No waking the dead in Preston

Fifty seven hard line racists gathered in Preston last weekend to commemorate the life of John Tyndall, the Nazi uniform wearing founder of the British National Party.

It was the sixth time that a collection of Nazis and Anti-Semites no longer welcomed or favoured in Nick Griffin’s new version of the party, have gathered to remember their mentor.

Tyndall was the eloquent writer of such immortal lines as “the Jew is like a maggot feeding off the corpse of the write race”. He died in 2005 while facing charges of behaviour likely to incite racial hatred, surprisingly.

In the dock with Tyndall back then was Nick Griffin (who Tyndall was also fighting a legal case against and who had become his sworn enemy) and Mark Collett, Griffin’s dynamic sure-to-be life long friend who only last week went onto the BBC’s Panorama programme to besmirch the very memory of their love-in.

The only thing that truly held all of those present in the same room was their burning hatred of Nick Griffin, and not any long term admiration of the fallen “Führer".

The meeting was organised by Mark Cotterill who has no real history of ever being much of a fan of Tyndall when he was actually alive. During the eighties and early 90’s Cotterill was instead a senior member of the Flag faction of the NF. They were anti-Tyndall’s BNP and vehemently and often violently, anti-Nick Griffin’s “Political Soldier” National Front. Confused? You should be.

Cotterill later moved to America to front-up the American Friends of the BNP a source of funding for the BNP once Nick Griffin took it over. That new found friendship didn’t last long and Cotterill soon found himself back in England and deciding to support the then displaced Tyndall.

Paul Ballard, a veteran Croydon based fascist made his way to Preston for this knees up. Ballard’s been in and out of the BNP over the years when he’s not been teaching English as a second language to “Johnny Foreigner”. In a rather non-illustrious career on the far-right, Ballard’s been everything from a hard line Nazi to a moderate and even occasionally, a Griffinite “radical”. He was even (another) co-defendant of Griffin’s during another race hate trial during the 90’s over editing something that Griffin had written. [Not well enough?-Ed)

Ballard was last seen in public sulking at a BNP meeting in Dagenham where the BNP had to vote to allow non-white members into the party back in February 2010.

Chastising Ballard on that fateful day in 2010 was none other than Richard Edmonds. Out of all of those present in Preston, Edmonds is probably the true heir to Tyndall’s legacy. He followed Tyndall in and out of the old NF, the New National Front and even into and then out of the BNP. And then back again.

Edmonds even ran the BNP and edited Tyndall’s long-running record of boredom, Spearhead during one occasion when Tyndall found himself again in prison in the 1980's and the BNP had a membership of some 400.

Back in February 2010, Edmonds upset a few old-timers when he used his lofty position as Tyndall's spokeperson on earth and gave Tyndall’s beyond-the-grave blessing to allow non-white members into the BNP. It seemed to have been mostly out of pragmatism or expediency because he was later filmed denigrating white people he assumed were “race mixers” because they did not like BNP literature being posted through their doors. Such obedience to Griffin back then not only helped Edmonds onto the BNP’s Advisory Council but also earned him the soubriquet “veteran Nationalist” from the party, which in their vernacular means “Old Nazi”.

Edmonds was back to being an “old Nazi” when he announced he was standing against Griffin to be party leader earlier this year and positively labelled a “crank” by Herr Griffin when he finally left the BNP earlier this month to rejoin the National Front. One can only assume that Ballard (bizarrely nicknamed Trotsky by his admirers), and Edmonds sorted out their little squabble in time for the long journey to Preston. As ever, Edmonds made a vicious and racist speech that mentioned all the usual favourites, Jews, blacks, Asians, Nick Griffin..

But they were not alone. If the BNP and NF are not cranky enough for you, the British People's Party sent a speaker along. This meant that a dog somewhere was without it's master. This tiny Yorkshire based sect are perhaps better known for administering the Redwatch website and producing homicidal paedophiles that keep bombs under their child’s bed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7469180.stm

The BPP’s Dave Jones, who enjoys nothing more than dressing up in historical costume himself, spoke of the wonderful work he has done in the village of Todmorden where he comes last in almost every election. Jones distributes a local leaflet with stunning regularity warning mostly, of the dangers of the local school/church/pub/bus stop/phone box being turned into a Mosque. Jones managed to waffle on long enough to earn the ire of most people, but did earn himself a small ripple of applause when he announced that he has been working very closely with the NF of late. This must have given Edmonds a bit of a migraine!

Most people were there however not to dig up old stories about “JT”, but to hear the BNP’s other MEP Andrew Brons, announce the launch of a new party. Brons, as he has consistently on this subject of late, disappointed. He didn’t even turn up. I was not surprised.

