Harry's Place

You probably don’t know it, but we’re currently 12 days into the British National Party’s ‘White History Month‘.

The British National Party has launched White History Month this November in response to calls from the British public following yet another officially-endorsed Black History Month in October.

Yes, apparently white Britons are crying out to the BNP, asking them to inform the public about ‘white history’. As a result, they’ve set up a White History Month Campaign Centre website as an ‘educational’ resource.

Throughout the BNP’s history, the Party has had a bit of a problem with ‘the Jews’. For example, here’s an early picture of the BNP’s founder and former leader, John Tyndall (left):

Under present ‘chairman’ Nick Griffin, however, the BNP has tried to re-brand itself as a mainstream nationalist party and a sort of pressure group for white Britons. Long gone, they say, are the Nazi loving ways of the Tyndall days. After all, the BNP even has an elected Jewish councillor.

However, Nick Griffin, unsurprisingly, also has a ‘past’. Prior to the ‘modernisation’ campaign, he described the Holocaust as ‘the Hoax of the Twentieth Century’ and advocated the use of ‘well-directed boots and fists’, stating that ‘[w]hen the crunch comes, power is the product of force and will, not of rational debate’.

In 1998, Griffin was convicted of distributing material likely to incite racial hatred. During his defence, he explained his views on the Holocaust:

I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria.

Still, you might say, that was ten years ago, and people change. The White History Month website suggests otherwise.

Scrolling down them main page, we find an enthusiastic endorsement of a book called March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, along with a large banner image which links to an online copy.

The BNP website states:

Written by prolific British National Party historian Arthur Kemp, March of the Titans is the complete history of the European White Race, from the earliest prehistoric times to the present. March of the Titans contains a wealth of hidden and suppressed facts and events, and uncovers the true reasons for the downfall of ancient civilisations such as Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome. This book will, quite frankly, change your view of world history forever.

The reality of March of the Titans is that is a poorly researched work of propaganda, written by a white South African with a ‘Nordic’ racial obsession. Quite how bad a work of pseudo-history Kemp’s book actually is has been ably demonstrated by the critical work of Dienekes Pontikos.

The section of Kemp’s book that looks at Nazi Germany contains some interesting material. Here is how Kemp chooses to illustrate Hitler in Chapter 64: ‘The Racial State – The Third Reich’:

Regarding the Nazis, Kemp starts as he means to go on:

Adolf Hitler is without question the one towering figure over the 20th Century – and perhaps even of the 21st, even if measured only in the reaction against him. Because of this fame, or infamy, Hitler and the Third Reich remain one of the most controversial topics of contemporary history.

Yet despite all the intense scrutiny and historical evaluation, Hitler and the Third Reich remain one of the most difficult historical areas with which to come to grips. The reason for this is that Hitler still has a massive influence on everyday politics and life at the end of the 20th Century, and it is difficult to find any source which has an objective view of the state created by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 in Germany.

It turns out that Kemp doesn’t just think it is difficult to find an ‘objective view’ of the Third Reich in general, but that the same ‘difficulty’ applies to the Holocaust as well.

In ‘The “Final Solution”: Nazi Policy towards Jews‘, Kemp reproduces a 1944 ‘prisoner’s release note’ from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, using it to argue that ‘imprisonment at the camps was not necessarily permanent’ and that the release note was written ’supposedly at the height of that camp’s gas chamber operations’. Kemp continues: ‘The belief that imprisonment at Auschwitz meant gassing is belied by the release of prisoners from this camp and by the fact that many thousands of inmates did in fact survive’.

Of the Wannsee conference minutes, Kemp states: ‘Contemporary historians have taken the word “resettlement” as used in the Wannsee minutes to be a codeword for extermination – there is however no evidence to support this interpretation’.

Already we can see that Kemp is flirting with Holocaust ‘revisionism’, but it gets more explicit:

Despite the presence of massive industrial operations and the short time that the camps were in existence (less than two years all told) it is traditionally claimed that some six million Jews were killed in gas chambers at these six camps in Poland. (The other concentration camps in Germany itself, such as Dachau or Bergen Belsen, did not, it is claimed, have gas chambers).

