Hatred of Jews has always been the backbone of nazi ideas. The BNP is no different. But antisemitism is not a vote winner. It reminds people of Hitler and the Holocaust. The BNP wishes to distance itself from the images of swastikas and concentration camps. Despite this, they still believesthat there is a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
In Nick Griffin’s pamphlet Who are the Mindbenders Jewish names are listed as proof that they control the media.
Mindbenders claims that, “The mass media in Britain today have managed to implant into many people’s minds the idea that it is ‘anti-Semitic’ even to acknowledge that members of the Jewish community play a large part in controlling our news”.
Jews are accused of “providing us with an endless diet of pro-multiracial, pro-homosexual, anti-British trash”.
Who are the Mindbenders? has a sinister history:
It follows the lead of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the notorious 19th century tsarist forgery that purports to be the minutes of a meeting of Jews documenting their plans to control the whole world.
Mindbenders is based on Who Rules America?, written by Dr William Pierce, who before his death last year was one of the world’s foremost neo-nazis and a self confessed ally of Nick Griffin.
Pierce authored the notorious Turner Diaries, which inspired the Oklahoma bombing, and was the leader of the National Alliance, a group described by the US Anti-Defamation League as one of the most dangerous neo-nazi groups in the world. Griffin’s booklet is a carbon copy of Pierce’s.
In Spearhead in 1996, Griffin spoke of “the controllers of Hollywood, almost entirely Jewish”, and has written that: “Some ‘anti-Semitism’ may be provoked by the actions of certain Jews themselves and thereby have a rational basis”. Now he is trying to distance himself from the label of antisemitism, and has toned down his views in public. Where he once spoke of “Jewish influence”, he now speaks of “Zionist influence”, showing that it is his language not his beliefs that have changed.
Holocaust Denial
Griffin has never withdrawn his views on the Holocaust that landed him with a suspended prison sentence in 1998. His publication The Rune, which denied that the Holocaust ever took place, resulted in a conviction for inciting racial hatred under the Public Order Act. So extreme were Griffin’s beliefs that he attacked David Irving, the leading British Holocaust denier, for daring to admit that some people might have died in the Holocaust, Griffin wrote: “True revisionists will not be fooled by this new twist to the sorry tale of the Hoax of the Twentieth Century”.
Defaming the memory of British forces who fought the Nazis, he added, “Back in the 1960s the Jews quietly shifted the alleged sites of the mass gassings from the no longer believable German camps such as Dachau and Belsen to the sites in Communist Poland such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Now that the very idea of Zyklon-B extermination has been exposed as unscientific nonsense, they are once and again re-writing bogus history, playing down gas chambers and talking instead of ‘hundreds of hitherto unknown sites in the East where more than a million Jews were exterminated by shooting”.
Griffin sees the Holocaust as a lie invented by Jews to make money: “As your Hollywood friend is fond of remarking, (provided he is safely in select company) ‘there’s no business like Shoah business”.
When the former MP Alex Carlisle reported Griffin for inciting racial hatred and Holocaust denial, Griffin fumed: “This bloody Jew, our local MP who organised the raid whose only claim to fame is that two of his parents died in the Holocaust”
Star witness as Harrow Crown Court on Griffin’s behalf was Robert Faurisson, the famous French Holocaust denier.
In the 1990s the BNP hosted a number of revisionism seminars that were addressed by some of the world’s most infamous Holocaust deniers. They included David Irving.
International nazi links of the BNP
It is said that one can tell a lot about someone by the company they keep. That is certainly true about the British National Party. A quick look at its international contacts reveals its true nature. Across the world, the BNP is linked to some of the most extreme and fanatical nazi, fascist, and racist groups around. They include:
National Alliance, the foremost nazi group in the United States. NA speakers regularly address BNP meeting in the US and, in 1995, it founder and leader, William Pierce, spoke at the BNP annual rally in London. When Pierce died in the summer of 2002, the BNP posted an obituary on its website. Pierce was the author of The Turner Diaries, the fictional account of a Race War. The book proved to be an inspiration for the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the London nailbomber David Copeland.
David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux, is very close to Nick Griffin and the BNP. Griffin has regularly shared platforms with Duke and the American’s antisemitic and Holocaust denial material is sold through the BNP. Duke is currently living in Russia in a bid to avoid the US taxman.
