Karlskirche, Vienna

The long-term destiny of the Western world has been a movement from pre-modern ‘Providence’ via modern ‘Progress’ to postmodern ‘Nihilism’. Providentialism’s linear future-oriented focus — emphasizing the role of reason to the detriment of divine intervention — easily merged with the Enlightenment idea of Progress, paving the way for the rise of modern science. The Enlightenment project — designed to eliminate uncertainty and ambivalence — was gradually undermined by postmodern inversion, implosion, relativism and nihilism.

The resulting “postmodern condition” calls for an investigation into the archaeology of post-modernity. Excavations of this kind are likely to encounter layers of 19th and 20th-century answers to 21st-century questions. A privileged site to start looking for answers is Vienna — “the capital of the 20th century.”

Metropolises such as Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, St. Petersburg and New York – 19th and early 20th-century cityscapes with significant Jewish Diasporas and epicenters of a widely felt civilizational crisis — were scenes or “laboratories” for intense, sub-counter-cultural “experiments” and avant-garde strategies designing prototypes of a future hybridized, postmodern world.Viennese modernism represents, according to Jacques Le Rider, “the appearance of a post-modern moment in the history of European culture.”  The Jewish satirist Karl Kraus damned Vienna  as a “research laboratory for world destruction.”

The revolution of (proto-post-)modernism entailed an increasing separation of representation from “the real.” In this context, the pseudo-assimilated Jew has been seen as “the prototype of the post-modern self.”  Major themes of theKulturkritik of the 1970s and 1980s, Jacques Le Rider points out, were prefigured in the Viennese modernism of 1900.

Vienna Court Opera, 1902

Vienna: “The Capital of the 20th Century”

At the turn of the 20th century Vienna was one of Europe’s largest urban centers, with a population of more than two million by 1910. By then, Vienna had been a major centre of political power and cultural patronage for centuries. Vienna was a place of tensions and paradox: Its mayor, Karl Lueger, had  anti-Semitic inclinations. Vienna sheltered both Theodor Herzl — the founder of Zionism — as well as Adolf Hitler, the founder of National Socialism. The city’s numerous innovative cultural and intellectual movements and figures radically changed Western culture and thought, according to Steven Beller:

Leading a very long list are two intellectual giants: Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. … Hans Kelsen revolutionized the theory of law; the Austrian School of Economics had a large influence on liberal economic thought; the Vienna Circle of philosophers developed logical positivism, and Karl Popper acted as that movement’s leading critic; Alfred Adler developed individual psychology, the first of many rebels from Freudian orthodoxy who established their own movements; Austro-Marxism brought innovative reinterpretations of socialist theory. Vienna also became a powerhouse of literary innovation: Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel, later Elias Canetti, were but the most prominent among a vast array of writers. It is the depth of intellectuality and talent that is perhaps the most impressive part of Vienna 1900.

Viennese ‘critical modernism’ had its roots in French decadence, the positivism of the physicist Ernst Mach and the “Dionysian” influence of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had, in the words of Joan Peyser, “repudiated nineteenth-century ideology and demanded the reorganization of human society under the guidance of exceptional leaders. Richard Wagner answered the call,” and became “the German superhero, the embodiment of the Dionysian ideal for which Nietzsche yearned.”

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Vienna circa1900 was, as Steven Beller points out, “a vibrant centre of radical cultural and intellectual innovation, with consequences that reverberated through the twentieth century.”  Its culture was heavily influenced by the largest Jewish community in Western Europe:

In Vienna especially the Jewish role was predominant.  Some of the major figures of Viennese modern culture … such as Adolf Loos and Georg Trakl, Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann, were not Jewish, but the vast majority were. The Jewish presence among creative figures in the plastic arts was not that large, although Jews were prominent as patrons, art critics and propagandists, and eventually as art historians. In most other modern cultural fields … such as psychoanalysis, the Vienna Circle, Austro-Marxism and literary Young Vienna, the people involved were in a large majority Jewish or of Jewish descent.  The liberal professions — lawyers, physicians and journalists — also had a majority Jewish presence, and it has often been claimed that the public for Viennese modern culture was also heavily Jewish.  This Jewish predominance was based on solid socio-economic grounds, for the social reservoir of Viennese modern culture, the educated part of the liberal wing of the city’s bourgeoisie, was largely Jewish.

