BNP leader Griffin on Question Time tonight

I didn't say I have assumptions based on a persons race I did say you can make assumptions based on a persons religion, much as you can if they say by the way Im a member of the klan a religion is a belief system joining the klan is joining a belief system.

if you wish to say that if people say they belong to any group it doesn't matter because they can on a individual level believe anything will you apply that to bnp members or nazis , so if someone says I fully support the bnp will you think well this person may well want a multi-racial state even though the history of the bnp and the nf before it opposed that.

could well be you could find someone who joined the bnp because they thought it was actually a party for multi-racialism maybe some members of the nazi party joined because they thought the same .

would you call the people who laughed at griffin when he said he was a member of the klan but a non violent part prejudiced, how are they doing anything different from me making a informed assumption based on what they understand as the history of the klan

in a way I may be somewhat unfair to jack straw because there is some conversion into Judaism and the number of mixed marriages is reaching record numbers in the uk so things are changing, but either way it does have a history of self imposed segregation of discouraging people from marrying non jews .

Im not alone in saying this you will find books written by jews covering what Ive said

 

Once again...

Judaism is an ethnoreligious category, it's a race and a religion, a cultural identifier as much as a faith, something you are born into (like being an Englishman for instance) so perhaps more than most religions it is possible to be Jewish without sharing much or any of the ideological or cultural assumptions that historically may have formed part of the ehtnoreligious culture. This is particularly true of Judaism, which is what made your comments about it absurd, but it can also be said to varying degrees of the other faiths, which function as much as cultures into which people are raised without their choice as religious or ideological dogmas. It is quite possible to be a Christian and not be homophobic, sexist or in favour of gang rape, though those features form part of the literal doctrine of the faith, just as it is quite possible to be a liberal muslim who does not wish to wage jihad against every non-believer, despite what the letter of the Quran may say. The beliefs of those who belong to these cultural categories very often bear little resemblance to the literal or doctrinal content of the faiths themselves and are formulated instead by wider cultural influences from the societies and peergroups in which these individuals are raised, not to mention their own choices when these individuals reach maturity. Every Jew is not an on-message spokesperson for all other Jews and all the doctrinal and cultural tenets of Judaism... this is to invoke the faulty and absurdly misguided notion of essentialism, whereby every member of any group must possess all the characteristics which are associated with that group. This is childishly erroneous logic and the foundation of all prejudice...

This is why we judge people's beliefs according to the decisions they make and the groups they choose to identify with, such as joining the Labour Party, the BNP or the KKK, and not according to the race, religion or culture they happen to have been born into. Really Jonny I have repeated this over and over again and you seem unwilling or unable to engage with the idea. These are quite simple distinctions between concepts, and I know you're not stupid, so unless you're playing some kind of thought experiment with us I fail to understand what you're trying to get at by seemingly wilfully misunderstanding quite simple ideas and speaking up in favour of dangerously ignorant prejudices...

 

^

 

so if you had nick griffins son for example if he has one, and he was a member of the bnp that wouldnt say anything about the person if he was like 60 and a life long member of the bnp or klan .

you see as I pointed out earlier I as good as was born into a fundermentalist religion and if my religion believed in say burning witches, Id either leave, disassociate myself, or be a fellow traveller with witch burning .

as I understand it if your mothers a jew jews accept you as jewish, that doesnt mean that you have to class yourself as jewish, you have jews who convert to other religions or no religion so they do have a choice .

you view seems to suggest that anyone can belong to any group and say well it doesn't matter if my group roast baby's alive, i was born into it therefore its got nothing to do with me

I left my religion because I concluded the things in it were unethical things like sexism rape of captives in fact much of the old testament is unethical, if I was a jew Id do what lots of my fellow atheist former jews do and leave same as if my old dad was a nazi Id leave that too.

 

Jonny are you being wilfully ignorant? You are not born into a political party, a political party is not a wide-ranging cultural, racial or ethnic group intimately tied to social traditions... a political party exists solely to promulgate a political position, and whoever signs up to such a party, for whatever reasons, including social conditioning, is accountable to the beliefs they have accepted and decided to promote. Members of racial, ethnic, cultural or religious groups are not by definition proponents of a political position or even a unified set of beliefs and do not by definition represent and promote every single tenet of the culture into which they were born... Do you understand the difference between a political party and a religion or race? Do you understand the difference between an individual and a group?

 

well looking at what he has written in this thread i am going to have to disagree. someone who is saying such absurd things and is not rasist or ignorant is clearly not right in the head!!!!

 

As a point of interest, Jack Straw has apparently stated in the past that he considers himself a Christian...

 

Maybe so, maybe so, to be honest this is not Jonathan's finest hour, but having spent many hours in fine conversations with the fellow I can say for certain that he is not the simple minded racist bigot his words here make him seem...

 

haha

we seem to have reached a empass in that you seem to think of a religion in one way I think of it in another way this could be because of our seperate experience of religion
and if jack straw thinks of himself as a christain or if he had said he was a atheist buddhist or muslim I dont think my criticism of him is justified

 

Well if you can't tell the difference between a religion, a race and a political party I would say your understanding of religion is different to most people's and indeed to the objective definitions of those terms...

