One thing which characterises the dedicated far-righter, and a thing which separates them from "ordinary" racists on the extreme fringes of other parties or in society in general, is a belief that more or less everything that happens in the world is the result of a gigantic conspiracy rather than circumstances or simple demographic trends.
At different stages during my time as a member of the National Front I adhered to various conspiracies - Jewish, Freemasonic, "State". My views changed from one to the other as my understanding of the world grew, but my belief in a conspiracy of some kind was consistent throughout.
This afternoon I was perusing one of the many neo-Nazi internet forums and happened upon the little conversation below, which hopefully gives us all a telling insight into the poisoned thought processes which underpin and sustain the fascist movement, not just in the UK but throughout the world. I won't link to the site but I'll supply the URL privately to anybody who should wish to verify my discovery.
What is particularly pernicious about the "Jewish conspiracy" idea, over and above all other conspiracies, is that to be a participant one only needs to be born. Unlike Freemasons, policemen or politicians the Jewish "conspirator" doesn't choose to enter the group at which the finger is pointed, neither can he or she ever leave it. Ordinary, everyday experiences such as falling in love, experiencing financial difficulty, relationship breakdowns, problems at work, illness, grief and tragedy form no part of the lives of this community, we are asked to believe, as several million people all around the world set relentlessly about their business of taking over the world and destroying the hated white race, for purposes which are not entirely clear.
Please read this exchange, and consider what a lucky escape I had. All spelling mistakes and typos are retained for maximum effect:
"Do the jews have a stranglehold on Britian?"
S: as seems to be the case in the USA with media etc.... is this the reason why left wing political correctness rules everything? just seems that nowadays anything or anyone right wing doesnt get a look in
O: Yeh a larage amout of the media is controled by jews, they could manipulate the general public to think anything, and they do as they do in the United states.
D: It seems to me the only alternate answer is that White indiginous Britain's have done this to their own people. If we know this to be the MO of jews who pretend to be Whites, why wouldn't we assume that yes, it must be, again, jews doing what jews do.
L: If you control the banks, especially the bank of England, then you control the country.
D: Apparently, everyone doesn't understand who the moneychangers are.
E: Yes, the Rothschilds took over Britain in the early 19th Century, any none Jews in positions of power or influence are in subservience to them.
D: And so it is the jews who have manipulated and are responsible for the Muslim invasion of Britain and they are also responsible for the empowerment of Muslims aimed at the persecution and anguish of native Brits? Is that not fair to say? Assuming it is, I only bring this up because of the boisterous and vociferous criticism of and apparent hatred of Muslims by European nationals whenever the topic is broached, which I hold total sympathy with, but I find they never mention the roll of jews in their plight. The jews are spared their hatred even though it is the jews who are responsible for their suffering. Of course, Muslims will act like Muslims. You can't change a tiger's stripes, but isn't it more the responsiblity of the evil jews who have not only brought in the savage tigers in unmanageable numbers and released them on the European population, but have empowered them and protected them by making it essentially illegal for the native populations to even identify the problem publicly so they may deal with the tigers effectively?
A: Off topic, but did the Jews get Obongo into power to use him so that if anything goes wrong in the US [and it will] it can be blamed on him and that in turn blamed on 'racism', leading to serious internal strife which, like wars, makes money and power for the Jews?
'Similarly' in Britain, remembering that Brown wasnt elected as PM by the people via a General Election, is the present gigantic cock-up being purposely generated for similar reasons? I think what Hitler said about the Jews in Germany on many occasions should be more closely scrutinised as to similarities today and the intended outcomes.
The Jews are crafty people, and leopards dont change their spots. Should we recall that a very famous Jew [Jesus] threw out the Jewish financiers from the Temple and ended up being stapled to a cross of wood at the age of about 33. The Romans departed, the Jews remained and they all lived happily ever after, until Hitler intervened.......! We know [?] what happene to Hitler, but the Jews kept on living happily ever after until the next war, and the next......!
