Head of Propaganda for Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, once stated; 'If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.' Nick Griffin takes Goebbels dictum to heart in his fascinating article from September's Identity magazine.Before we take a belated look at Nick Griffin's bizarre article in September's Identity (the BNPs glossy in-house magazine), we have a couple of comments to make. First of all, thank you to the person who sent the magazine to us here at LUAF Towers - we really appreciate getting a chance to see the kind of nonsense the leadership throws at the membership. Second, an apology to the people we know have been waiting to read our take on the article; we've been busy but you can stop emailing now, thank you. :-)
The first thing that strikes the eye about the article is the use of the rat tipping over a drum of toxic waste to illustrate it. This motif is repeatedly used, presumably as a visual reference to the
'vermin' within the party and the stories they (and we) spread about in an attempt to show the public and BNP members exactly what is going on inside the BNP itself, thus keeping the membership au fait with what Nick Griffin and co would conceal from them. What worries us most about this article is not that Griffin uses it as a vehicle for his lies but that he clearly believes them himself.
Given the BNP's propensity for gimmicky stunts like litter-picking (when what the party should actually be doing is reporting litter to relevant local authorities and demanding they should clear it instead) and the party's stance on graffiti artists (hanging's too good for 'em), one wonders why Griffin chose to illustrate his article with illustrations stolen and cropped (one assumes without permission) from the most famous graffiti artist in this country,
Banksy. The complete image used can be seen
here.
The whole point of the piece in Identity, entitled 'A tidal wave of anti-BNP propaganda', seems to be to whine about the fact that the BNP is opposed on various levels by several organisations for a number of perfectly valid reasons. Naturally enough, Searchlight comes in for particular criticism (though we don't, which is irritating but just means we'll have to step our work up a bit) with a good deal of waffle about a BNP election candidate and activist (who stood for the party as recently as May 2007) who, according to Griffin, turned out to be a 'paid informer' for Searchlight. This was allegedly discovered after what Griffin describes as an 'internal intelligence review', which appears to have largely consisted of illegally checking through his BNP email account.
Right from the start of this article, Griffin's paranoia and control-freakery are both evident and disturbing but it is his clear ability to treat his own blatant lies as fact that should most concern any BNP member who is able to view the BNP leader and his party objectively. One of the more startling examples of this is Griffin's brief mention of the continuing
Solidarity fiasco:
'As in the earlier instance where a Searchlight agent effectively tool over Bradford BNP and then provided 'cover' for BBC mole Jason Gwynne and his 'Secret Agent' stunt and as appears to have happened in the recent failed coup attempt to derail the nationalist trade union Solidarity...'Regular readers will know full well that there was no 'coup attempt' within Solidarity until the former General Secretary Pat Harrington, long-time friend of Griffins, was suspended for, among other things, accounting irregularities. Following his suspension, the BNP-supported Harrington, with the direct collusion of Nick Griffin, himself engineered a coup, taking Solidarity's PayPal account, website and money with him. This is fact - we know it and Griffin knows it, yet without a qualm, lies and tells the membership that this is not the case.
There's no real need to get into a deep discussion about Solidarity in this article except to offer Griffin's comment as an indication of his determination not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
One little fantasy which seems to be engrossing Griffin is the one that suggests his party is riddled with hugely influential 'Searchlight moles' who seem capable of persuading anyone they fancy to slip into a pair of jackboots and start seig-heiling all over the place at the drop of a hat. According to him, Searchlight (the anti-fascist magazine) does everything it can to turn 'modern democratic nationalists into old-fashioned Nazis' and if he's surprised at all, it is only that his entire party isn't seig-heiling its way down Whitehall as he types. Pure paranoia of course. He does however, accept that not everyone within the party who is advocating a harder political line is a Searchlight agent, though those that aren't there thanks to Searchlight, he firmly labels 'cranks and losers'.
Regular readers will know that we are fed information from various sources both inside and outside the British National Party that helps us to disseminate the truth to everyone who cares to read it. Many of our correspondents not only send us information but also documentary evidence for their statements. The only reason we don't print such evidence is that it could lead directly back to the person who supplied it to us. As we've stated on a number of occasions, we never print anything accusatory unless we have corroboration from two or three sources, including at least one that we know and trust. These rules have worked extremely well over the past couple of years and have enabled us to produce some excellent reports on the shenanigans within the BNP - particularly when it comes to the financial chicanery that we long ago came to expect from Nick Griffin and the rest of the crooks at the top of the party.
