The BNP's slow return to antisemitism

Two recent statements by the British National Party and its leader Nick Griffin, have added to a growing sense that the party is returning to its antisemitic roots.

Like several far right parties in Western Europe, the BNP has spent the past few years insisting that any antisemitism or neo-Nazism was in its past. This coincided with a focus on Muslims as the primary target for the BNP's propaganda. In 2006, Griffin even wrote a long article on the BNP website attacking "Judeo-obsessives" who see a Jewish conspiracy behind all the troubles of the world.

Coming from the author of Who Are The Mindbenders?, a conspiracy tract that simply listed Jews who worked in the media (as if that demonstrated a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the unsuspecting masses), this was quite a u-turn.

In his infamous 2009 appearance on BBC's Question Time, Griffin claimed to support Israel and danced around his history of Holocaust Denial. In fact Griffin has never truly changed his support for Holocaust Denial. This is telling: Holocaust Denial is a core defining belief of the neo-Nazi far right. If Griffin acknowledged the full scale and horror of the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, he would take the BNP out of the far right forever. Instead, he would rather befriend the rising stars of the Hungarian and Greek far right. Note the antisemitic image that the BNP used to illustrate the article in the preceding link, and the reference to "international Zionists" in the headline.

The BNP took another step back towards its past in its statement on the crisis in Ukraine, which deployed the old antisemitic idea that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. This is not just a neo-Nazi idea: it comes directly from the original Nazis themselves. The BNP's added twist was to connect this to a very modern antisemitic conspiracy about "neo-cons" in the West:

The greatest irony of all is that, while naive Ukrainian nationalists blame Russia for the murder of millions during the 1930s, the Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly not Russian at all, although the majority of their victims were.

Indeed, the radical Jewish racism and supremacism and anti-Christian hatred that in the 1930s produced the Bolshevik terror, now largely find their outlet in the extreme Zionism, anti-white fanaticism and globalism of the neo-cons.

The Ukrainian nationalists who provided the backbone of the recent revolution/coup against the elected but pro-Russian government are undoubtedly sincere, but they have been manipulated, organised, funded and armed by sinister forces in the West, which are in reality very far from being Western.

The BNP's linkage of "Jewish racism", "extreme Zionism", "anti-white fanaticism" and "globalism" may seem bizarre to contemporary ears, but it makes perfect sense in the strange, conspiracy-addled world of the far right. It has long been a staple of far right belief that post-war non-white immigration to Britain (and other Western nations) is part of a Jewish plot to weaken and destroy the white race. This rarely makes it into BNP propaganda nowadays, mainly because it sounds completely bonkers to the average voter. But in recent years the BNP has lost most of its council seats and Griffin will probably lose his seat in the European Parliament in May; while the EDL's street activism has left the BNP looking rather pedestrian (before the EDL itself imploded last year). So if the BNP is going to stop prioritising electoral politics, we can expect a return to the overt antisemitism and conspiracy theories that have been hidden away for the past few years.

What would this kind of politics look like? It would look like the statement Griffin made in the European Parliament this week, which you can watch below (or if you can't stomach it, just read the transcript):

An unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our own homelands. As indigenous resistance to this human genetic modification industry grows, the criminal elite seeks new ways to camouflage their project. First, their immigrant pawns were temporary guest workers. Then it was a multiracial experiment. Then they were refugees. Then the answer to a shrinking population. Different excuses, different lies. And asylum is just another one, but the real aim stays the same: the biggest genocide in human history, the final solution of the Christian European problem. This crime demands a new set of Nuremberg trials and you people will be in the dock.

And for an older version of the same idea, see this 1962 poster from the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi predecessor of the BNP: