CST Blog

Blood & Honour: the case for proscription

22 February 2010

The Centre for Social Cohesion and Nothing British have produced a report (pdf) on the neo-Nazi Blood & Honour network, which uses music to promote racism, antisemitism and violence.

It makes the case for Blood & Honour to be added to the Home Office list of proscribed terrorist organisations, summed up in the report's Conclusion which we reproduce below.

The B&H organisation in the UK constitutes an undeniable threat to both security and community relations within the UK. Its propaganda is centred on an apocalyptic vision of racial conflict, and unambiguously encourages respect for, and glorification of, terrorist actions carried out in the name of furthering the cause of neo-Nazism. The B&H National Socialist Political Soldiers Handbook, in particular, provides information and advice that would clearly be useful in the commission or preparation of an act of terrorism.

B&H is ostensibly a ‘political’ movement; but arguably it has far more in common with other violent ideological forms of extremism than it does with what is generally understood as ‘politics’, even of a nationalist variety. Certainly, as an explicitly anti-democratic, anti-liberal, fascist organisation, B&H constitutes an atavistic manifestation of the same venomous mix of racial hatred and a cult of violence that came to prominence in the original Nazi movement. B&H takes its name, its imagery and indeed much of its ideology from the Third Reich, which is exalted as the apotheosis of white European achievement.

As fervent followers of Nazism in a world that has, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, so clearly rejected this ideology, B&H supporters exist outside the bounds of normal social and political interaction. The group, therefore, acts as a magnet to those who feel disenfranchised and, in more extreme cases, to the pathological, who find in its message and its embrace of neo-Nazism as an ‘identity’, a vehicle by which to indulge their extreme prejudice and nihilistic hatred of the modern world. As such, B&H is less a genuine ‘political’ threat than it is an incubator for racially motivated violence, which has already spilled over on a number of occasions into outright terrorism.

For these reasons, the government must seriously consider proscribing B&H, or else take stronger measures to prevent the proliferation of the militant white supremacist ideology that, if left unchecked, opens up the very real possibility of the future loss of innocent lives at the hands of those who act in the name of reviving Nazism.

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