Trashing Fascism

I’ve just played back the BBC’s latest edition of Question Time. It was a different show this time – extremely different. The BBC, smashing all modern precedent, invited onto its panel a fascist and thug in the form of Nick Griffin, just call him Nicholas though, please. Nicholas is Führer of the British National Party, a racist, whites-only political party with some tiny shingles of democratic – yes, democratic – legitimacy. Nicholas, and one of his fascist henchmen, was elected to the European Parliament this June – a horrific deliberation that saw two regional electorates erect the exact same thuggery that previous generations fought, and died for, in a great war that defeated Nazism and self-destructed its totalitarian ideology into the muggy gutter of history.

I’m glad we got to see this happen. Nicholas, or Mr Griffin if we’re going to be serious for just one moment, a smarmy blowhard with artificial charisma, powered academically, unbelievably, by a degree from Cambridge and fuelled with a blunt hatred for the multicultural diversity of blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, believed his QT appearance would be the breakthrough that his party still desperately craves. They’re desperate, why, because the vast majority of citizens, whites and blacks, have moved on. Enoch Powell, a far-right pugilist who found some brief notoriety within the upper echelons of British Conservatism in the late sixties, predicted, with racist tones and militant prestige, a river of blood flowing from the mass immigration dam bursting. Mrs Thatcher was a reluctant apologist for this creep, just like Powell, paradoxically, was a Thatcherite before Thatcherism was unleashed. But Powell, himself, was gutted from any future government position thanks to his racist enmity.

Nicholas seized his opportunity – by falling over his own arguments. The London audience, a group mostly comprising blacks and ethnic minorities, treated the crooked ruffin, correctly, as a doormat. The end result: namby-pamby politics was exposed. Nicholas looked ridiculous, as his answers travelled between the borders of idiocy and vulgarity, and a menagerie of indicting quotes from his past reduced his narcissism to a dead beat. He left the studio wailing in self-pity, claiming he’d been ambushed by a “lynch mob” posing as an audience, and that televising a debate in the capital was blatant trickery because the city has been “ethnically cleansed” and “is no longer British.” Excuse me, what is this babble? The United Kingdom is a proud agent of multiculturalism, and British society, undeniably, bathes itself in cosmopolitan diversity and, above all, tolerance.

Nick Griffin cannot reverse this sacred culture – it’s an immoderate conservative predilection to try, no, worse than that, it is plain reactionary. Great Britain, fortunately, and believe me as an opponent of imperialism and slavery and exploitation, I take great pride in this, is no longer an Empire – our tiny, fragile and insignificant, it must be said, island is a union for all skin colours. Britain is no longer an ethnocentric white man’s land – it is a land for everyone. Mr Griffin’s flagrant attempts at palliation failed and the relatively hostile audience, nothing like a “lynch mob” by the way, butchered his disgusting views. Nicholas looked flummoxed – neurotic squirming told me everything as those loathsome standpoints were exposed to the magnificence of daylight. Griffin and the BNP were the issue, yet their foul leader rescinded celebrations and reverted to type by mewling constantly. And this is the chronicle of Britain’s Nazis: abhorrent views that are a muddied frenzy of racist dogma, xenophobic paltry, and genocide denial. It only takes a few questions to unearth the truth. Nicholas laughed at his previous denial of the Holocaust, a masochism that is wrong at every moral juncture, denounced homophobia as something ghastly and obscene, and bellowed white supremacy by claiming that previous governments had perpetrated “genocide” against the white population. The stupidity meter was clearly depressed by this point.

So Griffin, having had his wish of being the centre of attention granted, screwed up and blamed others for his disastrously farcical exhibition. Every voter, if by some strange illusion they were too stupid to realise before, now must know actuality – so don’t vote for them ever again, got it? The “lynch mob” – no, no, no, interrogators for democratic exchange, I stand corrected – were the shining stars of this show. The panel brought light, but the audience sparked heat and, remember, light only comes from heat. Their concordance with each other was reflected in robust questions – to which Nicholas was stunned and silenced. Ganging up on fascist flippancy was, well, inevitable since the three other politicians, and a black lady, represented anti-racist views. Griffin was, by definition, confronting a tolerable coalition. Not a lynch mob though – the Klu Klux Klan, an “almost totally non-violent” organisation, are a lynch mob. Almost, yeah right.

