Tomorrow Belongs to Us

The British Far Right since 1967

Nigel Copsey, Matthew Worley, Nigel Copsey, Matthew Worley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317190882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book traces the varied development of the far right in Britain from the formation of the National Front in 1967 to the present day. Experts draw on a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives to provide a rich and detailed account of the evolution of the various strands of the contemporary far right over the course of the last fifty years. The book examines a broad range of subjects, including Holocaust denial, neo-Nazi groupuscularity, transnational activities, ideology, cultural engagement, homosexuality, gender and activist mobilisation. It also includes a detailed literature review. This book is essential reading for students of fascism, racism and contemporary British cultural and political history.

1

‘THE MEN WHO REWRITE HISTORY’

Holocaust denial and the British far right from 1967¹

Mark Hobbs

When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem to be true. This exercise of historical and psychological imagination […] enlarges the scope of our thinking.

(Russell 2008: 39)

Introduction

Bertrand Russell’s words may seem like an unusual place to begin a chapter on British far-right Holocaust denial, yet his discussion of how to approach different systems of historic and political thought are of great use to the academic study of Holocaust or genocide denial. All too often there has been an assumption that those who write and publish Holocaust denial are mad or stupid. While their beliefs about the history of the Holocaust have no foundation in historical fact or reality and are the product of closed minds locked into viewing the world through the lens of anti-Semitic conspiracy, these views are based on falsehood, manipulation and the exclusion of facts. Yet, we cannot ignore the reality that those who deny the Holocaust do often possess academic qualifications, and propagate a far-right, fascist or neo-Nazi way of thinking, abhorrent to the liberal imagination. To cast these individuals and their followers as mad or stupid is to ignore the serious danger that these ideologies pose and the violence that they produce. If we fail to understand why Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking underpins these movements then an important part of the history of the development of the British far right since 1945 is missing from the explanation of why these ideologies continue to exist.

The way in which denial and far-right policies were presented to the public reveals a great deal about the political direction of the various movements and parties on the far right but also the changing political and social character of Britain since 1945. This chapter will explore how Holocaust denial was both part of a political campaign to rehabilitate Nazism and how denial provided the epistemological platform for a ‘history’ that allowed far-right thinkers and followers to make sense of the world in which they lived and fought for power. It will argue, however, that these two positions were mutually exclusive.

The presence of Holocaust denial in the British far right was far from being a rehabilitative tool: it was a barrier to the political legitimacy of such movements in the minds of the public. Yet it was a trope that could not be jettisoned because it contained the key to the legitimacy of far-right political philosophy and ideology: it explained the failure of the movement to achieve power because a conspiracy led by Jews was working against it. Indeed the presence of the Holocaust in British collective memory and national commemoration was viewed as ‘evidence’ by the far right of the success of a clandestine Jewish world conspiracy. In short, the growing presence of the Holocaust in national narratives about the past confirmed their view that not only was a Jewish conspiracy at work but also that it was succeeding in its goals.

Denial and the ballot box

The defeat of Nazism by the Allied Powers in 1945 is of the utmost significance when examining Holocaust denial and far-right ideology. The military defeat of Hitler and the Third Reich meant that rather than seeing Nazism as a failed ideology or political system, supporters of Nazism and Fascism began to interpret this historical episode as a conspiracy: a re-run of the ‘stabbed in the back’ myth promulgated by right-wing circles in Weimar Germany. In far-right thinking, the Third Reich had not been toppled by popular uprisings as was the case with the February Revolution in Russia or later in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The Nazi regime and its ideas were rightfully branded as ‘evil’ and terrorist by the Allies but the epistemology that created it and its role as a counterweight to the failures of capitalism and liberal democracy in the minds of the electorate were largely ignored. As Jean-François Lyotard noted, Nazism ‘has not been refuted’ because ‘it has been beaten down like a mad dog, by a police action, and not in conformity with the rules accepted by its adversary’s genres of discourse (argumentation for liberalism, contradiction for Marxism)’ (1989: 106). It is clear that Nazism has been refuted morally and publicly as a result of the genocidal nature of the regime signified by the murder of six million European Jews.

However, for far-right thinkers and politicians, the popular attraction of Nazism to voters in the early 1930s in Germany and of fascism to Italians in Italy and later Spain meant that the ideology still has a resonance and role to play in shaping human culture, society and politics. Holocaust denial provides the answer to political legitimacy by removing the genocidal crimes of the regime. Yet it also has another role: in seeing the military defeat not as the result of the supremacy of Allied power and Hitler’s military bungling, a new false history is created. This ‘history’ employs Jewish conspiracy theory to deny the Holocaust, but also explain why the war was fought and won by the allies: the war was a Jewish war created and brought about by the Jews themselves with the Allied powers playing the role of puppets of Jewish control. Hitler himself created the trajectory of this history and thinking, demonstrated in his political testament:

It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests […] Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against those finally responsible, whom we have to thank for everything, international Jewry and its helpers, will grow.