Before Hitler, Lawrence was going back to Arabia to consolidate the united arab tribes, which would have halted the Jews' intended State of Israel at the time. Unfortunately, he had a nasty 'accident' in Dorset, but by that time Hitler was speaking to his people.....
It all sounds very cynical and 'conspiricycal', a bit like the Dr Kelly incident and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars more recently? Will there be a war with Iran? No, thats far too cynical.
'England is far too dangerous a country, but lets not worry cos our EU is going to see to that problem the day after tomorrow'.
Friday, 28 August 2009
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Sick stunt reveals racism in its natural presence
When I was a member of the National Front in the 1980s there weren't enough members to be holding outdoor "family" festivals, but if there had been they would probably have been something like the BNP's annual Red, White & Blue event. Not that I've ever been to one, nor am I ever likely to, but by all accounts they are weekend activities at which BNP members and their families pitch tents, visit stalls and listen to political speeches whilst drinking lots of beer.
This year reporters from the News of the World apparently gained access to the RWB and recorded for posterity the video reproduced above. In it a man who transpires to be a BNP council election candidate stages a mock "trial" of a golly, which is found guilty of "being black" and dropped onto a bonfire. A suggestion is made that those involved should venture into town and "find a real one". The person who releases the doll onto the flames is, we are told, a 12-year-old girl, presumably the daughter of one of the people attending the festival.
During my time in the Front I'm sure I witnessed far worse things. However what brought it home to me just how sick the whole far-right experience is was the thought that my own twin children are the same age as this young girl. I imagined for a moment either of them being involved in a ritual of this kind, being surrounded by and taking in all that hate and irrationality with the blessing, indeed encouragement of their parents and I found myself literally, physically shaking with fear and anger. Fear because there but for the grace of God go my kids, and anger at the thought that anybody could poison the mind of an innocent child like the girl in the video in this way.
Thankfully my kids do not think in this way at all but would that have been the case if, instead of leaving the far-right and in due course meeting Caroline, I had continued along my earlier path and instead settled down with somebody who shared my old allegiances? Had I not walked away when I did could that have been me, and a child of mine, burning the golly at the RWB?
Sometimes I like to reassure myself that, in the later years at least, I was a more "sophisticated" kind of fascist than some of these cave dwellers. The NF in the late 1980s abandoned the rhetoric (if not the actuality) of race hate and indulged instead in endless high falutin debate about the merits or otherwise of popular rule in Burkina Faso, and suchlike.
And yet, so many of the people who occupy high positions in today's BNP were involved with the NF during that very period, including of course Nick Griffin himself. The guest speaker at the RWB was by all accounts Roberto Fiore, whom so many of us looked up to during that so-called "intellectual" period and followed, with Griffin, into the ITP.
This afternoon I spent a little time browsing the various far-right forums to see whether any remorse was being expressed over this disgusting incident. Certainly there was an element of regret that it had made the papers but most of this, alas, focused on attacking the reporters themselves. "In public we have to project a good image. Burning golliwogs? Sieg Hail? (sic)" asks a poster at the non-aligned neo-Nazi site Stormfront. "No. The jew is waiting for an opportunity like that to exploit." ("The jew", it seems, was at the RWB this year - he certainly gets around, this guy!).
I would appeal to those who might have joined this organisation or supported it in good faith to take a step back and ask themselves - is this what we signed up to? The public presentation may have changed, but the reality resurfaces under the cover of darkness over a few drinks.
There are ways and means of challenging disengagement and injustice in our society. Putting black people onto bonfires, even if only symbolically, is not one of them.
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Walk Away
For over eleven years now I have been an independent councillor at the London Borough of Hounslow. Concerned by what I perceived to be a lack of community engagement by politicians in my own borough and in particular around Isleworth where I live, I helped set up a community action group which very soon found itself involved in electoral politics. In 1998 I became the first independent candidate ever to be elected to the London Borough of Hounslow. In 2002 two colleagues joined me and in 2006 we won six seats, and with it the balance of power on the local authority. We entered into coalition with the Conservatives - a decision taken purely on the basis of local considerations and not one that was based on ideological preference - which is where we remain today.
