Pinstriped fascism
Matthew Feldman |
Those seeking to expose British National Party leader Nick Griffin as a British Nazi on the BBC's Question Time programme last month will have been disappointed. The charge of German Nazism was a red herring, which Griffin managed to evade with claims about his father's role in the Second World War. Meanwhile, Griffin's fascism went largely undetected by audience and panel alike.
Griffin places 'indigenous' Britons at the forefront of BNP propaganda, for mythic nationalism is the thread linking Nazism, the BNP and every fascist movement in between. Forget the Romans, forget the Norman conquest, and forget the centuries of migration making Britain such a successful trading and multi-ethnic culture: the fiction of a British 'race' unchanging between the Ice Age and the HMS Windrush marks the BNP as a party political manifestation of fascist ideology.
For a decade now, Griffin's so-called 'modernisation' of the BNP has been predicated on deceiving voters, cynically manipulating real political issues, such as immigration, and developing two languages: one for its activists, another for the doorsteps. It was this forked-tongued rhetoric that enabled Nick Griffin to veil his party's fascist ideology in the June 2009 elections; and it seems, yet again on Question Time.
For instance, the BNP's 'Language and Concepts Discipline Manual' stresses that, 'when addressing a specific audience, arguments for our policies should always be couched in language calculated to be relevant to their interests.' Such open goals appear to have been missed in the charged atmosphere of last week's Question Time.
Perhaps this was always going to be the case in a programme that, by its very nature, is given over to emotive sound-bites rather than in-depth analysis. But even this might have been placed on a surer footing by hanging out the BNP's dirty policies for public view. I would have been very happy had Mr Dimbleby's first question to Nick Griffin been: 'You have no intention of telling the truth about your fascist party here tonight, do you?' Make no mistake: this is a revolutionary party, and one that would effect its immigration with real 'rivers of blood' in our towns and cities.
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