The British mini-series broadcast on Canal + returns to the activism of a motion led by Colin Jordan, Nostalgic of the Third Reich, in London in the 1960s. A rise in the extreme right that resonates with the current climate In Europe.
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During the summer of 1962, a demonstration organized by the British National Socialist Movement (NSM) stands at Trafalgar Square, in the center of London. Nazi activists are supervised by police officers present to ensure that freedom of expression is well respected. As soon as the clashes degenerate with anti-fascist supporters who have come to respond to racist and anti-Semitic slogans, the police intervene, most often to place counter-protests in custody.
In Ridley Road, a mini-series of the BBC broadcast since February 7 on Canal +, this mobilization is at the same time replayed and completed by archive images, to remember that when the British capital is ‘Prepared to become the “Swinging London”, between the rebirth of the cinema, the irruption of the Beatles, the explosion of fashion and rock, this festive era had its dark face. The NSM brandished swasting crosses and signs where registered: “Free Britain of Jewish power”. His leader, Colin Jordan, spent by Cambridge, looked at Oswald Mosley, then the leader of the fascist party union Movement, like a “fascist hide”, too much “delicate”, according to him, with respect to the British Jewish citizens.
“Terror campaign”
Sarah Solemani, the Showrunner of Ridley Road, was unaware of this sad renewal of the early 1960s. His father grew up at this time in an Orthodox Jewish family in Stamford Hill, in the north of London, where he witnessed several anti-Semitic assaults. But it was after reading the eponymous novel of Jo Bloom, unpublished in France, that she took the measure of the neonazie threat then weighing on Britain and found the narrative frame to wear it on the screen.
“To protect themselves from this violence, a militant branch of the Jewish community had created the 62 group, inspired by the anti-phase resistance movement of Cable Street in the 1930s. The more I advanced in my research, the more I ‘ have taken the measure of the terror campaign orchestrated by the Nazi movement. Synagogues were burned. A molotov cocktail had killed a Jewish boy. Despite the testimonies explaining for the police that members of the NSM have long targeted the synagogue From Cazenove Road, the police had concluded that it was a party that had turned badly, not an attack, which justified no subsequent investigation. “
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