Jews comprised 10 per cent or so of Vienna’s population, and even less, about 3 per cent, of the population of the lands of the later Austrian Republic. Yet Jews had a large presence in Vienna’s liberal socio-economic sectors, being 30 per cent of Vienna’s commercial self-employed. According to Beller, the Jewish emphasis on education was also much greater than normal: “Approximately two-thirds of all boys with a liberal bourgeois background who graduated from Vienna’s central Gymnasien [the elite secondary schools] between 1870 and 1910 were Jewish. (The equivalent proportion among girls was higher still.)”

As Louis Breger notes,

The new religious freedom that followed the German revolution of 1848 was accompanied by the lifting of restrictions and special taxes that Jews had suffered for many years. Now, they enjoyed the rights of full citizens; the professions were open to them, they could employ Christian servants, own real estate, and live outside the ghettos. These new opportunities had stimulated a flood of Jewish immigrants from the provinces during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860, there were 6000 Jews in Vienna; by 1900, the number was 147.000, the largest Jewish community of any country in Western Europe. In the capital, they found expanding economic, educational, and cultural avenues; by the turn of the century, they were a powerful presence in banking and industry, in medicine, law, journalism, literature, and music.

Vienna: Ringstrasse “The whole Ringstrasse had a magic effect upon me, as if it were a scene from theThousand-and-one-Nights.” (Adolf Hitler)

Members of the Austrian nobility considered it beneath their station to engage in trade, finance, and the professions, leaving these fields open to enterprising and educated Jews who were able to achieve positions of wealth and prominence. By the latter half of the 19th century, they dominated a number of fields. As Louis Breger observes:

By the 1880s, 12 percent of the population of Vienna was Jewish, yet they made up one-third of the student body of the university, with even higher numbers in certain fields: 50 percent in medicine and almost 60 percent in law. All the liberal newspapers were owned by Jews and a large proportion of the journalists were Jewish. As the turn of the century approached, the majority of the liberal, educated, intellectual elite of Vienna was Jewish. The politiciansVictor Adler — brother-in-law of Freud’s school friend Heinrich Braun — and Otto Bauer — older brother of the woman who became his famous case, ‘Dora’; the journalist Karl Kraus; the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig; the composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg — all came from Jewish families. Even that most Viennese of musicians, Johann Strauss, was, it is now believed, part Jewish.

Leon Botstein points out that the Jewish presence in Vienna “increased from less than half of 1 per cent in the Vienna of Schubert’s day, to around 5 per cent in 1862 when Brahms settled in the city, to over 10 per cent when Mahler left for Kassel in 1883. The Vienna in which Mahler died comprised over 175,000 Jews; the city he first encountered in 1875 comprised only about 55,000.”

Modernity attracted Jews from the periphery toward the center — as Philip V. Bohlman observes — “to the metropole, to the cosmopolitan culture of modernism, to the arts and sciences fostered by great universities, to the monumental synagogues, and to the concert halls and cabarets.” Jewish modernism took shape as a counter-history to the rise of European modernism, and Jewish music in the modern era inscribed its otherness “in such ways that it would circulate in a modern public sphere.” During the modern era, Bohlman points out, “the otherness of the [European] periphery increasingly shifted towards the center”:

Europe and the Enlightenment, and its Jewish form, the Haskala … are keys to understanding a revolutionary transition in Jewish music and Jewish music history. … Before the modernity articulated by Moses Mendelssohn and other … Jewish Enlightenment thinkers, “music” was largely vague as an aesthetically autonomous object in Jewish society.  In a strict sense everything in the synagogue was music — prayer, Torah and Haftorah, cantillation, ritual and liturgical interjection — therefore it was impossible to limit it to any single category.  … The cyclical nature of liturgical practices bounded music within ritual and prevented it from flowing over into the temporal world outside the synagogue.

