1,218 words
The Other Face of Terror (1984)
Directed by Ludi Boeken
BBC Channel Four
I came to realize there was a common motivating factor. It was hatred.
— Ray Hill
Ray Hill’s corpulent face and receding hairline fill the screen. He plucks a membership card for the secretive Column 88 out of an outsize jacket pocket, his drooling mouth quaffing a beer as his earnest interviewer lights the tip of his swirling cigarette. The audience is suddenly subjected to flashing images of burnt synagogues, swastika-daubed walls, the bloodied faces of Southeast Asians — and then Hill claims, rather portentously, that members of the Extreme Right in Britain are attacking Pakistani corner shops and “are proud of it.”
Moments later, an intrepid Hill is knocking on the door of a young Vietnamese gentleman, who lives on Rue Morice in the Clichy district of Paris. The man apparently offers our hero the opportunity to purchase a .44 Magnum or to take his pick from six semiautomatic weapons. Then, Hill, during his debrief outside, identifies the guns in the flat above as being similar to the Sten Guns he used during his army days. The narrator’s voice-over opines in a scaremongering tone:
His friends in the Extreme Right movement in Europe possess guns, ammunition, and explosives and they use them to injure, maim, and kill men, women, and children for the sake of violence and in pursuit of political goals, creating terror and spreading their propaganda of hatred. . .
Cut once again to Hill, this time sitting in front of a Union Jack in close proximity to the chairman of the British National Party, John Tyndall. This quickly segues into some old, grainy footage of Jean-Marie Le Pen describing immigrants as “living at the expense of the French working population,” a rather heavy-handed example of guilt by association. The narrator concludes that Hill’s recruitment activity for the British Movement targeted “the unemployed and disadvantaged white youth.”
The pastiche continues with secret footage of Hill, representing the British League of St. George — a group that the narrator describes as an elite Nazi club — carrying a flag at the Diksmuide rally in Belgium in 1980. The filmmakers completely overlook the very visible presence of the bearded Steven Brady, the League’s European Liaison Officer in the foreground, which in retrospect was a massive missed opportunity at the heart of their hit-piece.
The film’s focus, rather, was propaganda. It covers inflammatory and politically counterproductive speeches by the “wild men of the Extreme Right,” people like George Gateau, the Editor of Militant Magazine, Michel Faci, the deputy leader of the Federation d’Action Nationale et Europeenne (FANE), and Ian Souter-Clarence, the former SAS major who was then the head of the military wing of the infamous British Column 88. The narrator explains:
These men all play political double-acts. On the outside, they preach pseudo-respectable Right-wing politics, but in reality, they are violent racists, and above all, anti-Semites.
You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel Rising here
The latter charge is obviously the most significant in the minds of the producer. It’s emphasized by the pro-Zionist Searchlight investigators handling their self-identifying “sleeper agent” Ray Hill, and by the Anti-Defamation League’s Irwin Suall, who is interviewed about Saudi money financing the Extreme Right in Europe and America.
Using their surreptitiously obtained film, the filmmakers take great pains to capture for posterity and quote extensively from each of the aforementioned firebrands in turn, as if they and they alone were the spokesmen of that entire generation:
Certainly the French, the Flemish, the Spanish, the Americans, the English. . . All these white nations of our race who have succeeded in building the civilization we know have a battle, a total war to fight against the merciless enemy.
— George Gateau
The nationalist revolution. . . a revolution which will see a united, white Europe. . . cleared of all the parasites that now poison her. . . that is to say, the colored immigrants, freemasons, and the Jews. . . That Europe of honor is already present in my heart.
— Michel Faci (nicknamed “The Wolf”)
When the day comes in the future when Europe is threatened, then we in our turn will defend our common soil.
— Major Ian Souter-Clarence
Hill is trying to paint us a picture of unadulterated “hate.” We’re shown — at length — a black-and-white photograph of Tony Hancock, a printer involved in producing publications like Bulldog and Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the 20th Century (1976). The production team subsequently reveals the location of his press in Sussex, which was later firebombed by antifascists.
Searchlight and their “useful idiot” Hill then gallop ahead at some pace, linking British patriots — nevermind how tenuously or erratically — to a laundry list of violence, including:
- a Spanish Falangist who fought and killed two communists in a bar
- the Bologna train bombing in 1980
- Luciano Petrone, the fascist bank robber who emptied out the safes in Marbella
- the Karl-Heinz Hoffman Group in Nuremberg
- the Milky-Bar Kid lookalike Arndt Heinz Marx of the Action Front of National Socialism
- Odfried Hepp, who in an echo of the Baader-Meinhof Group, led an attack on the American military base in Frankfurt
- Michael Kuhnen’s Free German Worker’s Party
- Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Al Fatah
- the Oktoberfest bombing of September 1980
- James Warner of the Ku Klux Klan
They also attempt to implicate and defame American Right-wing intellectual Keith Thompson, World War Two veteran Otto Remer, the historian David Irving, Swiss financier Francois Genoud, and the French lawyer Jacques Verges who had defended several members of the French OAS.
