Why the US needs something like the BNP
Interview with Nick Griffin
Martin Penrose
Interviewer’s Note:
I admit to being a little mystified when I arrived at the British National Party’s 2007 Red, White, and Blue festival. In America, I’m used to nationalists having small, anxious meetings (that is, if the local leftists allow us to meet at all). But what I saw in England was astonishing: Ferris wheels, strong-man competitions, soccer tournaments, pig roasts, face painting, and 2,500 dedicated nationalists—men, women, and children—all gathered to listen, learn, and celebrate. Not only was it moving and inspiring, it was terribly confusing. I began to be haunted by the question, “Why couldn’t this happen in America?”
More than three years later, I’m still haunted by that question. How can we fix the American nationalist movement? Fortunately, many others—both Americans and Europeans—have found this question equally provocative; therefore, Counter-Currents/North American New Right has decided to publish a series of essays that address the American problem, the first of which is adapted from an interview I conducted in the summer of 2007 with BNP Chairman Nick Griffin.
As most readers are aware, Griffin’s tenure as BNP chairman has been controversial among pro-white Americans. While many admire the success and respectability he has brought the BNP, others insist that the party, under Griffin’s leadership, has futilely sacrificed its most important values. At the end of 2010, a year that saw the BNP enlist its first member of color—yet also a year in which two of the party’s leaders sit in the European Parliament—it is especially appropriate to reflect on Griffin’s views of the American nationalist scene. We thus hope that Griffin’s response will spark a constructive dialog that will help us build a vibrant, successful, and positive community of nationalists in America.
My question was “Why can’t we have something like the BNP in America?” Here is Nick Griffin’s answer.
Nick Griffin: At First, we in the BNP had problems similar to the ones you have in the States. Our previous leader, John Tyndall, did things his way for about thirty or so years. And that was a large part of the problem: we had certain personalities involved who wanted to keep doing things their way, so the personalities and the baggage of those people blocked any real change within the party. Now, some people today would say that it’s only the external circumstances which have made the BNP so much more successful—that the reason for our growing success is not the new direction of the party. Well, what proves that isn’t the case is the fact that the National Front, which is still around in Britain, is still marching and stomping around, being quite careless with its image, and it is smaller than ever—basically on the verge of collapse. If our success were due only to external circumstances, we would have grown, but the National Front would have grown proportionately. But that’s not what’s happened. External circumstances come into it, of course, because external circumstances for a nationalist movement haven’t been this good since the Great Depression. But it’s also a matter of cadres, of a solid organization and solid people getting together and doing the right things.
Your leaders in America have sometimes put your movement at a disadvantage, I think, with their derogatory references to the general public, to “Joe and Jill Sixpack” and “lemmings”—implying that these people are scum, basically. And the moment you start to think that way, your members cut themselves off more and more from everyday people. And the more that our people cut themselves off from the general public, then you end up with this tiny, incestuous sort of organization which remains powerless and often adopts extreme rhetoric and concepts. All the while, it becomes more and more repellent to ordinary people. And that’s the key problem. But you can change it, because we’ve changed it here.
Another problem that you’ve had in America is that, because of America’s enormous size, people are able to move away from many problems, like immigration, for example. But now—even in small towns—anywhere which has a substantial agriculture industry is awash with dirt-cheap, illegal labor. Their towns are being transformed. The public response to the Minutemen Project—despite that organization being totally crude and unformed—has been tremendous and positive. You see, there’s this huge groundswell of support in America for the things we’re concerned about. Popular musicians, like country artist Merle Haggard, for instance, are standing up for some of our issues in America—issues which would be beyond the pale in Great Britain. And the American public is able to see that opposition to immigration and so forth isn’t based on crazed hate.
There’s so much potential in the USA. Forget the excuses for why an effective organization hasn’t yet been built there. It’s only because you haven’t had the right single man to do it, or because you haven’t had the right group to do it—the right five or six people to work as a team. And that is what’s missing. That’s not to say it will be easy, because all of the other groups will either want to jump on your back and leech off of you, or they’ll smear you and accuse you of all sorts of horrors. It’s very difficult to build a proper, viable political organization, but it’s got to be done in America. I talk about this to American groups all the time, and the response is getting better and better.
You know, I get more sympathetic radio and other media interviews in America than I do in Great Britain. There are people out there, basically on our wavelength, willing to listen, wanting to get involved. They’d never join the kind of organizations that you’ve typically had in the States, but nevertheless they want to hear something positive and sensible. It’s important to remember that, when someone forms a solid organization, you won’t get rid of all the more extreme groups. You actually don’t want to. We’ve got several over here, and we regard them as our dustbin. And you know what happens if you don’t keep a dustbin around your house. If you just get on and do a good job, you’ll attract the best people from those other organizations. Some of those groups have good people, and they’re only with them because they haven’t seen anything else, or there hasn’t been anyone setting a better example.
Another excuse that is used in America is the size of the place, that it’s simply too big. That won’t do, because Pauline Hanson and a handful of people organized a very effective populist response to mass immigration in Australia, a country whose population is even more scattered geographically than America’s. If you’ve got a group of people willing to tough it out for several years, through what the Front National called their “crossing the desert” period—and in their case that period took seventeen years—then in the end you can pull through with a winning organization. External circumstances in America are changing at such a rate that the organization that gets it right, in a place where there’s so much pent up demand for our kind of politics, can become very popular and develop very, very rapidly.
And related to that, to people who say that the American electoral system discriminates against any third party, I would say that you have the best system for a radical movement to break through. Because here in Europe, we have some areas which are totally Labor, some areas which are totally conservative, and in these areas no other parties have any chance to win. But in America, you’re able to go to these areas and run in the primaries for whichever party is dominant; if you’re in a heavily Democratic area, stand your man as a Democrat. If you’re in a heavily Republican area, stand him as a Republican. And this has been done before in America: where a candidate, a couple of friends, and a dog, basically, without any funding at all, campaign for a few months and the guy gets 35–40% percent of the vote. But, if there’s an entire cadre-based organization behind these candidates, actually getting involved in grassroots political organization, I think you’d have a real chance at seeing some breakthroughs.
