ABSTRACT
Revulsion against the bloodbath of the First World War showed itself in pacificism and anti-militarism in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 the Labour Government ordered Armistice Day celebrations de-militarized; in 1933 the Oxford Union declared that it would not fight for King and Country; in 1935 the Peace Pledge Union was founded and gathered 80,000 supporters for its renunciation of war. Loss of confidence in oldestablished ways of doing things led many people to respect the European dictators, even to envy their people the discipline and sense of purpose the dictators seemed to provide. Mussolini was much admired for making trains run on time, and many people found the revitalization of the German economy under Hitler impressive and dismissed reports of brutal treatment of Jews as probably untrue and in any event a German domestic issue which was no concern of Englishmen, who had enough problems of their own. Sir Oswald Mosley founded a domestic Fascist party, the British Union of Fascists, in 1934, after he had failed to get his economic reform programme put into practice through the operation of the established party system. The Communist and Fascist parties attacked each other and the parliamentary system with such vigour and violence that special measures, such as the Public Order Act of 1936, were taken to restrain them. As these examples suggest, there were many shades of political opinion in the interwar years, but few people were inclined to take action against Fascism in Europe. The confidence which had supported nineteenth-century Englishmen in their determination to put the world to rights had disappeared. What had not been burned up in the First World War was shrivelled by the chill winds of the Depression, and when Chamberlain returned from Munich with the news that he had bought ‘peace in our time’ with the life-blood of Czechoslovakia he was hailed as a hero, a strong man who had the courage to work for a compromise instead of accepting a conflict.
