RosieBell

The mythical beast

I read this article on Nick Griffin in the Scotland on Sunday:-

At one stage he talks about how if the party had a more Aryan leader "who's 6ft 2in and whose two eyes are blue … then they'd probably take the party further on".

If politics is show business for ugly people, white supremacy politics is fantasy for even uglier people.

Fantasy BNP Leader

 

Actual BNP Leader

The Brooker Man

Charlie Brooker’s article on the BNP has received praise all over the net:-. 

He'd fought in the second world war, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone "different", that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called "the Nazis". Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were "different' wasn't merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone - anyone - using racist language again, they'd immediately get the slipper.

Corporal punishment was still alive and well, see. The slipper was his nuclear bomb.

It was the first time I was explicitly told that racism was unpleasant and it was a lesson served with a side order of patriot fries. Or rather, chips. Our headmaster had fought for his country, and for tolerance, all at once. That's what I understood it meant to be truly "British": to be polite, and civil and fair of mind. (And to occasionally wallop schoolkids with slippers, admittedly, but we'll overlook that, OK? We've moved on.)

I’m with him, that the best weapon to fight the racism of the BNP is enlightened patriotism.  Don’t let those bastards decide what is “British”.   Charlie gets the tone right – the humour, the hipness, and good for him.

He goes on:-

The other day, the BNP had a political broadcast on the box. I wasn't in my beloved homeland at the time, but I heard about it, via internet chuckles of derision. Fellow geeky types tweeting about the poor production values. I looked it up on YouTube. Sure enough, it was badly made. No surprise there. Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can't afford decent computers - these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile - but because anyone who's good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they'd have the greatest British designer working for them - Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don't. They've got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

But there's more to the advert's failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can't even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

The advert is bad, it is amateurish, but it’s clever.  These female councillors looking like your nice aunt and the friendly woman in the print room stumble out what they have been doing down at the grass roots.  Any voter could imagine approaching them and getting a helpful answer.  It looks “real” – the kind of video ordinary people take themselves on holiday. The party hasn’t wasted money on a slick presentation and it may be that some voters will see that as honesty and a change from the rich and distant politicians and their PR machines.

I’ve been going into remember the thirties mode of late.  In the Weimar Republic the anti-Nazis had the best minds and produced brilliant cabaret.  Mein Kampf is very badly written.  You know when a BNP supporter is on a thread because they can’t spell, use grammar or punctuate.  So what?  You don’t need much literacy to scribble a cross in a box.

Playing the System

Well, as manipulating the system is the fashion at Westminster now, I’ve come up with a great scam after the BNP takes power. 

Hope not Hate gives a handy list of what would happen if the BNP ruled Britain.

The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain. What if every other country in the world kicked out the Brits? A staggering 5.5 million people would be sent back here – far more than would leave our shores. This includes 800,000 from Spain, most of whom are pensioners.

I wasn’t born in Britain.  I’m looking with apprehension at my heaps of books, mostly got from the excellent second-hand local book shops, and wondering how I will ship them home.  Will there be room for them in the cattle truck?

However a chap in a thread over at Pickled Politics clarifies the situation:-

“The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain” - not true. The BNP would stop any further immigration, remove immigrants here illegally and offer generous cash payments to people who wish to return to their lands of ancestry. If “every other country in the world kicked out the Brits” that would be a problem for those countries because, unlike third world immigrants to the UK, our immigrants to other countries are an asset.

The “lands of my ancestry” are England, Scotland and Ireland.  I’ll be able to claim a “generous cash payment” to return to where my great grandparents came from, which on my father’s father’s side is  lowland Scotland, the place where I live now.

There are several hundred thousand Australians and New Zealanders living in the UK whose ancestors, often their parents or grandparents came from here.  Hey listen youse jokers, we can make a fast one.  Choice or not, eh?

You're a nationalist, it's not okay

A while ago I posted on the song Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the musical Cabaret.  It had come into the news after the death of Jorge Haider, whose acolytes used to sing it on country excursions.

