anti-immigration British National Party has been attempting of late to ditch its extremist origins and become a respectable mainstream political party. That effort is damaged by news about BNP head Nick Griffin and David Duke. The following exchange is from an e-mail discussion group:
E:
BNP Chairman Nick Griffin will be appearing at David Duke’s EURO conference in New Orleans in late May. He’ll be joining Willis Carto (the father of modern American anti-Semitism), Don Black (the creator of neo-Nazi website Stormfront) and Duke himself.
Now, Nick comes across as a smart fellow. Why in hell is he jeopardizing the BNP’s already not too great chances at the polls? Does he want to get elected or is it just a game to him? How can he expect the BNP to be considered mainstream in the UK when he’s openly associating himself with virulently ant-Semitic lunatics?
R:
He probably thinks he has to do business with all sorts of people he doesn’t agree with 100%.
He’s not necessarily endorsing their ideas just because he appears at the same conference.
LA:
Duke is poison. A total anti-Semite, a man who goes around the world looking for anti-Semites to join up with, like Zhirinovsky a few years ago.
Duke’s anti-Semitism was not clear when he began his political career around 1990. But it is crystal clear in his book, “My Awakening,” and in various statements he’s made in more recent years.
Any hopes of mainstreaming the BNP will be severely damaged if Griffin attends Duke’s conference.
For example, I tried a few months ago to publish at FrontPage an article about Griffin’s having been arrested for some nothing statement he had made about immigrants. The arrest was a horrific example of liberal tyranny, something that threatens all of us. FrontPage turned the article down, saying Griffin was too extreme and they didn’t want to take his side. I replied that from what I had heard he had become a much more moderate figure than he used to be. FP still rejected the article. But if Griffin appears at a David Duke conference, I would no longer be able to argue for his “moderateness,” let alone to take his side against liberal tyranny.
E:
I call it the Zhirinovsky syndrome: when an already eccentric politician is at the fringe of electoral politics for a long time, he gets so used to it, that it’s difficult for him to go mainstream.
LA:
Yes, it’s a basic matter of how one perceives oneself in relation to society. If you view yourself as completely marginal, you’re going to act that way, not acting responsibly, because, after all, you “have no power,” and, you tell yourself, it doesn’t matter what you do anyway. Many paleocons and other rightists have this attitude, so they just sound off, indulging themselves, and utterly fail to provide any intellectual leadership.
I suggest something different. Even if we at present are marginal, we must act as though we were not, we must act as though we were speaking to the country as a whole, offering responsible advice and leadership to the country as a whole. Then there is a chance that we actually will exert an influence on the mainstream. In any case, it will keep us from acting like cranks.