Question Time round one

So far I’ve watched the first 10 minute YouTube segment of the Question Time program. It starts with perennial cabinet minister Jack Straw saying that any party that bases itself on race is wrong and beyond the pale—the Nazi party based itself on race, and so does the BNP. Then a young black man in the audience denounces the BNP for saying that Britain should be a white country. I thought Straw’s and the black man’s comments were great. Finally the issue of whether race—the preservation of white nations (though Griffin doesn’t use the words “race” and “whiteness,” but rather speaks of “Britishness”)—was being openly discussed. And of course the racialist position will be condemned extremely harshly; that is only to be expected. Indeed, it is welcome, because it gives the racialist side the opportunity to explain why the desire to preserve white nations is not immoral.

Unfortunately, two things go very badly wrong from the start. Instead of letting Griffin respond to the black man’s point that goes to the very heart of the issue, the host immediately jumps on Griffin on some other, unrelated, charge, about the antecedents of the BNP being pro-Nazi. Then one person after another, both on the panel and in the audience, proceeds to dump on Griffin, with Griffin being given no chance to reply. This was outrageous and appalling. Further, Griffin himself makes matters even worse. Far from attempting to focus on the substantive questions raised by the attacks on him,—Is it immoral to defend the historical British people? Does the fact that Indians died fighting on the Allied side in World War II mean that Britain must now turn into an Asian country?—he alternatively shakes his head and smiles while the others are attacking him. Both reactions are highly inappropriate and make him look weak and foolish. And when Griffin does get a word in, it is on side points. In sum, the problem is not just that the host is denying Griffin the opportunity to reply to the string of attacks on him, it’s that Griffin himself does not attempt to answer and does not seem offended by the ganging-up that is being orchestrated by the host.

From Griffin’s writings he’s always struck me as intelligent, canny, and tough-minded. Those qualities are not on display so far.

I hope the rest of the program gets better. But I felt it was would be worthwhile to give my response to the first segment.

Perhaps he was simply thrown by the relentless barrage. If so, that only shows that he did not adequately prepare for this very important program. He had to know that he would be assaulted relentlessly and would need to have cogent, effective answers at the ready.

- end of initial entry -

Terry Morris writes:

I just finished watching all six segments of the show. A couple of things stood out for me—(1) Nick Griffin showed himself to be an utter buffoon overall, occasionally making a good point. (2) Black female American panelist lives up to her race, gender and nationality combination stereotype, i.e., a complete and utter humilityless idiot.

Marco Jawsario writes:

Let this serve as a lesson to any high-profile leader of the traditionalist and racialist movment NOT to appear in any venue dominated by the Left. That is like asking Martin Luther King in 1956 to appear on southern TV in front of a hostile White Citizens Council in Cummings, Georgia. Sheesh! Think of Rush Limbaugh’s ill-fated first attempt on the Letterman Show or Sarah Palin in front of Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, who made mincemeat out of her and clearly demonstrated for all that Palin was not presidential timber. We have email and we have Internet blogs. We need to concentrate coordinated fire on potentially receptive politicians and media types such as Senator DeMint, Limbaugh and Beck requesting they put a stop to anti-white bigotry such as so-called “Whiteness Studies” programs in our publicly-funded colleges. I believe that is how we can achieve some important tactical victories, rather than pie-in-the-sky hopes of wooing millions on national TV.

James P. writes:

BNP advocates must be prepared to defend themselves intelligently and clearly in front of vicious, hostile, and unfair interviewers and audiences. They will never be given the kind of kid glove treatment that liberal politicians are routinely given. Any BNP representative who can’t handle being tossed into the shark tank should not be allowed to represent the party in public.

Much the same logic applied to Palin during last year’s campaign. She was never going to get a fair shake from the media, and if she couldn’t handle unfair, hostile treatment, then she had no business being a candidate in the first place.

The media is liberal and unfair. This is a simple fact of life. Traditionalists everywhere who appear before the media need to prepare themselves accordingly.

Rohan Swee writes:

Your readers might be amused at this sample of how our lumpen-media (in this case, Time magazine) is instructing its readers in how to think properly about certain current political phenomena in the UK. It’s a Graphics Editing 101 lesson in “how to use images and captions in your ‘related stories’ sidebar to metaphorically photoshop devil-horns and pitchforks onto your subject’s image, without being *quite* so egregiously ham-handed as to get out your crayons and scrawl them onto the photo yourself”:

Maybe it’s just me, but I also had to do a double-take on the headline, as, scanning rapidly, I misread “tuning in to” as “turning into”. But perhaps that was just a side effect of the coffee going through my nose as I involuntarily snorted at Godwin’s Own Sidebar.

(Honestly, these days, I can’t keep track of the number of times I have to double check to make sure some news-aggregating wag hasn’t referred me to The Onion.)

October 26

James P. writes:

Mark Jaws says,

“Let this serve as a lesson to any high-profile leader of the traditionalist and racialist movment NOT to appear in any venue dominated by the Left.”

For traditionalists NEVER to appear on TV or in the print media is exactly what the Left wants. Conceding the traditional media venues to the Left is wrong and defeatist. The correct lesson is that the traditionalists should be prepared for unfair treatment, should have their arguments prepared and rehearsed ahead of time, and should come out swinging instead of sitting there with a simpering smile on their faces. It’s not that hard to figure out what the Left is going to say, and any traditionalist should have some counterarguments readily at hand.

“Sarah Palin in front of Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, who made mincemeat out of her and clearly demonstrated for all that Palin was not presidential timber.”

Gibson and Couric only demonstrated the truth—that Palin was not presidential timber—but this does not demonstrate that traditionalists should never appear before Charlie Gibson or Katie Couric. If the traditionalist candidate is intellectually inferior and unprepared to boot, then of course that candidate will get shredded, but this is an argument for finding better candidates, not for keeping inferior candidates away from the shredding machine.

“We have email and we have Internet blogs … I believe that is how we can achieve some important tactical victories, rather than pie-in-the-sky hopes of wooing millions on national TV.”

Strategically, the goal should be to get credible traditionalist voices heard in the mainstream media as often as possible so that as many ordinary Americans as possible hear other ideas than Leftist ones.

If we concede the mainstream media and confine ourselves to the internet, then ultimately our impact is limited, and of course at some point the liberals will come after the internet as well.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 25, 2009 11:10 AM | Send