Green fascists and the BNP

Hi folks,

I thought I ought to flag up schnews, a weekly newsletter from Brighton, one of the fruits of the direct action/anti-roads/Earth First! milleau of the 1990s that I over lapped a bit with and wrote my Phd on (!). Well, anarchistic rather than green socialist if one wants to be pedantic but full of very good information, they are also challenging the coop bank over unethical investments, fighting for asylum rights and animal liberation.

Worth subscribing to on a weekly basis....any way on to green fascism, I have written on this at some length and done lots of research but to cut a long story short the only real over lap between the far right and greens in the UK at present is via social credit/monetary reform.

Not all social crediters are fascists but many are prepared to work with overt anti-semites.

The lynch pin seems to be Scottish activist Alistair Mcconnachie, an ex-UKIP member expelled for holocaust revisionism who now stands as an independent Green in Glasgow.

All very nasty, in my view this stuff, anti-globalisation drawing upon anti-semitic conspiricy is very dangerous, the intellectual inspiration is AK Chesterton's book The New Unhappy Lords. Chesterton an ex member of the British Union of Fascists and first leader of the National Front (parent of the BNP) identified the Trilateral commission, Bilderburg group and the usual suspects as part of a Jewish lead conspiracy to take over the world....

Alistair has been to campaign against Asylum seekers and for David Irving....he needs to be challenged strongly!

This is from my 'ecosocialism of fools' article in Capitalism Nature Socialism....Bloomfield books, James Gibb Stuart and Alistair networked into Muslim groups(!) with the Islamic Party of Great Britain who in turn have members in RESPECT .

The British League of Rights established Bloomfield Books, which has promoted Douglas’s books along with Holocaust revisionist titles, the Protocols, a massive range of populist conspiracy texts and even Mein Kampf. The League of Rights also encourages supporters to subscribe to Spotlight. The Bromsgrove Group, an alliance of varied monetary reformers, contains right wingers such as Don Martin from the League of Rights and Alistair McConnachie. James Gibb Stuart acts as convener. His book The Lemming Folk is a conspiracist’s bible, which promotes once again the populist message that the “money power” links capitalism and communism with its plan for world domination. The book, which has been promoted by the far right British National Party, also praises apartheid,
it means separate development — not racism, or repression, or institutionalized violence, or the eternal social and economic subjugation of one race by another. It was adopted in South Africa some thirty years ago because a white minority saw it then as the only means by which they could preserve their culture and their identity.
During the 1970s Stuart supported Rhodesia’s white government who he saw as a target for the conspiracy because of their financial independence. His associate Alistair McConnachie, suspended from the UK Independence Party, an anti-European Union group, after writing to the Scotsman newspaper to question the Holocaust, edits Prosperity, a social credit/monetary reform newsletter widely promoted in the green movement. McConnachie, who was a member of the Douglas Secretariat during the 1990s, and remains active in monetary reform circles, is reported to have stated, “I don’t accept that gas chambers were used to execute Jews for the simple fact there is no direct physical evidence to show that such gas chambers existed.”

Nasty, nasty, nasty....oh well on to the BNP



ONE GOOSE-STEP BEYOND

BNP LOCAL ELECTION BREAKTHROUGH?

Far-right racist British National Party are fielding an
unprecedented number of candidates for the local council elections
on 4th May.

Their campaign feeds off the natural disillusionment people in the
UK have with New Labour's cut-throat capitalist policies, which
have flogged off public assets for the profits of a small elite
of wealthy individuals, while clamping down on civil liberties
with authoritarian laws. The BNP uses this dissatisfaction to
promote its racist agenda by blaming all these problems on
immigration and building up the fear-mongering myth of Islamic
extremism. Its inflammatory leaflets use the tried-and-tested
tactic of divide and rule to create divisions within society
along racial lines.

Initially the BNP's mid-nineties reorientation to electoral
politics was the result of defeat on the streets. Their strategy
of 'march and grow' where 'rights for whites' were to be secured
with 'well directed fists and boots' collapsed under the onslaught
of Anti-Fascist Action and the Anti-Nazi League. However the bulk
of the party now, publicly at least, supports Nick Griffin's
strategy of 'respectable' action through the ballot box.

The BNP are not on the verge of forming a government - they only
have currently 20 councillors up and down the country and nothing
like a majority on any local authority. Even if extremely
successful they can only hope to double that number. But
significant numbers of people are willing to put their cross
down next to a party that among other things promises
repatriation of every non-white individual to their country of
'ethnic' origin.