So now when someone searches for Tomorrow Belongs to Me my post turns up in the Google list.  Other sites turn up as well, and this caught my eye:-

The German folk song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" that predates the nazi era was adapted and slightly altered for that movie. I have a German version of the song. Most know of the version made famous by the band Skrewdriver from his album "hail the new dawn". If you want the Cabaret version they do sell the original musical score. The song is about nature, optimism and faith.

From a piece of rhyming slang on Stormfront.  I’m not going to link to the exchange but there’s some debate about whether it is a German folk song or not – obviously the preference is that it should be so rather than it should be written by Ebb and Karder (American Jews) in the 1960’s, for Cabaret, a film which the pieces of rhyming slang of Stormfront hate. 

Another Stormfront ascribes the song to Mussolini’s fascists:-

Actually, as far as I can remember this song is Italian, originally 'Il domani appartiene a noi', which I think originated with the Italian troops fighting in the Alps in WW1, and then had its lyrics changed somewhat and was then used by Mussolini.

Excellent translation! In truth, I prefer the Italian lyrics to the English ones...the song is being cleansed...we are making it our own. Salve!

So white supremacists and nationalists can’t even make up decent songs for themselves and have to pretend they are “cleansing” other people’s songs?  That is so uncreative.

I had a look at some BNP songs on YouTube.  There was one, called Don’t Unpack Your [sic] Going Back

Someone in the comments thread points out:-

The lyrics betray a mindset of a teenager, the music is cringeworthy, and NOBODY I have ever come across that supports the BNP can spell !

You all love England so much that you don't learn your mother tongue ?

Someone else says:-

Why can nobody in the BNP write music? They're all just covers with new lyrics...

(I don’t recognise the song myself but I’ll take it that that commenter knows what s/he is talking  about).

There does seem to be a dearth of good BNP songs.  So here’s an offering for them, especially now they are trying to look like a nice normal patriotic party.  It is written in the tradition of setting lyrics to someone else’s music and it’s an easy three chord tune that everyone knows:-  

I’m a nationalist and I’m your man,
I love my mum and I love my gran
(He’s a nationalist and he’s our man
He loves his mum and he loves his gran!)

I win local elections
I’m not a fascist creep
I go to Council meetings
And there I fall asleep

(He wins local elections
He’s not a fascist creep
He goes to Council meetings
And there he falls asleep)

I’m a nationalist, I’m not a thug
I haven’t spent much time in jug
(He’s a nationalist, he’s not a thug
He hasn’t spent much time in jug)

I aim to look respectable
And not a violent cock
The last time when I wore a suit
Was standing in the dock

(He aims to look respectable etc)

I’m a nationalist, I’ll take no shite
I want this country pure and white
(He’s a nationalist, he’ll take no shite
He wants this country pure and white)

I wear a shirt with clean long sleeves
To hide Nazi tattoos
I wish I could kick Asians,
And blacks, and wogs and Jews.

(He wears a shirt etc)

 

What you find under the suit - ex Lincs BNP Organiser and Bodyguard to Nick Griffin Mick Holmes

If you’ve watched the Monty Python video imagine the mounties as deluded supporters listening with dawning concern and outrage and the young ringletted woman wailing, And I thought you weren’t a racist!

It’s all yours, guys.  Feel free to sing it.  Take it away. 

And remember:-

You’re a nationalist and you are thick
You make folk puke and you make folk sick.

The Cynic, the Lunatic

The Voice of Modern Hatred by Nicholas Fraser is a journalist’s view of the European far right.  Good British liberal that he is, the author spends a lot of time nauseated and vomiting after interviewing the likes of Faurisson and Le Pen.

In his cramped, book-filled Left Bank apartment, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet threw up his hands when I said that I was shocked by the fact that 15 per cent of the French electorate had voted for Le Pen  “Of course it’s awful,” he said.  “The man is either a cynic or a lunatic.  He believes the moon is made of green cheese.  And his triumph makes nonsense of our belief that man is a rational creature.”

