ARTICLES BROUGHT TO YOU FROM SPIRITUAL NEWS

Maurice Barbanell

In May 1932, Maurice Barbanell founded Psychic News. Not only was he a journalist and a medium, he was also a dedicated anti-fascist. This is not a party political label – in the last war all of Great Britain’s major political parties were united in that fight against fascist dictatorship in Europe – but it would be a dis-service to the memory of Maurice Barbanell if his political bias to the left was not acknowledged. In fact in 1933 he officiated as minister at the funeral of Spiritualist Speaker David John Davis, West Ham Labour councillor from 1903 to 1932 and the Mayor in 1920 to 1921.  Hannen Swaffer, who wrote about Mr Davis’s life in the Daily Herald the next day and at whose Home Circle Silver Birch spoke through Maurice Barbanell, gave the funerary address. Maurice Barbanell was so against fascism that he went out to Spain and spent some time with comrades in the International Brigade who were fighting against Franco’s anti-democratic government, military insurgents.

General Franco’s fascist revolt broke out on July 17th 1936. On July 18th he and his henchman declared a ‘National Revolt’…

This was no Spanish holiday for Maurice Barbanell. The Nazi regime in Germany were supplying arms and equipment – and personnel – to Franco. Massacres mass executions and other atrocities were commonplace and everyday occurrences – it was a forerunner of events that were to further unfold in World War II.

And so we come to May 2008.

Seventy six years almost to the week of the launch of Psychic News and one week after the birthday of its founder, its front page carried a story about a fascist who runs ‘psychic events’, complete with his smiling picture, and referring to his standing for election to London Assembly on behalf of the British National Party.

All reported without one murmur of condemnation, or leader comment from the present editor, and a headline to be ashamed of; ‘TV Psychic is a candidate for BNP’.

Spiritualists and those who seek to tread the spiritual path understand that we are all one spirit, of the Great Spirit, whatever our political leanings – but virulent racism and hatred of other groups of human beings different from those perceived as one’s own defined as ‘nationalism’, with its prejudiced and narrow outlook, can have no place in the kind of world we all want to live in.
Maurice Barbanell was an internationalist – a view often expressed now as ‘universalist’ in spiritual circles. In the anniversary month of his passing in 1981 or promotion as he’d call it, Spiritual News will leave the last word with the founding editor of Psychic News.

In 1952 he stated… the infinite power, to which you attune yourself, is always present and always in operation… It is always available and without change, anywhere and at any time, making no distinction between colour, caste, creed, clime, language, race or nation. It is God’s greatest gift to humanity, the means by which it can establish the kingdom of heaven on earth.