As Jews from the eastern parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire “flooded the metropole” (i.e. Vienna), a new Jewish popular music took shape, trading in stories that “chronicled a new city culture in the liminal space between tradition and modernity.” The musical traditions these new immigrants brought with them gradually spread through the public sphere. As Bohlman points out,

One of the most important conditions for the complex new popular music was language. Each stream of immigration from a different part of the empire brought with it different dialects, which in turn were distinct from the other dialects found in Vienna. … Speech and language played a further role in the historical transformation of Jewish music, not least because of the partial supplanting of Hebrew with German in the synagogue. … The proliferation of Jewish dialects of German and different dialects of Yiddish in Vienna had a profound impact on the city’s popular culture. … TheWiener Mundart (Viennese dialect) that contributed to the formation of the genre known as Wienerlied (literally, Viennese song, but referring to an extensive repertory of popular song in Viennese dialect) bears direct witness to the specific influences of Jewish dialects.

Jewish composers in early 20th-century Europe formulated a vocabulary of melodic patterns and motivic meaning that allowed some of them — Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, among others — to create repertories that contained specifically Jewish symbolism. Max Brod (1884 – 1968) — the Jewish music critic, composer, philosopher, and future champion of Franz Kafka — established in an essay (“Jewish Folk Melodies”, 1916) the conditions for the Jewishness in Gustav Mahler’s music and by extension in modern Jewish music. As Bohlman observes,

Brod’s essay … turned the Jewish question many were posing inside out by claiming that what was presumably the most German trait of Mahler’s style, the march, was an expression of Jewishness. … The march style Brod ascribed to Mahler was religious and hassidic, even further removed from the firsthand experiences of Mahler’s lifetime. Mahler’s musical connection was possible, therefore, because of his “Jewish soul,” which was internal and thus contrasted with his merely “external consciousness” of German music.

Theodor Adorno also searched for Mahler’s “inner identities” by reflecting on his “musical physiognomy.” This search for Jewishness that preoccupied Brod and other 20th-century Jewish observers produced a constellation of themes orbiting Mahler’s music, claiming that it included — in Bohlman’s words — “specifically Jewish gestures, presumably absorbed from growing up in the Jewish soundscape of provincial Moravia.”

Mahler’s hometown Iglau contained one of the oldest Jewish communities in Moravia — a region well-known as the home to influential Talmudic scholars and famous rabbinical dynasties. Like many Moravian and Bohemian towns, Iglau was a German-speaking enclave within a larger Czech-speaking rural society. Czech was the language of farmers and peasants; German was the language of success and social advancement, the language of the educated, urban elites and the imperial bureaucracy.

Café Central, a key meeting place for intellectuals in late-19th-century Vienna

Mahler famously remarked that he was “thrice homeless: as a Czech among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world.” But Mahler was in “good company” as a prominent cultural figure of fin-de-siècle Vienna descended from the Crown Lands of Bohemia and Moravia: His fellow Bohemian Jews included Victor Adler, Otto Bauer, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hermann Broch, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Guido Adler, Otto Neurath, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg, and Otto Weininger.

It has been argued that Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is deployed as a remedy to misery: “Mahler’s lifelong juxtaposition of funeral march and dance music, dating back to his earliest childhood composition (a polka with funeral march introduction), is thus related to a specifically Jewish tradition. The Trio of the third movement of the First Symphony, with its interpolation of street music into the funeral march, is heard by many as an example of klezmer music as Mahler would have heard as a child and would have been heard on the streets of Vienna during his time there.”  As Philip Bohlman points out,

Mahler’s music revealed the afflictions experienced by a victim of anti-Semitism, to which he responded in particularly personal ways. Mahler’s marginality as a Jew, so his late twentieth-century champions claimed, exposed him to cultural contexts distinguished by jarring juxtapositions and pieces that failed to cohere as wholes. Mahler therefore employed the musical language of bricolage, somehow characteristic of a Jewish preference for hybridity over unity.