Where did he get the idea that man is a rational creature? Reasonable, intelligent, civilised people find it hard to understand how the self-evident idiocy of fascism appeals to a sufficient number of people.

Words from the arch lunatic and arch cynic:-

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.  Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.  But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.

The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotion of the masses, the more effective it will be.  And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.  The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.

Mein Kampf

Christmas Quiz

It’s that time of the year when you get bumper issues of magazines, the reviews of the past twelve months and, of course, the Christmas quiz.

So here, for Christmas, is our special quiz.

ARE YOU A CLERICAL FASCIST?

Answer the following 10 questions to check your clerical fascism credentials!

1. Before being published a book should be:-
a) Vetted by a board of clerics for blasphemy
b) Vetted by academics for offensiveness
c) Eh?

2. Putting a bomb in a rucksack and blowing up your fellow citizens:-
a) Sends you to Paradise
b) Sends a message to Tony Blair and George Bush
c) Sends a lot of people to hospital and the morgue, you morons!

3. Women should:-
a) Not go out in public unless escorted by a male relative
b) Not have their rights made into a shibboleth
c) Kick ass! Or crotch!! Or someone’s head in!!! For fuck’s sake

4. Apostates should be:-
a) Executed
b) Regarded as Uncle Toms or neocon pin ups
c) Hey!  What fucking century is this?

5. Atheists should be:-
a) Killed
b) Refraining from militancy or abrasivenes or insensitivity
c) Biting the carpet in a rage.  For Chrissake!

6. Israel is:-
a) An abomination that will be wiped off the map
b) The new South Africa, Nazi Germany, or any other unquestionably evil state
c) There are other fucking countries, you know

7. A body of men who if they came to power would place women under house arrest; enforce rules on dress; ban music, games and harmless pleasures generally and compel total religious observance are:-
a) Holy warriors for God
b) A heroic resistance movement
c) What bollocks is this?

8. Jews are:-
a) Responsible for all revolutions; destroyers of science; controllers of imperialist states; behind every war that was ever fought; secret rulers of the USA; controllers of the media.
b) As above, but could you change Jews to Zionists?
c) Jesus wept!

9. The holocaust:-
a) Didn’t happen, which is a shame
b) Happened, but denying it is an understandable response, and should be contextualised
c) Aaargh! Aaargh!  Aaargh!

10. The Golden Age was:-
a) 8th century, Baghdad
b) 1917 USSR – there was something to hope for
c) 10 September 2001 – though there was plenty of crap around, it wasn’t this particular kind of crap

Check your answers here:-

Answers to Quiz Here

See answers in comments box

The Anatomy of Fascism

I went to the library to see what they had on fascism.  The catalogue on the computers wasn’t working so I asked the librarian what they had.  The librarian was a hip looking guy in a black polo neck who had good liberal written all over him, and I felt as embarrassed as if I was asking for a book on Sexually Transmitted Diseases – it’s just out of interest, you understand. 

Come to think of it, I doubt whether any fascist became converted to the ideology by reading a book on the subject, or any other subject.

I borrowed The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxon which I’ve just finished.  It’s an excellent introduction to the subject, short and clear.

On the nature of Fascism (p218, 2004 Penguin edition):-

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion . .

I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language.  Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions. . . .

• A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
• The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
• The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• The need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
• The superiority of the leader’s instincts above abstract and universal reason;
• The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
• The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of he group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Fascists Freaked Out

The BNP membership list has been published on-line and the members are dripping panic and dismay.  All details here.

There’s nothing so sweet as a bunch of fascists in a sweat.  As someone said, “they couldn’t organise a putsch in a beer hall.”

This inspired me to verse:-

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list--I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!
There are the ethnic cleansers and the sort ‘em out by race,
There’s the scalped and shaven dickhead with a foreskin for a face,
There are the so-called councillors who’ve started to wear suits,
Though they’d rather be out kicking some dark person with their boots,
And ev’ry myth believing brain dead white supremacist
They'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed.

(after W S Gilbert)