Griffin’s account of the trial

From the land that was once known as the birthplace of liberty, and that is now turning into its grave, here is the blog Nick Griffin is keeping during the trial of himself and his co-defendant, Mark Collett, for the crime of incitement to racial hatred. Griffin’s account of the prosecution’s questioning of Collett makes clear the utter incompatibility between Britain’s anti-race hatred laws and any notion of free speech or even of common reasonableness. From my reading, the prosecution’s case appears to rest on the assumption that the defendants have the burden of proving that their statements about racial rapes, Muslim riots, and the “hell” that white people are undergoing in places like Bradford are verifiably true, even to the point of having to state correctly the mathematical frequency of such rapes, and of explaining why they did not also talk about rapes by whites. Imagine what all this means. Any kind of negative or critical statement about a minority group, whether the statement is specific or general, private or public, must be true,—and you must prove before a court that it’s true, and you must also prove that you’re being completely fair and balanced between that group and other groups—or you go to jail. So, for example, if I say, “Illegal immigration from south of the border is ruining this country,” unless I can prove that illegal immigration of Hispanics is ruining this country, and unless I can prove that I’m not unfairly singling out Hispanics as compared with other groups, I would be guilty of incitement to racial hatred.

Since speech is inseparable from thought, what we’re looking at here is thought crime, people being put on trial for their thoughts, being forced to justify their thoughts before a magistrate. Furthermore, since relations between ethnic groups, particularly groups that are in competition with each other, always involve a certain amount of unfair generalization about members of the other group, what we’re looking at here is the criminalization of ingroup-outgroup relations—but only if you’re white, of course. I’m reminded again of Nicholas Davidson’s prophetic remark in Chronicles around 1990: that we were rapidly reaching the point where traditional views would be simply illegal. Davidson was speaking of relations between the sexes. But the same applies to ethnic and racial relations. If you object to the takeover and transformation of your society by a culturally alien, hostile, and frequently violent group, and if you’re white, you’re a race hater. If you’re a normal person, you’re a Nazi.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 24, 2006 11:56 PM | Send