BNP leader criticizes anti-Semitism

I have been interested in reports that the British National Party has been carefully distancing itself from its anti-Semitic past and from the kind of anti-Semitism that is still widespread on the nationalist right. Britain is so desparately in need of a party that will defend the national identity while avoiding the rathole of anti-Semitism that this development should be of great interest to us.

Below, sent to me by a correspondent, is a recent column by BNP chairman Nick Griffin. My correspondent boldfaced the parts on Jews. There are obviously things here I don’t approve of, such as Griffin’s view that Kevin MacDonald has been unfairly discredited, and his assumption that President Bush and his neoconservative advisors lied America into the invasion of Iraq. But we must remember that we are dealing here with European nationalist conservatism, not American-style conservatism, and it is important to understand the extent to which Griffin, the head of what was once a seriously anti-Semitic party, is clearly disapproving the whole mindset of anti-Semitism. This is not an endorsement of the BNP. The jury is still out on that subject. I have not personally made a study of the party and its statements. Articles with anti-Semitic contents published in the past are still posted at their website. But it also would be wrong, and counter-productive to the cause of Western patriotism, simply to ignore or deride what appears to be an intellectually serious effort by Griffin to criticize anti-Semitism. His statements below are not of the pro forma, “I am not an anti-Semite” type. Rather, they seem to grasp much of what is truly objectionable about anti-Semitism and therefore are deserving of attention.

“Those who automatically blame “the Jews” for everything are blinded by their knee-jerking to a multitude of other factors, not least the age-old facts that “power corrupts” and that the monopolising aggression and greed which are the flip side of the short-term efficiency of capitalism know no borders or ethnic distinctions.

Those who claim to believe that no Jew ever does anything wrong, or that to criticise any Jew or group of Jews is a mortal sin against a group singled out by God or Hitler for special treatment and in consequence entitled ever-after to carry a globally valid ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card, are clearly in the grip either of PC self-censorship or the last misguided upholders of the late 19th century ‘Master Race’ fantasy.

But equally, those who believe that only Jews are capable of abusing great power for their selfish personal or group benefit are sadly lacking in any grasp of the realities of human nature. Give an elite—any elite—power, especially over decades or generations, and that elite will abuse that power, and scheme, cheat and kill to maintain and extend it.

Sometimes Gentile elites even find in individual Jews a useful cover for their own greed: In medieval Europe, and pre-revolutionary Russia for instance, assorted Kings and Princes and Nobles used Jews as money-lenders and tax-collectors, knowing that this would lead to popular anger against the exploitation which they sanctioned and grew fat upon would be deflected onto their Jewish functionaries.

This tendency to blame wicked shadowy groups of ‘bad advisors’ doesn’t always require Jews—the same nonsense was spectacularly present in England at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt—but it has always helped those ‘on top’ to stay there, and rendered the efforts of the ‘common masses’ (that’s you and me, in case you still haven’t realised) to secure justice and self-determination. Throughout history there have indeed been instances which have borne out Marx’s dictum that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.”

Similarly, while a number of Jewish intellectuals and lobbyists – including the Frankfurt School and most of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement – have played a key role in providing the academic and ‘moral’ justification’ for the multi-racial assault on the survival of separate races and cultures, it is utterly wrong of anti-Semitic bigots to overlook the fact that the key practical motor for mass immigration is and always has been the greed of wealthy individuals, companies and corporations.

This was true in the days of Deep South slavery; when the British Empire carted indentured coolies all over the world; when the mill-owners of Lancashire and West Yorkshire placed adverts for workers in newspapers in Pakistan, and it is still true today in the food processing plants in small towns from mid-Wales and the Highlands of Scotland to the American mid-West.

It is perhaps no surprise that US-based ‘nationalists’, raised in a mental cocoon of free enterprise American Dream drivel are often unable to see that flaws in the very basis of their society are the root of the problem, but for nationalists in the European and radical British tradition to swallow the same pro-capitalist nonsense is frankly remarkable and shameful.

In modern times, the insistence of the naive and the bigoted that “the Jews” are to blame for everything that goes wrong in the world and their own lives allows those of us who do criticise genuine abuses of power and influence by some Jews (and, contrary to liberal mythology of the second half of the last century, they are not all blameless saints) to be painted by the media as crazy “anti-Semites“.

The paranoid mentality that blamed “the Jews” for causing the Black Death by poisoning wells, and which now blames them for the soaring price of oil, only allows those who clipped coins or who promote the anti-white mind-rot of MTV to escape justified criticism by convincing ordinary people that those with genuine criticisms are as misguided as the paranoid cranks. If Professor Kevin MacDonald’s writings are not evaluated sensibly and fairly, it is partly because his realm of study has been discredited by drivel about conspiracies by “Learned Elders” to use Underground tunnels to blow up our cities.

It is certainly true that most of the media went along with the absurd WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq. And it is equally true that assorted Zionists – particularly around President Bush—played a key role both in pushing for that invasion and in telling the lies that created a degree of public support for it. It seems that they thought that having the Yanks and Brits go in and obliterate Saddam was a good thing for Israel, and perhaps it was (though for “all-seeing masters of global manipulation” they seem to have got it spectacularly wrong; did it really benefit Israel to turn Iraq from a stable socialist tyranny basket case which used to give handouts to the families of a few Palestinian suicide bombers into a giant hands-on training centre for Islamic fanatics from all over the world?). But while this was clearly a key reason behind the decision of various Jewish media bosses to back the invasion, it does not automatically prove that it was the real, or the only, reason for it.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2005 05:38 PM | Send