Brons and Tyndall go far back, further back than even Edmonds goes. In the mid 1960’s Brons was a member of the National Socialist Movement, a bitter rival to Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement. To mention that there were two tiny Nazi sects around at the time would mean dragging up the history of the two group's competing leaders (Tyndall and Colin Jordon). So, here goes; having competed for the hand in marriage and become engaged to perfume heiress and all round naughty Nazi Françoise Dior in the sixties, poor old Tyndall got sent to prison and while in there and no doubt enjoying the pleasures of reading Mein kampf, his friend and mentor Jordan ran off with and eventually married Dior!

Later, Brons was to take over the leadership of the National Front in 1980 when Tyndall jumped before being pushed out of that party for being too public with his Nazism. So there was actually, no love lost between those two, ever.

Of course, Brons later had a fall out with Nick Griffin when they were in the National Front and Griffin wanted Brons removed from his job!

So, Brons and Griffin may have become friends again for a while and have now fallen out (again), but going to a memorial for Tyndall was obviously just too much, even for Brons. So instead of turning up, Brons sent along a letter in which the former politics lecturer pointed out that Tyndall had never been to university and also that they had often had differences of opinion!

There was no new party announced by Brons, and it still does not look likely there will be. He’s preparing himself for his own faction’s BNP conference this weekend which will be pretty much the same crowd that were at John Tyndall sixth annual wake.

In their game, friends become enemies and then friends again, even when you’re dead.



Thanks to Matthew Collins at HOPE not Hate

BNP establishes 'social networking' branch in America

The British National Party has set up a branch in the United States – nine years after it abandoned a fundraising drive across the Atlantic amid controversy over its links with American white supremacists.

The far-right party described its new US "unit" as simply a social networking organisation designed to help expatriate BNP supporters stay in touch with one another, and the party, while working abroad. But the Government last night accused the BNP, which has been hit by internal strife following poor general election results, of looking overseas to promote "hate and intolerance".

The new US branch has signed up 90 sympathisers, while a Canadian branch has 60 members. The party is also trying to boost its presence in Europe and the Far East. The American operation is being co-ordinated by an IT worker from Croydon, Adam McArthur, who recently moved to the US to take up a job. Mr McArthur, a BNP officer since February, lives in Berryville, a small town in rural Virginia just over an hour's drive from Washington DC.

The move follows the collapse of American Friends of the BNP, based in Virginia, which was set up to raise cash for the party and was addressed by Nick Griffin, the party's leader. Members of the group included David Duke, the leader of the Ku Klux Klan at the time, who was photographed with Mr Griffin. James W von Brunn, the white supremacist who shot dead a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington last year, attended two meetings.

The organisation was run by Mark Cotterill, a veteran figure on the far right, who drew inspiration from the IRA's success in raising money in North America in the 1990s. It folded amid claims that its fundraising activities were illegal under American law. Mr Cotterill returned to Britain and has left the BNP.

In January, Mr McArthur registered under American law to reactivate the party's presence in the country. According to US government documents, he said the branch would "organise US-based members, so that we can develop social networking campaigns to increase votes for the BNP in the forthcoming local and general elections".

He also said he would advise the party's supporters on how to vote in British elections. The move was part of efforts co-ordinated by the BNP's overseas liaison officer, Andy McBride, to forge links with sympathisers around the world.

Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities, told The Independent: "This just shows there's nothing British about the BNP. It's a sign of the party's own weakness that it has to look outside Britain to try to peddle their messages of hate and intolerance."

Mr McBride said the new branch would be carefully monitored to prevent extremist sympathisers of organisations such as the KKK from joining.

"People are told that if they come into this party because they hate people, or hate the colour of their skin, it's the wrong party for them," he said. Mr McBride added that the party did not encourage donations from members living abroad because it involved completing "immense" amounts of paperwork.

Meanwhile in Britain

The British National Party is struggling under a weight of debts estimated at more than £500,000 and has suffered a series of resignations of prominent activists. Its cash crisis has arisen because of unpaid bills to suppliers and the cost of fighting legal actions with Unilever over the use of an image of a Marmite jar in an election broadcast and with the Equality and Human Rights Commission over its constitution.

Nick Griffin fought off a challenge to his leadership and has promised to step down in 2013. Last May, he said he wanted to "make way for a younger person" and focus on getting re-elected to the European Parliament in 2014. But infighting has continued to destabilise the party, with Eddy Butler, its former campaigns director, and Richard Barnbrook, the BNP's sole London Assembly member, both recently expelled.

