Wednesday, January 20, 2010

From The American Conservative. Brownshirts at the door?

The lives of genuine conservatives in Britain have been made much harder by the recent growth of the British National Party, a sordid and disreputable group with its origins in racial obsessions and Holocaust denial. Its success, achieved by faked reasonableness and slick PR, ha seemed to confirm the liberal Left’s view that the Right is just one step away from Hitlerism, steeped in prejudice and loutish stupidity.This is a grave burden to proper, patriotic conservatives, and I am ceaselessly amazed at how many people are taken in. Perhaps a few words of explanation and background are in order for any on the far side ofthe Atlantic who might have been beguiled.Imagine a political party where the ex-leader launches an investigation into his successor because he thinks he may be Jewish. There is, infact, no need to imagine. The British National Party’s podgy chieftain,Nick Griffin, actually had his ancestry probed for alleged Jewishness by the organization’s former Fuehrer, the late John Tyndall.