The disturbing story of the appeal of the swastika for many young Britons, by Nick Griffin

[Nick Griffin looks at how modern-day “Nazis” are created by the mainstream media and Politically Correct propaganda.]

By Nick Griffin, November 2002

I was talking to a pair of 16-year-olds in a town in northern England the other week. Bright kids, who not so long ago would probably have been able to take the grammar school route out of poverty, they were typical of a generation wickedly let down by the liberal-left’s demolition of our education system.

Their grasp of modern history was almost non-existent. They knew next-to-nothing about the causes or the course of the Second World War. They knew even less about the National Socialist German Workers Party or its political programme. Yet these two youngsters — who have lived their entire lives under a ceaseless barrage of multiracist propaganda, on TV, in the music they like, and in school — were sure of one thing: They were ‘Nazis’.

Why? Were they attracted by the long-dead NSDAP’s broken or unfulfilled promises to break up capitalist monopolies? No. Were they attracted by key Nazi pledges to execute First World War profiteers and to replace the German army with a citizen’s militia? No. Did they believe that the Jews were responsible for both Communism and Capitalism and want — as a minimum — to expel every last one from the country? No.

No such ideas had ever so much as flickered through their sharp but unstretched, junk-filled minds. Their uninformed but fervent identification with ‘Nazism’ was motivated by one thing, and one thing alone: the presence in their town of a large and growing Pakistani community.

So how on earth had they made that connection? Well, in a way, they hadn’t. The connection between fear and hatred of their Asian classmates on one side, and Hitler and the swastika on the other, had been made by their teachers, textbooks and the national curriculum — with the message reinforced time and time again at home on television.

“Hitler thought the white race was superior, and hated non-whites,” These kids are taught. “Hitler was a racist who hated other races and wanted to kill them. If you say or even think bad things about immigrants, that makes you a Nazi too.”

This is the message which the liberal-left Establishment forces down the throats of the children of this country morning, noon and night. The primary aim, of course, is to turn out obedient little enthusiasts for multi-culturalism — perfect new citizen-consumers for Blair’s Brave New World.

How ironic then that, especially in places where young whites live and go to school with significant and growing numbers of non-whites, the indoctrination process is more and more prone to backfire. Teaching kids the lie that Adolf Hitler was the only person in history to stand up for the white man may have the desired ‘anti-racist’ effect on spoilt rich kids living in leafy suburbia and insulated by daddy’s money from muggings, racist abuse, sexual harassment and playground shakedowns by ethnic ‘minority’ bullies.

Political correctness to blame

But the same politically correct propaganda applied to kids who have learned from personal experience what it’s like to be abused, victimised second class nobodies, tends to rebound on its perpetrators. “We’re tret like shit. No one stands up for us whites. The Nazis were the only people who stood up for whites. So that makes me a Nazi.”

That’s the simplistic but powerful logic that — in multiracial wonderlands from London to Glasgow, Preston to Leeds — is making more and more young white Britons decide that they are what their grandparents fought against.

To the average left-wing teacher the development must be shocking and depressing beyond belief. The harder they try to turn out brainwashed multiracist clones, the faster they produce unrepentant extremists.

But now, as the rugby song says, we come to the tragic bit. The process whereby alienated white kids come to think of themselves as ‘Nazis’ must upset Gary Snot, with his third rate teaching degree from Crudborough polytechnic. But the people who actually designed the national brainwashing curriculum and who give the TV stations their overall direction, don’t mind at all when the system they created turns out semi-literate ‘Nazis.’ In fact, they’re delighted, it’s part of the plan!

The people responsible for all the multiracial propaganda in schoolbooks and on TV are communications experts. They understand, and make ruthless use of, all the findings of the thousands of scientific studies which have been undertaken over the last three or four decades of how and why people form, and change, their opinions. Advertising has very rightly been described as “the bureaucracy of capitalism”, and as such the world’s advertising giants have poured literally billions of pounds, trillions of dollars, into finding out everything they can about the conscious and subconscious triggers to “buy this, or reject that” which either already exist in us or can be implanted in us by adverts and propaganda.

Mind manipulation

The science of mind manipulation has advanced in leaps and bounds since Pavlov first discovered that dogs which were taught to associate the ringing of a bell with food would then salivate when they heard the bell, even without seeing or smelling any food. But the hugely increased sophistication of what the experts in this field know has only reinforced the fundamental fact that those in control of the media and the education system are in a uniquely powerful position to wash the brains and befuddle the natural instincts of a huge proportion of the population.