We are lucky, here in Britain, that the fascistic minority are conspicuously inept. The British National Party fill the vacuum – a deficit wreaked by the deepest recession in modern history joined with an expenses scandal, which has turned an adversarial parliament into a pretentious saloon – installed by the current government, and the subversions of an unelected prime minister who has betrayed the poorest in society, leading everything to electoral revolt. Yet this is all it adds up to – fervent hatred, delineated by race, is a glowing highlight, a horrendously heinous highlight in fact, of what the extreme right has to offer, and its limited flourishes happen because the establishment has screwed up. That is all. Nick Griffin, indeed, cuts a pathetic figure when compared to, say, Oswald Mosley, a fellow bigot of thirties fascism and a preluding trope for this new wave of ugly chauvinism, who was terribly charismatic and scarily intelligent – two efficiencies that Nicholas will never have. But Mosley’s despotism could not customise, nor modify, conscience and tolerance within the British people. The thirties, similarly, can be paralleled with the here and now: economic grievances intensified by political dystopia. The BNP are simply a plaintive elongation of this indigent apologia. But fascism always fails – always has, always will.

The vanity publishing tautology of the BNP is their own liability, and Question Time worked like hypothermia to a freezing psychopath. Exposure is the superlative foe. And the tough questions mortified Nick Griffin’s puerility: “I can’t explain why I said those things,” was the shifty response to his previous proclamation in which he likened the Holocaust to the myth that the Earth is flat. Nicholas also destroyed a popular characterisation, and a precious one I’m sure he holds dear, that he is a monster. A monster? Nothing can be further from the truth because, surprisingly enough, those tepid responses and meandering explanations showed the monstrous image to be nothing more than contrived hysteria – the goon was more like a mouse with less spine than a single jellyfish.

Griffin was ultimately an amateur, disconcerted by nervous streaks that were made abundant by shifty, totally malfunctioning, answers, meanwhile, a sweaty and dilapidated face evidently couldn’t bear the strain so his ugliness resorted to maniacal grins frequently, and incompetently, consumed by degrading fulminations – and all of them every bit complicit with the malodorous virulence we’ve come to expect from this maleficent piece of scum. No, Nicholas is no monster – just a depraved loon. You want a monster people, go carp at Mrs Thatcher – and she’ll confront you with a proper tussle. British Nazism was defeated by this eloquent, and absolutely necessary, broadcast, albeit it’s only a marginal defeat in a cosmopolitan culture war that will encompass many future battles.

So Nick Griffin wasn’t monstrous, nor a master in the performing art of malevolence. Nicholas was plain thoughtless. His last stand was no exception, and an exemplar fit to define the man as an idiot: “The indigenous people of these islands – the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh – it’s the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aborigines here.” Um, okay, what could be more cleverer than that? And this is supposed to be his guiding principle – “the absolute nub” of what Mr Griffin swears by. I could go on and on and on, I really could. But my readers – the intelligent ones anyway – can judge for themselves, just like everyone else can and should.

The BNP have unleashed an evil that is so evil that it has the capacity, and historical precedent, to implode from within. Nazism, similarly to Stalinism and Iraqi Ba'athism, was destroyed from the inside – a concept of evil that is so evil that it annihilates itself via its innards. Fascists, like these, have two fountainheads for a semblance of promotion. The centrifuge of the British National Party is spun by closet racists, but the outer exterior is ingested by disaffected citizens, voters without a job and without political representation from the mainstream, therefore effectively validating political disenfranchisement, completely raped by conventional parties, and to the point that they’re prepared to vote for delusional crackpots so they can inflict extreme wounds into the reactionary establishment.

The only way to respond is to, painstakingly and emphatically, address these grievances – something all three major parties have epically failed to do hitherto. But the BNP are no ordinary lay man’s fringe party, and the effects of electing fascism in the ballot box will transmit into more than the simplistic generalisation of a protest vote. Most people know this, and fascism is, at best, a demented trespasser interfering, but condemned, in the margins of national political reality. Indeed it is that – reality – which will destroy this evil from within and the exposé of frauds will be eclipsed by the solidarity of a tolerable democracy.

Robert King is a Contributing Editor to WDC.