National Democratic Party, Germany’s leading nazi group. NPD leaders deny the Holocaust took place and revere Adolf Hitler. The NPD shares many of its activists with the outlawed Blood and Honour skinhead movement. Griffin addressed a NPD rally in August 2002. NPD activists have attended BNP events in Britain.
Front National, the French fascist group led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen was convicted for dismissing the Holocaust as a “mere detail” of the Second World War and for violence. BNP supporters are regular attendees at the FN’s annual summer festival and Griffin has publicly stated his admiration for the group. A member of the FN leadership addressed the 2002 BNP Red, White and Blue festival.
Holocaust deniers. The BNP, and especially Nick Griffin, are close to many of the world’s leading Holocaust deniers. Robert Faurisson, one of the foremost Holocaust deniers, was a star witness at Griffin’s trial for racial hatred in 1998. The German Gunter Deckert, who has been to prison for denying the Holocaust, spoke at a London BNP meeting in 2001. Even the British Holocaust denier and antisemite, David Irving, has addressed BNP meetings.
American Renaissance. A far right US based publication that supports the notion of the biological superiority of white people. Each edition is packed with the theories of race-science, and grim statistics showing the moral degeneracy of black people. Griffin spoke at their annual conference in February 2002 on “Racial friction in Britain and Europe”.
Blood and Honour. Blood and Honour is the openly nazi skinhead organisation in Britain. Many of its leaders are BNP members and Blood and Honour nazi bands have raised money for the BNP.
The attempts by the BNP to portray a more moderate image are often dropped when addressing events abroad. Speaking to a private nazi meeting in the US in 2001, Nick Griffin admitted that the party’s new-found respectability was simply a tactic to con the British people. “My politics have not changed,” he told the audience of racists and nazis. “I still believe in fighting for this,” he added, pointing to his white skin.
The BNP - democracy and elections
The British National Party claims to favour a democracy. Indeed they see themselves as its only advocates in a system where it is in tatters. Another lie. Over the years a number of BNP leaders have given us an insight into their idea of democracy.
John Tyndall, who founded the BNP, once said, “with the numbers of murderous asocials and perverts on the increase, as a result of our sick society, there will be an unanswerable case when the day for the great clean up comes, to implement the final solution against these sub-human elements by means of the gas chambers” (Spearhead 1965).
In 1976, Tyndall told the East London Advertiser, “When we get to power our opponents will be swept away like flies”.
Current leader Nick Griffin told Wales on Sunday in 1997, “The politicians, those in charge of the mass media, police chiefs and others responsible for creating this multi-racial hell hole must face trial and pay the ultimate penalty”.
Griffin’s contempt for the political process was evident when he told supporters in 1996 that the BNP needed to be seen as “a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan, ‘Defend Rights for Whites’, with well directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate”.
He went on to add, “It is more important to control the streets of a city than its council chamber. If that is the sort of ‘unreasonable’ attitude that journalists and opponents try to use against us at election times, it shouldn’t bother us”.
The BNP’s scorn for democracy is clear through its disregard for election rules.
In May 2002 one of its candidates in Sunderland stood for election despite having a recent conviction for fraud which disbarred him from standing
In May 2001, six BNP council candidates in Burnley were excluded after it was discovered that several of the people who were supposed to have signed the nomination papers denied doing so.
Deception also played a role in a council by-election in Three Rivers, Hertfordshire in November 2000. Several people who signed the form nominating BNP member Ian Edwards later complained that they were unaware of what they were signing. This included an 80-year-old Labour Party member.
In 2000, BNP member John Haycock was elected unopposed to a parish council in Bromyard. He was sacked from the council nine months later for non-attendance. More contempt for democracy.
Colin Smith, a key member of the BNP gave an address in Beckton, despite actually living in Bexleyheath. In May 1998, Smith stood in two local council elections simultaneously, using separate addresses to meet the residence requirement in each case.
During the passage through Parliament of the Representation of the People act 2000, Home Secretary Jack Straw specifically noted the BNP abuse in his speech introducing the Bill.
In the House of Commons 50 MPs signed an Early Day Motion condemning the BNP’s actions. It read, “This house deplores the unlawful action of the racist and fascist British National Party in once again breaching the Representation of the People Act”.
One candidate, Paul Henderson, stood under a false name. In Scotland, where the BNP fielded eight candidates, seven were not living at the addresses given on their nomination forms.
