Racism & fascism - new material (42)
01 May 2003
BNP charts new course, David Turner. Labour Left Briefing July 2003, pp. 9-10. Turner evaluates the "post-fascist" BNP's "race realism" in the context of the local elections last May. The results revealed that "The BNP's heartland is...the former mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire...in which industrial decline, poverty and social exclusion have combined with...racial segregation to produce a poisonous political cocktail". Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, the BNP has assumed the guise of a right-wing popularist party in the continental tradition, disguising its racism behind slogans on asylum seekers. The BNP plans a push at the May 2004 council elections and Turner warns that the work to stop this happening begins now: "not only must the BNP's progress be impeded - its gains so far must be comprehensively rolled back."
CARF. no. 71 (Campaign Against Racism & Fascism) 2003, pp. 16. This issue has pieces on "Fortress America", the Israeli military offensive against members of the International Solidarity Movement, immigration detainees, racism and the media. In an editorial Sivanandan notes that "Racial superiority is back on the agenda" in the form of a "super-nation, super-people, a chosen people, on a mission to liberate the world." He finds "the closed circuit of thought" of the Bush junta - "religious conviction rooted in economic rationale backed by military might" - terrifying in "the certainty of their righteousness, the righteousness of their certainty."
Diario de un skin, Antonio Salas. Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 2003, pp. 358. The account of an investigative journalist writing under the pseudonym of Antonio Salas who spent nearly a year in the Spanish nazi skinhead movement, until his cover was blown by an unnamed police officer. Salas gained the confidence of several groups (including the Hammerskins and Edelweiss, a women's nazi organisation), and access to some of the nazi movement's leading ideologues (such as Chilean Miguel Serrano and Ramon B., formerly of CEDADE and founder of the CEI, Centro de Estudios Indoeuropeos), as well as football supporters groups (such as Real Madrid's Ultrassur and Espanyol's Brigadas Blanquiazules). He highlights the relations between supposedly "democratic" right-wing parties (Democracia Nacional, Alianza por la Unidad Nacional and Movimiento Social Republicano) and skinheads, the cross-membership between nazi skinhead groups and football supporters' groups, and the support given to such groups by some clubs. In the case of Real Madrid, it comes in the form of free tickets for games that are routinely re-sold at a profit as a form of financing, and the provision of a deposit/office within the Santiago Bernabeu stadium. It also looks at the Spanish nazi skinhead worldview, the music scene, and the cult for Third Reich texts and memorabilia.
Tyndall's last stand, Nick Lowles. Searchlight no. 338 (August) 2003. Lowles reports that Nick Griffin's British National Party is "planning to expel John Tyndall, Richards Edmonds and John Morse, the three men who ran the party until 1999." The decision "was taken at an extended Advisory Council meeting last month [July] in a hotel in the West Midlands."
Las fosas de Franco, Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías. Ediciones Temas de Hoy 2003, pp.374. The moving chronicle of efforts by the relatives of people murdered and buried in mass graves in fields around the country by Nationalists in Spain (estimated at around 30,000) during and after the civil war that opened the way for General Franco's dictatorship, to recover the remains of their murdered relatives. They set up an organisation, the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) in order to help relatives to find the remains of their loved ones, and as a means to combat the veil of silence that surrounds the events they are investigating. Over twenty years after Franco's death, they find that people are still frightened to talk about this hidden history. Si