Rod Liddle on the National Front

Liddle is a pretty reasonable bloke a lot of the time. I think all the abuse is just a leadup to saying that the NF are right about the Muslims

John Tyndall, Britain’s most prominent neo-Nazi for the best part of 40 years, was found dead in his home last week. If it is true that every man’s death diminishes us, then it is perhaps also true this particular death diminishes us slightly less than most. Frankly, speaking for myself, I feel fairly undiminished by it.

I use the term “neo-Nazi” with scrupulous care, not as an inaccurate, blanket term of abuse. Tyndall, you see, had a great deal of time for Adolf Hitler and not much time at all for the Jews. He had pictures of Hitler on his walls at home, just as you and I might have pictures of Angelina Jolie.

According to the British National party, of which he was intermittently a member between expulsions for being too extreme, Tyndall was a good orator. He could “hold a room”, it is said. I saw him speak once and thought him the most unintentionally hilarious creature I had ever encountered; the ludicrous florid language, the flailing of the arms and the pompous, plummy tone of his voice — like that of a retired minor public school geography master with a pole up his bottom.

He even did that weird Hitler thing with his hair, in the days when he still had some.

Tyndall led the National Front during its most successful period, which was broadly speaking 1974-9. The Conservative victory in 1979 pretty much wiped it out — the far right does well in Britain when the centre right is weak, which may be one reason why the BNP is doing so well now.

He had previously served time in an organisation called the League of Empire Loyalists and had attracted the admiration of Britain’s leading crypto-fascist of the day, AK Chesterton — the cousin of that overrated Edwardian Catholic bore, the writer GK Chesterton. The British far right at that time was characterised by its fervent belief in the spiritual rebirth of the British nation. And also by the fact that its leaders were almost always, to a man, as mad as a box of frogs.

Academics have pondered long and hard over the historic failure of British fascism. They have suggested that our long-standing record of political gradualism, as opposed to sudden, violent change, might be one answer. Or maybe it’s been the absence of a genuine Bolshevik threat, or the fact that we don’t have proportional representation and it is therefore harder for a new party to make rapid and dramatic inroads into the Commons.

But they have given perhaps too little weight to the notion that, Oswald Mosley aside, the British far right has been led by chaps who are a few sandwiches short of a picnic. And even Oswald had his problems.

Arnold Leese, the spiritual father of British fascism, the founder of the Imperial Fascist league, was a retired camel-doctor who objected to Stalin not because of the murder of 20m people or the gulags — but because Joe had married “a Jewess”.

Leese provided the imprimatur for future British fascists: his palpable madness a product of a consuming anti-semitism, a monomania, which resulted in him disbelieving Einstein (because he was Jewish) and writing this sort of stuff: “The Jew knows less about real work than an ape and that is why, apelike, he walks about with his hands dangling backwards.”

Being utterly deranged and hating Jewish people have been the two constants of the British far right and led to the British National party, back in the 1980s, extolling the virtues of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. They’ve had to perform an about-turn on their pro-Muslim sympathies of late.

At an early meeting of the National Front in a pub, six or seven people, one of whom had a large suitcase by his side, sat around a table. What’s in the suitcase, everybody wondered, until a ferret eventually clambered out of the top of it and scuttled away across the bar.

Such stories give us a little comfort in these difficult times. There are few political weapons more effective than downright ridicule and we console ourselves that although the far right might occasionally inflame us or offend us with their rhetoric, they are not really — if you get my meaning — all there. The lights are on but nobody’s home.

But the far right is at its most potent when it appears to be in closer accord with the sentiments of a proportion of the general public than does our Establishment.

The Establishment tells us incessantly that Islam is a peaceable religion that is associated with the terrorist outrages in London and Egypt only through an unfortunate coincidence; that the terrorists are criminals, pure and simple.

But there is nothing the far right likes better than to appear the victim of an establishment conspiracy — and that its leaders are being banged up for giving the alternative view which, rightly or wrongly, you can hear every night of the week in saloon bars up and down the country.

When we see Muslim clerics approving these mass murders, yet remaining apparently immune from prosecution and still in receipt of sizable welfare payments, then we may begin to ask: is the Establishment as mad as the far right?

From The Times

Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, July 24, 2005 at 09:21 AM in Far Right
Comments (15) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by jonjayray on July 24, 2005, 09:42 AM | #

I was rather amused at Liddle’s inability to find anything bad to say about Mosley. Mosley was much respected in his time. The King even came to his wedding, believe it or not

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 24, 2005, 09:46 AM | #

He spent so much time ridiculing the neo-Nazis, he never got to make his point about Moslems. What was his point? If you read the piece you have to go looking for his point with a magnifying glass somewhere in there toward the last three paragraphs or so—good luck finding it, because I wasn’t able to, though I can make some guesses at it. That was a terrific piece condemning the Nazis—would’ve been great 65 years ago. Why’s he fighting the last war when we’re plunged in a brand-new one (two or three brand-new ones simultaneously, in fact, and none of ‘em, not one, is against the Nazi party or the neo-Nazi Party)? He trying to prove how un-Nazi he is or something, sort of as Arcane tries constantly to do? How about he and Arcane sort that out in the privacy of their own consciences and come help us fight the wars that are actually upon us in the year 2005?