Rudolf Louis, one of Mahler’s anti-Semitic critics, summarized it thus in 1909: “What I find so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern Jew.” Louis’s choice of words, according to Julian Johnson, “underlines something true about Mahler’s music: it speaks the language of the Austro-German tradition but with a different tone, accent, and voice. It remains contested whether this difference is explained by Mahler’s Jewish origins … or whether it results from a modernist attitude toward language (marked by irony, parody, exaggeration) that exceeds the specific category of Jewish identity.”

Despite his conversion, there was never any doubt in Vienna that Mahler was Jewish.  As Leon Botstein points out, “Jewish identity was no mere matter of an individual’s theological practices or convictions. In the eyes of Jews and anti-Semites alike, it was a matter of birth, race, and nation, as well as faith.”

It has been suggested, that Mahler’s music reflects the tragic Weltgefühl of his era. Julian Johnson points out that Mahler’s music is like “an acoustic prism placed at the end of one century and the beginning of another, refracting musical voices from both historical directions, from Viennese classicism and early romanticism to the stylistic eclecticism and polyvocality of the twentieth century.”

Part II: The Emancipation of Dissonance

E. R. E. Knutsson (email him) is a freelance writer.

Brits (mostly indigenous) protesting the BNP during Nick Griffin’s Question Time performance

Alex Kurtagic has already described British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin’s appearance on the high profile BBC Television programme Question Time, 24 October 2009). Here I add to Mr. Kurtagic’s account by focusing on the lessons to be learned from its reception including the ideological pathology it revealed. But first some observations on the program.

The event, 22 October 2009

This program amounted to a public flaying, a verbal lynching of a lone victim by a mob that somehow failed to apprehend the unfairness of their joint actions. The spectacle demeaned all involved.

Referees often take sides to help the weaker party, understandable if not quite Marquess of Queensberry. On this occasion the “moderator” took the side of the stronger party against the weaker. The result was a foregone conclusion.

The referee on this occasion, a Mr. Dimbleby, took sides with both feet. He interrupted and cast slurs. Griffin was rarely able to complete a thought let alone a sentence. Just one example: Near the beginning of proceedings: Dimbleby asked Griffin to explain his claim that the BNP would be the only party that would accept Winston Churchill in contemporary Britain. As Griffin began to answer Dimbleby, speaking in parallel and at reduced volume slipped in a follow-up question: “Why have you hijacked his reputation?” This second question simultaneously interrupted the answer and conveyed a slur against Griffin’s character and motives in a way that impeded his defending himself. Because Griffin was beginning to speak he might not have caught the gist of Dimbleby’s sotte voce thrust. Even if he had heard, attempting to deal with it first would have necessitated interrupting his own train of thought. Dimbleby’s tactics were as low as they come in a session that approached blood sport.

Griffin was brave to subject himself to such an onslaught. He held up for the hour, only flinching in the form of nervous smiles and laughs out of sync with the feeding frenzy centered upon him. He affected amiable banter with the Black American playwright sitting beside him — banter which was not reciprocated. Indeed, she commented that “at one point, I had to restrain myself from slapping him.”

Griffin: Amiable banter with a Black American playwright Bonnie Greer

Griffin’s performance was not adequate to impress the educated classes. Few individuals would have been adequate under the circumstances. Nevertheless some of the fault lay with Griffin. He could not provide examples of press bias when asked by the “mediator”; he did not or could not deny an embarrassing statement available on youtube.com in which he portrays BNP policies as a ploy intended to prepare the way for more hardline ones. His new policy of withdrawing criticism of Jewish subversion and supporting Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians is ill-conceived because it is unprincipled and sure to undermine the BNP’s credibility in the long run.