In the June 1999 elections, the BNP lied and cheated its way to a five-minute party political broadcast and the free delivery of 15 million leaflets by the Royal Mail. As many as 15 BNP candidates, out of a total of 79, gave false addressed on their nomination forms.
The BNP use dirty tricks. In November 2002 they secured their fourth councillor when Robin Evans won Mill Hill ward in Blackburn. Their campaign was based on deception and lies. In one leaflet a picture of Finsbury Park mosque was printed, with a caption stating that Muslims there celebrated the September 11th attacks. It neglected to tell voters that this mosque was in London.
Another ludicrous claim – that Asians were likely to become the majority in Blackburn within 10 years – was aimed at stoking up fear based on misinformation. In fact the non-white population stands at one-fifth in the town.
Forgery was even attempted when the BNP produced a leaflet purporting to come from the Liberal Democrats. Under the title “Caring for Ethnic Minorities” the leaflet urged people to vote Lib Dem if they wanted more money spent on Asians and asylum seekers. The leaflet is now under police investigation. A similar dirty tricks campaign was used in the Mixenden by-election in Halifax.
Even when the BNP do manage to take a seat on the council, their disrespect for the political process is obvious. In Halifax and Burnley, BNP councillors failed to attend the crucial budget meeting that sets council tax and spending for the coming year. This was in spite of promising voters that they would fight for tax cuts. In Burnley, all three councillors were absent from the most important meeting of the year.
These facts prove the BNP’s total disregard for democracy. Democracy would, after all, be swept away if the BNP ever gained power.
The BNP - racist party
Racism is at the very heart of the British National Party. It is racism that separates it from any other political party. And it is racism that attracts many of its members.
Of course the BNP denies this. It knows how hateful its views appear, and has tried to make its language less crude. But the song remains the same. BNP publications are still filled with racist articles, lies about immigration and asylum, and distorted figures in an attempt to portray black people as criminals and dole scroungers.
Today, the BNP has dropped its policy of compulsory repatriation and replaced it with a voluntary scheme. Make no mistake about it, this move is designed to win over supporters. The party recognise that the vast majority of people found its previous policy abhorrent. But the small print of BNP policy makes clear its true aims. The BNP claims that a BNP led government would consider forcible repatriation if not enough “non-whites” took up its offer.
If the BNP does not publicly support compulsory repatriation, it makes no attempt to hide its backing for an apartheid state in Britain. Current party literature proposes to “protect and preserve the racial and cultural integrity of the British people – and of others too, the party believes in separation”.
According to the BNP 2001 general election manifesto, “native Britons”, who they claim can only be white, would be given priority in the job market. “Non-whites” would instantly become second class citizens in Britain.
Any black person who commits a crime would also be thrown out of the country, even those who were born here.
Mixed race relationships would be outlawed.
Privately, the BNP leaders have continued to air their real political views. “All black people will be repatriated, even if they were born here”, BNP leader Nick Griffin told Wales on Sunday in 1996. “We must preserve the white race, because it has been responsible for all the good things in civilisation”.
According to party number two, Tony Lecomber, the preservation of the white race can be done through a racial eugenic programme.
The BNP supported ethnic cleansing in the Kosovan crisis. “The Serbs’ real crime isn’t the harshness with which they have expelled so many of the Albanian Muslims who having become the majority in the Kosovan heart of Serbia by a mixture of immigration, a high birth rate, and low level ethnic cleansing of the native Serbs… No! The real crime in the eyes of the powerful advocates of a multi-racial New World Order is for any people to demand the right to preserve their own identity and freedom”.
The BNP says they have no truck with “race hate”. Another outrageous lie. The jokes, caricatures, cartoons and articles depict black people as stupid, criminally minded and ugly. Time and again, BNP publications talk about the genetic superiority of the white race.
Several BNP members have put this racism into practice:
Former National Organiser Richard Edmonds was convicted for his part in a vicious bottle attack on a mixed race couple in a pub in East London 1993
BNP supporter Stuart Kerr was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment for firebombing an Asian shop in Chichester, Sussex
BNP leader Nick Griffin was convicted of incitement to racial hatred in April 1998
The BNP organiser for Waltham Forest, Alan Gould, was convicted of racially abusing people in a pub in 2000
Former BNP member David Copeland was sentenced to six life sentences after planting bombs in London. He wanted to start a race war.
