Wednesday, October 21, 2009

'I've never seen anything so ridiculous in my life'

Bernie Heinink, Simon Weston and the other military veterans in this video (via Francis Sedgemore) are worth more than a million Guardian columnists in discrediting the British National Party's efforts to re-brand themselves as a mainstream party.

Mr. Heinink's comment on seeing a piece of BNP propaganda evoking the Battle of Britain, which serves as the title of this post, puts it succinctly.



As I'm in Britain this week, I've been catching a bit more of the discussion around the BNP's hijacking of Second World War imagery than I otherwise would.

And, having a number of veterans (British and American) of that war in my family, I take this rather personally.

So, as I opened the hotel's complimentary issue of the Daily Mail this morning, I was pleased to find not only outrage at Nick Griffin's comparison of British army generals with Nazi war criminals but also a condemnation of Griffin as a 'racist' and 'bigot' that includes some charming highlights from what the paper refers to accurately enough as his 'vile words'.

That this sort of criticism can be found in the Mail of all places is encouraging. And I would like to think it would continue.

Of course, if the Mail and other like-minded rags hadn't spent so much time whipping up the kind of fears that the BNP and other fascists have so successfully capitalised upon, I would take their outrage a bit more seriously.

Still: if this is some sign on the part of at least some people in the right-wing press have begun to recoil from the monster they've helped create, then all the better.

But they should really stop feeding him.

(Nothing British)

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