And for God’s sake: stop putting people up for president. It’s better to get a dog catcher elected than to waste your time running for the presidency. You can stand in elections under these labels and get elected; and you’ll cause such a huge fuss and controversy about the movement that’s behind it that you shouldn’t even be worried about forming a third party or wasting your time with sensational national elections. I think your system is perfectly designed for our kind of politics. Honestly, though this might be my intellectual arrogance, I think if we were able to dump the twenty or thirty best people from the European nationalist movement into America, we could create something massive within a couple of years. You look at all the advantages America’s got. God, I wish we had that.
It’s important that you start building a grassroots practical movement, doing hands-on community politics, helping areas and running campaigns on vital issues, not just issues connected with race—getting involved with school-oriented and other community issues, things like that. You should start by reading a book on Change Theory called The Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. We’ve always ridiculed the left for being a bunch of beardy sociologists; the problem is: the sociologists study change theory and communication theory in order to learn how to change the world, so they know how to influence people and make things happen. You need a small group of key people to read these books and consider them, and develop a campaign and propaganda strategy; and then set out on a grassroots politics base in an area dense with nationalists, and enter a primary at the smallest scale available. And do this, mind you, within the two-party system. That will get you a lot of constructive publicity, which you will need to begin capitalizing on immediately.
I believe that America is, potentially, one of the most fertile countries for Eurocentric nationalism on the planet, probably only behind Russia. You have so many advantages: just briefly, you have some states where there is quite generous funding available for political party work. You can start there. You have whole rungs of local government: the school boards, the person manning the dog catchers, and so on, which are, in many places, elected positions. So, there is tremendous opportunity for a sensible party or political organization, with a radical hardcore, to do community politicking in fields that other people probably aren’t interested in. But also, because you’re controversial, when you get the dog pound director elected in this little town, it’s going to get you a lot of attention.
In our latest magazine, we talked about building nationalist strongholds—not geographical strongholds, but strongholds in areas of influence, such as in an independent service man’s organization. Right now you’ve got thousands of men and women coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, and because there’s such domestic opposition to these wars, they’re going to be left feeling completely isolated and neglected. So support operations for them. And build a constructive music scene. See, these are concrete things that you can move into, things that the established parties simply won’t touch. The radical left were absolutely right in their long march through the institutions. They could see that this Gramscian position is not just about politics; it’s about a much broader movement. And that’s very, very important.
Again, it’s a matter of starting small. For example, our first Red, White, and Blue Festival had only about 250 people, and at that point the party couldn’t have possibly considered putting on a festival like we had this weekend, with 2,500 people or so. But once you reach such a level, you get the capability to do the same thing bigger and better. And there also becomes a point that the organization’s resources grow to a certain key level that you have a degree of organizational competence that you can then carry over to different projects. But the key is to start doing practical things and stop talking about skull sizes.
The nationalist readers in all parties of Europe look with concern at the striking absence of something worthwhile in the United States. We would be willing to help you develop your alternative media, to help any serious organization get off the ground, and we’d of course be willing to travel to America to speak at your events. Because if we help get something worthwhile going over there, it will help our cause over here as well. In the end, like Trotsky realized, you can’t have a revolution in just one country. But the lead has to come from you. Don’t think that any of the other groups are going to get serious, because they’ve had decades to do it and they haven’t. So it’s up to good people to come to the right conclusions, to provide leadership, and to get things done. It’s you and no one else.
II.
I joined the National Front when I was fifteen, and by the middle of the 1980s, many of our younger activists—all in our early twenties and younger—tried to rescue it from the wreckage. And for about three years, we began to experiment with things like community politics, non-racist phraseology, collaboration with separatists of other racial groups, and other projects. After a while we began to experience some ideological indigestion, and by 1989 we happened to wreck the organization through indiscipline and inexperience. After the split, I was one of a group that went in the more “extremist” direction with the International Third Position, while some of the others wanted to have a more moderate, modernizing effort.
After the National Front split it was obvious that the movement in Britain was drastically divided. At that time there were several groups, none of which were going anywhere, so we decided to pool our assets and develop a resource center where we could use the experience we had gathered while doing some rather extensive work in British politics. We hoped that, in due course, we could build some contacts, carry out some organizational experimentation, and then build something truly effective.
Then I was in a pretty serious accident, which put me in the hospital and made me pretty damn useless for about a year. When I came back to the resource center, there was another group, a clerical fascist organization, which had basically taken over in my absence. Well, once I was sorted out again, there was nothing there that was of any value to me—they didn’t want me and I didn’t want them—so I went into the wilderness by myself for a period of about eighteen months in the early 90s. Then, I had a friend whose children went to a tiny village school in a very rural part of western England. They were told that they couldn’t have their traditional Christmas celebrations—with Christmas trees, a nativity scene, carols, and things like that—which had been going on for generations. The area’s educational authority declared that, since we’re now a multicultural country, you can’t celebrate Christmas unless you celebrate other holidays, like Diwali and others. The headmaster, who was a left liberal, said that he’d love to celebrate these other holidays, but that they didn’t really have the resources. Plus, he said, it’s not really appropriate here, because this isn’t really an “enriched” area, so to speak. So when he told the education authority that they didn’t have the resources to organize all these different celebrations, they responded by saying that they’d be glad to lend him some saris. When I heard about this—and this is one of the least populated areas in England, totally native—I realized that you can’t run away and hide from this, like I had done by moving up into the hills. I realized that I had to do something about it.
