The BNP, James MacIntyre and the Tiger Woods strategy
Tiger Woods, a golfer of some renown, was unfaithful to his wife and crashed his car into a tree. You may have read about it in the newspapers.
He took some time away from golfing. He has now decided to return, but many people consider what he has done to be despicable, and he is afraid that he will be unpopular with the golf-loving and wider public. He is therefore pursuing a careful media strategy, which involves saying he regrets greatly what he has done in very controlled circumstances.
This is a clever strategy, because when he comes to do a more open press conference, he will , as and when asked about his behaviour off the golf course, be able to say that he has spoken about these matters in previous interviews, and is keen instead to talk about his chip shot at the 13th.
Thus, he hopes to re-integrate himself into golfing society, and that everything will become as normal as possible thereafter.
This is also the basic strategy of the BNP, and in particular their racist leader Nick Griffin.
Nick Griffin has, in the past, been very publicly dismissive of the holocaust, suggesting that it is a convenient fiction invented by, presumably, Marxists. Or Zionists, or perhaps black people. The details need not detain us, because what is important is that most people regard this as a wrong, even abhorrent thing, to have said.
So Nick Griffin has adopted a ‘normalisation’ strategy, akin to that of Tiger Woods.
This strategy is being unwittingly aided and abetted by some parts of the media/blogosphere, such as John Harris of the Guardian or Iain Dale of Iain Dale.
It has also been partially aided and abetted this evening by James MacIntyre, who has written a well-meaning but confused piece on his New Statesman blog in praise of Iain Dale, and his rigorous interviewing technique.
James MacIntyre describes his general position towards the BNP as one of ‘non-engagement’, but then goes on to set out a different position, in which it is acceptable to engage with the BNP as long as it is done well and their lies are exposed. He praises Iain Dale, therefore, for the rigour of his interview.
This, unfortunately, misses the point.
It does not matter how well Iain Dale conducted the interview, not least because in a small magazine like Total Politics, very few people will read it.
What does matter is that Nick Griffin, by allowing himself to be interviewed on the matters on which he is most controversial and from which he now seeks to distance himself as part of his normalisation strategy, will be in a position to say to other interviewers that he has already covered these matters fully, and would prefer to talk about other matters – perhaps about his chip shot at the 13th, but more likely about how the BNP is being victimized by Marxists.
It does not matter that Iain Dale, and indeed John Harris, are ‘fundamentally decent’ people – I do not doubt that they are. What matters is that they, and now James MacIntyre, have assisted the BNP in their normalisation strategy.
James MacIntyre in particular, as a self-professed ‘non-engager’, needs to think through the logic of his position, and ask himself honestly why he is making these exceptions to his rule.
Is it really all about the BNP, or is there just a little bit of a media love-in going on, where he is keen to show how open-minded and noble he is, noble enough even to praise one who has apparently crossed him previously.
More importantly, he needs to look at what ‘no platform’ or ‘no engagement’ means in the real world, where one small, awkward platform leads to another bigger, more comfortable one.
The racists at the BNP are clever as well as evil, and we need to be as clever back.
This is an article hardly worthy of comment, but I will have a stab anyway. Supposedly it was written on the orders of the NUJ/Communist party or suchlike. The R word is so over-used it has become meaningless. The plethora of articles on the BNP and Nick Griffin can only mean one thing – that the left is worried about the rising popularity of this party. In fact it is not a party, but a movement, and if the journalist bothered to read the BNP website, he would see that it is full of sensible, common sense policies. This is in contrast to the left’s Common Purpose attempt at creating a Marxist state. It is clearly following the principles of the Frankfurt School.
I await for my comments to be published, but in the light of mentioning Common Purpose, I am not holding my breath.
Paul is not a member of either the Communist Party or the NUJ, and who knows what you consider “suchlike” to include.
The R word continues to mean what it ever has: the use of race as a means to divide one person from another, by which to derive political policies and to place one race above another – which is exactly what the BNP try to do, though they’ve become a bit more nuanced since the white/not white dichotomy of the 1930s.
