution of modern British society, and the developing revolutionary situation now in process of completion, as a consequence of the disintegration of the traditional norms of British capitalist-imperialist society.

I wish to state as emphatically as possible that the conception of English History and the Workers’ State as set forward in the following lines differs widely from the ‘facts’ set forward by the newspapers and bourgeois politicians- ‘facts’ that are, fundamentally, not objective, but rather a skilful compound of ‘wish-fulfilments’ and bourgeois apologetics, in the ultimate interest of Imperialism and the most astute ruling-class in all human history; of that financial oligarchy which, under successive ‘democratic’ disguises, has been the real ruler of the world since before the time of Marx.

I envy the proletarian ‘Gibbon’ upon whom the fascinating task will devolve of writing The decline and fall of the British Empire, a canvass of great sweep and satanic grandeur. The more modest aim of these chapters is to provide workers who are not afraid to indulge in some serious thought with a brief introduction to the British Revolution and the resultant organisation of the Federation of Workers’ Republics.

All who do not intend to have their minds made up for them by the millionaire press should read and digest this pamphlet.

T H E  E V O L U T I O N  O F  T H E 

B R I T I S H   O L I G A R C H Y

IT was the outstanding paradox of Modern History, and the underlying cause of the Revolution, that whilst economically Britain was the model country of capitalist development, it was politically in no sense typical of the normal evolution of bourgeois society into democratic society. It was this basic feature of this model land of capitalism- the scene of the Industrial Revolution, and for long its monopolist, yet still ruled by a pre-capitalist caste system- which marked Britain as the lowest-hanging fruit of the coming World Revolution.

The most important feature of pre-revolutionary Britain was precisely the fact that, with the exception of a single eighteen month period under the ‘Provisional Government’, it has never been a bourgeois democracy. It is the one country in Europe that remained untouched by the great wave of revolutions that began with the French Revolution in 1789-94. For more than three centuries, and despite a skilfully erected facade of democratic camouflage, Britain has been the land, per excellence, of Government by the few- of an oligarchic plutocracy. Britain- for we include with England her ‘occupied’ territories, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, India and so on- was, in fact, the modern counterpart of Carthage or Venice, the thalassocratic oligarchies of classical and medieval times.

It is not the purpose of this pamphlet to detail the rise and fall of the British Oligarchy, except in the broadest terms. Readers who are curious about these matters will find enlightenment in other volumes of this series. Yet it is helpful to provide a brief outline.

THE THREE CHURCHIILS

One curious, but perhaps logical feature of the British Oligarchy, given its aristocratic nature, is that a single family appears again and again in its historical development, whose representatives on each occasion played a pivotal role in moving British society closer to the Revolution. The British Oligarchy arose in the sixteenth century at the time of the great religious revolution, which also marked the beginning of English Capitalism. It grew and matured in the form of the Whig Party of merchant capital; and it is here that the first of the Three Churchills made himself known.

Using the Whig Party as the instrument of the British Oligarchy, the truly infamous John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, overthrew the Stuarts with Dutch aid in the curiously-named ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-9- actually about as sordid a piece of jobbery as is to be found anywhere even in the annals of Capitalism! The first Churchill established a thinly disguised but extremely effective dictatorship, which lasted unaltered down to the Reform Bill of 1832, which at last transformed the Whig Party of merchant capital into the Liberal Party of industrial capital.

From 1838 to 1848 the Chartist Movement ran its course. This movement has often been misunderstood. It aimed, not at Socialism, then in its earliest infancy, but at the creation in England of a genuine bourgeois democracy. It intended to be a successor of the French Revolution, not a predecessor of our own! Chartism, however, failed. It was killed by the ‘Repeal of the Corn Laws’ in 1846, which ended the ‘Hungry Forties’.

With the advent of Free Trade, bourgeois society in England arrived at economic maturity. But politically, it still remained an Oligarchy, albeit one that found itself increasingly under threat. About 1850, Karl Marx – a poverty-stricken exile in London since the failure of the European Revolution in 1848- wrote to Engels that Toryism was about to quit the scene, leaving the future to be fought for between the Liberal Party, henceforth the sole party of Capital, and the rising forces of labour, still temporarily dazed by the fiasco of Chartism.

On his own premises Marx was right. But he failed to anticipate the second Churchill. He did not foresee the arrival, at this particular moment, of that Machiavellian genius, the greatest master of counter-revolution of the nineteenth century, or excepting only the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, probably in modern times.

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849-97) led the Tory Party from about 1885 until he death in 1897. During this period he was Prime Minister twice (1887-90 and 1891-97), and his enduring interest for permanent history lies in his role as the author of the most successful counter-revolution in modern times- a transformation which bought the British Oligarchy another half-century of life.

Under the original guidance of its man of genius, the Tory Party, agrarian and therefore moribund, between 1885 and 1897, subsumed the party of industrial capital and in the form of the Unionist Party became the party of the most advanced kind of capitalism, of finance-capitalism, of Imperialism. The social transformation that began with ‘Tory Democracy’ was concluded in 1893 when the Trades Union Congress was incorporated into the Government. Finally, as a final stroke of genius, Churchill secured a mass basis for the new Imperialism by the brilliant conception of ‘Tory Democracy’- hitherto a contradiction in terms, for prior to Churchill no Tory could be a democrat.

How was the contradiction overcome? The answer is simple; imperialist expansion and colonial plunder! For the next generation, the counter-revolution of which Churchill was the initial and guiding genius resulted in a unique society, a ‘free’ metropolis based on a slave Empire, in a permanent class-truce at home based on exploitation without parallel abroad in the Empire, in a gigantic corporation with British labour, united as a junior partner with its own ruling class at home, bribed by a share in Imperial plunder.

Cecil Rhodes summed up the essential nature of the new social formation with an apt phrase: "The Empire is a question of Bread." Indeed, we can extend the phrase; the purpose of the Unionist movement was to butter the bread of the workers to make them blind to their lack of freedom. And this is where the third Churchill entered the scene. 

T H E   B R I T I S