On other occasions, the BNP has glorified racist attacks. In 1991, the BNP newspaper gloated after several BNP supporters stabbed an African immigrant at London Bridge station. The victim had his “kidney surgically removed”, the paper boasted. In the same year, the BNP leadership whipped up a racist riot in Bermondsey, London, and led an attack on an anti-racist meeting that was protesting against the BNP headquaters in Welling. Thirteen people needed hospital treatment.
A BNP presence has almost always culminated in “race hate”. When Derek Beackon was elected as a BNP councillor in Millwall, racist attacks in the area soared by 300%
Profile of Nick Griffin
The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, is a hardline fascist. Convicted for inciting race hate, he denies that the Holocaust ever took place and believes that Jews are conspiring against white British people.
Griffin is from a wealthy family with a history of far right involvement. His father, Edwin, took him to his first NF meeting when he was just 15. Griffin’s mother is the administration secretary of the party and stood in the 2001 general election.
When Nick Griffin attended Cambridge University to study law his involvement in extremist politics grew. By 1978, he was the national organiser of the NF.
In 1980, Griffin launched Nationalism Today with the help of Joe Pearce, a convicted racist and editor of Bulldog. Nationalism Today became the springboard for the Third Positionist ideas that the NF later adopted. Through Nationalism Today Griffin and Pearce developed their idea that a “third way” was needed to replace the evils of both capitalism and communism. They felt both were Zionist controlled.
The Third Positionist wing of the NF saw the traditional style of fascist organising as pro-capitalist. Griffin wanted to create a political elite. Based on the blood and soil philosophy of Julius Evola, an Italian National Socialist, Griffin and the NF began to develop their Third Positionist ideas.
But it was also terrorists who were to prove a strong influence on Griffin’s politics. Italian fascist, Roberto Fiore, had arrived in Britain with several others including people implicated in the bombing at Bologna railway station in 1980 in which 85 people.
Griffin and Fiore became close, with the Italian working for Griffin’s tour company, Heritage Tours. Griffin’s father remains Fiore’s personal and business accountant.
Griffin’s BNP may hate Islamic fundamentalists now. But this has not always been the case. After his faction took control of the NF, they began to make some strange alliances. They met with representatives of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime through the Libyan People’s Bureau in London, and expressed support for Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.
Rank and File members of the NF were not too pleased when Griffin, in 1985, praised the black separatist Louis Farrakhan: “White nationalists everywhere wish (Farrakhan) well, for we share a common struggle for the same ends: Racial Separation and Racial Freedom”.
During this period, Griffin and other NF leaders took an all-expenses paid trip to Libya, as guests of the Gaddafi regime to obtain funding.
National Front News wrote at the time: “Common interest must be turned into practical cooperation. Those involved must work to nail the media lies which are used by our enemies to try and divide us and make us afraid to be seen standing side by side with Third Way nations such as Libya and Iran”. Ironic that Griffin once allied himself so closely with Muslim countries that he now condemns as terrorist states. But political gymnastics have been constant throughout Griffin’s life. His bizarre ideologies have changed like the wind.
In 1989, he left the NF and formed the International Third Position, a fanatically Catholic fascist group. The ITP campaigned against Coca Cola, McDonalds, urbanisation and “Zionism” His involvement did not last beyond a few years. In 1991, after a failed business venture, Griffin went his own way.
In 1995, Griffin joined the BNP. He began to edit The Rune, an anti-Semitic quarterly. He also announced that the BNP should prioritise denying the Holocaust to schoolchildren.
He earned a two-year suspended prison sentence for his sick views on the Holocaust. In 1998 he was found guilty of inciting race hatred at Harrow Crown Court for denying that the Holocaust ever took place.
But now Griffin tries to pretend the BNP is respectable. The ITP have also been baffled by Griffin’s incoherence. It recently declared: “He has been a conservative, a revolutionary nationalist, a radical National Socialist, a Third Positionist, a friend of the ‘boot boys’ and the skinhead scene, a man committed to respectable politics and electioneering, a ‘moderniser’. Which is he in reality? Perhaps he has been all these quite sincerely – in which case his judgement is abysmal; or perhaps he has been none of them sincerely – which speaks for itself!”
Griffin immediately had his sights upon leading the BNP. He became editor of Spearhead, the then BNP magazine, from 1996 until his split from former leader John Tyndall in 1999.
