Nazi News
Nazism is news here in Britain. The deeply unpleasant (and not very bright) Leader of the deeply unpleasant British National Party has in the last few hours appeared on a flagship BBC panel program, while the controversy continues over the new Tory allies in the ridiculous European Parliament at Strasbourg, especially those from Latvia, who seem to have some sort of connection to the SS.
If the BNP wants votes here in the former mining areas, where it certainly does want them, then it will stop identifying with Churchill, as it is very keen to do. But it won’t. In the Thirties, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, originator in English of the currently modish concept of a Union of the Mediterranean.
In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini.
Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.
All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 electoral defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided district, and when an Independent did very well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection as a parliamentary candidate by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
But we have not forgotten the truth about him in the old pit communities. Nor have they in the places that he signed away to Stalin, including the country for whose freedom the War was fought, making it a failure in its own terms. And including Latvia. It may exist in German, but I have never come across in English a full study of the SS Divisions of various nationalities after they had gone home. Yet the movements and subcultures that they became turn up an awful lot. And, except in Latvia, we love them.
We loved Alija Izetbegovic, SS recruitment sergeant turned Wahhabi rabble-rouser, and founder of one of the two entities to which the terms “Islamofascist” and “failed state” are both properly applicable. We love the other one, created by the Kosovo “Liberation” Army of heroin-trafficking pimps whose black shirts defer to their fathers and grandfathers. We love the pro-war Danish People’s Party: the coalition of the willing, no matter who the willing might be. We love those advocating Flemish secession, now that that would be in the service of global capital. Ahmadinejad’s oblique, if any, Holocaust denial causes uproar, yet that of Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman – historically, geographically, ideologically and sartorially far closer to the events – did not. But for some reason, the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party is a problem. Why? No one ever mentions that Eurofederalist, big business-loving Fine Gael of Ireland goes back to the Blueshirts, admittedly far from the worst, but even so.
Just as some Nazi roots are acceptable but others are not (never mind that Ahmadinejad has none at all), so the anti-Semitism and the general racism, the brutality and the contempt for democracy, the admiration for Mussolini and especially for Hitler, are omitted from accounts of those who agitated for war in the Thirties, but heavily emphasised, sometimes to point of fabrication, in accounts of those who pleaded for peace.
If you leave aside Churchill and Mosley, then both sides wished to harness the full capacity of the State to correct the root and branch injustice of capitalism in itself, in order to conserve national sovereignty and traditional values, and in order to prevent a Communist revolution; that was the position of all three British parties at the time, and the reason why certainly Labour, and arguably also the modern Conservative Party, had been set up in the first place. But one side also wished, for exactly the same reasons, to prevent another war in Europe, or in countries beyond Europe to stay out of any such war. The contemporary resonances of both aspects could not be more obvious. Those who held to both, across or astride the political spectrum, deserve to be reassessed.
As, far less sympathetically, does Churchill. The BNP is as welcome to him as it is to Mosley, or to the Bosniaks, or to the Kosovars, or to the Danish People’s Party, or to the Vlaams Belang.
[...] David Lindsay has a brilliant post on the nazis who are sometimes acceptable to the Euro-establishment @ The American Conservative http://www.amconmag.com/postright/2009/10/22/nazi-news/ [...]
Densely-packed, as is your wont, but, overall, a very good article.
I never realized how much I liked Churchill until reading this piece
Why do we get so upset about the Nazi invasions of countries and feel that we have a higher moral ground in invading Iraq for no other purpose than to obtain the oil supply and the political influence that follows from its possession and invade and fight in Afghanistan for equally self serving reasons. At least the Nazi’s were honest and did not dress up premptive attacks in meaningless rhetoric.
We possess the largest amount of WMD. So why should not Iran have some also. Leave poor Iran alone.
I am not so sure Griffin was less bright than some others on the panel, or most people in the audience (if that matters). As impolite and unbourgeois as his party expresses its views, I am still unsure as to how they are such an imminent danger to anything compared to the three mainstream parties.
As for the Latvian Right, if they would only reintegrate with the European Peoples Party, then I am sure we can agree to reanalyse history (again).
