This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 22/11/08
Listing To Starboard
I have to say that the leaking of the BNP's membership list all over the internet has provided me with a bit of a chuckle, but at the same time some cause to ponder.
I detest those Führerprinzip-worshipping, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals - and if they are examples of the white Aryan race, then a meteorite strike may be our best hope - with a will. For all the smart clothing of its increasingly hangdog-looking leader, these are the same old turds-in-human-form which have comprised the Brit hard-right since the seventies, when the National Front were on the go. I also - though largely from the standpoint of taste - abhor their attempts to use Celtic-twilight mythology to justify their ideology, and their shameless attempts to mask their innate anti-Semitism by trying to jump onto the various campaigns for the rights of the Palestinians.
And yet, the data which has been released into the wild is, essentially, private information. As someone who stands firmly against all the State's current attempts to log, code, register and accumulate the most sensitive facts about our lives, I might be expected to say that the leak is a disgraceful breach of people's fundamental right to privacy.
Well yes, it is. But...
(I suppose you were waiting for that "but...").
The difference (if there is any) is that the State's schemes are - either de jure or de facto - compulsory. We have had little if any say in the setting up of the variety of databases with which those who hold power now (and will hold it in the future) intend to monitor the minutiae of our lives. Indeed, more and more evidence of both the cunning and the arrogance of our rulers emerges all the time; the latest being details of the measures that will be levied against those who refuse to have anything to do with the National Identity Register (one of which is effectively to ban them from leaving the country by refusing to supply them with a passport or a renewal of one) or those who don't keep their details up to date (a fine of £250 a throw, up to a maximum of £1000 within any five-year period, plus the prospect of having the bailiffs - who have recently been handed increased powers to do things like this - smash your door down and steal your belongings for non-compliance).
By contrast, membership of a political party (any political party) is a voluntary act, an act of commission rather than omission. If you volunteer for something, then you should at least go into it with your eyes open. It is rather difficult to imagine that all the people on the BNP's membership roll joined completely unaware that they were signing up to a party which has racial bigotry as its central plank of policy. Nevertheless, these people are now shitting a stick at the prospect of being 'outed'. Why so?
One would think that, if you were going to nail your colours to the mast in that way, you wouldn't mind people knowing it. Joining a political party as an act of will and then wanting to keep quiet about it is surely analogous with being a fundamentalist Christian evangelist and not telling anyone; you would be defeating the whole object of what you claimed you were doing.
The trouble is, of course, that the BNP is no ordinary party. Its policies (and you'll have to excuse my sweeping assumption here that they have more than just the one of "We 'ate wogs") and the people associated with it make sure of that. That is why membership of it is - if I can be excused the word - verboten for such as police officers and others in sensitive positions.
(For the record, I don't approve of banning political parties unless they have - as bodies - been proven to have been involved in serious illegality. I remember the thoroughly risible ban on the voices of members of Sinn Féin being broadcast over twenty years ago. Like the current tendency of the Castilian government to get one of its tame, Francoist judges to ban any and every organisation which emerges claiming to speak for the Basques, such actions merely make those who order them look like - to use a term from political science - a bunch of raving pricks. Likewise with the BNP; the best way of exposing them is to allow them to expose themselves. Every time they've managed to get enough sufficiently deluded people to vote them into council seats, those councillors have shown in short order that they would have difficulty finding their own gonads with a GPS system).
So why are the members of the BNP - apart from the ones whose membership is deemed incompatible with their employment - so far up in arms about their status being revealed that they are trying to use the Human Rights Act - which their policy states they wish to repeal because it was based on proposals drawn up by nasty foreigners who are all in the pay of the Zionist Occupation Government, or some such cack - in order to seek redress?
Perhaps it's because they know what such information is capable of creating if it falls into the hands of their opponents. After all, it's what the BNP and its various allies and splinter groups have been doing for years. There's an infamous website (no, I'm not going to provide a link to it) upon which have been published the names, addresses, phone numbers and - often - photographs of anti-fascist campaigners and their families, and even of journalists who have worked to expose the far right for what they really are. Frequently, this has led to acts of intimidation, threat or even actual violence against those who have been thus 'exposed'. Sometimes, what goes around comes around, and that must have given the closet racial supremacists a troubled night's sleep or two. Although I hope, of course, that nothing of that nature would happen to them, if only because I don't think people should drag themselves down to that level.
What is interesting about the leak of the list is the fact that it has not come from campaigning journalists or anti-fascist activists, but (apparently) from a disgruntled former official of the party, possibly as a way of discrediting Griffin, who is regarded by some elements of his gang as not being extreme enough. It's interesting in that it shows that the far right is just as factional and fractious as its equivalents on the left. And while they are fighting each other, of course, they're not trying to fight the rest of us and we can get on with living in the real world.
At this point, I must confess that the only reason for my writing this piece was to provide some background for the alien reader before linking to this wonderful re-subtitling of a scene from the movie Untergang (Downfall) by Chris Applegate:
