British National Party (BNP) chairman Nick Griffin has defended a party leaflet which says that black Britons and Asian Britons “do not exist”.
The BNP’s “Language and Concepts Discipline Manual” says the term used should be “racial foreigners”.
In a BBC interview, Mr Griffin said to call such people British was a sort of “bloodless genocide” because it denied indigenous people their own identity.
Mr Griffin is standing in the European Parliament elections in June…
The manual describes the BNP’s “ultimate aim” as the “lawful, humane and voluntary repatriation of the resident foreigners of the UK”.
- BBC News
64 Comments
Yep. That was what I was gonna say. As my grandmother liked to spout: The Prince o’ Wales cannae wear that! He’s a bloody German.
So everyone who ain’t Gallic – get out. The Celts are the original people.
Oh wait
This particular BNP argument is one that so doesn’t fly in the UK… I mean, once we’ve chucked out the Normans, we can start on the Saxons and the Angles and the Romans…
Great idea, now my family may get back our documented 4 acres near London from the Normans
I’m sure I read of a genetic study which said that the people in the Orkneys had some genetic qualities which suggested they were the original people of Britain. Hey, maybe Orcadians should get the whole of Britain back.
Speaking of ancient wrongs, my mother’s two family lines lost their lands in titles in the French Revolution, could we please have those back? While we’re at it, Dad’s ancestor owned the first pub in Tasmania, I reckon I could cope with owning a pub.
What a load of rubish
Sorry that should have been ‘What a load of rubbish’. bad typing.
My ancestor owned a substantial chunk of what is now Glebe in Sydney – I think I want that, although if there are any descendants of the indigenous people who lived there, I guess they’ll trump me…
Saw this gorgeous doco where they did a genetic profile of really “english” people to find out where their family DNA had come from. One lady of the manor turned out to be a mixture of european and chinese (suggesting that she had Mongol ancestors). Her much quieter husband just raised his eyebrows and said that he was in no way surprised.
You certainly do get the face you deserve at 50 if you’re both barking and a fascist.
Speaking of ancient wrongs, my mother’s two family lines lost their lands in titles in the French Revolution, could we please have those back?
.
No you Aristo swine. To the guillotine with ye. Arm-Ez-Cit-Wah-Yan Form-Ez Voo-Bat-Ah-Yons!!!
.
Liberte, Fraternite
.
Faberge
Richard – Your comment implies that there are fascist who aren’t barking. I’m highly skeptical.
For my part, I’m always intrigued that fascists are usually such unattractive specimens of humanity in all respects. Perhaps that’s why they try to argue that their race is the best – it’s all they’ve got going for them.
The good number of Germans in the 30s who identified as fascists were suffering some form of mass psychosis? To a certain extent perhaps on occasion but a bit simplistic to say they were all barking. Were the Ku Klux Klan or George W Bush or Sarah Palin devotees also barking? If only things were so simple and scientists only needed to hurry up and design a drug that’d make such people sane like the rest of us.
For my part, I’m always intrigued that fascists are usually such unattractive specimens of humanity in all respects. Perhaps that’s why they try to argue that their race is the best – it’s all they’ve got going for them.
.
One of the better comic series out is Preacher.
This is a magic realist post-feminist boy’s own modern Western/Vampire tale with a Nietzschean theological theme.
I love the esoteric subject matter that that comes of low cost visual narrative media.
Anyway in one of the episodes the preacher of the title, Jesse Carter, becomes sherrif of a small town. And he confronts the local clan. Having had ‘em remove their hoods he declares: Why is it you – The White Race are Superior – types are always the worst examples of it? You! Where the FUCK is your chin?
Sounds deep.
That made me laugh, I just wonder if the husband may be in the “you have to watch the quiet ones”.
My sister’s hubby has loaned me a Preacher comic – it’s fun. But I’ve never seen the one with the Klan…I do agree with the Preacher’s analysis though!
“This is a magic realist post-feminist boy’s own modern Western/Vampire tale with a Nietzschean theological theme.”
Sounds like the usual uber-mainstream conventional fare on offer since the year dot. Yawn bloody yawn.
When oh when we will be allowed to see and talk about some realist, feminist, girls’ own modernist universalist non-religious non-violent genuinely creative and visionary transcendent art?
Posey, you write it, I’ll illustrate it?
You’re an illustrator too, LE?
Sounds like the usual uber-mainstream conventional fare on offer since the year dot. Yawn bloody yawn.
.
Yeah there’s at least 10 shows on TV just like it.
When oh when we will be allowed to see and talk about some realist, feminist, girls’ own modernist universalist non-religious non-violent genuinely creative and visionary transcendent art?
Posey, you write it, I’ll illustrate it?
Exactly.
It’s a hobby – not a profession – although I do want to do more on zinc and copper etching. I think that would be great medium for cartoons (in a kind of 18th C kind of way)
About the same I found Preacher I found this
The premise is that something happens and instantaneously every mammal with a Y chromosome drops dead.
Except this one guy and his monkey in Brooklyn. When it happens he’s on the phone to his girlfriend in Australian and’s just asked her to marry him. Before she can answer the phone goes dead ’cause it has happened.
Sorry Posey but it’s not non-violent. It is excellent however. I just got hold of the final issue and it’s a great story. The ending makes or breaks ‘em (imho).
Funny fact in the event Australia becomes the dominant sea power in the world. Why? We let ladies on submarines.
It all started with woodcuts… some of the Edo period ones from Japan are amazing.
As a pure bred descendant of vikings I claim all of Europe as my personal sandpit and all occupants as my personal play things. We never bothered too much with documents.
Skål!
Oh just go back to the Olduvai Gorge, the lot of you.
As a pure bred descendant of vikings
.
As a Celt I’m gonna sue your arse.
Heh, the Celts are riddled with Viking ancestry. Dublin itself was a Viking colony. They integrated so well though that they became part of Ireland. I’m sure I’ve got some Vikings in my background somewhere. If only because my sister and I keep getting mistaken for Swedes when we go to the tennis.
This is a magic realist post-feminist boy’s own modern Western/Vampire tale with a Nietzschean theological theme.
This is weird violent steeped in fundamentalist paranoia Made Only In and For America mindrot.
Mongrel/hybrid vigor will be ruled out then, and like any monoculture, there is a greater chance of wiping out a society with a bug that no-one can make antibodies against.
Besides neanderthals preceded sapiens in Britain… so maybe he just wants the UK full of troglodytes again.
Or… given that the anthropoid apes are so new to Europe, perhaps he could deport himself to Olduvai Gorge.
So you’re familiar with the membership profile of the BNP then…
DEM@33
said “So you’re familiar with the membership profile of the BNP then”
Naaa…. good guess.
Actually, there are some quite nice troglodytic residences still in use, somewhere in Asia Minor from memory.
The BNP troglodytes, on the other hand, have gravel rash on their knuckles and probably barrack for the UK equivalent of Collingwood.
This is weird violent steeped in fundamentalist paranoia Made Only In and For America mindrot.
.
Fundamentalist?
Mmm let’s see. It features the living descendant of Jesus Christ who is an inbred dickhead. An evil granny religious fanatic and, oh yeah, the hero’s on a mission to find God and make Him explain just why the World’s so FUBAR.
Doesn’t happen. God gets shot to death instead. Yep fundamentalist.
BTW Do you know what Nietzche said about Christianity? Hint: It wasn’t the same sort of thing that Billy Graham would say.
Unlike its former colonies, the UK has signed the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
So will the Brits now force all the Johnny-Come-Lately Pakis, wogs, orientals, krauts, Hun, sand-niggers and so on, to memorise Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Donne? Will the BBC be required to broadcast back-to-back reruns of Benny Hill, Dick Emery, and On The Buses? Will Sainsbury’s be required to sell Spotted Dicks?
I think not.
Oooooohhhh, you are awful! But I like you!!
If we take the real meaning of “fascist”, I wonder how many of us would not have supported Mussolini in 1930s Germany? Before he jumped into bed with Hitler?
Er, that should read “Italy”
DEM
Given that we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, I am always suss when these reports about genetics and claims to land are made.