Last week, Wiltshire's only BNP councillor, Michael Simpkins, quit the party over the scale of its debts and said he would sit on Corsham Town Council as an independent. He said he knew of two local printers that waited six months for the BNP to pay its bills. Meanwhile, Jim Dowson has said he will be stepping down as the BNP's chief fundraiser. He has faced accusations of making inappropriate advances to a young female activist. He has denied the claims and said he is the victim of a dirty-tricks campaign.

Independent

Do the BNP and EFP leadership still believe in the mass slaughter of billions?

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Roddy Newman. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

In November 1995, the guest speaker at the BNP's annual rally in London, was the most extreme fascist party leader that the world has ever produced since Hitler, the late William Pierce (1933-2002), who led the National Alliance splinter group from the American Nazi Party. In Pierce's 1978 novel, "The Turner Diaries", which he wrote under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald, fascists use nuclear weapons, terrorist bombings, and other methods to wipe out all of the world's Jews and non-white people, or, in other words, billions of people. The novel can be read online though if you want to read it, you'll have to find it yourself because we're not linking to it.

Not surprisingly, when the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard, found out about Pierce's 1995 visit to London, he banned him from visiting the UK for life. See an obituary of Pierce here, which was written by the late John Tyndall (1934-2005), the BNP leader who invited him to London, to read about Howard's lifetime ban.

Pierce also wanted to kill many white people. In his July 26, 2002 obituary in "The Independent" newspaper, you can read:

When writing The Turner Diaries, he recounted in a radio broadcast in 1997,

"I wanted to take all of the feminist agitators and propagandists and all of the race-mixing fanatics and all of the mass media bosses and all of the bureaucrats and politicians who were collaborating with them, and I wanted to put them up against a wall, in batches of a thousand or so at a time, and machine-gun them."

Pierce's novel, which is very well known in international far right circles, has sold nearly 500,000 copies, which is why the FBI has described it as "the bible of the racist right" (see an April 3, 2000 article on the website of "The Guardian", "Gospels of hate that slip through the net", to see how many copies the novel has sold, and the FBI quote), and which is why a prominent American Jewish anti-fascist group, the Anti-Defamation League, has described the novel as,

"One of the most widely read and cited books on the far-right".

So, is it conceivable that John Tyndall did not know about Pierce's pro-murdering billions of people views when he asked him to be the guest speaker at the BNP's November 1995 annual rally, seventeen years after Pierce's novel had been published, and did Tyndall also secretly wish that he could kill billions of Jews and non-white people?

Pierce's National Alliance does not stand in elections like the BNP, so Pierce did not have to worry about his insane ideas putting voters off his party, but the BNP does stand in elections, which may explain why Tyndall never openly said that he shared Pierce's views.

The British anti-fascist magazine "Searchlight" has said of the popularity of "The Turner Diaries" in Tyndall era BNP circles:

"The growing influence of US nazi ideas was illustrated in November 1995 when William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, addressed the BNP annual rally. Pierce was also the author of The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of a race war which, it has been claimed, inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma bombing. By the mid-1990s The Turner Diaries was better known on the British right than Mein Kampf."

(Searchlight feature, "A century of British fascism", "1990 to 1999: Ballot box to bomb - fighting on all fronts").

In the earler mentioned "Independent" obituary of Pierce, you can read:

"His influence on Britain was incendiary: after reading another novel of his called Hunter [in which the hero travels around killing various types of people who fascists do not like, for example, interracial couples, journalists, and politicians]...[Tyndall era] British National Party members began a sticker campaign against "mongrelisation", and attacked a mixed-race couple in a London pub."

"Hunter" was dedicated to an American racist serial killer, Joseph Paul Franklin, a former American Nazi Party and Ku Klux Klan member who has been accused of 20 racist murders. Franklin also confessed to shooting the American pornographer Larry Flynt, plotted to assassinate the African American politician Jesse Jackson, and threatened to assassinate US President Jimmy Carter because of his pro-black civil rights views.

Nick Griffin, who was famously convicted for inciting racial hatred after he denied the Holocaust in a 1998 article for the BNP magazine "The Rune", claims that the BNP has become a respectable democratic political party since he took over its leadership from its hardline pro-Nazi founder, John "Mein Kampf is my bible" Tyndall, who led the BNP from when he founded it in 1982 until 1999, but I will show in a moment that respectable Holocaust-denier Nick Griffin's claim may be as incorrect as his view of the Holocaust.

See the Conservative Party blog webpage here to see a picture of Tyndall in a Nazi uniform, and to see the "Mein Kampf is my bible" quote.