One gaffe was failing immediately to confess to once denying the holocaust when challenged. It is not pretty to see someone dodge and weave especially when there is no need. So what if he once doubted that an atrocity occurred? He should have attacked the question, should have boasted of a generally critical stance and suspicion of authority that mark the British character.

Another problem is overly rapid speech. This is a mark of intelligence but it can also appear harried. Statesmen speak with regular diction and do not allow themselves to be hastened, least of all by impertinent journalists. Statesmen often pause before answering. They show their ease and authority by leaving room for others to interrupt. Rushing to fill silences is self-defeating.

At present Griffin does not have the gravitas to attract the middle- and upper-middle classes. Until he improves or new leaders emerge, this limits the BNP to a populism unable to capture a significant segment of the intellectual and managerial high ground. It can slow the rot but as it is presently constituted, it cannot save the culture or the nation.

What is needed is the involvement of people of exceptional presence. Not superhumans but articulate, self-possessed, and principled. Perhaps the unimpressive way Griffin handled some questions would have been weeded out by conversations with more sophisticated colleagues. There is reason to hope. Griffin can perform creditably in one-on-one interviews. In one such encounter the interviewer, renowned for bullying interviewees, lost his professional demeanor when Griffin accused him and the rest of the media of betraying Britain.

Griffin has also shown intellectual leadership by introducing some needed ideological reforms — the main one being a clarification of the BNP’s constituency. Griffin maintains that the BNP represents indigenous ethnic Britons — the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. This improves on the vague conceptualization of the English and British as branches of the White race, by implication interchangeable with any other.

The new formulation is in line with what is known about history, culture and genetics and is supported by the best scholarship on ethnicity and nationalism such as Walker Connor’s Ethnonationalism. The Quest for Understanding (1994). An ethnic group is a cultural and genetic manifold with interests and solidarity dependent on both elements. Griffin’s reform makes good political sense because it positions the BNP as the flag-bearer of authentic British nationalism which a race-based policy cannot. We realize we are White, but for reasons of descent and history, we think of ourselves first and foremost as English, Welsh, Scots and Irish — then British; then perhaps as part of the Anglosphere including the pre-1965 U.S.A., Canada, and Australia; then Western European; then part of the European sub-continent. Thus Whiteness is the least compelling of ethnic identities, hardly something with which to attract mass support.

That is not to say that Polish immigration poses as much as a threat as Caribbean or Pakistani immigration of the same magnitude. Nevertheless large scale Polish or German or French or Italian colonization of Britain would reduce indigenous ethnic interests.

The prelude

The riot that took place at the gates of the BBC studios on the day Question Time was taped was a violent manifestation of the illiberal stance taken over preceding weeks by the Left and minority activists. One expects conflicts among tribes to be robust and often nasty. So it comes as no surprise that the Board of Deputies of British Jews has consistently advocated censoring the BNP, not only from this particular program but from the media in general. They see the fight against British ethnic nationalism as a priority on a par with defending their own nation state in the Middle East, and their opposition to restrictive immigration to Britain as compelling as keeping Israel for the Jews.

Jewish intolerance of English ethnic sentiment is understandable even if shortsighted. Neither is it difficult to comprehend their simultaneous protestations of liberal and democratic values once it is realized that all are means to the single end of ethnic welfare.

What is difficult to comprehend is how genuine leftists can juggle such inconsistent positions. Of course the left has its authoritarian wing as does the right. Stalinism is the mirror image of Nazism in its contempt for freedom of speech. But the influential type of leftism in Britain does not present itself as Stalinist but democratic.

Consider the quality newspaper The Guardian. This is a sophisticated cosmopolitan daily that is the most influential intellectual publication on the left in Britain. The paper editorialized against Nick Griffin appearing on Question Time. It rejects, when it is not ignoring, the BNP claim that there is an indigenous British people. It does not bother to discuss this issue despite it being critical for understanding the BNP’s position. The claim is indisputably true and well known in the academic literature on the subject of ethnicity and nationalism. (See for example the history of indigenous English nationhood by the late Adrian Hastings in The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, religion and Nationalism [1997]).