This has obviously been noted by Griffin, who has reserved a special bit of venom for 'several mutually supporting Lie Factories', which we can assume refers to
Searchlight and we happy souls at
Lancaster UAF,
Voice of Reason and
Kirklees Unity. He writes:
'In large part there is no point even trying to refute them...'Well, no. Because we tell the truth. Any refutation would only have the knock-on effect of exposing more lies and cover-ups.
Griffin's delusions extend to embrace the performance of his own party. At one point he suggests that the BNP's 'relentless advance' is coincident with the collapse of the far-left. Assuming his phrase 'far-left' to mean anyone who opposes the BNP, there is obviously no collapse. Nor is the BNP seeing any kind of relentless advance - unless complete stagnation for the past year counts.
At this point - madness firmly set in overdrive - he segues into one of the most bizarre diversions we've ever set eyes on, claiming that Nick Lowles of Searchlight and Peter Rushton of the 'nationalist' magazine Heritage and Destiny are one and the same person. Rushton, who reminds everyone who sees him for the first time of an aging Mr Bean, is
not Nick Lowles and Nick Griffin knows perfectly well he isn't. So why tell such an obvious lie?
Griffin is anxious at the moment to promote the appalling Arthur Kemp, the author of the truly dreadful 'March of the Titans' and a former member of the South African Intelligence Services. Out of nowhere, Kemp, a hardcore racist and white supremacist, seems to have become the representative of the Ideological Training Department of the BNP - so much so that it will soon be impossible to attend a BNP conference or indeed to be an 'Voting Member' with limited voting rights unless one has received ideological training from Kemp, a man who, it is rumoured, is not even a member of the party himself.
Rushton is overtly more hardcore far-right than Griffin and appears to be getting something of a following consisting largely of those on the right who are sick of Griffin's increasingly futile attempts to break into mainstream politics by shoving his nazi past to one side and firmly concealing it from the gaze of a disapproving public. Griffin's hatred of anyone who shows up the BNP as any more than very slightly to the right of Genghis Khan is legendary and Rushton constantly badgering about the BNP's loss of its ideological way hasn't exactly endeared him to the Führer at Welshpool.
Quite why he picked on Nick Lowles to be Rushton's alter ego, only Griffin himself knows - but he also knows that it's a lie that many in the membership are unlikely to concern themselves with. His ridiculous claim that Rushton is another Searchlight 'agent' might well be believed by those who wish to remain loyal to the current incarnation of the BNP and newer members who have been taken in by the Griffinites, while those who consider the claim to be so stupid it's beneath contempt are those who are simply more likely to fall away from the party. These tend to be the longer-term nationalists - members who have been around for a few years and who are starting to take a closer look at Griffin, the constant accusations of misuse of party funds and the lies he spins, and who are beginning to ask the questions that they should have been asking for the past five years. These are the people who in any case, Griffin is desperate to get rid of.
The recent
leadership challenge has allowed Nick Griffin to identify many of the dissentors in the ranks. Despite the fact that ballots are meant to be secret, Griffin seems to have all the supporters of Chris Jackson on a list and ready to throw out at a moment's notice and on the slightest pretext. We've already reported on the
purging of a number of these people and have no doubt that we'll be reporting on a few more over the next few months. Griffin's fake identification of Peter Rushton as Nick Lowles will help him to falsely identify further dissentors who are sympathetic to Rushton as faux Searchlight 'agents'. This may also serve to undermine Rushton's credibility with the newer members of the party and will enable Kemp to revenge himself for the abiding antipathy that Rushton and he have been nurturing for the past fifteen years or so. The claim that Rushon and Lowles are the same person is certainly fraudulent but if it serves to cause problems for he and his comrade's enemies, Griffin will tell any lie that has the appropriate result.
Nick Griffin is playing a long game but he's playing it with people who have been around the far-right for a very long time and the feeling we have (which we share with a lot of our correspondents) is that he's riding for a fall by playing any game at all based on such an easily disprovable premise.
Griffin's lies will always show up more readily when he is referring to money - particularly when he is on the defensive, which he clearly is in this article. He picks on two examples to use as illustrations of the lengths we will go to in our attempts to destabilise him and the BNP.