But for me it wasn't always that way. My first foray into the world of politics saw me riding the waves of the extremism which pervaded the latter part of the 1970s for many young people such as myself. At the age of fifteen I joined the National Front.
In a way it was an odd decision for me to take. I wasn't a natural racist. It sounds like a tired old cliche but some of my best friends honestly were black or Asian. But the dynamics of the age drove the more impressionable towards the political fringes, and in fascism I found a philosophy and a practice which satisfied my craving for excitement.
There was nothing particularly unusual about the story up till then. An awful lot of young people flirted with the far-right, as indeed others did with the far-left. If your respectable neighbour is a suited, booted family man in his late forties who works for a bank, there's a not insignificant chance that he too attended the odd NF meeting in his early days, either that or he ran with the Anti-Nazi League and harried NF members as they marched around the streets. What is different for me is that, as unfortunately befits my personality, I threw everything I had into my new vocation. I gave up my education, any hope I may have had of following a "normal" career, and almost certainly a great part of what otherwise might have been a very different and interesting social life.
It is difficult to explain to others what makes an otherwise reasonably intelligent person become more and more deeply involved with an absurd ideology which has it that almost everything that happens in the world is the result not of circumstance or even economic forces but of the dark machinations of a small group of people whose sole purpose in life is to perform evil deeds and to plot against anything that is right and good. But I could make a start by pointing out the obvious truism that when normal people start to shun you, and increasingly the only company available to you is that of others who share your affectations and prejudices, then before you know it the outside world - the real world - becomes a stranger and increasingly you hear only the things you want to hear.
As a member of the National Front I was not a bit-part player. I became a local official at the age of sixteen, and was elected to the party's National Directorate at the age of 22. During my five years at the top of the NF I worked closely with Martin Webster, Andrew Brons, Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce, Nick Griffin, Martin Wingfield, Patrick Harrington, Colin Todd, Roberto Fiore and Derek Holland. I knew all of these individuals, and at various times considered each of them to be my friends.
In 1989 I left the NF, but only as a result of a factional dispute which saw what was left of an already dwindling party break into two, with Griffin, Holland and Fiore leading what became known as the International Third Position (ITP), which I joined, and Harrington running the bit that was left behind, which very shortly afterwards adopted the name Third Way.
The ITP, very cleverly, sold itself as a "federation of autonomous groups". Thus it could work on many fronts simultaneously. For many it had a strong traditional Catholic ethos, for others its anti-Zionist (read anti-Jewish) enthusiasms were the dominating factor. It even had a vegetarian group! Speaking personally, during my later years in the Front I had already become very attracted to community politics (albeit, during those days, with a racist flavour) and the ITP was happy for my new locally-based group, Liberation, to operate with one foot in the parent organisation and one foot out.
It is difficult to say when I first began to question the prejudices that I had taken for granted throughout my adult life. But for whatever reason things came to a head and, by the end of 1991, I had decided that I'd had enough. I dropped out of far-right activity, left the house that I had shared with erstwhile comrades and which had become our local "base", and went "home" at the age of thirty to live once again with my parents.
Others who have walked away from the far-right talk of a Damascene conversion, of a particular incident which brought home to them the wrong that they had inflicted upon others, and themselves. In his book The Other Face of Terror Ray Hill, who worked as a mole within the far-right after having abandoned his once sincerely-held racist beliefs, talks of an encounter with an Asian family who had been evicted from their home as a direct result of his actions as a right-wing agitator in South Africa. For me there was no such experience, just a long overdue realisation that for nearly a decade and a half I had been living a lie.