Posted by jonjayray on July 24, 2005, 10:08 AM | #

I think the final graf was the point:

“When we see Muslim clerics approving these mass murders, yet remaining apparently immune from prosecution and still in receipt of sizable welfare payments, then we may begin to ask: is the Establishment as mad as the far right?”

Posted by Stuka on July 24, 2005, 10:36 AM | #

Good point, Fred.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 24, 2005, 10:38 AM | #

Right John, that was apparently his point but it took him long enough to make it, didn’t it. He could’ve begun with it and written a much more effective piece. What was all that other irrelevant stuff about—assuaging his own guilty conscience or something?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 24, 2005, 10:39 AM | #

Thnx, Stuka.

Posted by Guessedworker on July 24, 2005, 10:51 AM | #

I concurr with Stuka.

John,

I would like to see a much greater understanding of the gradations on the non-mainstream right. It suits leftists to lump everyone west of Gerald Howarth into one sin bin. But there is a great range of philosophy and belief here, a tiny fraction of which is fascistic (though much of it scarcely Conservative). That said, most of it is immeasurably more healthy to society than Marxism, for example.

Perhaps the only idea common to all who would call themselves rightists is that Western Man must recoil from his creeping dispossesion and deracination. That, though, would be the view of 95% of those who have given the matter any thought at all. The 5% is the liberal establishment.

Posted by sr on July 24, 2005, 11:43 AM | #

English humor is sometimes hard for Americans to grasp - I used to puzzle over the cartoons in Punch. What was that bit about the ferret in the pub in aid of?

Posted by Tournament of Champions on July 24, 2005, 12:16 PM | #

Liddle’s piece might be considered cutting in a fair debate among kin. It is designed to a) make his point without b) offending his kinsmen and c) impress by doing so in glib fashion. From that perspective it is an excellent article.

However, Jewish media does not engage in fair debate; their entire meme load is basically scientifically crafted PYSOPS/marketing designed to co-opt the ordinary mind. Their conception of artistry is skill in delivering such a package only; one cannot use within-group tactics in between-group memetic warfare. Nations at war do not stupidly use reason alone against enemy propaganda, they use propaganda in response to enemy propaganda.

Posted by AD on July 24, 2005, 12:25 PM | #

But there is a great range of philosophy and belief here, a tiny fraction of which is fascistic (though much of it scarcely Conservative).

Isn’t fascism just a dirty word for revolutionary conservatism?

Posted by Svigor on July 24, 2005, 02:49 PM | #

Amen to that Tournament. The tactics of the left are sitting there waiting to be coopted.

Posted by Guessedworker on July 24, 2005, 04:13 PM | #

AD,

I have met a modern-day fascist, who happened to be Italian. Fascism, unlike Nazism, is a living political philosophy.

Revolutionary Conservatism is term which is much overused. It tends to mean what people want it to.

However, it surely ought to be specific. My interpretation - based, for what it’s worth, on the concept of competing political zeitgeists - is contained in a two-part post from January, to be found here and here.

Posted by jonjayray on July 24, 2005, 06:45 PM | #

I may have got it wrong about the ferret story either but ferrets do appear to be something of a British working class hobby—so I suppose the ferret was seen as something of a letdown after expecting something more important in the suitcase

Posted by Guessedworker on July 25, 2005, 05:02 AM | #

Depends on whether the ferret was an undercover BBC reporter.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on October 17, 2006, 06:02 PM | #

“I was rather amused at Liddle’s inability to find anything bad to say about Mosley. Mosley was much respected in his time. The King even came to his wedding, believe it or not.” (—JJR, first comment in the thread)

Speaking of Sir Oswald Mosley, incidentally, here‘s some 1936 newsreel footage which preserves an attempt by him to lead 5,000 of his “blackshirt” followers in a demonstration-march in London’s East End before things got broken up by violent counter-demonstrators made up, according to the narrator, of “communists, Laborites, and Jews.” Eighty injured were treated in hospital; some hundreds-more injured were treated at the scene; there were eighty-four arrests. The incident is remembered as “The Battle of Cable Street.” (Listen to the narrator’s distinctive 1930s BBC accent, by the way. You won’t hear that accent today: it’s gone, gone with the wind, probably thanks at least in part to degenerate American influence on Britain over the decades since.)

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