BNP election broadcast
Jeremy G. writes:
Take a look on YouTube to see the BNP’s fabulous election broadcast.
This is a very well done broadcast. Judging by the ruthless response from the mainstream media in Britain (here and here), I think the broadcast has really hit home.
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Steven Warshawsky writes:
I have not followed the VFR discussion about the BNP very closely. But I watched the party’s election video, and must say that I’m not impressed. The overriding message in the video is that the British welfare state should give preference to native-born Brits who work and pay taxes, not to “sponges” and recent immigrants. Thus, while properly opposing multiculturalism, the BNP’s message nevertheless endorses the liberal policy that the government has the right to distribute society’s resources among the citizenry. The welfare state is at the heart of contemporary liberalism; the welfare state preceded and led to the undermining of the West’s traditional values (e.g., traditional marriage, self-reliance, political and economic liberty, patriotism and martial vigor). The BNP offers no alternative, at least not in their campaign commercial. Notice the lack of any Thatcherite rhetoric of individual rights, private property, and free markets. Notice also that the BNP expressly states that it “does not blame” the immigrants themselves—this, after complaining about crowding, crime, terrorism, and many other ills directly associated with immigration. So even the BNP cannot completely throw off the shackles of political correctness. A “whiter” and more “Christian” welfare state appears to be the best that the BNP can offer. In my opinion, hardly a party worth praising or promoting.
LA replies:
So, BNP-criticism has gone from calling it an evil Nazi party to calling it a mere welfare state party—from criticizing it as a gang of anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying thugs to criticizing it as it a party that refuses to “blame” immigrants! That’s quite an upgrade!
I think Steven misses the point. Everything in Britain that opposes the current establishment is uniting around the BNP. If they won every race in this election the BNP would not have one ounce of power over national policy, because this is not a parliamentary election; it is for local councils and the European Parliament. The significance of the vote would be as a call for the overthrow of Britain’s current totally corrupt and anti-British ruling elite.
Ken Hechtman writes:
The BNP has never been allergic to the welfare state the way the American far right is. Quite the opposite. Remember that half of “national socialist” is “socialist.”
When Nick Griffin dropped the party’s racist and anti-Semitic baggage, he also dropped a lot of the socialist baggage but he didn’t drop all of it. I’d still place them to the left of New Labour on a number of economic issues. I’ve even talked to an Old Labour guy who paid a lot of attention to Nick Griffin. He hadn’t signed a BNP card, but he was thinking about it.
Our provincial Parti Quebecois is probably the closest equivalent to the BNP in North America, or at least the faction that’s dominant right now is. They’re 1970s-style Keynesian welfare state social democrats on economics, ethnocentric nationalists on race and culture.
There was one line of the video that jumped out at me, at 1:55: “and we include the British-born children of the decent immigrants who came here to work in the 50s and 60s.” Is that a reversal or a clarification? I don’t remember him talking like that five years ago.
LA replies:
It sounds like a reversal to me.
Also, to respond further to Steven Warshawsky who criticized Griffin over his failure to sound like Mrs. Thatcher, let us remember that La Maggie did NOTHING to slow down, arrest, or reverse the Islamization and Third-Worldization of Britain. She was an economic conservative with an old fashioned middle-class asperity and patriotism; but she was not a cultural conservative. In fact, her assertive patriotism and anti-leftism combined with her total lack of opposition to immigration and Islamization makes her seem, in retrospect, like a neocon
So, to make the situation stark, if the choice were between
1. Welfare statism plus restored national existence (BNP)
and
2. Free markets and anti-Communism plus continued ethno-cultural dissolution of nation (Thatcher)
which would you choose?
LA continues:
However, I have to temper my criticism of Thatcher with the fact that she opposed the European Union, which was what brought her down. However, that was only at the very end of her years in office. Up until then she had gone along with the EU. So it looks like, at best, a wash.
May 28
Steven Warshawsky writes:
The welfare state undermines the West’s historic/traditional values and civilization. This is the contradiction at the heart of all conservatism that does not reject the welfare state (no less so than “open borders” fanaticism is the contradiction at the heart of “classical” libertarianism). Socialism is not the historic character of Anglo-American civilization; indeed, it is fundamentally incompatible with it. The philosophical and political bases of socialism lead directly to contemporary liberalism. The non-discrimination principle that you so brilliantly explicate starts in the economic realm and then moves to the social and cultural realms. Economic socialism comes first (see the New Deal); social and cultural liberalism follows (see The Great Society). There can be no such thing as welfare statism plus restored national existence for either Britain or the United States.