Hitler’s words help us to understand the way in which the British far right began to interpret the defeat of Nazism and how, as a history, it could reformulate its own fortunes and understandings in a post-Third Reich world. The pre-war leader of the British Union of Fascists Oswald Mosley proved influential in helping formulate the counter ‘cultural hegemonic’ far-right narratives which would provide the framework for Holocaust denial. Yet despite Mosley’s and his wife Diana’s involvement with the dissemination of denial, their role in shaping the policies of the National Front (NF) towards denial was negligible (Hillman 2001: 13).

Hitler’s words are especially significant in the trajectory of the British far-right Holocaust denial because Arnold Leese, a fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite sowed the post-war seeds of British fascism and National Socialism. Leese’s disciples would dominate the NF and British National Party (BNP) and its ideological philosophy, a fact acknowledged by BNP leader Nick Griffin in 2003 when he sought to move the party away from the ideology of the ‘sub-Mosleyite wackiness of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League’ (Copsey 2008: 15). The domination of a band of neo-Nazi followers in the British far right would shape policies towards Holocaust denial.

The overt nature was not necessarily always on display to the public and was often hidden with a rhetoric which had to appeal to the public for votes and who were implacably opposed to Nazism. A respectable face needed to be presented or as Nigel Copsey explains, the iron fist needed to be covered with a velvet glove (2008: 15). The first example of this was seen in the speech given by A.K. Chesterton at the inaugural meeting of the NF in 1967:

The man who thinks this is a war that can be won by mouthing slogans about ‘dirty Jews and filthy niggers’ is a maniac whose place should not be in the National Front but in a mental hospital … A nation once noble and very great cannot be rescued from the mire by jackasses who play straight into the enemy’s hands by giving the public that image of us that the enemy most clearly wants to be given.

(Candour, October, 1967)

Chesterton’s speech was a call to supporters to find a more acceptable face for post-war British far-right ideology that would move the public to place a cross in the box of fascism at the election booth. While the direct correlation between the neo-Nazi, Leesite ideology and of the various incarnations of British far-right groups since 1967 is overt, it is not to say that this ideology was set in stone and impervious to change. As Paxton has stated, definitions are inherently limiting and we must look not just to what movements said but also what they did (2005: 14). Like all political parties the British far right had to respond to events, public opinion and the internal tensions within the membership. Holocaust denial provides a means by which to measure the differing ways in which policy and ideology were presented to the public. An overt and rabid expression of denial indicated an extremist policy, which proclaimed revolution and paramilitary activity, but a more measured tone relying on a pseudo-scholarly framework indicated a movement more drawn to achieving power by elections and the pursuit of populism.

The history of the Holocaust, and its place in British collective memory, was inevitably tied up with the way in which Holocaust deniers presented their arguments. It is clear that knowledge of the Final Solution and the fate of European Jewry was well known by the British public in various media outlets during the war and after (Holmila 2011: 30–35). The liberation of Belsen by British and Canadian armed forces in April 1945 became the central focus in the popular British imagination of Nazi atrocities. Yet a perennial anti-Semitism remained within Britain after the war and this coloured the view that the public held about the murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis (Orwell 2000: chapter 22). Indeed as Louise London opines, the British Government during and in the immediate aftermath played down the particularism of Jewish suffering in favour of stressing universal suffering in order to avoid a public wave of anti-Semitism (London et al. 2002: 511–515). Unlike the British-centric readings of the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contemporary society has read the history of the war through the events of the Holocaust. Popular understanding of the Holocaust, fostered through education and national memorial days, has become infused with understandings of the Second World War and Nazism. This increasing development of ‘Holocaust consciousness’ clearly had an impact on the way in which the British far right presented their arguments about denial and will be the subject of discussion in what follows.