I really hope that I wouldn’t have supported Mussolini, even before he jumped into bed with Hitler. Even if he did get the Italian trains running on time…but by shooting drivers… I just can’t feel comfortable with a regime enforced by squadristi.
When I lived in Italy I had some of the most surreal conversations I’ve ever had with older Italians on the topic of Mussolini.
Perhaps the strangest was with the mayor of a small Italian hill town in Umbria who insisted that Mussolini was ‘very good for Italy’ … thing is, he was Partiti Radicale di Sinistra (ie, basically a Commo), had the hammer and sickle up in his office and everything. It’d be hard to find a more market oriented (or more savvy) administrator. Until I spoke with him, I didn’t realise that Mussolini had largely cleaned up the Mafia, which the Yanks then reintroduced in order to make the invasion of Sicily go more smoothly.
And Hitler was great for workers rights and brought in conditions that are STILL the envy of the rest of Europe (fancy that weekend at the Spa the Germans get?). Doesn’t balance out the millions murdered in his racial purification drive of course, but if you were an able-bodied ethnic german under the Nazis you were SET, (hence the widespread support that saw him democratically elected) – it was everyone else that was screwed…
Oh God, I’m having a South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut flashback.
LE
I must admit, inter-war Italy is not my Special Subject.
I suppose all I was trying to emphasise is that there was a lot more to Mussolini’s fascism that just Hitler’s racism.
The interesting thing about both Hitler and Mussolini was that they had socialist elements which made their approaches very attractive to the majority of people. Mussolini had actually started out life as a Socialist, but became disenchanted after WWI.
LE
Actually, Nazim was absolutely Socialist. Except, rather that the class-based Socialism of Marxism, it was a nation-focues Socialism. Still, whether class-based or nation-based, Socialism is vile.
John G, I very much doubt that most Germans, Spaniards, French, Greeks, Russians or Italians today think that fascism was a variant or subset of socialism.
European social democracy (let alone socialism) of the 30s and 40s was far to the left of anything that’s existed since in comparable countries.
Today, the Australian Greens are a tepid form of social democracy when compared to the most radical social democratic party that ever existed, the German SPD, pre-1914. This is as good as social democracy gets today, folks.
I lived in Prague for a few years and many of the younger generation certainly equated socialism with fascism and that’s possibly true for other East European countries without direct experience of fascist rule. However that view was also far less common among the working class within the general population there.
I’d agree the still strong socialist and left traditions in Spain, Greece and France incorporate a clear, educated understanding of the difference between fascism and socialism, or communism for that matter. This does influence the broader population’s view of these two distinct modern political ideologies.
I lived in Prague for a few years and many of the younger generation certainly equated socialism with fascism and that’s possibly true for other East European countries without direct experience of fascist rule. However that view was also far less common among the working class within the general population there.
.
The difference is inthe ideal to which the ideologies aspire. And by socialism we should be clear we’re talking Communism. In one of the speeches to the ’67 writer’s congress Milan Kundera railed against the pollution of a noble idea by the Party.
Of course he realizes and has written that often noble ideas are the worst. Kundera’s suggested that Communism’s actually worse than fascism because at least when the Great Leader drops dead it’s over.
Or is it?.
Fascism isn’t over. It’s waiting in the wings. It is and will be an extension of neoliberalism or its equivalent.
‘To fly about this obscure world of anguish, this black world of pain!. For me there will always be the struggle to escape the darkness. I reached for …. I wanted with wild, wild abandon, with a surging, defiant, emboldened desire. I wanted the extreme – the exultation, the passion and the moment, the fire, the light. I reached for …. In hope. Hope. Everlasting hope.”
Author?
Actually, it was the last para of “Presumed Innocent” by seriously hunky lawyer-writer Scott Turow though it could just as well been an uttering of the equally magnetic ventriloquist, Milan Kundera.
I have not read any of Scott Turow’s writing. Seriously hunky-lawyer writer? Maybe I need to get into it!
LE, I’ve read that all of Turow’s subsequent novels are very good but not quite the masterpiece that was this one, his first.
