Was Churchill a sympathetic Fascist?

 

Winston Churchill

In 1919, Winston Churchill sent tanks into Liverpool to deal with striking workers. He also sent the warship Valiant and two destroyers as well as sending in the troops.

We should not forget that Churchill once described Mussolini as "the Roman genius." When Churchill visited Italy in 1927, he told reporters: "If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you...against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism. But in England we have not yet had to face this danger in the same deadly form. We have our own way of doing things " 

It was the ex-socialist, Mussolini, who coined the term 'Fascism' and he was the first fascist. Churchill thought that Mussolini was doing the world a favour in eradicating Communists. In the 1920s, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic and many Italian Jews were fascists. The people that Mussolini's Black Shirts murdered, were Socialists, Communists, and Trade Unionists. 

Although Churchill stood up to Hitler, at a time when many Conservatives were sympathetic towards the Nazis, he had written approvingly of Hitler in an essay in 'Great Contemporaries', but this was in the mid-1930s, before the war and the Holocaust. As George Orwell pointed out, the British establishment may have underestimated Hitler and the Nazi's, but they knew that Hitler was on the side of the dividend drawer and that he despised Communists. 

The British establishment had also been sympathetic towards General Franco, and the Spanish nationalist rebels. The historian, Paul Preston, notes that the Italian charge in London, Leonardo Vitetti, "reported that widespread sympathy for the Spanish rebels and for Italian Fascism was to be found within the highest reaches of the Conservative Party." 

According to Preston, the journalist Henry Buckley, was told by a British diplomat, "the essential thing to remember in the case of Spain is that it is civil conflict and that it is very necessary that we stand by our class." (Paul Preston,  A People Betrayed - A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence, and Social Division in Modern Spain). 

At the end of the Spanish Civil War 1936-39, Franco wrote to Neville Chamberlain, to thank him for his support. Chamberlain's sister-in-law, Lady Austen Chamberlain, was a well known fascist sympathiser.