The “holocaust” is a lie unto its very name,
death in a great fire. That is not how 500,000
to one million Jews at most died in WW2.
Most of them from typhus in the last two years of the
war and much fewer on the eastern front in 41-42.
They didn’t bomb the Auschwitz rails because
they were way behind Soviet lines and because
there was no mass extermination going on there.
Readers can check out ihr.org and vho.org and
read the works of Rassinier, Harwood, Butz,
Faurisson, Rudolph, Mattogno, Sanning and
Graf among others. I’m so sick of moron
“conservatives” endlessly recycling ancient
Commie lies from the Stalinist “trials” after
the war.
Dear s gosling,
The German people of the 1930s were not so terrible as to wish to invade foreign countries simply for Lebensraum und Blutlust. Before Hitler’s attack on Poland, he sent German agents over the border to signal a false flag Polish attack on Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident). This was broadcast over the radio as an evil Polish aggression against the Prussian border, and the Germans rolled in.
Likewise, the USSR’s trumped up supposed plan of invasion into German territory was the pretext for Barbarossa. Unfortunately, some right-wing clowns in West Europe and the US enjoy reigniting their perverse, reverse personality cult of Stalin (i.e., attributing all 20th c. historical ills to him plus Lenin) and try to justify this claim, not rarely while also claiming that he was militarily incompetent (so how could they have planned a serious invasion with the cadre of talented generals eliminated and few troops near the border?). But that is a side story…
The main point is that uneven wars where the more advanced party is the aggressor virtually always begin with some false flag attack or fabricated threat of attack. The last several years in Iran have been a history of attempts by the Brits and Americans to provoke the Iranian govt into taking the first step of aggressive defence, which the Iranians, to their credit, have thus far avoided.
I agree with most of the article, but I don’t see why you have to bring Vlaams Belang into this. Sure, some people in the Flemish movement cooperated with the Germans but that doesn’t mean that the whole movement or even those who cooperated were Nazis. Keep in mind that no one knew about Nazi atrocities at the time. The reason some welcomed the Germans was because they saw them as a fellow Germanic people and the Germans did introduce dutch as an administrative language in Flanders along with other measures out of a similar sentiment. So, given what was known at the time I don’t think those who welcomed the Germans can be faulted to much. We should also keep in mind that only a minority actually worked with the Germans.
Problem: if you want to appear Respectable when writing for a magazine that occasionally criticizes immigration and is accused of political incorrectness, what should you do? The answer is obvious! You find someone more “extreme” and heap invectives over him. “He is the real racist! Take him, not me!” Then you can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing you have done your duty as a loyal son of the establishment.
This is true everywhere in Europe, but especially in Britain, where Respectability is the prevailing ideology, culture and religion. No wonder it is the most controlled country in the West.
“Unpleasant.” Yes, Lindsay old chum, mustn’t have anything to do with those unpleasant fellows, who carouse with unwashed workers and hardly ever visit the country club. Why, I’d wager Nick Griffin isn’t even a Rotary member.
And what’s that, the Danish People’s Party, and Vlaams Belang? If not even the Danish People’s Party is clean enough in your eyes, then you are not against mass immigration at all. The Danish People’s Party is the softest anti-immigrant party in Europe and the entire West. Far, far softer than Pat Buchanan, for example.
James,
I sense the VB comment might also have to do with their current geopolitical outlook.
But I will let David speak for himself, if he has the chance.
“Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.”
Nuance, dear boy, nuance. Churchill’s Zionism wasn’t “precisely” that of the BNP, his “anti-Semitism” wasn’t the same as Mosely’s, either.
Winston and Oswald didn’t exactly have the same attitude towards Eurofederalism either. At least Churchill didn’t have any love for a united Europe under the control of German fanatics and militarists.
To say that Churchill and Mosely had some beliefs and prejudices in common with each other (and with others of their era) isn’t to say that there weren’t also marked differences. Surely Britain has enough troubles with out falling for Rockwell-moronic travesties of history.