Tyndall stayed at Pierce's home in 1979 when he was in the US, and put Pierce up at his home when he visited Britain in 1995, as Tyndall admitted in his 2002 Pierce obituary, "A Great Man Passes On", so personally I really do not have much doubt that Tyndall secretly shared William "Great Man" Pierce's wish to kill billions of people.

If Holocaust denier Nick Griffin's claim that the BNP has become respectable since the Tyndall era is correct, he must have at least distanced himself from Pierce, because of his murderous views, but a "Searchlight" webpage has alleged that Griffin was close to Pierce: "Dr. William Pierce, who before his recent death was one of the world's foremost neo-Nazis and [allegedly] a close ally of Nick Griffin."

That webpage, which is here, also states that Griffin's pamphlet, "Who Are the Mindbenders?", which listed Jews in the British media, was inspired by a Pierce article and pamphlet about Jews in the American media, "Who Runs America?"

A Northamptonshire Racial Equality online article, also alleges that Griffin based his pamphlet on Pierce's article and pamphlet: "Mindbenders is [allegedly] based on Who Rules America?, a similar pamphlet written by Dr. William Pierce, one of the world's foremost neo-Nazis and a self-confessed ally of Nick Griffin."

The same article also said: "The BNP has a long relationship with William Pierce...In August 1999, Pierce addressed an American Friends of the BNP meeting in Arlington, Virginia...Pierce's articles regularly appeared in Spearhead when it was the official BNP magazine, and in 1995 he addressed a BNP rally in London."

So, does Nick Griffin secretly wish that he could also kill billions? He became the BNP leader in September 1999, the month after Pierce spoke to the AFBNP meeting, but he was allegedly a "close ally" of Pierce, and allegedly based his pamphlet on an article and pamphlet which was written by Pierce.

Does Nick Griffin also have the same kind of kill mass media owners fantasies that Pierce had, because on August 11, 1996, Griffin was quoted in the "Wales on Sunday" newspaper as having said: "The politicians, those in charge of the mass media, police chiefs and others responsible for creating this multi-racial hell hole must face trial and pay the ultimate penalty."? That quote is also in the just cited Nothamptonshire Racial Equality Council online article noted above.

What about Mark Cotterill, the founder, and original leader of the England First Party splinter group from the BNP, who was an EFP councillor in Blackburn from 2006 to 2007, and an EFP candidate for Preston City Council in 2009? He went to see William Pierce, and said that he spent three of the most enjoyable and interesting days of his life talking to him, so does Cotterill secretly wish that he too could kill billions of people?

In "Hands Across the Water", an article about the American Friends of the BNP group which was published in the Fall 2001 issue of "Intelligence Report", the quarterly magazine of the American civil rights law firm the Southern Poverty Law Center, you can read:

"His [Cotterill's] networking in the United States began in 1993, when he visited neo-Nazi William Pierce at his National Alliance headquarters in West Virginia.

"'I managed to talk to Dr. Pierce in depth", he wrote later. 'I had three of the most interesting and enjoyable days of my life there, and I hope to make a return visit in the near future.'

"In 1995, Cotterill moved to the United States. He was the U.S. distributor of the British far right publication Right Now! and corresponded with future BNP leader Nick Griffin."

Go here to read the full article about the AFBNP, which was founded by Cotterill. As the article points out, Pierce's "The Turner Diaries" was sold at AFBNP meetings.

According to an Anti-Defamation League webpage in 1999, Pierce gave a speech in Thessaloniki, Greece to members of far right parties from Greece, Portugal, Romania, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, and South Africa, and given how well known "The Turner Diaries" is in far right circles, is it conceivable that the leaders of those parties also did not know about Pierce advocating multiple genocides, 21 years after his "bible of the racist right" novel had been published? Do the leaders of those far right parties secretly wish that they too could kill billions of people?

Pierce's novel is not simply a far right fantasy which will never inspire violence, because it is no secret that a number of fascist terrorists were inspired by it (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, London nail bomber David Copeland, and three American terrorist groups, the Order, the New Order, and the Aryan Republican Army). See the already cited "Guardian" and "Independent" articles, a webpage of the already mentioned and highly respected American civil rights law firm, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and especially the already cited Anti-Defamation League webpage, to read about "The Turner Diaries" inspiring those terrorists.

The SPLC is highly respected because of its tolerance education, because of its informative quarterly magazine about hate groups, "Intelligence Report", which is widely read in American law enforcement circles, and because its compensation for racist violence lawsuits have bankrupted a number of American fascist organisations and leaders in recent decades.

For example, after the White Aryan Resistance skinhead gang killed an Ethiopian student, an SPLC lawsuit against the group and its leader, forced it to pay over $12 million compensation to the student's son, which led to the seizure of all of the assets of the group and its leader.