I cannot say that on the day I walked away from the ITP I was the dedicated anti-racist that I am today. Although recollections are hazy I am sure I met former colleagues on occasions, purely socially, in the months following my decision. Even today there is barely a day, and hardly ever a week, that passes without me bumping into somebody who was involved with me politically on the local scene at some time during my racist "career". Do I ignore them or bawl abuse at them in the street? Of course I don't. Many, like myself, have changed anyway. Any who haven't who have the misfortune to engage me in political conversation are left in no doubt at all as to where I stand today.
But so much for the background, on to the point. During the time that I was involved with the far-right I naturally encountered a not inconsiderable number of those people who call themselves anti-fascists. When I was active, anti-fascism was almost exclusively the preserve of those on the political left. That is not to say that others not on the political left were not opposed to fascism, but simply that it was traditionally people from the left who were motivated enough to become seriously involved in combating it.
Not unreasonably, when I was a member of the National Front traditional anti-racists considered me to be their enemy. What is perhaps more surprising is, since I walked away and denounced racism and fascism unequivocally as I still do today, they became more hostile still. The harder I work, as a councillor and as a community activist, to build community cohesion and a society free from fear and hatred - often in the face of well-intentioned but short-sighted opposition from colleagues on the democratic right - the more vociferous, and sometimes vicious, the attacks become.
I can handle it. But what does disappoint me is the effect that this negativity could have on others who might find themselves in the position I was in eighteen years ago, still waving the banner of the far-right but thinking twice about the morality of what they are doing and looking, perhaps without even completely realising it, for a way out of their present emotional morass. It is as though there is a door, half open, which leads to the real world but with those who have always hated them for being on the other side of the door standing in the way, blocking their way out.
There are, of course, many celebrated examples of racists turned anti-racists who have been championed by traditional anti-fascists and who are able to perform valuable work in the ongoing fight against the far-right. If I am asked why the attitude of the same people towards me is so fundamentally different I can only express my belief that it is down to my purely local quarrel with the Labour Party, a quarrel which is of an organisational rather than ideological nature. Usually when I express this view I am accused of being paranoid. So I ask for a better explanation as to why it may be, and an answer is never forthcoming.
About a year ago I established contact with a very active and well-respected anti-fascist operation, following a bit of cock-up in which the group in question managed to blow a very effective anti-BNP operation of mine out of the water. We spoke of some work I might do to help them in their cause. There was going to be a meeting. Then silence. To this day I'm still denied access to their online forum!
I have been offering for years to visit local schools and sixth form colleges to speak to young people and warn them of the dangers of becoming involved with the far-right, spreading the message of tolerance and countering irrational but sometimes widely-held prejudices. On one occasion not too long ago I managed to get a group of teachers from Hounslow together and put it to them that I could perform a valuable service by using my experience to counter racism in the borough's schools. Most of those at the gathering, not a few of them Labour Party members and supporters, blushed guiltily and some looked at their shoes. There was no way they were going to invite me to do any such thing, it didn't portray the correct image of me as a person with a rival (if temporary) political agenda. Better the kids should go unwarned than a political point should go unscored.
I believe passionately that we should be making it easier, not harder, for one-time fascists who genuinely see the error of their ways to put the far-right behind them and re-enter normal society. Often they will have valuable information and experience to offer, and in my view the most effective way to counter fascism is to understand who the people are and how they work rather than just seeking solace in our own prejudices and mythologies. Of course anti-fascism needs to be on its guard for the odd Trojan Horse, but that is not an excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People such as Searchlight, whose business anti-fascism is, will spot any such people sooner rather than later.
And that is why I have launched this blog. I hope it will be read, and enjoyed, by anti-fascists, but its target audience will be those members of the far-right groups themselves who are sincerely looking for a way out of their destructive lifestyles. Its purpose will not be to criticise other anti-fascist operations beyond the things I have already said, and in a spirit of goodwill and co-operation I will link to them and encourage my readers to visit their sites and see what they have to say. But my way will be different. My way is about combating fascism, with no party political strings attached.
Any member of any far-right group (or anybody else for that matter) can contact me in absolute confidence. My way is about imploring reluctant one-time dedicated fascists to do the decent thing, and WALK AWAY!
