Shane replied: In reality, Fascism was not at all anti-Semitic (Mussolini had a Jewish mistress and many upper-class Jews were pro-Fascist) until the need for alliance with Nazi Germany forced the Fascists into an ideological gleichshaltung with the Nazis.
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Having just finished Robert Darroch's D.H. LAWRENCE IN AUSTRALIA (MACMILLAN, 1981), I can really appreciate Shane's observations about anti-Semetism and the fascist movement. Living in Western Austrlia myself, I especially liked the first part of Darroch's tale about one, Siebenhaar, Perthian literary figure and Wobbly sympathizer and his brief association with both Lawrence and Monty Miller : probably the most famous I.W.W. organizer during that era in the WA. D.H. and his wife Frieda first landed in Australia at Fremantle, coming from what was then, Ceylon. The whole affair about the secret army which Lawrence stumbled upon during his stay in Sydney, after he left Perth, and the novel this encounter inspired, KANGAROO AND, the fear which this nascent, very large, fascistic organization (the King and Empire Alliance) must have inspired in D.H., was fascinating.
When you ponder those times, it's hard to remember how real and material fascism was. KANGAROO WAS PUBLISHED in 1923, a year after D.H. sailed from Sydney to San Francisco on his way to Taos, New Mexico and also a year after Mussolini's Black Shirts took State power in Italy. I don't think Lawrence was more than vaguely aware of the ideological tropes within which he wrote his novel. He strikes me as a man who was touched in ugly ways by irrationalist, nationalist prejudice while he was in Europe and especially in the UK because of his anti-war stance, during that "war to end all wars". Add to that, his German speaking wife, Frieda. That he should meet the same sorts of prejudicial ghosts once again when he stumbles upon Major General Rosenthal's gang is ironic for at least two reasons.
1. That Lawrence himself, saw in bourgeois democracy only the weak side--he dreamed that the lower classes actually ruled bourgeois democratic republics, sort of like consumers are supposed to rule in the marketplace. This was due, at least in part, to his Nietzschean philosophical outlook. Then, when he arrives in Sydney, he experiences, once again, the face of right-wing reaction, with it's patriarch, imagining himself riding on his white, Arabian charger, to save Australia herself from the weakness of a bourgeois democracy which would allow a Labor Party and its layabout unionist/syndicalist rebels to win control of the State.
2. That that WWI, veteran AIF Major General, the one who led his secret "digger" army for King and Empire was Jewish.
Regards, Mike B)
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