This doesn’t make them all-powerful, infallible or invincible, but it certainly gives them — and those political parties which dance to their tune — a head start. Particularly — as I’m sure you already understand — when their opponents either are, or can be falsely stigmatised as, ‘Nazis’. First, because the vast majority of the population — even those with no personal knowledge of World War Two — have been heavily programmed to feel both a gut and an intellectual revulsion for ‘Nazism’. Thus a political description which in fact belongs to a far-off country, in a time now out of the average living memory, when the problems facing the people of that country were massively different to those of today — and against which many of our older members fought — has been turned into a political kiss of death. Even a subconscious popular association between a present day political organisation and this demonised slice of history is politically devastating.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. More dangerous still is the impact of the ‘Nazi’ identification on the alienated few who react against the brainwashing and the evil project of which it forms an integral part by becoming what they mistakenly think is the only enemy the liberal-left fear.

Again, this is something which takes effect at a subconscious level, and it’s this: the ‘Nazis’ created by Hollywood, the BBC and the school curriculum are pre-programmed for defeat!

This is true even of those who know enough to see past the propaganda version of the Hitler regime and recall that many British political experts in the 1930s — including not just Lloyd George but even Winston Churchill himself — praised the Nazi state for saving and rebuilding Germany. Because even the tiny minority of latter-day ‘Nazis’ who actually know their history are forced, by sheer weight of imagery, to focus not on the things that happened in Germany while it was at peace, but on the horrors and defeat of a disastrous war that engulfed the whole of Europe.

There is a very fundamental, and very well-known — by psychologists and media mind-benders that is — quirk in the human mental process by which the subconscious mind cannot differentiate between whether what it is shown repeatedly is good or bad, wanted or unwanted by the conscious mind. Thus, if you flood your subconscious mind with images and ideas of failure and defeat, your subconscious will tend to conclude that this is actually your goal — and set about adapting your behaviour patterns to ensure that you achieve it.

This is why experts in motivation, as used to very significant effect by everyone from successful entrepreneurs to top athletes, constantly reiterate the importance of cultivating positive thoughts, visualising the achievement of positive goals, and imagining the fruits of that success long before it is actually attained in reality.

Conversely, the experts know the dangers of dwelling on defeat and disaster. Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of the actual facts of what happened and why, regardless of the unbelievable tenacity of the losing side, to identify with losers — in whatever war, and however much they may be hated by people who also hate you — is to programme your subconscious to lose. It’s not just that the mass of people don’t like them, ‘Nazis’ are pre-programmed to remain on the fringe, hard-wired to fail, happy to be cut off from normal society and the mainstream because it is mentally far easier and stops them becoming uncharacteristically successful.

This is what accounts, for example, for why groups like the last remnants of the National Front go round and round in circles holding pitiful ‘marches’ by 25 or 30 skinheads in places like Oldham. All this does is advertise their own weakness, in the process demoralising whites and emboldening Muslim fundamentalists and Labour party multi-racist extremists when they see the low-grade of the people who the media hold up as the most ‘hardline’ opponents of their plans to turn Britain into an Islamic Republic or a Third World slum.

To sum up this point, the combination of demonisation and ghettoisation is so strong that being a ‘Nazi’ isn’t just a disastrous choice when avowed publicly, it’s a recipe for failure even if kept in the closet. It’s not just a matter of not spouting System-inspired ‘Nazism’ when there’s a journalist around, the damage is done even if it’s just in someone’s head.

All this would make it bad enough for the BNP to be saddled with the ‘Nazi’ tag if we were ‘Nazis’, but it makes it doubly bad because we genuinely are not.

No place for old ideology in modern BNP

The first step to deal with this threat is for everyone in the party to understand that any misguided individual who gives ammunition to those who try to persuade the electorate that we are ‘Nazis’ will be sacked or disciplined regardless of personal sentiment, organisational value or political talent. Such behaviour is unacceptable and will not be accepted or permitted.

The second necessary step will take longer, and it is even more important. This is to develop our own 21st century ideals of popular nationalism. We must encourage, especially among our younger and newer members, a full understanding of how this is something unique, something for the future, and something which means that they do not have to look back to a past era and a past time to find a genuine and radical alternative to the liberal-left dogmas of globalism and multiracism which are crucifying our people, our nation and our race.

This is a need which we are only just beginning to fill, so it is not possible to go into detail on the subject here, but it is worthwhile to examine briefly some of the major ideological differences between radical modern nationalism and Nazism.