So I began to get in touch with former NF comrades who had moved into the British National Party, which was at that time an intellectually cretinous organization. But I found to my surprise that there were some good people involved—not just old friends of mine but good new people who were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, very keen and very naïve. And I could see that they were going to make all kinds of mistakes that I had already made, since I’d been around politics for a while at this point. So I began getting more and more involved with the BNP from 1993 onward. John Tyndall, who was running it at the time, had a problem with a moderating faction within the party that was trying to change the organization. And because I came from a fairly extreme, hard-line background, he thought it would be helpful to get me involved in various leadership roles. So since I was still fairly radical at that time, I was useful to him.
I got involved with the BNP thinking it was a far better organized group than it was. For example, when I started editing Tyndall’s magazine, Spearhead—which was the party’s main publicity organ—I asked the administrative organizer if he could put me on the mailing list for the organizers’ bulletin. He looked confused and replied that there wasn’t an organizers’ bulletin. There was nothing. So I approached Tyndall—who wanted to know how a bunch of kids had built a more effective organization than he could—and he gave me more and more responsibilities. And it started to make an organizational difference.
At first I had no thought about taking the party over. I gradually got to know the moderates, and in particular I got to spend time doing the things they were doing. And I found that what they were saying was right, that it really was what the public wanted. Also, external circumstances were really changing. While we were a bunch of crazed radicals in the early eighties, it didn’t really matter because there was no space for any serious nationalist organization in the country. But we found that, as the nineties went on, there was proper space opening up, and hence we had a duty to fill.
Then something happened that switched me from being a crazy-eyed extremist into a born-again moderate: one day we were approached by a British television crew that wanted to run a scam on the party and me. They approached us as if they were representatives of the Front National in France, and they offered us 50,000 pounds to help establish a proper nationalist movement over here. At first we thought that was reasonable enough, because we knew that LePen needed Europe’s other nationalist parties to get their acts together. So even though we were a bit suspicious, we decided to go along with it anyway.
Before we met up with these guys who were supposedly from the Front National, we decided that we better read up on their organization and learn something about them. So a friend of mine picked up a couple of leftist academic studies of the Front National—one in particular called The Resistable Rise of Jean Marie LePen—and while we were reading this book, we realized that this is really what we should be doing. Meanwhile, the “television crew,” of course, turned out to be a scam. Before they gave us the 50,000 pounds, they told us they wanted to make sure their money was secure, so they asked if we had a lot of tough young men who could protect their investment if the party was attacked. For proof, they wanted video footage of unarmed combat and things like that. That sort of behavior would have put us in prison for six months, so then we knew it was a trick.[1] But in the end, it was our enemies who had encouraged us to read about how a sensible, successful, modern nationalist party was doing things, and it suddenly appeared right. We decided: that’s the thing to do.
This was absolutely confirmed a bit later. I began writing a book called The Mindbenders, which is now wrongly presented by the left and the liberals as a piece of anti-Semitism. It looked at the frankly disproportionate number of Jews in the mass media, which, coming from the background I had, I viewed basically as a conspiracy. But I’ve changed my mind now. For example, there’s no conspiracy to put blacks at the top of 100-meter races all around the world; they’re just marginally better athletes. Similarly, when you look at the higher levels of society, a tiny overall average edge in intelligence does the trick. There’s no Jewish conspiracy there. They’re just, on average, a bit cleverer than we are, so they tend to gravitate toward the top. And obviously, having a higher degree of ethnocentrism than we do, the Jews will tend to push their own interests. And I say good luck to them; they should be emulated for this, not condemned. Our problem is that our people don’t do it, not that they do it.
So in 1997, when I was partway finished with the book, my house was raided by police on a Race Act charge because of a magazine I was producing. Everything in the magazine was true, but the truth is no defense in English law. During the raid the police took away absolutely everything except my computer and my file cabinet. They always take computers, but for some strange reason they left mine there. When they were leaving, one of the officers looked around at my cluttered file cabinet, saying: “I’ve got a file like that. It’s a very useful file.” A couple of days after the raid, when I was looking around in my office—which was empty except for the file cabinet and the computer—I thought that was a really strange comment for the officer to make. So I looked inside the file cabinet and there it was: my book manuscript for The Mindbenders.
I really began to think about that: this was no accident. This book was part of the reason why they came to arrest me, so they were briefed that the book would be there. They should have taken it with them. But this officer had obviously been ordered by his superiors to leave it there. I then realized that the politicized elements in the British security service want us to put ourselves in this little crazy box—a box with “crazy” written on each side, on the top, and with a flag on it. And that’s why today I’m a genuine modernist; it’s not camouflage. And if any nationalist movement anywhere in the white world wants to get anywhere it’s got to learn that lesson.
Note
1. Arthur Kemp, who was present during this interview, remarked that the party carried out some amusing subterfuge on the infiltrators. He remarked that a video of this prank can be found on YouTube under the title “The Cook Report.”
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28 comments
The BNP needs a thinner leader.
Well at least the discussion can only get better from here.
I support Nick Griffin. He has compromised and compromised while getting nothing in return. But, I won’t give up on those who take punches for us. It would be dishonorable if I did.
It’s time to unite the tribes.
Fat or thin, he’s great. It is true that the media like to demean us as a bunch of goofy Onslows, but this is an high-middle educated guy, and he’s managed to show a certain professional elasticity without selling his soul.
(Losing 15lbs would be great though…the name of the game is presentation and advertising.)
This article was evidently published here to promote debate concerning a White nationalist party in the United States — debate on issues such as the cultural and political space for such a party, its organizational and activist methods, its imagery and rhetoric — not partisan debates concerning the personalities and policies of Nick Griffin and John Tyndall. My comments here may therefore be off topic. However, I think it is only proper to advise readers that they should critically examine rather than credulously accept Griffin’s statements.
