Snakes and Arrows

Never willing to admit to incompetence but always willing to show bad faith to its most loyal supporters, over the RWB weekend the BNP fouled up yet another change of server and was hit - entirely coincidentally you understand - with another DDoS attack.

Well, that's what webmaster Simon Bennett told members anxious for their daily fix of all the news that's fit to bin - and since the trick had already been worked earlier in the summer, when Nick Griffin claimed the BNP website had been hit by the biggest DDoS attack "in recorded history", there was little harm in repeating the exercise.

Of course, those who looked for evidence of this latest attack came up as empty-handed as they had when seeking after evidence of the first. The only real difference this time was that though the BNP blamed everybody to the left of Attila the Hun for its supposed plight, there were no wild statements to the effect that the police, MI5, Interpol, the FBI and Gandalf the Grey were beating a path to the offices of Searchlight purposed on hauling off Gerry Gable for a long stretch on bread and water (if he was lucky).

Eventually the BNP website resurfaced in all its turgid, screamingly slow glory, and all was well with the world.

Hmm. Not quite.

"Where's our forum gone?" demanded nonplussed members of the small band who regularly used the BNP's private forum - for gone it was, without a word of warning, even to its own moderators.

Bennett came up with a number of excuses, first claiming that the BNP forum had been "lost in transit", then that it was "full of Reds", and finally admitting that it had been closed on the orders of the leadership because "the forums were counter-productive and offered no real benefit to the party on the whole" and were "a hot-bed for gossip and distraction".

Translated, that means: "Members were voicing their opinions, and we don't do that sort of thing in the BNP."

At its best, the BNP forum had around 250 registered users, of which 30-40 were regular posters. Such a low number of users from a party claiming 10,000 members might be explained by the frequency with which posters had their accounts deleted for transgressing Rule No. 1 ("Thou Shalt Speak No Ill Of Griffin, Not Even A Little Bit") and other mysterious rules the administrators conjured up on the fly. Even moderators, their task made more difficult than usual for having to observe lists of proscribed and non-proscribed subjects, could find a boot from on high connecting with their cyber backsides for reasons rarely explained.

And so the dispossessed, muttering darkly about "egos" and "dictatorships", move on to posting pastures new, but carry with them their unfailing loyalty to the very man who caused their discomfiture.

The closure of the BNP forum has led to a migration to the hitherto moribund Green Arrow forum - but if anybody thinks voicing an opinion there is a good idea, the spousally-challenged drink-loving Paul Morris has news for them, making it clear that nothing less than wholehearted support for Griffin and the Griffinite BNP is expected.

Now the pompous Morris is as much of a standing joke to his own fascist brethren as he is to the anti-fascist community. The online Colonel Blimpish persona and the over-frequent use of military metaphors are rather belied by his real-world persona as a vicious hater prone to subject his neighbours to drunken rants, and who urinated against his caravan while screaming and shouting at the now estranged wife who had locked him out of his own house.

Nobody reading this website needs to be reacquainted with the fact of Morris's abject cowardice concerning his own identity and his fulsome support for Redwatch, nor his self-pitying whining ("I could be killed") when anti-fascists gave him a taste of his own medicine and outed him. So we shan't mention it.

Morris has long entertained a high opinion of his own abilities, his importance and his influence, even going so far this week to modestly pat himself on the back for the vital part he claims he played in the election of Griffin, Brons and Barnbrook - a claim that may not sit well in the minds of the BNP's foot soldiers, who knocked doors and delivered the party's literature while Morris tapped away on his keyboard.

So pompous has Morris become, so inflated is his idea of his own worth, that the self-proclaimed "maverick" (!) refuses to take direction from the Leader he so fawningly adores and has managed to work himself into a tizz over an instruction that he fall into line with other BNP bloggers and remove the BNP logo and masturbatory photographs of Nick Griffin from his site.

It's all a storm in a cheap can of Tesco lager really, but in the sozzled mind of Morris assumes the importance of a Rorke's Drift, for conforming would be "... like a warship striking its colours or a regiment throwing down their colours and running. I will not run again - no matter what the price."

There speaks a true (internet) warrior.

Despite the ministrations of Welsh BNP organiser Brian Mahoney (purveyor of lies in the matter of Muslim-owned Cardiff post offices), Morris would not back down and resigned his membership, thus retaining his freedom of action to be a complete idiot while not (so he believes) damaging the hard-soiled reputation of the BNP.

Helpfully, for anti-fascists, Morris has decided to move away from the Google-owned Blogger and to set up his own bespoke website. I say "helpfully" since Morris's new thegreenarrow.co.uk address places him firmly within the remit of British hate and libel laws and makes him far more easily traceable by the authorities, who seem daunted by the legal technicalities presented by racists using American Blogger accounts.

There is now, then, a local audit trail, which begins at the registrant's address for the new Green Arrow site, being 50 Ammanford Road, Tycroes, Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, SA18 3QJ - which is also the address for the Patriot Products tat site ("for hygenic reasons we regret we are unable to refund underwear and hosiery products").

In his hubris Morris may well have made a rod for his own back, and it's up to us to ensure he feels it.

Assisting Morris in setting up his new site is scuba-diving enthusiast, software engineer, real ale lover and frequent Green Arrow contributor John of Gwent.

John, like Morris and Elizabeth Walton before him, isn't too keen on having his real name and that of the BNP spoken in the same sentence. It may, after all, prove harmful to his online Velvetwood Consultants business.

John has been secretly testing various mock-ups of the new Green Arrow site on his own server over the past few days, using the https protocol to hide his efforts from prying eyes, including, presumably, those of his customers, as here:

In true BNP fashion, John of Gwent cannot help himself and feels bound to turn the relatively simple process of setting up a new website into a drama - "I also see a few spirited souls trying to destroy the site by running the 'install' script that came with it. Denise, Atreus and Weyman you really MUST get round to training your cybertroopers to READ the manuals".

Now the name "John of Gwent" is, we suppose, intended to conjure up images of a handsome valiant medieval knight, one hand guiding his horse across the Welsh landscape while the other holds a lance ready to fell the foes of the nation (or those of the BNP, at any rate).

The reality is far less romantic. The knightly steed is stabled at the home of one John Roderick Voisey, of XXXXXXXXXX Close, Newport, Gwent, and the knight himself does not exactly exude an air of noble heroism:

For those struggling to make sense of the picture, Voisey is the one with hair, the other is an innocent snake.

Have a nice weekend, folks :-)