Nick Griffin: Closet Objectivist?
The BNP website has recently featured profiles of its European election candidates. In party leader Nick Griffin’s profile, we learn that his favourite colour is British Racing Green and that he’s partial to crab. We also read that his favourite book is apparently Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is, to put it mildly, a strange choice for the leader of an anti-immigrant party based on ethno-nationalism and crude patriotism.
Perhaps Griffin hasn’t got round to reading Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness. Had he done so, he would have found the following:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
Perhaps Griffin is also unaware of the work of Rand’s friend Harry Binswanger, member of the Board of Directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, and prolific promoter of Objectivism. On immigration, Binswanger has this to say:
The problem of ‘illegal’ immigration can be solved at the stroke of a pen: legalize immigration. Screen all you want (though I want damn little), but remove the quotas. Phase them out over a 5- or 10-year period. Grant immediate, unconditional amnesty to all ‘illegal’ immigrants.