Many of Griffin’s statements are self-serving, evasive, misleading, and dishonest. For example, he says that many of the National Front’s younger activists “tried to rescue it from the wreckage.” In reality, it was younger activists like him who were responsible for wrecking the National Front. He says that “by 1989 we happened to wreck the organization through indiscipline and inexperience.” He writes of this as if it was accidental. In reality, it was predictable, and had in fact been predicted by Tyndall early in the 1980s. The “ideological indigestion” to which Griffin refers was far more extensive than he suggests and was exacerbated by sectarianism: members who did not swallow idiocies such as Strasserism and Gaddafism were “reactionaries” and “Tories” and accordingly purged. It was no cause for surprise if “the movement in Britain was drastically divided.” Griffin says nothing about his particular role in all this, nor does he say anything about Tyndall’s efforts throughout the 1980s to unite nationalists, efforts that were constantly frustrated by individuals such as Griffin.
Griffin says that he was converted to a “born-again moderate” by studying the Front National. This did not prevent him from making the uncommonly stupid remark, broadcast on The Cook Report, that the British National Party should take political types and turn them into thugs.
Griffin’s story that the police stripped his office of everything except his computer and filing cabinet is pigswill. Although Griffin criticizes White nationalists who refer to the general public as “lemmings,” he treats his audience of White nationalists with even greater contempt, telling them ridiculous lies. It may be significant that he says that Who Are the Mind-Benders? “is now wrongly presented by the left and the liberals as a piece of anti-Semitism,” strangely omitting the Jews in his comment. Griffin seems to imply that the Jews can be defeated by not identifying them or opposing them. His sense of “fair play” towards the Jews is suicidal. He wishes the Jews “good luck” in pursuing their ethnocentrism. He seems oblivious to the fact that they do this at our cost and to our injury. If we are to emulate Jewish ethnocentrism, as he says, we must practice the dual code of ethics: amity towards the in-group, enmity towards the out-group. We must practice a combination of positive racism and negative racism. We must therefore practice anti-Semitism as part of the latter. But Griffin seems to have forgotten this.
Griffin still took the BNP far further in British politics than the NF ever managed to achieve in the 30 years it was active. There are many former members of the NF in the BNP, not least of all MEP Andrew Brons. Sure, he disregarded the Hiliterite NS worship and looked toward third-positionist strategies under Strasserism and Gaddafis Greenism as a logical political step forward. There is not one area that the BNP will touch (and quite rightly) that has the stain of Nazism on it. This is sheer political common sense and would be madness to think otherwise.
As for the the Jewish Question: It is illegal in Britain to even mention Jewish duplicity in the mass media, and the BNP is under enough scrutiny for far more moderate views ( the BNP is constantly fighting costly court battles under laws that are perfectly legal in the States). The simple reason it is being relentlessly sued, assaulted, and targeted by far-left government watchdogs is that it is seen as a threat to the establishment liberalism.
Griffin has forgotten nothing, he’s just gotten far wiser.
“I’ll combat the Jews by not mentioning them!” is hardly wisdom.
Nick Griffin has become cleverer, but not wiser. His followers seem to have forgotten many things or to have failed to learn them. White nationalists should ask themselves: against whom is Griffin being clever? One thinks here of Francis Parker Yockey’s remark: “Where Machiavelli writes of deception he is thinking of deceiving the enemy—Liberals and distorters regard deception as the norm of conduct toward the populations whose destiny is in their hands, and over whose lives they hold the power of disposition.”
Whether Griffin has taken the British National Party further in British politics that the National Front is debatable. John Tyndall wrote in 2005 that the membership of the BNP was smaller than that of the NF at its peak in the late 1970s. Of course, there is much more to establishing political influence and power than having a large membership, but Griffin’s depictions of British nationalist history should be assessed with critical intelligence. Griffin’s thesis that British nationalism was in the dark ages before he took over the BNP is obviously a self-serving one. The ruin of the NF was caused in no small part by Griffin and his colleagues. As he himself said: “My biggest regret is the mess that I and various colleagues made of the National Front in 1986. Had my colleagues and I not fallen out with each other about how many workers’ co-operatives we could fit on a pinhead and how radical we were, I think the Front could have been winning seats about the time the BNP won its first council seat in 1993. That probably cost us ten years . . . it is still a matter of regret that I fell out with friends over a series of misunderstandings and unnecessary fanaticisms.”
It would be more accurate to describe the Strasserism and Gaddafism of the NF as “right-wing Trotskyism” rather than “a logical political step forward.”
Griffin’s defenders may claim or pretend that the BNP was “forced” to change its constitution and to accept non-Whites. The historical record shows that Griffin actually sought this change. As John Morse wrote:
“We know from Nick Griffin’s whole record as BNP leader that the last thing he has been doing on the policy front is reinforcing the traditional principles of the party. Apart from his angling to admit ethnic minority members, this is the man who has allowed Jewish and half-Turkish candidates to be foisted on the party (local government elections, 2004); permitted the official party newspaper to positively celebrate the fact that in 2003 a candidate proud of his black son-in-law and half-caste grandchild was selected to fight a local ward in the North of England; and recruited an Asian to front the BNP’s TV election broadcast in 2004.
“Almost from the inception of his leadership in 1999, Nick has shown a near-obsession with portraying the BNP as ‘non-racist.’ On the subject of race, in one media interview after the other he has failed to offer any firm word in support of genuine nationalist principles. Speaking to the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror in May 2001 . . . he ingratiatingly whined his approval of some non-white immigration as some sort of flavoursome ‘salt in the soup’ of our otherwise flat and boring British society. In January 2002 he told the BBC that an all-white Britain was ‘no longer feasible’–music, surely, to the ears of the operatives of that institution, who want nothing better than for Britons to swallow such defeatism.”