But for me it wasn't always that way. My first foray into the world of politics saw me riding the waves of the extremism which pervaded the latter part of the 1970s for many young people such as myself. At the age of fifteen I joined the National Front.
In a way it was an odd decision for me to take. I wasn't a natural racist. It sounds like a tired old cliche but some of my best friends honestly were black or Asian. But the dynamics of the age drove the more impressionable towards the political fringes, and in fascism I found a philosophy and a practice which satisfied my craving for excitement.
There was nothing particularly unusual about the story up till then. An awful lot of young people flirted with the far-right, as indeed others did with the far-left. If your respectable neighbour is a suited, booted family man in his late forties who works for a bank, there's a not insignificant chance that he too attended the odd NF meeting in his early days, either that or he ran with the Anti-Nazi League and harried NF members as they marched around the streets. What is different for me is that, as unfortunately befits my personality, I threw everything I had into my new vocation. I gave up my education, any hope I may have had of following a "normal" career, and almost certainly a great part of what otherwise might have been a very different and interesting social life.
It is difficult to explain to others what makes an otherwise reasonably intelligent person become more and more deeply involved with an absurd ideology which has it that almost everything that happens in the world is the result not of circumstance or even economic forces but of the dark machinations of a small group of people whose sole purpose in life is to perform evil deeds and to plot against anything that is right and good. But I could make a start by pointing out the obvious truism that when normal people start to shun you, and increasingly the only company available to you is that of others who share your affectations and prejudices, then before you know it the outside world - the real world - becomes a stranger and increasingly you hear only the things you want to hear.
As a member of the National Front I was not a bit-part player. I became a local official at the age of sixteen, and was elected to the party's National Directorate at the age of 22. During my five years at the top of the NF I worked closely with Martin Webster, Andrew Brons, Ian Anderson, Joe Pearce, Nick Griffin, Martin Wingfield, Patrick Harrington, Colin Todd, Roberto Fiore and Derek Holland. I knew all of these individuals, and at various times considered each of them to be my friends.
In 1989 I left the NF, but only as a result of a factional dispute which saw what was left of an already dwindling party break into two, with Griffin, Holland and Fiore leading what became known as the International Third Position (ITP), which I joined, and Harrington running the bit that was left behind, which very shortly afterwards adopted the name Third Way.
The ITP, very cleverly, sold itself as a "federation of autonomous groups". Thus it could work on many fronts simultaneously. For many it had a strong traditional Catholic ethos, for others its anti-Zionist (read anti-Jewish) enthusiasms were the dominating factor. It even had a vegetarian group! Speaking personally, during my later years in the Front I had already become very attracted to community politics (albeit, during those days, with a racist flavour) and the ITP was happy for my new locally-based group, Liberation, to operate with one foot in the parent organisation and one foot out.
It is difficult to say when I first began to question the prejudices that I had taken for granted throughout my adult life. But for whatever reason things came to a head and, by the end of 1991, I had decided that I'd had enough. I dropped out of far-right activity, left the house that I had shared with erstwhile comrades and which had become our local "base", and went "home" at the age of thirty to live once again with my parents.
Others who have walked away from the far-right talk of a Damascene conversion, of a particular incident which brought home to them the wrong that they had inflicted upon others, and themselves. In his book The Other Face of Terror Ray Hill, who worked as a mole within the far-right after having abandoned his once sincerely-held racist beliefs, talks of an encounter with an Asian family who had been evicted from their home as a direct result of his actions as a right-wing agitator in South Africa. For me there was no such experience, just a long overdue realisation that for nearly a decade and a half I had been living a lie.
I cannot say that on the day I walked away from the ITP I was the dedicated anti-racist that I am today. Although recollections are hazy I am sure I met former colleagues on occasions, purely socially, in the months following my decision. Even today there is barely a day, and hardly ever a week, that passes without me bumping into somebody who was involved with me politically on the local scene at some time during my racist "career". Do I ignore them or bawl abuse at them in the street? Of course I don't. Many, like myself, have changed anyway. Any who haven't who have the misfortune to engage me in political conversation are left in no doubt at all as to where I stand today.
