"The Battle For Cable Street's Mural"

September 21, 2016 10:19 AM

Eighty years on from the day anti-fascists clashed with Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in the Jewish East End of London, David Rosenberg tells the story of the long struggle to protect the giant mural. Link to the Brick Lane Bookshop's article, and to more info about the founding of Tower Hamlet's Art Project, which still seems to be going in some form in the middle of our current 'austerity'. The story of the mural touches on world history*, community involvement, political activism, shared values*, spirit of place, and continuity. It's a fine example of the interaction between local and global; and perhaps of the legacy of Britain's now threatened, always contested, post-war socialist idealism.

*link to http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/mosley.html
*link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street

posted by glasseyes (11 comments total)

Wasn't It great pre-Brexit when we could pretend these fuckers lost?
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on September 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

I've just finished reading Jo Walton's Ha'penny which is all about an alternate Britain where England made peace with Hitler, and then begins its own march towards facism, anti-semitism, and general hatred of "the other".

It is scary how believable it all is.
posted by Fence at 11:15 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's some footage on Youtube set to the song "Ghosts of Cable Street" by The Men They Couldn't Hang.
Artw - I still can't believe the genetic refuse that makes up UKIP has managed to gain the ground that it has.
posted by Zack_Replica at 11:20 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, but think how USAians are feeling now.
Not that that's a cheerful thought.
posted by glasseyes at 11:33 AM on September 21, 2016

"these fuckers' have always been around I guess. But they don't half seem to have been emboldened recently.
posted by glasseyes at 11:35 AM on September 21, 2016

Nice mural; I used to see it every day on my walk to work, which was agreeable.
posted by Segundus at 11:53 AM on September 21, 2016

Wasn't It great pre-Brexit when we could pretend these fuckers lost?

Actually Mosley strongly advocated for a single European government.

Of course he wanted to expel all the Jews to Palestine and blacks to Africa, retain strict control of Africa as a European colony under an apartheid system, and kinda sorta make Mediterranean Europeans second-class citizens. But his economic ideas, among those of his contemporaries. were part of the evolutionary trail that eventually led to the EEC and the EU (although they bore little resemblance to the final result).
posted by xthlc at 11:59 AM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

My dad was there -Cable Street in 1936.
An activist in a small agit-prop theatre group
posted by jan murray at 1:06 PM on September 21, 2016 [5 favorites]

You know that Vidal Sasson was a part of the anti-fascist group against Mosley? Here is a nice article about the young days of Vidal Sassoon, hair-stylist innovator and ardent anti-fascist street fighter.
posted by jadepearl at 6:48 PM on September 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

winterhill, I've had two recent experiences of racism that were entirely unexpected and really, really dogwhistley. That's new, relying as it does on some sort of shared sense of...snide and aggressive victimisation? It feels different from the racism I'm used to!

One of the reasons I like the article is in the heading: 'an antidote to the far right's poison'. It was like a breath of the old Guardian values which, to me, have eroded from the paper to the point I hardly recognise it. And a reminder that plenty of people had, have, and will keep those values, whatever games the main stream media is playing.

Sorry to hear you've not been well, hope you're better soon.
posted by glasseyes at 2:32 AM on September 22, 2016

jan murray, that's something to be proud of!
posted by glasseyes at 2:35 AM on September 22, 2016 [1 favorite]