With the establishment of the NF in 1967, a competing array of different parties with varying views about the future of far-right policies merged. It was clear, as outlined in Chesterton’s speech above, that anti-Semitism and outright Nazism had no place in the new united front. However, influential members of the far right harboured different views, particularly the future leader of the party from 1972, John Tyndall. Tyndall had been committed to a National Socialist vision for Britain, joining forces with Colin Jordan – a follower of Arnold Leese and beneficiary of Leese’s property and political legacy (Walker 1977: 27–28). Jordan and Tyndall had formed various groups based on National Socialist principles and ideology in the 1950s and into the 1960s. They parted company in 1963 after conflicts over the future course of British National Socialism and romantic rivalry over Françoise Dior (Thurlow 1998: 238). Both Jordan and Tyndall had been excluded from the movement because of their commitment to National Socialism, yet while Jordan refused to water down or popularise his message Tyndall began to orchestrate a charm offensive to get himself and his Greater Britain Movement into the NF. It seems that on the part of Tyndall and Chesterton there was a good deal of negotiation through back channels (Copsey 2008: 15–16). When Tyndall dropped his commitment to National Socialism in his magazine Spearhead in 1966 and published a pamphlet entitled Six Principles of British Nationalism in 1966 which called for a united far-right front, and was devoid of Jewish conspiracy and calls for National Socialist solutions, Tyndall was admitted to the NF in exchange for the dissolution of the Greater Britain Movement.

While Tyndall remained loyal to Chesterton up to his retirement in 1970 his eyes had always been on the leadership of the movement. Tyndall would acquire the leadership in 1972, and remain leader until 1980, except for a two-year gap in which he was ousted from the position of chairman of the party by ‘moderate populists’ in October 1974 only to return as chairman in 1976 (Thurlow 1998: 251–254). These political machinations and PR exercises reveal a great deal about the tone and course of Holocaust denial in the NF. Tyndall was willing to publicly compromise his beliefs and views in order to secure power and influence while still privately retaining his commitment to National Socialist ideology.

The key to exercising this was his control of propaganda and public rhetoric and the support of Richard Verrall. Verrall was an intellectual figure, with a first class degree from the University of London; he also had a mind full of conspiracy and was appointed an editor of Tyndall’s Spearhead magazine in 1976. He was to provide the rational arguments for conspiracy and racism. Under Verrall’s tenure as editor, Spearhead began to directly push the question of conspiracy out into the open. An article in Spearhead in March 1976, ‘The Jewish Question: Out in the Open or Under the Carpet?’, sought to revisit the propaganda and issues sidelined under Chesterton’s vision of the NF in 1967 (Spearhead, No. 96, 1976, p. 7). Verrall’s Did Six Million Really Die? published in 1974, began to be referenced in Spearhead. The work is a canon of Holocaust denial literature, published under the pseudonym Richard Harwood, who was described as a specialist of the Second World War at the University of London. The use of a pseudonym underscores the NF’s leadership and propaganda strategy with regard to Holocaust denial. By giving the text an author in an academic institution Verrall intended to imbue the book with academic merit. Furthermore, the presence of footnotes, bibliography and scholastic framework was all designed to present the idea that Holocaust denial was a viable form of legitimate historical revisionism. This technique was intended to give scholastic credence to the views that had been prevalent in the extreme right since the mid-to-late 1940s regarding the murder of Jews and further legitimate the presence of a Jewish conspiracy at work in the world.

In essence, the book was emblematic of an attempt by the NF, and other deniers who used the work, to give an academic cloak of respectability to Holocaust denial, sympathy for National Socialist ideologies and forward the thesis of a Jewish conspiracy. Denial and the ‘Jewish question’ was therefore both out in the open (with the veneer of pseudo-academic authority) while the more National Socialist genocidal mentalities remained hidden under the carpet. The ploy was unsuccessful; anti-fascist groups were successful in demonstrating the neo-Nazi credentials of the NF. The Front’s attempt to win power by fielding over 300 candidates in the 1979 general election ended in failure when the party failed to gain one per cent of the votes cast. The presence of Holocaust denial alone was, of course, not the sole factor in the resulting humiliation and defeat. The defeat is largely attributed to the election campaign of the Conservative party. Margaret Thatcher repositioned the party’s stance on immigration policy and as a result drained the NF’s key election platform, a fact the NF leadership acknowledged in its publication National Front News (Durham 1996: 95). However, the popular rejection of the NF also reflected the extent to which British society had become increasingly aware of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This awareness-raising has been attributed to the success of the Granada World at War episode ‘Genocide’ and the American mini-series Holocaust, first broadcast in 1978 (Pearce 2014: 30–31, 170–173).

Verrall’s Did Six Million Really die? proved to be hugely influential and remains a staple in the catalogue of Holocaust denial literature. The work itself also directly impacted on the trajectory of denial. When published by Ernst Zündel in Canada, Zündel was put on trial in 1985 (and again in 1988). His defence was supported by testimony from Robert Faurisson, Bradley Smith and David Irving, all of whom were well known for their Holocaust denial, admir...