Issue 30, May 2007

Nation Revisited

An occasional email to friends. # 30, May 2007

The End of an Era

In the first years of the 21^st century, history will recall that it was neoconservatism that played the role of the most despised and least understood intellectual theory. For years it languished in the obscurity of certain US university think-tanks. Though its despised adherents were important protagonists of the Cold War, it never really got much of a public airing as a theoretical system of its own.

It took, improbably, the arrival of George Bush in the White House and September 11, 2001 to catapult it into the public consciousness. When Mr Bush cited its most simplified tenet – that the US should seek to promote liberal democracy around the world – as a key case for invading Iraq, neoconservatism was suddenly everywhere. It was, to its many critics, a unified ideology that justified military adventurism, sanctioned torture and promoted aggressive Zionism. (Gerard Baker, The Times, 13^th April 2007)

This quotation is not taken from a far right publication or website but straight from the pages of the The Times a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch and, until now, a staunch defender of American policy.

We could be witnessing the end of the neocons. Donald Rumsfeld has been sacked, Lewis Scooter Libby is under investigation and Paul Wolfowitz is accused of orchestrating a massive pay rise for his girlfriend Shaha Riza. 

Their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lurch from disaster to farce. Despite an extra 20,000 troops committed to securing Baghdad the insurgents were able to blow up the Iraqi Parliament in the heart of the city. After four years of fighting the security situation is getting worse and the American taxpayer is calling time.

The New American Century has got off to a shaky start. Wolfowitz’s dream of a world ruled by America and guarded by NATO forces is beginning to look doubtful. The war on Lebanon was a trial run to prove the effectiveness of American surveillance and Israeli Armour but both failed the test and the invasion of Iran had to be put on hold.

Now the neocons are running out of friends and money. Their policies have killed well over a million people including thousands of Coalition troops. And it is not just minority publications that are highlighting the Zionist connection but ordinary mainstream newspapers like the The Times. Soon Tony Blair will be gone from power and a new Prime Minister will have the chance to distance Britain from the war-mongering fanatics of Washington.

Armed Police by Vic Sarson

(This article was written at the time of the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Underground Station in July 2005. The police mistook the 27 year-old Brazilian for Pakistani suicide bomber Hussain Osman who fled the country undetected and was arrested by the Italian police in Rome. They made false statements alleging that the victim had run when challenged and that he had been wearing a heavy jacket. An inquiry established that he had not been challenged, he was not wearing a jacket and that he did not run. He was shot eight times in the head while sitting on the train. The police eventually issued an apology and offered the de Menezes family compensation. No charges were brought and the senior officer in charge of the operation has been promoted.)

I have long been hostile towards arming our police for the following reasons.

Firstly, that the average plod is not bright enough to be given or trusted with firearms. Secondly, those those who volunteer for firearms training are very often psychopathic individuals or those with a desire to kill. Thirdly, that Britain, unlike America, has no tradition and therefore no experience of armed police.

Despite British perceptions of American police being trigger-happy there are very strict controls in place and American officers seem more adept at using discretion. I hate to praise the Yanks but the arming of Britain’s police has so far proven disastrous.

There was, for example, the Stephen Waldorf case in the early 1980s when no roadblocks were set up, no challenges made or any attempt to ensure that the driver was the actual suspect. The officers got clean away with it and when an ‘inquiry’ was announced other armed officers threatened to stand down, as armed officers, in protest and without regard for the very expensive training they had been given, and the extra pay they had, up to then, enjoyed, or the need to protect the public, the acclaimed reason for their existence.

There was another case in the 1970s in Birmingham when armed police trapped an individual they had already wanted to shoot dead even if he had been carrying a lollypop. He used his pregnant girlfriend as a shield but that proved no problem to armed officers. They simply fired repeatedly into her, killing her and the unborn baby, in order to get ‘their man.’

Ten years ago a man walking along a riverbank at dusk and carrying a fishing rod, fortunately stood still when shouted at by armed police officers that he could not even see. He dropped the rod and lay on the ground as ordered. Had he been deaf as well as short sighted he too would have been shot dead, according to the officers. They had been called by an anonymous member of the public and told that a man was on the riverbank armed with a rifle and merrily set out to kill him, without first ascertaining that the report was true.

Not long after that we had the shooting dead of the man in east London who had just left a pub carrying a table leg. Again he was not challenged and the sniper that shot him was so far away and so well concealed that the victim was unaware that he was a target. The sniper in his own defence claimed to have fired because he was in fear of his life. Why then is he an armed police officer, or even a police officer? Other armed officers threatened to lay down their arms in protest if their colleagues stood trial. In the army this would have been mutiny and even in criminal law amounts to seeking to pervert the course of justice.

Going back to the miner’s strike of the early 1980s, we repeatedly saw the ugly spectacle of uniformed paramilitary police chanting mockingly like soldiers of an opposing army while attacking striking miners. We know that Scargill was as guilty as Thatcher, but the miners were not yobs, criminals or terrorists. They were ordinary workingmen trying to protect their employment and their communities. Look at those communities now!

A couple of years earlier, in central London, swarms of police officers waded into demonstrating nurses beating them mercilessly with truncheons. At the Countryside March they behaved similarly and without justification. The average young copper is a yob in uniform, while the average Inspector and Sargeant lacks maturity, let alone experience.

