You really are making a meal of this in defence of British fascism Keith
"I did not describe........ as illogical"
Very true - you said "It is simply not believable," - whence the difference?
You made great play of not being anti Semitic, yet your behaviour here says otherwise.
1. You trivialise anti- Semitism at a time when pogroms, persecution, beatings, dehumanising, ghetoising the German Jewish population was well underway and moving towards the setting up of the death camps, with the active support of leading members of the Brithish establishment, including members of the Royal family; YOU COMPARE THIS TO DAD'S ARMY.
2. You support with your silence the report on British Facism in support of Nazi Germany (do you accept the Independant report - we still don't know?)
3. You divert our attention by taking up something that is in fact totally unimportant - what does it matter who said it?
If the story is apocrypal, which I very much doubt as I have heard it from numerous people down the years who would have been alive at the time ot the event, why on earth does it matter - IT REFLECTS PERFECTLY THE BEHAVIOUR OF MANY ESTABLISHMENT FIGURES - INCLUDING THE WINDSORS - AT THE TIME - tell us it does not.
In the long run who gives a toss - anti-Semitism was just another episode of Dad's Army, or 'Allo, Allo anyway, according to you.
As far as the IRA's links with the Nazis is concerned; there is no suggestion that any such link was anything more than pragmatism in any of the history books, Tim Pat Coogan, Robert Kee, J. Bowyer Bell. The only link with fascism covered in any of these is through O'Duffy's Blueshirts, treated largely as a crank splinter-group.
It was the same pragmatism that brought about Lenin's entering revolutionary Russia in 1917 on a sealed train provided by the Germans, or Britain's embracing Stalinist Russia ("Good old Uncle Joe" was the slogan at the time), or the US taking Von Braun and his team into their rocket building project - or, for that matter, co-operated with some of the world's greatest monsters, Marshal Kee, Papa Doc, General Pinochet.
Anyway, it was only a sit-com, so what does it matter?
Jim Carroll