LA replies:
Here I’m not responding to your very interesting main point that welfare statism is incompatible with national existence, but to your passing point about the connection between anti-discrimination and socialism.
Certainly the non-discriminatory principle is analogous to socialism. Socialism says we must give undeserved benefits to people who are worse off , and impose undeserved burdens on people who are better off, so as to make everyone equal. The non-discriminatory principle says that there shall be no difference in the way individuals belonging to various groups, especially outsider and marginal groups, are treated: all shall be included equally and represented equally. Indeed, my First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal society, which is a direct expression of the non-discriminatory principle, shows how close the analogy is. The First Law says that the more dysfunctional, troublesome, or threatening a minority or non-Western group is, the more we must praise it, the more we must blame ourselves for its problems, and the more we must call ourselves racist if we speak the truth about it. This is exactly like the socialist principle that the more undeserving a person is, the more he should receive, and the more deserving a person is, the more he should be punished. In any case, both principles tend toward a complete equality. And since socialism came first, one might infer that the non-discriminatory principle grew out of socialism.
But I don’t know that this is true, and I don’t think that it is true. When people after World War II said that what the Nazis did to the Jews was intolerance and discrimination, and therefore we must eliminate all intolerance and discrimination, and when a similar conclusion was drawn during the Civil rights movement, that eliminating all discrimination against racial minorities was the highest priority of society, I don’t think that the motivating impulse for the elimination of discrimination came from socialism as such. I think that the motivating impulse was exactly as it represented itself at the time: a response (wrong-headed, extreme and suicidal though it was) to concerns over intergroup mistreatment and intergroup discrimination. But once established, this new guiding moral principle was no longer dependent on its origins. It was simply true and right.
Also, the non-discriminatory principle in its main articulations does not pertain to classes and groups, as socialism does, but to individuals (“we must treat all individuals the same”). It would appear then that the non-discriminatory prnciple is more of an outgrowth of classical liberalism, with its emphasis on procedural equality toward individuals, than of socialism. But, of course, as I’ve shown, once the non-discriminatory principle vis a vis individuals is introduced, it inevitably morphs into the active embrace and inclusion of entire groups, i.e., into multiculturaism. So multiculturalism is fed both from the right-liberal (procedural-individual equality) side, and from the left-liberal (substantive group equality) side. But the non-discriminatory principle, as I see it, did not emerge from socialism.
A supporting piece of evidence for my conclusion is that most of the people who over the decades have signed onto the non-discriminatory principle were not socialists and had no socialist background. Is George W. Bush a socialist? Is John McCain a socialist? Are the pro-open borders evangelicals socialists? Again, for such people, non-discrimination is simply a moral axiom, having no connection with socialism. But, having accepted that moral axiom, with all of its sequelae, they are likely to move in the direction of socialism. Thus in many cases, socialism may emerge from the non-discriminatory principle rather than vice versa.
Ken Hechtman writes:
You wrote:
In any case, to make the situation stark, if the choice were between
1. Welfare statism plus restored national existence (BNP)
and
2. Free markets and anti-Communism plus continued ethno-cultural dissolution of nation (Thatcher)
which would you choose?
I know you’re not directing the question to me, but I’ll answer it anyway.
The faction of the Parti Quebecois that’s had my undivided attention for the last five years is Option 2. They’re called “Le Gang Rebello” after their half-Indian leader Francois Rebello. On the plus side, they want to open the borders. On the minus side, they also want to privatize the sidewalks. Whaddaya gonna do? Le Gang Rebello targets the same swing districts we do, they go after the same movable fraction of the ethnic vote in the same way we do. And so we’ve been butting heads for the last five years and they play rough and we’ve learned to play rough accordingly.
The next municipal election is going to be very interesting. Rebello’s mistress is running on the eco-socialist new-urbanist ticket in the same district as his worst enemies on both the provincial and federal levels. We’re going to have to sit in an office and work next to guys who phoned in death threats to our mothers five years ago.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 27, 2009 11:40 AM | Send