Daily we see armed officers waving sub machine guns as if they were Christmas toys. In 1974 The Police Review magazine expressed concern that the number of members of the public killed by speeding police cars for the previous year was 30 and was consistent with earlier years. A worrying trend, as the magazine pointed out, but in 2004, according to The Police Review the figure was 62 and was again consistent with that of previous years. So, since the 1970s an average of 45 people have been run over and killed by police officers, which puts the police on a par with the IRA. Combined with the number of shootings, a member of the public is more likely to die a sudden and violent death at the hands of police officers than by criminals.

Given that the police see themselves as an army there should be added to the Police Act a charge of mutiny so that officers who strike or threaten to, can be charged and punished with the utmost severity. Similarly a charge of cowardice should be added to prevent acts such as we experienced at the Brixton Riots and at the Broadwater Farm housing estate where senior officers left the public, and in the later case, even their own men, to the mercy of the mob.

Increasingly we are seeing the police becoming enemies of the people. Modern society has been made amoral by liberals who have come to infest education, the media and the law, among others, and having shifted the emphasis from severity to mercy, the only occasion they demand severity is for anyone who dares to challenge liberalism itself.

Postwar Elections

In Nation Revisited no 10, June 2006 we listed the election results of patriotic parties from 1959 to 2005. A correspondent has pointed out that some very brave men fought in local and parliamentary elections in the postwar years despite organized violence from anti-fascist terrorists that was funded and provided with intelligence by the state.

The first nationalist candidate to stand after the war in a parliamentary election was Air Commodore GS Oddie who stood for John Beckett’s British People’s Party in the Combined English Universities by-election of 1946. He got 239 votes – 1.3%. It should be remembered that this election was held in an atmosphere of total hostility just weeks after William Joyce was executed on a charge of High Treason. John Beckett and William Joyce had served together in Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and in the breakaway National Socialist League. Given the anti-fascist hysteria of the time it is remarkable that GS Oddie got as many as 239 votes. He later joined AK Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists.

In 1950 Andrew Fountaine stood as a Conservative in the safe Labour seat of Chorley, Lancs, despite being deselected for making anti-Zionist speeches. He got 22,872 votes – 46.8% but was narrowly beaten. He founded a short-lived movement called the National Front that was inspired by the writings of Francis Parker Yockey. He joined with John Bean in the late Fifties and helped to found the historic National Front in 1967.

T David stood in Ogmore, South Wales in 1951 for Phil Ridout’s British Empire Party. He got 1,643 votes – 3.4%. Phil Ridout had been a member of the prewar Imperial Fascist League and he was still speaking for the British National Party in the early Sixties. In the 2005 general election the modern BNP averaged 1,621 votes per candidate; T David’s 1,643 was therefore an impressive result only six years after the war.

Union Movement was founded in 1948 when over fifty nationalist movements, including Jeffrey Hamm’s British League of ex-Servicemen and Women, came together and invited Oswald Mosley to lead them. They contested local elections in the Fifties and achieved 33% in Shoreditch but they did not put up a parliamentary candidate until Oswald Mosley stood in north Kensington in 1959.

The story from then to the present day has been well documented. The courage and determination of the men and women who went before made today’s political progress possible. At a recent social gathering BUF veteran and 18B detainee Robert Wilkinson, who is in his nineties, spoke passionately against the importation of cheap goods and labour and the exportation of jobs and capital. He said that the current situation is the same as it was in the Thirties. He went on that we were right to fight the capitalist racket then and that we are right now.

European Action a newspaper in support of a National Party for Europe.

Edited by Robert Edwards. PO Box 415, Ramsgate CT11 9WW, UK.

webmaster@europeanaction.com

Views on The News

The Pound has soared above $2 driven by a bank rate designed to curb inflation.

It’s the same old merry go round - the Chancellor ups the bank rate to curb spending and the speculators buy Pounds and sell Dollars. This is good for shopping trips to New York but it makes British goods dearer in America and drives away American tourists. As the world trading blocs emerge a virtual gold standard will avoid the ups and downs that can ruin economies. In the mean time there should be an internationally agreed windfall tax on currency dealing to stop the speculators.

Neocon candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has promised closer ties with America if he wins the French Presidential election. Socialist Segolene Royal has promised to crack down on crime and immigration. And Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has failed to reach the second round with 11.5%. If Sarkozy wins France could be dragged into American wars in the Middle East. Let’s hope that Segolene wins on May 10^th and defends France’s decent working conditions. France has got the best health service and the best transport system because they put social priorities before profit. If France joins Britain as an American satellite it will further undermine the European social model that has made her the envy of the world and the chosen destination of thousands of expatriate Brits.

Tony Blair is holding talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to clinch a new Euro constitution before he quits his job. He is determined to leave on a high note after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once a certain Duke of Norfolk happened to be at the local railway station when a little Irish girl stepped off a train with a very heavy bag. She had come to join his staff as a maidservant at his home, Arundel Castle,

Timidly she asked a porter if he would carry her bag to the castle, about a mile away. She offered him a shilling – all the money she had. The porter contemptuously refused. Then the Duke stepped forward, shabby as usual in appearance. He picked up her bag and walked beside her along the road to the castle chatting to her as they went.

At the castle gate he took the shilling she offered him and waved her goodbye. It was only the next day, when she met her employer that the little Irish girl knew that it was the Duke of Norfolk himself who had carried her bag from the station for a shilling.

The truly great man does not think of his place or prestige. It is only little people who think how great they are.

Francis Gay – The Friendship Book.