Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: they need a credible centrist voice

Boneheads and Ballots
Explaining the rise of the British National Party
By Ben Cohen | 7:00 am June 17, 2009
Poor Nick Griffin. Every time the leader of the British National Party
thinks he’s gained respectability, something comes along to spoil it.
In the European parliament elections two weeks ago, the BNP won two
seats. Days later, James von Brunn murdered a security guard in an
assault on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and
it quickly emerged that the aging white supremacist had attended
meetings of the BNP’s American Friends branch. He did so with his
friend John de Nugent, who last year launched what the neo-Nazi online
forum Stormfront called a “serious bid for President of the United
States.” De Nugent gushed on his blog that Griffin, whom he had met
twice, was bravely tackling the “Jewsmedia…. Hail the White Leader,
Nick Griffin!”
Griffin could do without these kinds of encomiums. As one of the new
BNP European Parliamentary members, Griffin’s electoral success
demonstrates the effectiveness of his strategy to emphasize the
party’s British nationalism while adopting an amnesiac approach to its
neo-Nazi origins. The elections marked a breakthrough.
The party has never secured any kind of parliamentary representation
before. However, Griffin and his supporters know that the European
parliament does not have the significance or the prestige of the
British parliament at Westminster. Those who bother to vote in
European elections often do so to register a protest against the
establishment parties. When the time comes for a Westminster election,
the good sense and caution of the voters kicks back in. If Griffin is
to buck that trend, he must cast away any associations with de Nugent,
Von Brunn, and people of that ilk.
To be sure, the BNP has quite a history to overcome. Nothing better
symbolizes the unashamedly Nazi roots of the party than the October
1963 wedding between Colin Jordan and Françoise Dior. Jordan was the
founder of the National Socialist Movement, from which the BNP is
directly descended. His bride, the niece of fashion designer Christian
Dior, was a Hitler worshipper who had spent most of her life on the
edges of the moldering French aristocracy. Their nuptials were a
macabre celebration of Nazi occultism. Having sworn that they were
both of pure Aryan stock, Dior and Jordan pricked their fingers and
let their mingled blood drip onto a virgin copy of Mein Kampf.
A Royal Air Force reject, Jordan founded the National Socialist
Movement on what would have been Hitler’s 73rd birthday, April 20,
1962. He was the most foul of racists, obsessed with the image of
black males as sexual predators. (”Semi-savages are given material
rewards to mate with the women of one of the leading civilized nations
in the world,” he spat.) These demons in his head were fueled by the
svelte, hard-faced Dior, who taunted him about her previous
relationship with John Tyndall, Jordan’s deputy. When Jordan
eventually dismissed Tyndall, Dior said: “I once thought Colin was
weak. Now he has proved his strength.” A few months later, she dumped
him.
Such melodrama makes it easy to forget that Jordan and Tyndall—when
they were not fighting each other or doing time for such offenses as
an arson campaign against synagogues—were at the helm of a group that
never had more than a few hundred members. By the end of the 1960s,
Jordan had been eclipsed and Tyndall was slowly realizing that winning
elections was a necessary condition of political success. He reasoned
that labels like “British nationalist” were probably more appealing to
the public than “National Socialist.”
Tyndall became one of the leaders of the National Front, which
dominated the British far right during the 1970s. What distinguished
the National Front was not so much its hostility to immigrants—a
plentiful sentiment in the Conservative Party of the time—as its
strident racism and proclivity for violence. These were never
moderated for electoral purposes. Rude Boy, a film released in 1980
starring The Clash, features documentary footage of a National Front
candidate ranting menacingly about an opponent who is “half wog, half
Jew!” For nationalists like these, race and nation were one and the
same—and always would be.
In his public statements, Nick Griffin may have eschewed the racist
verbiage of his predecessors—
“wog,” “coon,” “yid,” and so forth—but racial nationalism remains the
thread which links the British National Party with the National
Socialist Movement. The BNP’s constitution restricts membership to
“indigenous Caucasians.” “Rights for Whites,” a racial slogan, is one
of the party’s favorites. Moreover, most political reformers will tend
to disown or at least apologize for an unsavory past. Griffin has not
done so, either on behalf of himself—his career highlights include
teenage activism in the National Front, Holocaust denial and
authorship of a brazenly anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled “The
Mindbenders”—or his party.
However, the BNP only won two seats, and not to the national
legislature, so how worried should Jews and liberals in the United
Kingdom be? Wasn’t it possible, I asked Mark Gardner, head of the
Community Security Trust—the British Jewish communal body which tracks
antisemitic incidents and trends—that the BNP could suffer the same
kind of humiliation that the National Front did in the 1979 election,
when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to power with British
pride as one of their themes? “The Conservatives will need to say to
that sector of the electorate, ‘we hear your concerns, we won’t let
you down,’” he answered. “They might not be as blunt as that.”
So who is politically in a position to shape the fight against the
BNP? Historically, that role has been fallen to the far left—but to
allow it to do so now might mean courting further disaster. As one of
the Britain’s more outspoken bloggers put it, “The first step towards
defeating the BNP is to take the fight against the far right out of
the hands of the far left.”
As 10 years of Israel fixation on the far left can attest, the tropes
of anti-Semitism are not just the preserve of the farthest right.
Indeed, they have become so embedded on the left that one British
advocate of an academic boycott of Israel has promoted the latest
crackpot myth doing the rounds of anti-Semites, namely that Lehman
Brothers transferred its assets to Israel before going under. Other
characteristics of the far right—the scorning of internationalism in
the name of a selfish, parochial isolationism, admiration for tyrants,
depicting terrorists as “resistors” or “political soldiers”—have also
penetrated the far left. All of which suggests that if the people who
might vote for the BNP are to vote for someone else, they need a
credible centrist voice to persuade them accordingly.
Ben Cohen is the associate director of communications for the American
Jewish Committee.
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/boneheads-and-ballots/

 States.”
a proposito di SF, nella sezione italiana (ne parlano qui:
http://www.7yearwinter.com/2009/06/la-ballata-di-scotto
) c'è un
surreale dibattito in corso tra i suprematisti bianchi più ortodossi e
un negher (no, non è Diego, deve esserci un'epidemia) che è stato
nominato da Fiore capo di Forza Nuova vicino a Napoli...
spettacolo, quasi quanto Persiobuster...Namib potrebbe farci una bella
antologia per il suo sito..