Griffin gets a rough ride

posted by: Nick Lowles | on: Saturday, 18 September 2010, 20:16

Griffin, the great un-British patriot!

The BNP today launched their ‘Bring back the boys’ campaign with a series of leafleting sessions across the country. Nick Griffin turned up with his few remaining party activists in Liverpool but got more than he bargained for as almost 100 anti-fascists gathered around him.

According to the BNP website: “This campaign will help establish the BNP as the only political party that is opposed to the bloody, unwinnable, futile and illegal war in Afghanistan.” Whatever the merits of British intervention in Afghanistan the BNP certainly has no answers. The far right party is posing as the patriotic party but perhaps the British public might like to know just how patriotic it really is:

1. In November 1986 Griffin headed an NF march to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, desecrating the memory of those who fought and died in the struggle against Nazism by marching ahead of a banner which bore the legend “No More Brothers Wars” a key rallying cry for post-war fascists who claim Britain was dragged into a “Jews war” against the Third Reich with whom it should have been forged an alliance.

2. In 1996 Griffin picketed Coventry Cathedral in protest at a service being held to commemorate the Nazis’ destruction of Coventry in the Second World War. Griffin did not think the Nazis had anything to apologise for and described the service as a “guilt trip”.

3. Griffin has described British RAF pilots as war criminals and murderers. He wrote an article in The Rune, the antisemitic journal he edited, praising the “courage and sacrifices” of the Waffen-SS soldiers while claiming in another piece that “the Waffen-SS were undoubtedly no worse than the troops of other nations … ” including Britain!

4. Only last month BNP official Adam Walker travelled to Japan for an international far-right gathering hosted by Issuikai, an extreme-right group that denies Japanese war crimes.

While there he visited the Yasukuni Shrine, which venerates the militarists who led Japan’s brief but disastrous rampage across Asia. “I realise that there are war veterans in the UK who will see this as an insult, especially on VJ day,” said Walker. “It’s easy to point fingers now but these people were doing what they thought was right at the time.” There’s lots more besides. I feel another HOPE not hate leaflet coming on.