Legal eagles, criminal prosecutors rave about its accuracy. I read it once ages ago and remember it vividly and know its final para off by heart.
I love the fact that a male lawyer could write that flawed character, that unreliable witness so viscerally, convincingly, empathetically, in the first person.
I’ve always felt that the panic over the ‘far-right’ is overstated by the left. It’s what ended a brief fling I had with the Greens in the UK (their national policies were sensible but on the ground they turned out to be all ex-socialist alliance types).
To my mind there will ALWAYS be activity at both extremes of the political spectrum (sorry, I’ve always thought the right-wing-bad, left-wing-good is a crock) but like any population distribution, numbers at the extremes tend to be very small and their influence proportional.
On the rare occasions they manage to pinpoint a grass-roots issue that might boost their following, their political teeth are inevitably pulled by mainstream parties eventually appropriating their policy (as Howard’s Liberals did with One Nation).
Our society has ample protection for personal liberty already entrenched in law so it would require an electoral tsunami to sweep an extremist party into office with enough power to change this (which is why I don’t expect that “black flag of Islam” to be flying over Downing Street anytime soon). Historically this only tends to happen when mainstream politics has been fatally compromised by gross economic incompetence or institutionalised corruption.
Actively banning parties at the extreme, as is still done in Germany for example, undermines any claim to democratic credentials.
I think Posey’s point was that there is the potential for something like fascism sitting right in the centre of the political spectrum, out in the open as it were. For mine, I think the ‘f’ word may be misleading in discussions like this, but vigilance in important.
The only place I’d put a question mark over your remarks, DEM is this: “ample protection for personal liberty”. I don’t know about elsewhere, but there were some fairly extreme changes in Australia recently to limit those protections in certain situations, not all of which have been reversed. What some call the ‘state of exception’ may, at any time, be sufficient to bring out the extremity of the moderates.
When the world goes FUBAR fascism results. Technocracy + untrammeled human nature = Fascism. It’s Stupid Monkey time, head, club – donk.
There is absolutely no threat of fascism, so long as we keep the socialists at bay. And for the last time, there is no such thibng as “neoliberalism”.
so long as we keep the socialists at bay.
.
Fascism doesn’t rewuire socialism. It’s routed in ancient structures of tribe, love of war and obedience to leaders. It’s a monkey thing.
.
And for the last time, there is no such thibng as “neoliberalism”.
.
Not anymore.
.
But there never was?
Actually Adrien, if you look at the relatively small number of fascist irruptions, they are always a response to Socialist imperialism.
I think it’s time to realise that both facism and socialism/communism were both authoritarian movements that were very much of their economic and political times – and as JG points out, often reactions to each other – which we will in fact, never see again.
Conditions may recurr in which government authoritarianism will increase (Klaus, you’ll probably agree this may already be happening with the various anti-terror measures already implemented in the West – Skepticlawyer has a neat argument about the financial punishment of smokers to pay for the wider societal and health costs of their freely-chosen habit) but authoritarianism occurs completely independently of political affiliation.
Legalise neo-nazis today and give David Irving a chat show but we will NOT see another Nazi government arise. We may see governments that share some of their authoritanian attributes – not because they are neo-liberal, libertarian, neoconservative or even green, but because they feel authoritarian tools are necessary to implement their political, social or financial agenda. The only requirement for it to happen is that the wider public is either largely in agreement with their goals or unable to prevent it.
authoritarianism occurs completely independently of political affiliation.
.
One of the most authoritarian people I ever met was a hippie anarchist.
.
but because they feel authoritarian tools are necessary to implement their political, social or financial agenda.
.
And for fun.
Well, no… No one actually likes authoritarianism any more than they like torture (no ‘decent’ person would) but they need some sort of real or manufactured emergency to provide a publicly acceptable excuse for having to bring it in and support the inevitable “ends justify the means” argument.
Actually, I think some of those who implement an authoritarian regime do like it, and that’s part of the problem. Or they think they know what is best for everyone, and if they just force everyone else to see this, then the scales will fall from their eyes…
The people who really don’t like authoritarian regimes are the ones whose freedoms are curtailed and who are not in control (obviously).