For a start, Nazism was fundamentally a totalitarian doctrine. This is not surprising, given that it — like the other versions of fascism which grew so fast in the 1930s — was above all else a reaction to the deadly threat posed to Europe by Communism. To Germans, Italians and others in the 1930s, Communism wasn’t some distant, impractical ‘ideal’ held by a few silly students; there was a clear and present danger of the millions of Communists among their fellow countryman seizing control and embarking on the same programme of systematic and brutal political and religious repression, cultural destruction, economic chaos and mass murder that had turned Eastern Europe into a blood-soaked, starving hell.

Communism was spread by subversion and terror, and could only be fought by spy networks, counter-repression and the psychological militarisation of the entire nation. The all-powerful state, the huge parades, the incarceration of political opponents, even the mass murders which later occurred during the brutal partisan warfare behind the Eastern Front — all took place in the context of the deadly menace of Bolshevism.

With that physical menace long gone, all the measures and attitudes taken on board by those who opposed it must similarly be consigned to the history books. In Britain and Europe today, the equivalent threat to Western civilisation is increasingly clearly provided by the fundamentalist wing of militant Islam. This is a very different enemy which must therefore be opposed in a very different way. Although similarly alien in origin, Communism was supported in the ‘30s mainly by people who belonged to the nations it was seeking to conquer. A key requirement in stopping them was therefore, regrettably, a powerful secret police force and political persecution (tactics, of course, now used by the liberal German state against democratic nationalists, but that’s another story).

The modern problem of Islamic fundamentalism, however, is a different kettle of fish entirely. No one needs a secret police force to know who these people are. And there is no need for any kind of persecution to stop them destroying our democracy and our European heritage. Generations of our forebears fought and died for our fast vanishing traditions and freedoms. We cannot preserve freedom by instituting a totalitarian state. We do not need secret police, uniformed storm troopers or identity cards to deal with foreign fundamentalist fanatics.

A very British approach

All that is needed is: 1) to stop any more potential recruits to their ideology coming into Britain by slamming the doors on any further immigration; 2) to expel the extremists; 3) to institute a generous financially assisted resettlement scheme — like that now being used by New Labour to get rid of a limited number of Afghans — to reduce the number of non-whites to a much smaller fraction of the population and thus ensure the continuation for all time of our unique cultural and ethnic identity, and, 4) to insist that any non-whites who want to stay here do so on the understanding that they must conform to our norms and standards, and not seek to impose their ways or religion on us.

A second area where both our ideological roots and the practicalities of modern life lead us in a very different direction to that taken by the Nazi party is economics. Nazism flourished in the era when ‘big government’ was all the rage. Except for hostility to aspects of the banking system, Nazi economic policy had a great deal in common with the American ‘New Deal’ and even with Stalin’s Five Year Plans.

The latter, of course, were based on utterly unworkable Marxist fantasies about equality and the abolition of private property — and therefore led to the most appalling inefficiency, cruelty and corruption.

But the big economic idea — that central government should control and direct the commanding heights of the economy, spending a huge proportion of the national tax-take and directing vast numbers of workers in the process — was shared by Nazis, Bolsheviks and US Democrats alike. It was just the ideological fashion of the times.

And to an extent it worked: the Nazis did get Germany back to work; the New Deal — coupled with rearmament — did help to end the Great Depression, and Stalin’s slave state did complete a huge electrification programme and build the enormous tank production capability which in the end overwhelmed the technologically superior Germans.

But, seventy years on, we’ve also seen the downside of big government economics — the sheer inefficiency of nationalised industries with their lack of incentive and responsibility; the inability of bureaucrats to do anything more than tinker with something of complex as a modern economy, where an action taken with one problem in mind can throw up a dozen unintended consequences, and endemic corruption and waste.

Tax burden

Above all, there’s the problem of taxation. Back in the 1920s and ‘30s, rates of tax were so much lower than today. Far fewer people even earned enough to pay direct taxes. Under those circumstances, the suggestion that the state should increase taxation to pay for basic welfare for the poor and needy, or spend money into circulation on huge development projects, was a highly attractive proposition to millions of people. Rampant capitalism and urbanisation had turned free peasant farmers and artisans into exploited wage-slaves, so the demand that the state should intervene on behalf of the ordinary man and his family was both just and a vote winner.

Contrast this with the situation today: The crushing burden of direct and indirect taxation is such that even people below the official poverty line pay tax. Meanwhile the middle classes groan under a confiscatory tax regime all their working lives and are then still likely to be forced to sell their homes to pay for nursing care in their old age.