Perhaps we could do the decent thing and stop bullying Iran and at the same time for moral and financial reasons give up some of our own WMD. That’s the Conservative thing to do.
Adam Rurik, very many thanks.
Thomas, the audience was very London in containing many members of visible ethnic minorities (though, tellingly, no Muslim women in headscarves, never mind veils), which meant that it looked very, very unlike the rest of the country. At the last census, ninety-two per cent of people ticked the White British box.
James, “Keep in mind that no one knew about Nazi atrocities at the time” – rubbish. But you are right that Flemings were part of the Volk, unambiguously so, unlike, say, Balts. (Rexism in Wallonia is a whole other story.) The present Flemish separatist movement comes directly out of that tradition. But it serves certain interests, so it is treated as just fine and dandy.
AL, if you can spot the difference between Churchill’s Zionism and the BNP’s, then do enlighten the rest of us. Like them, he saw the Jews as alien, so he wanted them to go away. I should add that being far from pro-Israeli is still quite normal in his British upper class, however.
[...] David Lindsay at TAC: Nazism is news here in Britain. The deeply unpleasant (and not very bright) Leader of the deeply unpleasant British National Party has in the last few hours appeared on a flagship BBC panel program, while the controversy continues over the new Tory allies in the ridiculous European Parliament at Strasbourg, especially those from Latvia, who seem to have some sort of connection to the SS. [...]
Carpenter, you, like most people over here, have the BNP’s class base all wrong. It is a lower-middle-class movement with a few upper-class cranks to pay the bills. Griffin isn’t Mosley, but he still comes from the posh end.
“Britain, where Respectability is the prevailing ideology, culture and religion”
If only…
And I am not aware that Pat Buchanan arose out of a Division of the SS. Nor that he supported the invasion of Iraq.
“AL, if you can spot the difference between Churchill’s Zionism and the BNP’s, then do enlighten the rest of us. Like them, he saw the Jews as alien, so he wanted them to go away. I should add that being far from pro-Israeli is still quite normal in his British upper class, however.”
It’s still up to you to prove that Churchill “did not regard Jews as British” and “wanted them to go away.”
It’s said that Lord Balfour came to support Zionism because he disliked Jews and wanted them out of his country, but where’s your evidence that Churchill thought British Jews were alien and unassimilable and wanted them gone?
Winston may not have wanted unlimited Jewish immigration to Britain — what politician of his generation would have supported unlimited immigration of foreigners — but if he did he didn’t have to give his support to Jewish colonization efforts elsewhere. He could simply have closed the borders to immigration.
But that doesn’t appear to have been much of a concern to Churchill. When he came to support Zionism Britain wasn’t the primary goal for Jewish immigrants and there were still other countries hospitable to them. In any case, so far as I can tell he wasn’t on record as an opponent of Jewish immigration.
Early on in his career, after Churchill left the Tories and took up with the Liberals, he worried about keeping his seat. Assigned a Manchester constituency with many Jews, Winston courted those voters with speeches and an endorsement of a “Jewish National Home” for refugees from Eastern Europe. Churchill won the election and entered the government. See the book, “Churchill’s promised land: Zionism and Statecraft” by Michael Makovsky, for more information.
That’s when Winston’s support for Zionism began. It didn”t have to do with wanting to get rid of British Jews. In fact it had much to do with wanting to win them over. Later, after the First World War, the same sort of atrocity stories that he’d heard from Manchester Jews made Churchill renew his commitment to Zionism.
I’m not saying Winston was wholly altruistic or that other factors — the feeling that a Jewish colony or client or ally in the Near East would be an asset to Britain, fellow feeling for the Zionists as Western pioneers in an “unsettled” region — didn’t influence him.
I’m also not saying that Churchill was unwavering in his support for Zionism, or that Zionism was the right or just answer to what was going on a the time. But my point is that sometimes the “debunking” or cynical view is as wrongheaded as the worshipful, high-minded one.
I don’t know why the BNP takes the position it does on Zionism. Questions of motives are always difficult to answer. But it doesn’t look like they are moved by the same concerns that affected Churchill.