Griffin’s defenders should pay attention to these incidents and dates. I recommend that they carefully examine what Griffin has said and done in this and other matters over time. I also recommend that they carefully examine both his rhetorical style as well as his factual claims and arguments. As Morse wrote: “It is a wise maxim never to take the words of BNP chairman, Nick Griffin, at their face value. However tiresome the chore, it is always advisable to peel away the layers of deceptive, overheated verbiage in which Mr. Griffin’s speeches and writings tend to be couched in. It is important, too, not to allow oneself to be unthinkingly swept off one’s feet by the glib, slick, cocksure, jaunty style of your average snake-oil salesman. Only too often, what you find at the core of Nick’s characteristic rhetorical onion is some ulterior, self-serving meaning. The rest is spin.”
As long as certain limitations are observed, it is not illegal in Britain to address topics such as the Jewish problem. Spearhead was prosecuted under race relations laws only once or twice in several decades of publication. It seems that both the NF and the BNP sold literature on what Griffin used to call the “Holohoax” without being prosecuted for “Holocaust denial.”
I wish the BNP the best of luck in their efforts to offer a nationalist alternative in Great Britain. Hopefully they will elect some MPs and be able to offer a real voice inside the government. Mr. Griffin’s offer to help an American group get started is very generous. I wonder if he’s heard of the A3P?
Griffin does trial and error. Anyone who does that will be wrong most of the time but at least has a chance of getting it right eventually.
On reflection that sounds critical when it was meant as a compliment.
Often-times the data yielded by failed experiments is the most valuable!
Still one must wonder if Griffins moderate model is the one to follow? Le Pen has had far more success (particularly in 2002) then Griffin has ever had and Le Pen doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to semites in general (Arabs and Jews in particular!)
Le Penism > moderate Griffinism.
At First [= first], we in the BNP
LePen [= Le Pen]
pent up [= pent-up]
Griffin attributes his success to his moderation of tone and rhetoric, but I believe there’s a strong case to be made that his success is due to simple tenacity and creative systems design. As Wandrin suggested, the man had an experimental approach and I believe it served him well. I don’t believe it’s necessary or appropriate to become explicitly pro-Jewish. It’s much smarter to adopt a simple ethnonationalist frame, one that’s incompatible with being Jewish. By doing so, one can employ accessible rhetoric that side-steps the crimethink taboos without swallowing the poison pill.
By Griffin’s own logic, won’t these clever and ethnocentric Jews rise to the top of the BNP, then gradually steer it toward their interests? Wouldn’t taking his suggestion, becoming more clever and ethnocentric, entail doing the exact opposite of what he’s doing? I’m eager to learn from the BNP and emulate their success, and I do have some trepidation about questioning “the master” of successful nationalist politics – but if my calculations are correct, the best this model can promise is rolling that specific problem into the future, with the worst it can promise being duped into a Christian Zionist-style situation where we become junior partners in their foreign policy campaigns and nation-building projects.
Muslims don’t belong in America, but I’m simply not going to reduce myself to hating or vilifying any group of people for being who they are (even Jews). Perhaps that handicaps me and guarantees that I’ll fail, but I’m simply not going to pretend that Jews in America don’t pose an existential threat and I’m not going to pretend that Arabs in Arabia do pose an existential threat.
“Griffin attributes his success to his moderation of tone and rhetoric”
I think the key is psychological. People have been conditioned to react negatively to certain behaviour and language forcing pro-whites to traverse a psychological minefield.
Trial and error should lead to moderating tone and rhetoric as neccessary to avoid the first mine but that only takes you a short way. The difficulties making further progress leads to a temptation to keep moderating the message but that leads to a dead end.
I think the trick for nationalists is to figure out how to make a radical case without triggering people’s conditioning. More trial and error needed.
The NF and the third position debate moved away from anything related to the German NS regime (thought by this stage had given birth to consverative revolutionary entities like the British “new right” and so forth) . Suffice to say that Griffin was an experimenter with new ideas at the time and has since moved away from the “Green Book” and Strasserism (which is original NS anyhow and a product of Enlightenment rhetoric as is irredentist republicanism). You’ll also notice the rhetoric has shifted from “Aryan” to the “indigenous native” substrata. Simply the signs of the times as any traditional observer of civilisation cycles would incur.
Griffin has often said got he got his act together 10 yrs before with the NF (without all the trial and error) that they could have reached the heights they made with the BNP much sooner. It must be noted that Griffin’s father sold hand to the hundreds of thousands to save the party from ruin. I will not say, however, that the times are ideal and neither are Griffin’s views palatable to a traditional society, but in terms of holding back the tide then the BNPs tactics are the only viable sort for working towards a populist vote amongst the masses. This is simply if you want to reach a wider audience while still maintaining a strong anti-immigrationist and identarianist approach. Other methods (rightist think/tanks, interest groups, etc) must exist but within the mainstream political sphere they’ll have no chance . Let me remind you that it implies strictly within the political sphere I speak of. A coup from above by military generals or mega-corporationists seems unlikely in any modern Western country anytime soon.
As for the Jewish Question and “naming the Jew” out rightly is political suicide, that not even the NF attempted in its later years under Tyndall. Both Griffin and Le Pen learned this the hard way.
@Jolif Zarilles .
Le Pen’s Front Nationale is friendly towards Jews and has been for quite some time, otherwise he would never have gotten this far. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/jews-for-le-pen-1.216573 .
Yes the West is trailing into the darkest tunnel of the Iron age and our enemies have rigged the game so that it is a matter of survival that we must imitate their rise to power (Machiavelli from above and Alinsky from below) and become like them. No wonder the aristocratics of yonder abstained from the rabble of politics that they perceived as rightly below their dignity to engage in, less they be tainted by their activities (positioning others to do the job). The fable of the “bow and the club” also factors.
Politicians and high profile leaders of organisations cannot be completely honest for obvious reasons and this is not lost on the majority. Here’s a quote from Plato’s Republic no less (the foundational ideas for your white res-publican laws began here) dealing with the very nature of hierarchy and responsibilities of using the “privilege of the lie”:
“Then if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege, for a private man to lie to them in return is to be deemed a more heinous fault than for the patient or the pupil of a gymnasium not to speak the truth about his own bodily illnesses to the physician or to the trainer, or for a sailor not to tell the captain what is happening about the ship and the rest of the crew, and how things are going with himself or his fellow-sailors.
Most true, he said.
If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
“Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,”
he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State.”
SOCRATES, ADEIMANTUS.The Republic, by Plato
Lest this “demon of dialectics” continue like ping pong I’ll just leave it with saying my observation of Griffins *current* policies (what ever ones opinion of them) would go far further in the conservative USA than in the liberal soft totalitarian consensus of Europe. That is all.
When did the National Front or the British National Party use “Aryan rhetoric”? I thought these groups consistently referred to “Whites” rather than “Aryans.” Can you to define what you mean by “Aryan rhetoric” and give examples of this? This sounds suspiciously like a red herring.
I recognise that a party such as the BNP must address the Jewish problem carefully. I recognise that a party has certain constraints on what it can and should say concerning the Jewish problem. A party as a party does not have the freedom of speech that other forms of organisation can have. But I think that a policy of silence concerning the Jews or a policy of philo-Semitism is dishonest, dishonourable, and self-defeating. It is precisely because the Jewish problem is so great that we must rise to this challenge rather than shrink from it. Our race will not survive another Jewish century.
How the Jewish problem should be addressed in the exoteric and esoteric discourse of a party–as distinct from a movement–is a proper subject of debate. John Tyndall’s views on this matter are reasonable: “we should not make a taboo of the issue of Zionism and organised Zionist power. Within party circles and in our publications we should permit a frank and free discussion of this power–always provided that it is conducted in moderate language, that it avoids insults, and that it excludes the emissions of obvious cranks.” (Spearhead, no. 423, May 2004, p. 9.) Matt Parrott’s views are also reasonable.
Nick Griffin seems to be directing nationalism into the dead-end of civic nationalism and philo-Semitism. “Leaders” such as Gianfranco Fini and Filip Dewinter have done this elsewhere in the course of “modernising” their movements.
I wish that I was wrong about Griffin. I used to respect him, but I eventually got tired of his spin, stunts, and purges. You have cited Plato’s Republic concerning “noble lies.” Griffin’s lies, big and small, are neither noble nor necessary. They are the lies of the petty politician. They are cheap, contemptible, and gratuitous lies. They are lies like the one that during a raid the police “took away absolutely everything except my computer and my file cabinet,” or the one that he usually proofread The Voice of Freedom but did not do so with the infamous issue promoting a candidate with a Black son-in-law, or the one that Tyndall was a drunkard. I would like a direct answer as to whether you believe these stories. I would also like a direct answer as to whether you approve of Griffin’s series of stunts relating to the admission of non-Whites to the BNP. And I would like an explanation of precisely how these stunts were necessary and useful to the BNP. If you’re as comfortable with these things as you seem to be, you shouldn’t have a problem explaining them.
“It is precisely because the Jewish problem is so great that we must rise to this challenge rather than shrink from it.”
Throughout most of the west people have been conditioned to react negatively to criticism of the jews. It is taboo. This is an unassailable fact of life. In some places this is reinforced by legal sanction. However as you say they are also a self-chosen enemy seeking to destroy us. The question then is how to get out of that Catch 22?
Everything happens for a reason. Taboos don’t exist in a vaccuum. They are created and enforced by physical mechanisms. So instead of attacking the taboo head on and triggering people’s conditioning, instead attack the mechanisms that enforce the taboo.
What has the paedophile priest issue to do with the Catholic church’s opposition to same-sex marriage? Everything. Why? because the loss of moral authority caused by the abuse scandal applies across the board to everything the church says about everything.
The taboo against criticizing jews is created in the education system with holocaust history and then reinforced and enforced in the MSM. So, instead of being either philo or anti semitic nationalists in Europe could simply ignore jews and focus on undermining the power of the education system and MSM to enforce philo-semitic taboos.
The way to do this is through using other issues to undermine their moral authority e.g the MSM’s anti-white double standards when reporting crime or attacking the education system for their denial of the Bolshevik holocaust and the anti-white distortions in their history of slavery.
Successfully undermining the power to enforce a taboo creates the opportunity to later attack the taboo itself.
A sci-fi analogy would be a spaceship defended by a force-field. Instead of trying to punch through the force field, attack the generator that powers it.
nb I’m not saying this is neccessarily the best way everywhere but in European countries with a philo-semitic media, education and legal sanctions it’s a third and possibly better option than either grovelling or banging one’s head against a brick wall through breaking the taboo.
Wandrin,
I think that addressing the Jewish problem in nationalist discourse effectively requires several approaches rather than a single approach. It requires an understanding that we need to act within many “discursive spaces.” We need to use many channels for communication and to use messages appropriate for these channels. We need to identify and promote the most effective methods and messages. We need to be disciplined, creative, and flexible in these matters.
Addressing the Jewish problem should not be seen as an either-or matter of focusing exclusively on the Jews or of saying nothing about them. It is not an either-or matter of direct attacks or indirect attacks, of violating taboos relating to the Jews or of focusing attacks on the mechanisms of Jewish power. In these matters we need to avoid false dichotomies, to exercise a sense of proportion, and to recognise that some approaches can be combined with or coexist with others. We also need to recognise the heterogeneity of the “discursive spaces” in which we operate. We should not think that one message or one method should be used by everyone, everywhere, every time. We cannot enforce a uniform approach and we should not try to do so. This should not, however, mean taking an attitude of “anything goes.”