In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that there is not any public appetite for ‘big government’ proposals, whose cost would have to be borne — in part at least — through increased taxes. Modern populist nationalism must be a movement which aims to reduce the burden of taxation on the vast majority of the workforce. This means shrinking the State, rather than glorifying it as the Nazis did.

At the same time, we must find ways to shift the money which is available for government spending away from bureaucracies, politically correct pet projects and the nanny state, and channel it into genuinely essential services for the truly needy.

Freedom from State interference

While the Nazis sought an all-powerful state, we radical modern nationalists believe that it is the job of government not to provide for its able-bodied citizens “from the cradle to the grave”, but to create the economic and social circumstances in which they can comfortably provide for themselves and their families through their own efforts.

If we look anywhere to the 1930s for inspiration for our economic and social ideals, it is not to the big government, mass production, state-directed capitalism favoured by the Nazis, but to the Distributist proposals of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Their basic aim was to increase the proportion of the population who own — directly and personally — not just their home but also the means by which they earned their living.

Independent retailing, franchises, partnerships, family farms and producers’ co-operatives are the main methods by which this can be achieved. This doesn’t mean that such systems of ownership should be the only ones permitted, but merely that such personal ownership and responsibility is regarded as preferable, where practicable.

The Nazi policy of seeking lebensraum — literally ‘living space’ — for the expansion of the German population at the expense of their Slavic neighbours is another area where there is a massive difference between the Nazis and modern pro-white parties like the BNP. Most obviously, there is the fact that we recognise the Slavs — Poles, Russians and so on — to be our close ethnic and cultural cousins rather than ‘subhumans’ as Himmler and Co. regarded them.

As for expanding the population — a key policy for all 1930s totalitarians, including Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini — this would be an utterly absurd aim for a party operating in modern Britain. This is one of the most overpopulated countries in the world already, the last thing we need is more people — even our own. In the 21st Century, wars will be won by high tech gadgetry and computers, not by nineteen-year-olds with fixed bayonets. With a properly increased level of spending on our armed forces, the biggest danger Britain will face in a future conflict would not be having too few men on the battlefield, but having too many mouths to feed in our overcrowded islands under enemy blockade.

The extent to which having an ageing and shrinking population could provide a future nationalist government with great opportunities rather than problems is a major subject in its own right to which we must return in the near future. All that needs to be said here is that the very idea is totally at odds with a fundamental tenet of 1930s Nazism.

I could go on and on extending the list of such deep rooted differences between modern popular nationalism and the long-gone regime whose memory is the best — indeed virtually the only — leftist ‘argument’ against us. But I hope I’ve made the case sufficiently strongly already.

And I hope that all the people like you agreeing with me will use the arguments here to help win over any youngsters you meet who have fallen into the opposition’s ‘Nazi’ trap. We don’t need cultists, we need freedom-loving patriots in tune with how millions of ordinary decent Britons think.

The same point is made very effectively by Prof Robert Whitaker, writing in the latest issue of National Vanguard. This is the theoretical magazine of the National Alliance, perhaps one of the most hard line pro-white organisations in America, and one with which we also have very significant ideological and tactical differences, but the extremism of the Alliance only underscores the value of Professor Whitaker’s message. He explains how he regards it as self-evident that race mixing is wrong, then goes on to say that:

“Liberals and ‘respectable’ conservatives agree that this makes me a ‘Nazi’! It also made Harry Truman and Douglas MacArthur ‘nazis’ according to today’s respectable conservatives.

“It is time to take on this ‘nazi’ tactic without compromise.

“For many decades I have been yelled at by respectable conservatives and liberals screaming: ‘If you are a heretic on race, you are a NAZI!’ For anyone with any male hormones there is a hurting wish to scream: ‘OK, damn you, I’m a nazi.’ Many of us have yielded to that natural tendency. But the simple fact remains that I am not a ‘nazi’. Truman was not a ‘nazi’. MacArthur was not a ‘nazi’.

“When you let them make you react that way, you are yielding to their Orwellian tactic.”

Professor Whitaker urges genuine nationalists and patriots to work to win those confused youngsters back from “the swastika and the klan.” He concludes: “As long as ‘respectable’ means ‘coward’, a lot of good people will fall for the lefts’ Orwellian ‘nazi’ tactic. I want the good people who have fallen for this enemy tactic to come back. I want them to join those of us who fight for freedom and who care about our race.”



Originally published on the website of the British National Party.

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