The first example is that of the peculiar BNP accounts. Rather than explain satisfactorily why the accounts for last year are so shockingly late at great financial cost to the party, he chooses to dwell on the accusation that he and his colleagues in the leadership of the party are living in luxury thanks to misappropriation of party funds. Curiously, he chooses not to state clearly what happens to the enormous amount of money that is filtered into the party via the Trafalgar Club, stays well away from the question of how much money comes to the party from the States via the BNP-front Civil Liberty and doesn't venture into the cost/benefit ratio of establishing Great White Records, a financial disaster that anyone (except apparently the BNP) could see coming from a mile off.
Griffin then claims that the 'newest' story is the one that revolves around Croatia. Not so. The
Croatia story is known to so many people in the party now that it's hardly worth reporting on except when someone sends us a new snippet of information that we can use. Griffin gives us nothing except the usual lies to be getting on with. He claims to have been approached by a supporter who had inherited a chunk of land in Croatia - not true. He makes it sound like a throwaway idea that was of no consequence - not true. And he claims to have approached the MEPs of the BNP's European 'sister parties' for help on the mystery inheritor's behalf. Again, not true. The BNP
did approach the MEPs and were promptly and unceremoniously rebuffed. If all the claims of financial shenanigans in the BNP are truly false and can be proven to be false, why has Griffin never even so much as threatened to take Searchlight (or indeed us) to court for libel?
This whole article, four solid pages of Identity, is packed with lies that even the most gullible of BNP members could surely see through or at least expose with a minimal amount of research. Griffin refers to former Stoke BNP councillor Mark Leat, who you may remember
stood down as a councillor for the BNP and moved across the chamber to become a 'non-aligned Independent' back in May (just a week after the local government elections). Three days after his move, the BNP group announced that it had withdrawn the whip (thrown him out) stating that he didn't work hard enough. Griffin now claims that he was got rid of because he was plotting to stand as an Independent against BNP 'loyalist' Mike Coleman and that he made all kinds of demands of the BNP group before the election. Not only that, but Griffin claims he is also working with a 'Searchlight-run phoney nationalist party to split the BNP vote in Stoke'.
In an interview with Simon Darby just a couple of days ago, Griffin stated that the best thing to do about the sites like ours that print the truth about the BNP and himself is not to look at them. He repeats that advice in this article, saying '...all you need to do is ignore it. If you hear someone doing Searchlight's dirty work, pull them up over it. And if they won't stop, don't have any misplaced sympathy for them when we boot them out'. Curiously, his next sentence is 'This is not about stopping free speech'. Oh yeah?
'Lively, even ferocious, internal debate about policies, tactics and how to make the party ever more accountable to its activist hardcore are both needed and welcome. But such debates must be conducted through the proper channels, and the overwhelming majority of our officials and key activists have already decreed are Voting Member's discussion groups, meetings and conference motions.'Not much room there for the ordinary membership to be able to discuss anything at all. Referring back to the leadership challenge and those who voted against him, Griffin goes on;
'Over the rest of this year, the members of this Negative Tendency will systematically be quietly approached and given one last chance to accept common sense and exercise self-restraint - or go.'So much for secret ballots and so much for the future of the 337 members who voted against Griffin, and possibly the 4904 who chose not to vote at all. Griffin's almost insane hatred of those who dared to vote against him has been demonstrated numerous times by his liberal use of the words 'vermin', 'cranks', 'losers', 'Hollywood Nazis' and 'negative fools', but he has another phrase for them.
'When the rubbish has been binned we'll be a happier party, more united and more effective than ever.'It'll also be a party that's nearly 10% smaller than it is at present. Or possibly a good deal more. Griffin reserves his most vicious attack though for the end of the article.
'We are cutting out the last of the poison-mongers. It doesn't matter if they are councillors or donors or minor party heroes or otherwise good activists - none of these pluses outweighs the damage done by individuals who spread lies. Whether plants, dupes or negative losers, they will be tolerated no longer...'Do you reckon his screen was covered in spit after he wrote that?
The fact is that the whole article is an attempt to paint
everyone who opposes Griffin with a similar brush - they are all Searchlight agents, liars, fruitcakes, losers and/or jackboot-fetishists. It's pretty clear though that what they all share is that they oppose Nick Griffin himself either, like the hardcore right-wing, because they consider he's gone soft, or because they believe he's feathering his own nest at the constant expense of the membership or possibly simply because he's patently losing it and striking out at random to destroy his mostly imaginary enemies. It looks like the BNP's Night of the Long Knives is set to be a good deal longer yet.
This last few days must have been terribly disappointing for the BNP.