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OPPORTUNISTS KNOCK

If people are gravitating to extremist organisations, it is
because the mass organised Left has collapsed and the centre has
proved to be an illusion. After 1997, some people held a naïve
hope that things would improve after the nightmare of Thatcherism,
but of course Neo Labour only continued the capitalist project,
adding their own peculiar twist of authoritarianism and sinister
doublespeak (while fascists threaten to bomb Muslims, Neo Labour
are actually doing it all over the world). The BNP's propaganda
attempts to step into this political vacuum by latching onto
legitimate issues like unemployment, the state of the NHS,
privatisation and in fact any bandwagon with more than three
wheels. While seeming to promise everything to everyone in an
attempt to gain support, their answers consist entirely of racism
and hot air, returning relentlessly to the pseudo-problem of
immigration.

The danger they represent is more in the influence they have on
mainstream media and politics than any prospect of jack boots in
Whitehall. Parts of the media, notably the Murdoch press, are
pushing an openly racist agenda, with the likes of Richard
Littlebrain (yeah, he's working for the Mail now) leaving no
fact undistorted to blame social ills and inequality on immigrants.

Nick Griffin has described the tabloids as "one of the BNPs best
recruiting agents" and expressed his satisfaction with government
immigration policies. The BNP's success has been to get immigration
considered a 'problem' right across the board, dragging the debate
inexorably down and to the right.

The racist political and media campaign has real consequences -
last Friday, 18 year old Christopher Alaneme was stabbed to death
in Kent in a racist attack, and the British Crime Survey estimates
that there are more than 200,000 racially motivated incidents
every year. The fact that the Tory party's election campaign
echoed the BNP's stance on immigration and law 'n' order, with
Neo-Labour playing second fiddle, is an indicator that all
parties consider that playing the race card is a potential winner.

While the Mirror may have recently attempted to stem the tide of
anti-immigration propaganda, the recent furore of Charles Clarke's
failure to ensure the control of 'foreign' prisoners shows that
many in the so-called political 'centre' are willing to play with
fire when it comes to using latent racism to score political points
Politicians and journalists assume that the electorate -
particularly the 'white working class' - is racist, so their tactic
to restore confidence in the 'centre' is to promise to be 'tougher'
with an endless series of crackdowns and fear-mongering against
the most marginalised people in society. The centre party's
ceaselessly irrigate the cesspool in which the BNP swim.


The bungled attempt by the state to prosecute Nasty Nick Griffin
twice for the same offences of race hate were certain to fail
while giving free publicity to the disgusting ideas he has
carefully cleaned up to remain within the law, and served mainly
to soften up public opinion for more laws restricting freedom of
expression and the erosion of double-jeopardy protection.

One of the central ironies of the BNP's attempt to surf the
zeitgeist of terrorism paranoia and Islamophobia (the party
tastelessly reproduced images of the bus blown apart on July 7th
with the slogan "Maybe now it's time to start listening to the
BNP"), is that the far-right produced its very own homegrown
terrorist - David Copeland. His association with the BNP in the
early nineties fuelled his psychosis, leading to him placing three
nail bombs around London in 1999 in an effort to spark a "racial
war...so that all the white people would go and vote BNP".

Curiously, in all his rants about the danger of terrorism from
immigrant communities Old Nick doesn't dwell on his own
organisation's flirtation with suspect devices.

Neo-Labour are using the BNP as an electoral scare tactic. In an
effort to avoid an electoral referendum over their own cowboy job
while in power, they're attempting to use the fascist bogeyman to
scare voters back into the fold and make their own authoritarian
racist policies seem relatively moderate. Sadly the main
anti-fascist organisation, the Socialist Workers' Party-inspired
Unite against Fascism (UAF), while providing a network of activists
prepared to combat the BNP electoral threat, has chosen to
emphasise the message of 'using your vote', i.e. voting for
either of the other authoritarian anti-immigration parties on
offer. So what's a good anarchist to do? Leafleting with the UAF
at least destroys the idea of mass consensus around a right-wing
agenda, but it is no alternative to building real anti-fascist
coalitions willing to take on the authoritarians in power as well
as the fascists on the street.

On St George's Day, for example, Sussex activists chased the BNP
off the streets of Crawley, Ifield and Southgate. Meanwhile in
Bristol recently, local people got together and acted to shut
down a neo-Nazi website run by an organisation called November
9th Society, after noticing stickers appearing around the city.

Residents tracked down who the site was registered to (one Kevin
Quinn, for the record) and where it was hosted, and then
complained to them. US-based Excellence Host acknowledged that
the site stuffed full of race-hate and other trash breached their
terms of service and so suspended the site on their servers.

In a way, this represents the true political situation in the UK.
The mass organised Left are not out in the streets fighting fascism
, and it has come down to networks of individuals organising
ourselves to fight the BNP without relying on the dubious authority
of state or party.

* For info about anti-fascist direct action see www.antifa.org.uk
* To find where the BNP are standing candidates in your region,
check www.stopthebnp.org.uk/index.php?location=ec2006
* www.uaf.org.uk contains useful information, although their
leaflets do urge people to vote.
* www.uaf.org.uk/news.asp?choice=60423 lists anti-BNP events
around the country.