Braindead in cyberspace

Anybody who has ever posted to an internet forum will be aware that these are prime targets for manipulation by the Braindead Neanderthal Party (BNP). In some cases this can be subtle, in most cases it's as subtle as a sledgehammer. BNP members routinely flood forums with threads on race and immigration, then support themselves with a multiplicity of sock puppets.

Sock puppets are operated in a variety of ways. There is usually an attempt to pretend that more BNP members exist on a forum than is really the case. Some sock puppets are deployed as "ordinary members of the public" who invariably support the BNP line. Some are deployed to hunt with the hounds and run with the foxes. Some will appear to mildly question the BNP and its policies - the questions posed in an easily rebutted manner, as was the intention.

Many BNP posters adopt a tone of sweet reason, and are capable of dressing up their vile propaganda in some handsome clothes. But most of them will simply post with a link to a news story - so long as the story is crime-related and has a picture of a black or Asian face, they're satisfied. Then the sock puppets come in to do their duty.

The majority of BNP posters being notably unintelligent, they frequently revert to gutter language and have few inhibitions about making personal attacks on other posters. This frequently leads to them being banned - but they always come back.

What is remarkable to many is that abusive BNP posters fail to understand that for every person posting on a forum there are many more "lurkers" - people who simply like to browse forums but who do not feel inclined to contribute. Members of other political parties might have a care for what these unseen lurkers make of them, but the braindead BNP rarely do.

Illustrative of this is the curious case of the Oxfordshire and Brighton Argus forums.

For some years the Brighton Argus forum has been targetted by various BNP supporters, who, true to form, began thread after thread on their favourite subject and got on with the business of abusing their gainsayers. This led to a pattern of bannings and reincarnations that has continued to this day.

Somewhere along the line, the Argus BNP contingent discovered the Oxfordshire forum, where they began their familiar pattern. Though moderation of the Argus forum is at best feeble, at the Oxfordshire forum it is virtually non-existent. Very quickly the language and the abuse reached new depths, and what was by all accounts once a very active and lively forum began a steady decline as regulars deserted, tired at the endless immigration threads and the certainty that questioning or opposing the BNP supporters would bring a shower of foul-mouthed abuse raining down upon them.

Today the Oxfordshire forum is a sterile, inert place, populated only by the braindead BNP, the odd die hard-regular, and an anti-BNP campaigner.

Back at the Argus, they have adopted a new tactic. This involves blocking threads started by people they detest, or where the balance of posting has gone against them (as it always does), or where they have been shown to be liars, or - uniquely, where they have started a thread so that they can block it themselves and blame "the lefties".

Thread blocking apparently works by posting huge amounts of data into a reply box. The effect is to cause something akin to server time-outs. The posts can only be viewed after several minutes of rendering (if at all), cannot be added to, and also have the effect of making the site run slowly.

For some time these idiots have run riot, blocking entire pages of threads. They schizophrenically admit to thread blocking one day (in the name of "free speech", as one of them claimed), and the next blame "the lefties". And they sit in their empty haven of the Oxfordshire forum to crow to one another about how well they have done.

Of course, it has never yet occurred to them that they are doing the party they support the biggest disservice possible - but I don't call them braindead for nothing!

Things have lately become so serious on the Argus forum that one of their own, posting on the Nazi Stormfront site, took them to task:

'Well you and your buddies have screwed up big time. Now nobody can post to either forum and there are likely to be legal consequences and bad publicity that are going to reflect badly on all Nationalists. Thank you. Thank you very much.... You swamped the forum with race-based posts that had nothing to say but just contained links to news stories. It was all you did, and not surprisingly other posters got fed up with it. You wouldn't leave threads that had nothing to do with race alone and other posters got fed up with that too. When they complained to you, you and your cronies immediately stooped to personal abuse. You even abused people who had a BNP mindset... You also did the same thing on the Oxford forums. You made that forum a joke and even when one of our own people came on to fire a warning shot across your bows you ignored him. You caused disruption every day on the Argus forum and used the Oxford forum to boast about it. Very clever... You went there and behaved like trolls so you got treated like trolls.'