Hill suggests — by now obviously stretching credibility — that these men belong to a world-wide Neo-Nazi underground that includes the spectral Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” who was “snatched” from his sanctuary in Bolivia to face a controversial trial in France, and the rather ridiculous and foul-mouthed figure of Tony Malski. The latter drunkenly asserts that he could put a thousand fully-uniformed members of his National Socialist Movement on the streets of London at the “drop of a hat.”
Malski is then honey-trapped by Hill into considering planting a suitcase bomb at the very epicenter of the West Indian Notting Hill Carnival in Ladbroke Grove, an unforgivable act that would have set the Right in Britain back decades — which is the deliberate strategy that Hill and his controllers leaked to the Daily Mirror for a full front-page expose.
So, with his job done and his paymasters satisfied, Hill walks off into the distance with Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” playing us out.
The narrator repeats the question originally posed by the investigative journalist: “Why are you doing this?”
Hill insists, even as the Judas coins rattle in his pockets: “To try and point away kids who are dragged into this sort of thing for their own good and the good of society . . . and if I can stop just one or two being drawn into this sort of evil, it will be worthwhile.”
It concludes a salutary tale of misrepresentation and exaggeration that is unfortunately repeated time after time. It rather raises the question: will we ever learn?
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4 Comments
Jews need nutzis. For too long the scenarios played out in this article have been repeated. Not only in the UK, but globally in all White homelands.
We need intelligent strategists more than ever, to give our race a clear and workable road map out of the wasteland.
The makers of false charts and their modus operandi are known to us; ADL, SPLC, Searchlight, Hope not Hate. These organisations and their innumerable copies need ego nutzis to drive and perpetuate their campaigns. To stoke the fires of fear, envy and loathing, to continue their lucrative shakedown . In fact, they now invent and lie and place their agent provocateurs within white identity for that sole purpose. The real nutzis of yesteryear no longer exist and true patriots, like AH, Sir Oswald Mosley, Rockwell are forever maligned. But if we keep making the mistakes good men like Matt Hale made.
https://archive.org/details/ErnstZundelConversationWithDrFredrickToben
Michael Walsh McLaughlin, former leader of the British Movement and author, called out Ray Hill as a mole long before he revealed it himself. It was one of the reasons he fell out with Colin Jordan. Nationalist organisations are easily penetrated by fifth columnists and State actors because few have any vetting procedures or internal security.
Another interesting piece of writing from Fenrek, to which I, who am, unlike Fenrek, old enough (alas!) to remember the British nationalist political scene of the early 1980s, would add only the following.
The story of Ray Hill’s short involvement in the British National Party (John Tyndall’s 1982 iteration, a different animal from John Bean’s 1960 version, itself not the first party to use the name) is a warning from the past of what happens when a radical group welcomes any old rubbish that comes along into its ranks.
When John Tyndall led a breakaway from the National Front (imaginatively called the New National Front) in June 1980, he said that the new group would value quality over quantity, a reference to the NF’s easy tolerance of skinheads, football hooligans and other undesirables in its ranks, with the predictable outcome by the application of Gresham’s law that by 1980 bad activists were driving out the good rather quickly.
Unfortunately, short term expediency soon got the better of good intentions in the Tyndall faction too. By January 1982, JT, perhaps privately disappointed by the limited number of defections from the NF to the NNF, was secretly talking to Ray Hill, despite receiving warnings from NNF members acquainted with Hill’s past that Hill was an unstable and undesirable individual.
By 1982, Hill had a long criminal record, his first reported offence being a conviction for causing actual bodily harm to a policeman in Birmingham, for which he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. He had bitten off part of the officer’s ear; see the Birmingham Mail of 28th July 1962.
He also committed many offences of dishonesty, both in England and in his sojourn in South Africa, which came to a mysterious end c. 1979/1980, as well as wholly counterproductive racially motivated offences of violence, such as the incitement of skinheads to attack randomly selected members of the Asian community in Leicester.
Despite warnings that he would be inviting a cuckoo into the nest, JT was sufficiently impressed with Hill’s following amongst easily influenced youngsters in the East Midlands (always a good area for British Nationalism) to welcome a thoroughly bad man, by then a paid informant for the Zionist hate magazine, Searchlight, into his version of the BNP, with the outcome that Fenrek describes.
Vile and contemptible though Hill is or was (I do not know whether the creature still draws breath) the serious errors of judgment that led to Hill’s admission into the BNP despite strident warnings to keep him well away are cautionary tale for all those involved in nationalist and racialist groups to-day. Those who fail to learn lessons from the mistakes of the past will surely be condemned to repeat them.