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LadyEllen -> Churchill and the BNP? (10/24/2009 6:22:14 AM)
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The BNP has come under fire for using images of Churchill, adopting him as their own and stating that if he were alive today the BNP would be his natural political home.
Churchill was the wartime leader of the UK through WWII and therefore associated with a struggle against a vile regime based on racism and accompanying eugenics to (supposedly) improve one already great race at the expense by extermination of competing races. He is therefore associated equally with moral values which resist the sort of ideas promoted by the BNP.
Yet reading about Winston, one finds the truth to be somewhat shocking in this regard - there is no doubt that he was a racist and no doubt whatever that he was a lead supporter for the introduction of eugenics into public policy and law. Similarly there is no doubt from this that his views on the general superiority of the white race, (and peculiarly the British race), as compared to others and the threat they faced from supposed degeneration if mixed with other races, would fit him very much into the BNP mould.
The odd thing about all this is that Churchill (and notable others) derived their ideas in this way not from reactionary right wing bigotry but from the liberal progressive tradition; the notion was that the social misery of the poor was due to the genetic presence amongst them of genetically poor and "feeble minded" persons whose reproduction perpetuated that presence from generation to generation so perpetuating their misery. In order to alleviate that social misery and poverty therefore, eugenics should be implemented to remove that presence once and for all.
It was an idea born of enlightened aims, supported by a stetched interpretation of Darwinism and pretty vile in its potential execution. It was an idea fully implemented in many countries round the world - including the USA where it gained great currency in the 1930s.
Naturally, given that other races were taken to be genetically poor and "feeble minded", (particularly black African and other "coloured" races), it went without saying that any admixture of black and white would result in poor offspring and so social misery - therefore the prevention of mixed marriages (mostly a potential only in those days) was paramount to social progress and the promotion of civilisation. From there it is but a short jump to hold that believers in eugenics such as Churchill would have been against the sort of multi-ethnic society we have in Britain today, providing as it does for the heightened potential of admixture with the white race and influence upon it by supposedly feeble minded thinking derived from other genetically inferior ethnic groups in its midst.
We can therefore conclude that the BNP assertion to adopt Churchill is at worst not without merit and in reality probably well founded indeed.
This however presents urgent and great problems - Churchill is so much part of the British national myth that for these truths to be acknowledged is in itself dangerous. Combined with an association with fascists as in this case, the danger grows enormously, lending the BNP a credibility quite beyond its deserving. Yet we cannot change history to suit ourselves - or can we?
E
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