Another SPLC lawsuit bankrupted the Aryan Nations group by forcing it to pay over $6 milion to a woman and her son who AN members had shot at and beaten up. AN was forced to sell its famous compound to pay the compensation award.

It would be a good idea if European lawyers began using SPLC type lawsuits to bankrupt the BNP, Nick Griffin, and other European fascist organisations and leaders. No doubt the SPLC would be happy to tell European lawyers how to sue fascist groups and leaders, who could also be sued after homophobic violence, or after other types of violence. This SPLC webpage which discusses some of their lawsuits might be helpful.

It is also no secret that "The Turner Diaries" inspired the most notorious American racist murderers of modern times, John William King, Shawn Allen Berry, and Lawrence Russell Brewer, who battered a black man, James Byrd, Jr., and then shackled him to a truck and drove off. When he was shackling Byrd to the truck, King allegedly said: "We're starting "The Turner Diaries" early." See the ADL webpage to read more about Byrd's murder.

David Copeland said that he planted his three nail bombs in London to spark off a race war which would make white Britons vote BNP, and more "Turner Diaries" inspired fascist terrorism could be round the corner, because if you go to the website of the "Searchlight" magazine, and put the word "terrorism" into its search engine, you will find articles which discuss a number of British would-be terrorists who were members of the BNP, or other British far right groups.

See a HOPE not hate anti-fascist group webpage at to read more about former BNP member David Copeland and his attempt to create a race war to make white Britons vote BNP. The HOPE not hate page has a link to a BBC News profile of Copeland which discusses his BNP membership, and his involvement with them.

Suspect in US Holocaust museum guard killing has links to BNP

James Von Brunn attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National Party

A white supremacist who killed a security guard at a Holocaust memorial in the US has links to the British National party, which gained two MEPs in last week's European elections.

Thousands of visitors fled the museum in Washington yesterday after James Von Brunn opened fire, killing a security guard. In the gunfight that followed the 88-year-old was shot and is now being treated in hospital.

Today it emerged that Von Brunn, a longtime antisemite, had attended meetings of the American Friends of the British National party (AFBNP), the party's fundraising arm set up to raise cash from rightwing activists in America.

Mark Cotterill, who ran the US-based organisation before it folded in 2001, said: "He did attend meetings. I have just checked my database and he is down as 'meetings only' so he was not a major donor, although he may have put some money on the plate when it was passed round."

The AFBNP treasurer, Todd Blodgett, also told the Washington Post that he and Von Brunn had attended fundraising meetings together in Arlington county, Virginia. Nick Griffiin spoke at least two AFBNP meetings and the BNP leader said the money raised by the organisation made a "significant contribution to the BNP's [2001] general election campaign".

Yesterday a spokesman for the party said: "You get a lot of people coming to meetings but I don't think you can blame us for that. Even if he did go to meetings it was nothing to do with us."

However, anti-racism campaigners said Von Brunn's links to the BNP underlined its extremist agenda.

"It is clear that Nick Griffin is at the centre of an international network of white supremacists," said Dan Hodges from Searchlight. "The BNP must explain the full extent of his organisation's links with this antisemitic gunman."

The far-right party gained its first two MEPs in last week's European elections – Griffin in the north-west and former National Front leader Andrew Brons in Yorkshire and the Humber.

During the campaign photographs emerged of Griffin alongside the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard Stephen "Don" Black – one of the extremists banned from the UK by the then home secretary, Jacqui Smith – and he was widely criticised for defending a BNP leaflet that said black and Asian Britons "do not exist" and should be referred to as "racial foreigners".

US police today said Von Brunn, who is in a critical condition in hospital, would be charged with murder and may also be charged with hate crimes and civil rights violations.

At a press conference in Washington police chief Cathy Lanier said security guard Stephen T Johns was shot when he opened the door of the museum for Von Brunn. Other security guards opened fire, and Von Brunn slumped to the ground just outside the museum door.

Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office, said Von Brunn was known to the police "as an antisemite and a white supremacist, who had an established website that had espoused hatred against African Americans, Jewish [sic] and others".

Von Brunn wrote an antisemitic treatise, Kill the Best Gentiles, decried "the browning of America" and claimed to have exposed a Jewish conspiracy "to destroy the White gene-pool".

In 1983 he was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on "a Jew judge" and "Negro jury".

Civil rights groups said they had been monitoring Von Brunn for decades. Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Centre's intelligence project, said: "He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil. He's an extreme antisemite."

His Internet writings say the Holocaust was a hoax: "At Auschwitz the 'Holocaust' myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations."

Guardian