He yearned for a BNP that was reputable and modern. The label of Nazism tarnished the group’s image, and Griffin wanted to copy the more intellectual far right parties on the continent. But though he spoke of the need for a community-based politics, his words in The Rune showed his real colours. “The electors of Millwall did not back a post-modernist Rightist Party, but what they perceived to be a strong, disciplined organisation with the ability to back up its slogan “Defend Rights for Whites’ with well-directed boots and fists. When the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate”.
History of the BNP
Formed in 1982 by John Tyndall, one of Britain’s foremost post-war nazis, the BNP spent much of the 1980s in the shadow of the larger National Front. The NF was to split quite dramatically, and, torn by internal conflict, left a space on the far right for the BNP to fill.
In 1985, one of its main activists, Tony Lecomber, was sent to prison for trying to blow up the offices of a rival organisation. He was also caught with hand-grenades. Despite his attempted terrorism, he remains number two in today’s BNP.
During the early 1990s much of its activities were focused on East London, where, in 1993, it secured a council by-election victory in the Tower Hamlets ward of Millwall. The price to pay was a massive rise in racial attacks. In the three months after the election, racial incidents rose by 300%.
At about the same time the BNP spawned the violent Combat 18 as its security force. . C18 later emerged as a nazi terror group, responsible for a letter bomb campaign and a series of murders. C18 thugs, made up of football hooligans and nazi skinheads, protected BNP meetings and minded BNP leaders during party marches
In 1993 the BNP became increasingly embarrassed by Combat 18 violence. After its victory in Millwall it decided it no longer needed the street thugs and banned dual membership. However most BNP members ignored this plea. In September 1995 four of the five London BNP branch organisers attended a C18 meeting.
The Millwall seat was lost eight months later. The BNP lost momentum, with younger members going over to C18. Tyndall reversed the slide by adopting a more hardline strategy, which included bringing veteran US nazi leader, William Pierce, to London.
Pierce penned the evil tract, The Turner Diaries, which inspired the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and the London nailbomber David Copeland. Copeland learnt his politics in the BNP.
After Nick Griffin became leader in 1999, the BNP began to adopt a more respectable image. It campaigned on rural issues and, publicly at least, watered down some of its more racist policies. However most of the key BNP personnel have remained the same. And it was only one year before Griffin became leader that he received a suspended prison sentence for inciting racial hatred.
In 2002 the BNP won three council seats in Burnley and averaged 28% of the town-wide vote. In Oldham, the party came second in four of the five wards it contested and took an average 27%. Across the country the BNP averaged 16% in the council wards it contested, easily its best election results in its history. It is important remember that it challenged less than 1% of all seats up for election. But since then, they have added two more council seats and this looks set to grow in May.
The Politics of the BNP
The BNP are all things to all people. They are populists whose politics change like the wind. If the public is concerned with asylum, the BNP will exploit the issue. When Islamic fundamentalists commit terrorist attacks, suddenly all Muslims are to blame for the world’s ills. No matter what problems exist in this country, someone else is always to blame. Now the BNP wants to take power in council elections. But they know their nazi image has to go. Britons fought for our freedom against Hitler’s Nazi Germany. No decent British citizens want homegrown extremists destroying the memory of those brave men and women who lost their lives to secure our future. This is why the BNP lie about who they are and what they stand for.
The BNP are cynics. They pretend that they are not racists. But make no mistake about it, all minority groups would be under threat if faced with a BNP victory. The BNP promise the world but can deliver nothing. They say that they love this country, but they wish to destroy its harmony and diversity. They say that they stand for the ordinary worker, but the BNP would scrap Trade Unions given the chance.
Extremism runs through the BNP. From leader Nick Griffin’s Holocaust denial through to Tony Lecomber’s proposed eugenics plan for a purer white race, the party has expounded outrageous and downright dangerous views. Recently Mark Collett, leader of the young BNP was shown by channel 4’s Despatches to be an out and out Nazi sympathiser: “National Socialism was the best solution for the German people in the 1930s”, he told the cameras. “I honestly cant understand how a man who’s seen the inner city hell of Britain today cant look back on that era [Hitler’s Germany] with a certain nostalgia”. Despite the BNP’s public denunciation of Collett, he remains a full-time party worker and Yorkshire Regional Organiser.
THE TRUTH ABOUT BNP
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