But so much for the background, on to the point. During the time that I was involved with the far-right I naturally encountered a not inconsiderable number of those people who call themselves anti-fascists. When I was active, anti-fascism was almost exclusively the preserve of those on the political left. That is not to say that others not on the political left were not opposed to fascism, but simply that it was traditionally people from the left who were motivated enough to become seriously involved in combating it.
Not unreasonably, when I was a member of the National Front traditional anti-racists considered me to be their enemy. What is perhaps more surprising is, since I walked away and denounced racism and fascism unequivocally as I still do today, they became more hostile still. The harder I work, as a councillor and as a community activist, to build community cohesion and a society free from fear and hatred - often in the face of well-intentioned but short-sighted opposition from colleagues on the democratic right - the more vociferous, and sometimes vicious, the attacks become.
I can handle it. But what does disappoint me is the effect that this negativity could have on others who might find themselves in the position I was in eighteen years ago, still waving the banner of the far-right but thinking twice about the morality of what they are doing and looking, perhaps without even completely realising it, for a way out of their present emotional morass. It is as though there is a door, half open, which leads to the real world but with those who have always hated them for being on the other side of the door standing in the way, blocking their way out.
There are, of course, many celebrated examples of racists turned anti-racists who have been championed by traditional anti-fascists and who are able to perform valuable work in the ongoing fight against the far-right. If I am asked why the attitude of the same people towards me is so fundamentally different I can only express my belief that it is down to my purely local quarrel with the Labour Party, a quarrel which is of an organisational rather than ideological nature. Usually when I express this view I am accused of being paranoid. So I ask for a better explanation as to why it may be, and an answer is never forthcoming.
About a year ago I established contact with a very active and well-respected anti-fascist operation, following a bit of cock-up in which the group in question managed to blow a very effective anti-BNP operation of mine out of the water. We spoke of some work I might do to help them in their cause. There was going to be a meeting. Then silence. To this day I'm still denied access to their online forum!
I have been offering for years to visit local schools and sixth form colleges to speak to young people and warn them of the dangers of becoming involved with the far-right, spreading the message of tolerance and countering irrational but sometimes widely-held prejudices. On one occasion not too long ago I managed to get a group of teachers from Hounslow together and put it to them that I could perform a valuable service by using my experience to counter racism in the borough's schools. Most of those at the gathering, not a few of them Labour Party members and supporters, blushed guiltily and some looked at their shoes. There was no way they were going to invite me to do any such thing, it didn't portray the correct image of me as a person with a rival (if temporary) political agenda. Better the kids should go unwarned than a political point should go unscored.
I believe passionately that we should be making it easier, not harder, for one-time fascists who genuinely see the error of their ways to put the far-right behind them and re-enter normal society. Often they will have valuable information and experience to offer, and in my view the most effective way to counter fascism is to understand who the people are and how they work rather than just seeking solace in our own prejudices and mythologies. Of course anti-fascism needs to be on its guard for the odd Trojan Horse, but that is not an excuse for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People such as Searchlight, whose business anti-fascism is, will spot any such people sooner rather than later.
And that is why I have launched this blog. I hope it will be read, and enjoyed, by anti-fascists, but its target audience will be those members of the far-right groups themselves who are sincerely looking for a way out of their destructive lifestyles. Its purpose will not be to criticise other anti-fascist operations beyond the things I have already said, and in a spirit of goodwill and co-operation I will link to them and encourage my readers to visit their sites and see what they have to say. But my way will be different. My way is about combating fascism, with no party political strings attached.
Any member of any far-right group (or anybody else for that matter) can contact me in absolute confidence. My way is about imploring reluctant one-time dedicated fascists to do the decent thing, and WALK AWAY!
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