The Guardian left accepts as allies individuals and groups that are obviously motivated by ethnic sentiment. The Guardian is not at all interested in distancing itself from those who criticize the BNP for nefarious reasons, such as contempt for indigenous Britons. They did not cast a critical eye on the Board of Deputies and examine its motives for seeking to keep Nick Griffin off television. One gains the impression that anyone who attacks the BNP is acceptable as an ally no matter the motive.

Thus we find Gary Younge, a Black columnist for The Guardian who opposed Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time. In doing so, he criticized those who attributed any cause of racial tension to minorities. The only cause of racism is racism itself, Younge asserted. In 2006 following the London transport bombings — by Muslims born and raised in Britain — Jack Straw urged Muslim women to cease wearing the naqab as a means of better integrating into British society. Younge thought this was “New Labour’s race-baiting rhetoric”. Racism, by which he means a strictly White malady, is produced by bad politics such as failing to service the White working class. Younge thinks that racism is not caused at all by minority behavior or numbers.

Thus the Guardian crowd not only overlooks minority chauvinist motives for hating British nationalism but tolerates vacuous analysis when it produces the desired result.

The British left is pathologically confused about ethnicity. Its adherents fail to admit that White peoples can have ethnic interests while implicitly sympathizing with minority and Third World ethnic and national sentiments and defending the perceived group interests of women and gays. In Britain the left equates Englishness and Whiteness, as does the neo-Nazi right. As if ethnicity is only a matter of race. The conflation serves the purpose of unleashing the powerful “racism” slur against all varieties of White ethnic affiliation — ethnic and national, affiliative and aggressive, moderate and extreme.

The left also confuses racial sentiment and authoritarianism, unleashing the “fascism” slur against all White ethnic loyalty. The representatives of a tradition that put class loyalty ahead of religion and nationality now look down snobbishly on those who have defected from a Labour Party that has abandoned its original White working class base.

The absolutism of the left’s anti-White nationalism needs explaining. The Guardian circle happily condemns in one breath the late Enoch Powell — in his time a professor of classics, cabinet minister, and conservative without fascist ties or sympathies — and declared neo-Nazis. This helps explain the campaign of violence conducted by the left against moderate and radical nationalists alike: The thugs are not trained to distinguish between them.

Of course the intellectual left does not condone violent attacks on the BNP. They just don’t take much notice. Meanwhile their concern for non-White victims of White racism rests on a hair trigger.

As a result of all this, British ethnic nationalists have nowhere to go except to parties such as the BNP because they are confronted with the choice of either surrendering what they see as vital interests or taking positions as intransigent towards the left and its ethnic allies as the left is towards them.

If the nice White consciousness types did create a more respectable middle-class party ,it would be called fascist and physically attacked for the reasons just described. To conduct public meetings and protect their officials they would need the protection of heavy-set men with short-cropped hair. Soon they would find that the bourgeoisie had deserted, leaving tough idealists willing to sacrifice all for their people. They would be pilloried, censored and mocked by the mainstream media. They would have created a duplicate BNP.

Let’s put these pieces together. By behaving with the selective intensity of an ethnically partisan movement, the left forces Anglo ethnic loyalists to either acquiesce or mirror this approach by adopting elements of fascism. Much the same observation was made by Kevin MacDonald in his book on anti-Semitism, Separation and its discontents: Toward an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism. However, in that book the stimulus that produced the reaction of anti-Semitism was Jewish ethnic group strategies. What needs to be explained is why the modern left, ostensibly universalist and cosmopolitan, behaves like minority ethnic activists.

