More on Griffin

(I break my golden rule to reply at length to a comment on an earlier post.)

________________________

I would think most people came away from Question Time with their prejudices intact.

Griffin's fans would have seen the plain-speaking man of the people harried by the same professional politicians and ‘foreigners’ who have conspired together to alienate them.

His enemies will have seen what I saw: a bitter, alienated man, more or less incoherent in the face of sustained but civilised hostility, one more used to dealing with a mob such as can be arranged at short notice by the ironically named Unite Against Fascism.

Griffin’s views resonate with at least a million people in England. He believes he is capable of leading them and he probably is because despite his shambolic TV turn he is smarter than almost all of them. There will always be a man like Griffin ready and able to lead the angry and alienated who cannot cope with the inevitabilities of the world as it is and who have no voice.

His own will have loved him last night and he will have gained a few more sympathisers. I am not the first to say he could not lose with a seat at the QT table but it is necessary for all our sakes that he be there. Evil does its best work in the shadows. The way to ensure that this angry man’s day is as short as possible is to turn the spotlight on him. Let the sunshine in.

Politicians are blamed for ignoring and thereby alienating – and delivering – Griffin’s constituency. They have to accept the obloquy although they would be on the receiving end of it whatever they did or did not do. Oh, they should have done this (limited Immigration) and they should have done that (refrained from lying to the electors) but it would have made no difference.

For all societies in all times and places have aggrieved groups and they always have their Griffins. The reasons for the grievances will differ between those times and places but the anger is the same.

There will always arise a man with a penetrating gaze to articulate the rage, identify the longed-for scapegoat and offer the relief of simplicity. He will be a hero. Knowing that his constituency is swimming against the tide of history, he will tell them the opposite. He will promise to empower them and they, the oppressed, the ignored, they will simply turn back the tide – if only they will follow him.

He… they… will force the deluded majority to understand that they are on a road to disaster. That he and his followers have The Truth although the majority’s leaders will try and lie to refute it for their selfish ends. He is not your enemy. Those others are. He is your friend. He hears you. He smiles.

We have heard it all before. We know that the road down which Griffin would lead us always ends at Auschwitz and Belsen. We wish we could wish him out of existence. The UAF think that if they shout loudly enough he will cease to exist but they also believe that every time you say fairies don’t exist, a fairy dies.

We know that it is essential for the survival of civilisation that Griffin’s inevitable glory is as temporary as possible. His influence must be destroyed, preferably without doing his work for him in the process - not a lesson UAF has ever learned, nor do they want to learn it.

How?

A National Socialist ‘reich’ (for want of a better word) depends for its survival on the enforcement of secrecy in an atmosphere of fear among neighbours. There is only one way to counter such a tendency from its earliest stages: total transparency. Sunlight as disinfectant.

It is essential to get the Griffins on to our TV screens. Some of them, like Oswald Mosley, would do very well in front of a camera and smarter, harder debaters than last night’s panel would be required for them. Others, like Griffin, lack the communications skills suitable for television so that last night, in the face of determined opposition, he, victim representing victims, struggled to express the inchoate anger of the alienated for whom he believes he speaks – as do a million others.

Today, Griffin will be basking in triumphant self-pity and the congratulations of his gorillas. His inbox will be flooded with messages of love. But the moment will pass.

Politicians may rue the fact that they did not pre-empt the rise of the BNP years ago. Yes, they could and should have learned from history. No, they should not have treated the great unwashed among the electorate with such contempt. Yes, we now have acute national problems of identity and loyalty and tremendous local economic pressure caused by Labour’s open door to unlimited immigration, with the bulk of the newly arrived strangers coming en masse to streets where the contemptible great unwashed are trapped in poverty. Yes, these problems stoke Griffin’s boilers.

Alienation? Anger? Racism? Of course.

There is no simple answer to the mob rage of the alienated who, like the poor, are always with us.

The grossest crime of which politicians, in their softly-carpeted, sound-proofed ivory towers, should be accused (in this context) is pretending that the facts of human nature are not as they are. That will have to change. Contrary to the dream of Socialism, politicians will all – all – have to accept that mankind is not perfectible. Economic ease does not render all men nice. Original sin is true.

There will always be Griffins. They have to be pre-empted as far as possible, by truth and transparency which are also, as it happens, the solution to the world’s Griffin problems.

After QT, most people are getting on with their lives, glad that they and their friends and neighbours are not filled with hate like Mr Griffin and his henchmen. But soon the politicians will come canvassing and then the people will say, ‘These evil BNP people. They are taking advantage of opportunities which your party has created, Mr Candidate. What are you going to do to take the rug out from under them?’

So the politicians have work to do, to clear up the heap of trouble of their own making, atop of which stands Mr Griffin, waving to his supporters and quite possibly praying for real martyrdom instead of the martyrdom-lite of television.

In the greater scheme of things, Mr Griffin is not destined to be even a minor major figure on the political scene. He is no Oswald Mosley. Whatever happened to that Fabian-turned-Fascist?

Mr Griffin will be loved for a while by the minority who are like him or for whom, he tells them, he will speak against their ‘oppressors’. But their numbers are self-limiting. Mr Griffin has about as much chance of taking the levers of power as I have of an awayday to Pluto.

Do not expect anyone to change their mind having seen the face of Fascism on The Telly. Most people will be repelled. A small minority will be attracted.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.