A combination of direct measures and indirect measures may be appropriate. The two are not mutually exclusive. “We” is a collective noun I have applied to White nationalists. We are not a homogeneous or monolithic group. We can include those who take a harder or a softer position on the Jewish problem. We can include people active in a wide range of organisations and activities. We do not have to do the same work to serve the same cause. We can include those who use direct measures, or indirect measures, or both.
“requires several approaches rather than a single approach. It requires an understanding that we need to act within many “discursive spaces.” ”
Yes i agree. The Griffin context set me to thinking about just one of those discursive spaces i.e doorstep politics talking to people who are completely unradicalized on this issue and deeply conditioned to react badly to mention of the J-word.
As I expected, The Realist has not yet answered any of my questions. He might say that he does not want to play dialectical ping-pong and that I am winding him up by asking him such questions. This is not my intention. I have no interest in playing games and scoring points. I deliberately made my questions highly pointed and direct to demonstrate to him and others that Nick Griffin’s spin is indefensible and self-defeating.
Although The Realist is clearly not stupid, inarticulate, or ignorant, he is unwilling or unable to answer my questions. He is unwilling or unable to defend things that Griffin has said and done that I and many others would regard as dishonest, dishonourable, and disastrous. The Realist emphasises what can be sold to the public. He seems to be unwilling or unable to buy or sell the particular statements and actions by Griffin that I asked him about. If so, he is not alone.
I will not accuse The Realist of being stupid or dishonest. He may simply be in a state of cognitive dissonance regarding Griffin. This used to be the case with me. I used to give Griffin the benefit of the doubt, despite being troubled by many of the things he was saying and doing, but I could do this for only so long. Griffin’s use of salami tactics, combined with clever spin, fooled me for a longer time than I would like to admit.
Griffin counts upon people being “unable to foresee the consequences to which a cause may lead, if it is portrayed in a certain light.”
I hope that The Realist will exercise greater realism in the future.
“that Nick Griffin’s spin is indefensible and self-defeating”
It’s possible for both this to be true *and* for Griffin’s meandering to *eventually* hit the sweet spot that works.
Given the enormous difficulties involved in getting and maintaining momentum i’m in favour of lots of different nationalist groups using unprincipled trial and error until someone hits the golden thread at which point everyone can copy them.
In the above interview, Nick Griffin remarks: “The radical left were absolutely right in their long march through the institutions. They could see that this Gramscian position is not just about politics; it’s about a much broader movement. And that’s very, very important.” I agree with this. This is why a certain organisational pluralism is necessary, and why it is important to act within many “discursive spaces.”
Griffin talks of “building nationalist strongholds—not geographical strongholds, but strongholds in areas of influence, such as in an independent service man’s organization.” I think this is sensible. We should think in terms of “publics” rather than “the public” or “the masses.” For one thing, we cannot address “the masses” because we do not have mass media. For another thing, if we try to communicate to everybody, we will communicate to nobody. Even those cultural and commercial institutions that make up or use the mass media do not address the masses as masses. They segment their audience or market into specific audiences or markets, and address specific messages to specific audiences or markets. Appealing to the lowest common denominator–in the sense of appealing to what everybody has in common with each other, as distinct from appealing to base sentiments–does not work because this appeal is too vague, feeble, and indistinct to be effective. “The public” is an amorphous aggregation of individuals. “The public” is an abstraction.
Mainstreamers think that political success lies in directly appealing to “the public” or “the masses.” Their view of “the public” is abstract and mythical. They seem to think that they can wake up “the public,” and that “the public” will rise up and cleanse the political institutions of their state. Mainstreamers also think that they can appeal to “the public” by being “respectable.” Nationalists should certainly ensure that they are presentable, but there are no means by which nationalists can get the mass media to bestow the halo of “respectability” upon them and remain nationalists. Such “respectability” requires kosher certification.
We need to be conscious of how big and small cultural changes are effected. (Hence the importance of works on diffusion theory such as Everett M. Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations.) We need to be conscious of the methods and timespans involved in these things. We need to avoid artificial and sterile divisions between “extremists” and “moderates” or between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” While there will always be tensions between these groups, rooted in differences of temperament and culture, we need to get these groups to work together.
The great revolutionary nationalist François Duprat saw no contradiction in organising both the Front National and the Groupes nationalistes révolutionnaires simultaneously. As Duprat envisaged it, the GNR would act as a revolutionary nationalist pacemaker within the FN. Duprat’s assassination in 1978 was a historical tragedy. Had he not been assassinated, Duprat could have become the Lenin of French nationalism.
From a Traditionalist perspective; Aryan was the term given to the aristocracies who invaded the lands of Europe and conquered the indigenous inhabitants. Only the aristocracies had the title of Aryan. However, after the fall of the aristocracies, it was all about nationalism, after that it was all about socialism and so on. In the post-war decadence, the rhetoric is “save the whale (whites)”, it’s multiplicity, quantity, without distinction made to the various races of Europe etc. All “far-right” groups that deal with race today almost exclusively focus on a universal bolshevised white ethnicity of the first degree of racism, without touching on the second or third degrees (soul and spirit). This is not a call to reverse this, since the times require us to talk in levelling ways that are congruent to the zeitgeist. This is what I mean by the “rhetoric” shifting downward rather than upward because the epoch of modernism demands it in the name of “democracy”. Like Spengler, Evola and others noticed, this is the downward spiral of European civilisation that has not been resisted sufficiently for two hundred years and we’re far more down the tunnel then we thought. Now we find ourselves fighting for scraps under progressivist civil rights and hoping we may preserve patches of ethnic homogenous communes in a tidal sea of multicultural soup.