As for the left’s “common purpose”, clearly you’ve got no experience of the Left – and the fact that you use the word “Marxist state” without being tongue in cheek deprives you of all credibility. They say a little learning is a dangerous thing and this bit about the Frankfurt School certainly proves it, because it has little relation to what the Left is about these days.
You are up early! Congratulations. I know a hell of a lot about Common Purpose the organisation thankyou very much and its influence in British society. I can only assume that you are a Common Purpose graduate yourself.
As for the Frankfurt School, you just look at the 10 principles which it espouses, and you tell me if they have not come to pass in the years since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.
You can know all your like about the Common Purpose, but I suspect it exists only in your head and in the heads of some other looney toon conspiracy theorists on the far right. There isn’t any worldview except “Stupid” under which the aims of Blair, Brown etc can be said to be equivalent to that of many members of Labour, the minority groups within Labour – LRC, Socialist Appeal – or outwith: Green Left, Socialist Party, SWP etc.
On the subject of the Frankfurt School, I don’t know what ten principles ‘it’ espoused, but said school of Marxism a) consisted of different academics, each of whom had their own ideas and b) deviated from Marxism considerably, to the point were I’ve seen people like Habermas called “a radical liberal”.
I await education on the subject, but the mention of the Frankfurt school (and I googled the ten principles and of course up comes a bunch of right wing sites) seems based on the wiki article on Political Correctness, which suggests that PC was based in Frankfurt School Marxism. Like I said, a little learning is a dangerous thing, because PC as it is denounced today is a very complex issue, not the result of a “Marxist” conspiracy.
Dave @2 and @4: Please do engage with the above nonsense if you like. I’m not going to bother if that’s alright.
I am grateful for your further comments. I would just refer you to this webpage, and I have studied this concept for over a year now, but this page is a good summary:-
http://www.encyclopedia.com/video/K0bqQetlgJ4-death-of-west-frankfurt-school.aspx
It is not the only page, and I am not the only person talking about it. Dismiss it if you will, but more and more people are getting to know the truth. I won’t waste any more of your time, or mine. Good day to you with best wishes. Have a nice day.
P.S. Common purpose website:
http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/
PPS. Perhaps a little knowledege is better than none at all??
Anne, what has the common purpose website got to do with any of this? Or with “the Left” and a “Marxist state”? I don’t doubt you that these Common Purpose chaps are baby-eating monsters…but you seem to have built a narrative around them that doesn’t quite fit.
That stuff you linked to regarding the Frankfurt School is, by the way, hysterical. It’s the sort of thing you see around here about once a year or so in a far-right newspaper delivered free to everyone. The last one had a picture of David Miliband and Angela Merkel and labelled them both “Marxists”.
If you believe this sort of stuff, about the USSR having “bought” a Frankfurt University department and how “teaching homosexuality to children” undermines “Western culture” (whatever that is), can I suggest perhaps reading some serious political philosophy and not the joke kind, or maybe getting out of whatever basement you live in and talking to real people?
One of the interesting things about the interview was that Griffin trotted out the same stuff as Anne about the evil Marxists conspiring to change our society, and Iain’s response was “maybe this is true about some things, but not civil partnerships”.
Iain’s been a bit shy about saying which bits of our society he believes have been imposed on us by the evil Marxists – but I’m guessing that in the Tory Party, this conspiracy theory is relatively common place, such that what surprised Iain was not that Griffin believes it, but that he would apply it to the subject of civil partnerships.
This Frankfurt School nonsense Anne is flagging up is a staple of most far right freaks. About three years ago I began a long and extremely depressing “dialogue” with someone who made more or less exactly the same points as Ann, and like the aforementioned it quickly became clearly they hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. The opening shots of the debate can be found here.
I would suggest Ann follows Dave’s advice.
Cheers Dale.
Griffin comes across like a twit, but a fairly normal one.
The gradual process of normalisation and legitimation continues. If anyone thinks Dale was “tough”, well fuck them. Saying “that’s bollocks” doesn’t constitute a tough interview. Griffin is allowed to peddle nonsense and lies on multiple counts. What a joke.