Leftist rejection of any expression of White ethnic solidarity is a puzzle because it is tribal in its intensity and inconsistency. This is not to be expected from minds imbued with universal and rational values. The intensity alone is unreasonable. Why should ethnocentrism expressed by Britons, and not that commonly expressed by minorities, produce absolute opposition? Why seek to punish mild White clannishness but not the far more intense clannishness shown by minorities? The Left has long been the most important source of criticism of Israel’s racial nationalism but why is it not also a critic of organized Jewry for its support of Israel? Indeed, why does it turn a blind eye to the ethnic loyalties of Jewish and other ethnic activists in its own ranks? And why the embrace of diversity, which has been shown to undermine many leftist values including equality, a sense of community, trust, high wages for labor, welfare, and democracy?

The aftermath

The most important aftershock of Griffin’s Question Time appearance was the exposure of the treason of Justice Minister Jack Straw. In the Question Time program, Straw was Griffin’s main antagonist apart from the moderator. Despite coming under some pressure during the program, Straw was generally allowed to appear respectable. In response to a questioner’s assertion that Straw’s own ruling party was responsible for the rise of the BNP because of its lax immigration policy, Straw claimed that he and his colleagues had taken strong measures to control run-away immigration:

I accept entirely people’s concerns about the pace of change and I’ve seen that in my own constituency. . . . What we have done sir . . . we have responded to the concerns very significantly for example by tightening border controls, introducing the kind of checks on people going out as well as people coming in . . . What we’ve also done is to introduce the Australian points system for work visas. (Question Time on Youtube.com, Part 5 of 7)

Within a day Straw’s claims about his government’s immigration policy were shown to be a lie. Andrew Neather, a former Labour Party adviser, revealed that the surge in immigration beginning in 2000 was not happenchance as widely thought, but in fact the objective of a plan by Straw and then Prime Minister Tony Blair. The goal was to swamp Britain with Third World immigrants as a means of demoralizing opposition to multiculturalism. They intended to “rub the Right’s noses in diversity” and make Britain’s demographic transformation irreversible.

As Melanie Phillips observed, the BBC failed to even report Neather’s bombshell:

“Yet last Friday Neather revealed that the demographic composition of this country had been deliberately altered by the government in a deliberate deception of the British electorate who had voted it into power and whose cultural identity was now being deliberately and covertly destroyed. And yet everyone is either too indifferent or too intimidated to talk about this. Truly, this country is in a lethal trance.

Nevertheless, it’s not lethal enough to drive Phillips (who is Jewish) to support the BNP, despite their newfound pro-Israel rhetoric.

The public response to Neather’s revelation was overwhelmingly negative, as revealed by the hundreds of comments posted on newspaper discussion forums. As one correspondent stated with typical British succinctness: “Straw and Blair are traitors to Britain and should be treated as such.” And another: “Every member of the Labour Party involved in this act of treason should be put on trial for treason and all the immigrants that have been allowed into the country should be told that they will be deported.”

Yet Jack Straw, with the able assistance of the BBC, played the noble moralist on Question Time, despite long ago having declared war on the British people. Perhaps his hostility was aided by identification with immigrants rather than ethnic Britons: “I come from immigrant stock . . . I’m third generation Jewish émigrés on my mother’s side. . . . We don’t want to pull up the draw bridge” (Question Time on Youtube.com, Part 5 of 7).

Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time was valuable for showing just how desperate Britain’s situation is. This is a struggle of national life and death with powerful forces arrayed against us. For all their faults the BNP are the friends of the British peoples; they stand for national freedom and dignity and continuity. We should base our political choices on such fundamental issues: Better to have leaders who identify with and care about us than those who are indifferent or actually hate us.

The BNP are of great value because they give political expression to healthy ethnic sentiments increasingly evident in the British scene. Because they are the major force on our side, they are indispensible. While they continue to represent the interests of ethnic Britons, Nick Griffin and the other BNP leaders should be treated as heroes, warts and all.

Charles Dodgson (email him) is the pen name of an English social analyst.