Those are excerpts from the first of a series of Stormfront posts. The response of the Braindeads was predictable - they ignored what any rational person would have seen to be sound advice. Unable to believe that one of their own could seriously question their disruption of the two forums they concluded that the Stormfront poster must be an imposter!

BNP antics on two obscure internet forums might not seem to carry much importance (and on these two forums at least, the BNPs are their own worst enemies), but multiply that by several hundred active forums and you have thousands and thousands of people daily exposed to their message - no matter how badly or unintelligently it is posed.

Several things have become very clear to me, after browsing several dozen BNP-infested forums. That is their ability to brazenly lie, to avoid difficult questions (usually by coming back with a question), to query their opponents' bona fides, to attribute to their opponents things they have never said or done, to take statistics and quotes and to mangle them until they fit in with the BNP purpose, and to deflect almost any topic, no matter how innocent, into anti-immigrant propaganda.

There is also a strange propensity for dredging up posts by opponents that were made years before - as if these creepy creatures were keeping databases of who said what and when. Now why would they want to do that?

The BNP encourage and pursue cyber-activism with a vengeance. They realise, even if their opponents do not, that the Internet is an increasingly vital tool in the war of ideas and propaganda, and that the internet forum is one of the strategic fronts in that war. They have taken the initiative, meeting little real opposition away from the larger forums - and though, thanks to their own incompetence and stupidity, they frequently do themselves more harm than good, we should remember that often a post containing nothing more than a link to a crime story with ethnic minority involvement is all that is needed for them to get their racist message across.

Though it isn't my wish to either deny or denigrate the anti-racist stalwarts who do oppose the BNP on many forums, I think we can do so much more. They have many small local newspaper forums to themselves - forums which do have quite a wide local readership. We should be on these forums, not only challenging their views, but exposing their organisation for what it really is.

And the BNP make it so easy!

A thread on crime? Respond by posting of criminality among the BNP membership themselves - there are more than enough links to such stories. Or remind them of the missing money promised to Sharon Ebanks, collected from among their own ranks. Why do none of them ever question what happened to it?

Fastest growing party? Remind them that in 2005 (a great year for racism) the BNP had a net gain of less than 150 members, according to their own accounts as submitted to the Electoral Commission.

Corrupt local government? BNP supporter "EN Ronn" composed an article named 'Unsettling Accounts', reposted on Stormfront several times. Make good use of it! In fact, take a good look at Stormfront, including the back threads - there is so much to use concerning the corrupt internal workings of the BNP that you can counter them on almost anything and throw them completely off balance. And, of course, keep checking the regular anti-racist websites that contain tasty little tit-bits you can store away for future use.

Nick Griffin the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from anti-Griffin posting on Stormfront and similar sites, the best demolition of his reputation to date was penned by the man he deposed, the late John Tyndall. His magazine Spearhead may thankfully be defunct, but its website still exists, and contains many articles full of useful information and quotes. If it's there, you may as well use it.

We're Nationalists? Are they? Ask the majority of them to explain their "nationalist philosophy" and watch them squirm. On two forums they were asked this, and on both avoided giving any answer - in fact their response was to demand that we explain it (they always come back with a question when they have no answers, remember?). Eventually there was some desultory quoting from Wikipedia, and even the OED definition, but nothing in their own words. Which allowed us to show them up as the bone-headed bigots they really are, obsessed with one issue alone, and utterly clueless about the ideology they profess to follow.

We're patriots? So much to choose from to shoot that one down in flames - Mark Collett's "Churchill was a ****ing ***t" tirade is always good.

Undermining the BNP with facts about their own party's doings seems to me the best course of action in the current climate. They cannot dispute provable facts, and their general response when presented with them is a sort of embarrassed prevarication, and sometimes an abusive retort. It doesn't matter which - you have succeeded in undermining their credibility, and can be seen to have done so.

You may not win many converts to the cause of anti-racism but you will cause people to think more deeply about the organisation they may have been tempted to support or vote for. And mostly you can do it simply by posting the facts, the unavoidable, incontrovertible facts!

Article supplied by DG