Basically any idea that cannot in one way or another be articulated from the narrative of the Enlightenment is seen as an “outsider” phenomenon. But that is the least of all issues compared to others.
The first problem is the equality laws (in Britain and Europe), not the sensibility of tactics that Tyndall proposed. Not one iota of the BNPs policies have not been picked apart by far-left social engineers and the existing political ruling class. Since the BNP gained two MEPs it was immediately attacked and sued accordingly on the slightest anti-equality pretences. Now they could have backed down and obeyed their masters on the first round but they choose to go the long hard route every time at great expense to the party’s coffers and fight each lawsuit to the bitter end. Most have ended in the BNP having to either change their parties or dissolve, Griffin choose not to dissolve. Thus what little success has been made the establishment sought to break them and hinder progress at every step of the way over a quango court battle.
It is not unreasonable to be fed up with Griffins stunts and purges and his many lies to cover himself in the heat of the political climate. There may be half-truths to some of his stories but I do understand why he acts in such a duplicitous fashion and spins nearly every compromise into a positive. Given the ferocity of his enemies Griffin has learned the fine art of covering his own ass in the high profile position he is in. I suppose his reasoning would be if that if everyone else is doing why shouldn’t he.
Do I approve of the changes made on an ideological level? No, but we are far from ideals. The admission of a two non-whites to the BNP is to do with the law (not speaking of gimmicks either), nothing more, as explained above. The only possible way that an organisation would be allowed to exist in the British (or even European) establishment that championed ethnic rights for a particular ethnic group would be if it did not contend for political power. Griffin knows this (as does Bowden), but the decision has been made to fight on for power at whatever the cost. At this stage we will know at the next general election if anything has been effective or not. I only ask is that white ethnic peoples understand the situation and legal options available to us that hint at some reasonable chance of possibility.
By all means if anyone can imitate organisational tactics of the BNP or Front Nationale (even Jobbik) in the USA without the kosher conservatism then do so (since draconian equality laws in Europe are not as prevalent in the States).
Correct, and any political endeavours in the way of attaining cultural power should work on multiple fronts; “new right gatherings” of meta-political initiatives (yes GRECE failed, but at least we can learned the lesson. For instance, Johnson, your self-sacrifice and intelligence is appreciated), community organising and ethnic civil rights initiatives – through professional suing, and not least of all the most costly: canvassing for political power.
White Republican made an excellent point, that I must tie into the unique position Counter-Currents occupies, and why that message can not be compromised, particularly in the name of political opportunism.
White Republican wrote:
In the above interview, Nick Griffin remarks: “The radical left were absolutely right in their long march through the institutions. They could see that this Gramscian position is not just about politics; it’s about a much broader movement. And that’s very, very important.” I agree with this. This is why a certain organisational pluralism is necessary, and why it is important to act within many “discursive spaces.”
In reply, we must observe that “the left” had a metapolitical focus, and such political agendas as they used were formed in the service of their metapolitical focus.
First, essentially, they trapped us into what Bob Whitaker calls “Wordism,” loosely defined as the creation of ideologies to control, and the tendency for that ideology to become a religion in all but name, rendering the believer into a True Believer, and a servant of that particular True Faith.
Orwell prophesied of this in 1984, and the Appendix to 1984 shows how easily we were played for fools, and became fools.
That take us, second, to Griffith, and the BNP — the current occupiers of a small, distant corner of the sandbox, aspiring to be minor tools of British politics, used to create a safe alternative for the powerless to vent their anger helplessly. They pose no danger of constructing the most remote challenge to the status quo, much less form the foundation of a better status quo for their posterity — who are dying out. They are not participants in any sort of metapolitical endeavor whatsoever.
Why?
In part, nobody equates the BNP with excellence. This is particularly the case after Griffin’s evisceration on the BBC’s Question Time, and the BNP’s scornfully dismissive brief mention, and then absence, from the marathon BBC broadcast of the last General Election.
There’s a reason for that.
The BBC treated the BNP with the respect it deserves, and has earned, by playing Judy in the ongoing Punch and Judy show of British politics.
They were defeated on the metapolitical level by an enemy that is united around one principle: Victory, at all costs. To them, it is not enough that they win; their opposition must lose, and must be seen to be losers.
The BNP as a model to be emulated in terms of changing the tide has been tried by the American Third Position people. Their track records speaks for itself.
Counter-Currents must maintain its constant focus on the pole star of the metapolitical project.
After all, a metapolitical focus has worked so well for our opposition.
We can learn from that.
Ironically, in the quote above, Griffin laid out why the metapolitical focus is correct.
Nick Griffin said, “They could see that this Gramscian position is not just about politics; it’s about a much broader movement.”
A movement that is “broader than politics.”
That is a topic worthy of discussion.
Note that nobody on our side – except Cross-Currents – is engaged in even discussing such an endavor.
We can learn from this.
I’d allow the American Third Position to exist a bit longer than a single year before dismissing its “track record.”
There is a peaceful way to help gradually wake white people up that’s best done in a conservative white community usually located outside of big cities and anyway here is how in steps.
Step 1. Know What You’re Up Against First
Step 2. Save a copy of this image I made at http://c3.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/142/l_3af261b093e943cca258037f11c808de.jpg
Step 3.Go to http://www.epingo.com or any other photo site that does these uncommon sizes and have a photo printed of this in size 8.5×11 or 9×12 and when you receive the photo wear it by taping it on your back so people can see it.You can also get a custom photo t-shirt with this on it or you can go to http://www.cafepress.com and have your own custom bumper stickers or buttons made with this image or your own just like it.
I have listed what to do in order to help stop the leftist brainwashing and however you choose to is up to you.
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