There is however considerable confusion over the exact number of Jewish deaths in all the camps, and indeed a debate over whether gas chamber executions even took place on the scale so often alleged. The complete lack of German documentation on the issue has not helped: unlike the Einsatzgruppen, where at least a partial record was kept of all killings carried out, the Germans kept no records of any mass murders in any of the camps.

An increasing number of historian dissidents are challenging the claim of mass exterminations of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War Two, to the point where such revisionism has been declared illegal in many European countries. This in itself is cause to question the allegations, as truth should not need to be defended by law. However, an analysis of the claims and counter claims is outside of the scope and purpose of this book.

It is clear from what Kemp has written that he is offering a thinly veiled endorsement of Holocaust denial, using slippery language to present ‘doubts’ about the Holocaust as being a matter of honest inquiry and a lack of clear evidence. The reality, of course, is that no mainstream, credible historian has any ‘doubts’ about the facts of the Holocaust and that Kemp is a propagandist for denial and pseudo-history.

To add insult to injury, Kemp also implies that Jews actually brought Nazi persecution on themselves and expounds a belief in shadowy ‘Jewish pressure’ being responsible for Britain entering the Second World War. Citing a favourite text of Holocaust deniers and Nazi apologists, a March 1933 British Daily Express front page article entitled ‘Judea Declares War on Germany’, Kemp states:

The very first declaration of war which led up the Second World War was in fact made on 23 March 1933, when a meeting of Jewish leaders from around the world formally and publicly declared war on the Hitler government, which at that stage was only two months old and had passed none of its racial laws.

On 24 March 1933, newspapers across the world carried the news that the leaders of the world’s Jews had declared war on Germany: the first declaration of war of the Second World War, and an event which goes a long way to explaining why Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939 for invading Poland, but not on the Soviet Union for doing exactly the same thing. The Second World War broke against Germany, not the Soviet Union, primarily because of Jewish pressure to destroy the anti-Jewish Germany; rather than a genuine concern for the Poles.

Here, Kemp presents the Jewish ‘declaration of war’, which was actually a call for a worldwide boycott of German goods, as though the Jews who organised it basically chose to boycott Germany almost at random, without any real reason or justification, which is an extraordinary abuse of history. He states that the Nazi government ‘was only two months old and had passed none of its racial laws’, as though, therefore, the Jewish boycott was unjustified. However, this is nonsense. As the Encyclopædia Britannica article ‘Nazi anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust‘ explains:

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they had made no secret of their anti-Semitism. As early as 1919, Adolf Hitler had written, “Rational anti-Semitism, however, must lead to systematic legal opposition.…Its final objective must unswervingly be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”; 1925–27), Hitler further developed the idea of the Jews as an evil race struggling for world domination. Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in religious anti-Semitism and enhanced by political anti-Semitism. To this the Nazis added a further dimension: racial anti-Semitism. Nazi racial ideology characterized the Jews as Untermenschen (German: “subhumans”). The Nazis portrayed Jews as a race and not a religious group. Religious anti-Semitism could be resolved by conversion, political anti-Semitism by expulsion. Ultimately, the logic of Nazi racial anti-Semitism led to annihilation.

Kemp acknowledges the existence of anti-Semitism in Germany prior to Hitler coming to power, but then goes on to present the Nazi regime’s treatment of Jews and imprisonment of them in concentration camps as a logical response to the call for a boycott:

Unwittingly, this public declaration of war on Germany only served to inflame anti-Jewish feeling in Germany: the German government barred Jews from holding public office or “positions of influence” which were defined as university lecturing posts, journalists or newspaper editors, amongst others.

This declaration of war also provided the legal basis upon which Germany would later justify its internment of large numbers of Jews inside Germany: America had after all, interned its Japanese, as had Canada, and Britain had interned all its Italians. If Jews had declared themselves at war with Germany, the Nazis argued, then it would not be unreasonable to treat them as a hostile group and intern them as well.

This, then, is the kind of ‘history’ that the ‘modern’ BNP is promoting. These are the kind of ‘hidden and suppressed facts’ that the BNP thinks will ‘change your view of world history forever’.

The BNP may have a new image, and the swastika flags and Hitler portraits may no longer appear in publicity pictures, but with its endorsement of March of the Titans, it is clear that the old Nazi sympathies are still very much present.