In the case of Jack Straw it turns out that his race (Jew) his religion (Christian) and his politics (centre-left) are three totally different things, and it would be very hard if not impossible to draw conclusions about one based on either of the other two. This demonstrates exactly what was wrong with your assumptions about his politics based on his religion or race. It was in fact a pretty clear example of antisemitic prejudice which made you assume something which was in itself obviously incorrect. Chocolate digestive

 

BBC News 24

Plus its repeated every 10 minutes, compensating for the short term memory loss.

 

Anyone who backs Griffin is either nasty, ignorant, racist, violent, stupid, vindictive or the recipient of a lobotomy...

...or all of the above.

 

haha! all so true!!!!!!!!

 

whats the sustainable population of the uk or the world with much less or no fossil fuels ?

and remember solar panels and all alternative fuels are made with the use of oil so they aren't alternatives to oil.
that would include nuclear power wind biofuels etc etc

 

Alternative energies like wind and solar etc may well make use of oil for initial builds and installation but once spent they don't need a constant supply of oil in order to continue producing energy. It's not using oil at all which is the problem but using it unsustainably, alternative energies could well form part of an integrated solution to our moving away from oil...

Not that the uk's sustainable population or alternative energies have anything very much to do with the BNP's policies...

 

http://www.postcarbon.org/press-release/44666-new-pci-study-concludes-no-combination

http://www.postcarbon.org/new-site-files/Reports/Searching_for_a_Miracle_web10nov09.pdf

if you look at the eroei of alternative energy's no way are we going to be able to transition , what your basing your projection of the future is blind optimism , and when you consider what happens if your wrong and we end up with a 70 million or a 100 million population and we can support 2 to 10 million I think its foolhardy .

why I posted this in this thread is a comment earlier sarah-jane said immigration is good well not if it leads to mass starvation war and cannibalism it isn't .

 

That is exactly the kind of separatism that the BNP propagates. Foolhardy it may well be, but if people are fleeing a drought-stricken country in which the the only water is the rising sea level, then we are going to have to experience some kind of lowering of conditions.

Admittedly from my position of privilege right now, I would much rather share whatever we have equally, even if it's not enough, than restrict people's movements to relatively resource-rich countries. http://www.noborder.org/

Interestingly, many of the bnp inner circles are climate change deniers, and have vociferously denounced the current copenhagen talks as a Marxist ploy to reallocate resources to Muslims etc.

To whoever it was that said UAF are just as bad as the BNP, I think that probably some of that was rhetorical. In case you really think it though: UAF is a broad coalition, what is called a united front, spearheaded at some level by revolutionary socialists, but comprising lots of active trade unionists, and even members of the parties whose policies have created the conditions in which fascism thrives. Although it is not always the most effective organisation, due to its very diversity of opinions, it is an absolutely necessary one. It is ridiculous to propose that it is made up of closet racists.

It does court controversy, because you need that to get into the media, and you need a media presence in order to combat pervasive racist ideologies. It has to be broad because fascism is ultimately only beatable with the participation of everyone in society, including you all behind your screens. That does not mean just not being a fascist, or telling people off when they seem to be overly nationalistic, or even actively creating alternatives, although of course these are necessary. It means building an active anti-fascist movement that can explain to people experiencing oppression why nazi ideologies are not the answer, keep a collective memory of how we have combatted fascism before, and oppose the neo-liberal policies that created this mess.

To bring this back to questiontime; I'm surprised that no-one has yet advocated my own position of no-platform for fascists. Freedom of speech is all well and good, but so is an analysis of objective conditions. When someone is using their freedom of speech to propagate policies that would take that same freedom away from other people in the community, or exclude them completely, I think it is acceptable to stop them. Note that this doesn't mean they can't think, or discuss those ideas, it means that they can't forward them on mainstream television, on a channel paid for by the general public, to a huge audience. 14,000 new members, or interested parties, is blatantly a lie, but they will have seen a surge in membership, they always do, and racist and homophobic attacks rise whenever Griffin goes somewhere to speak.

As it happens, he got a pretty tough time, but he has got extremely easy rides on the radio before this. He got to attack unpopular wars, and some other deeply unpleasant panellists, the BNP pretty much saw it is a victory, they got the soundbites out of it. And what happens if someone decided to ask a question about public transport or something? Nick Griffin says "I think the amount we pay for public transport is disgraceful, and we need to be reallocating money to it right now". And all the other panellists have to sit there and nod, to agree with Griffin. So he comes off as a reasonable man from a reasonable party, giving them public legitimacy that we absolutely cannot afford to give them.

I was protesting outside against the talk, and am an active anti-fascist. Please don't post saying fascism is not a threat in this country - I spend enough time on it to know that it is. Also, check this shit out - https://www.youtube.com/results?sea...y+vs+nick+griffin&search_type=&aq=4&oq=casset

Peace and love and shit

Jacob

 

The world energy crisis is a global problem, if the nightmare scenario were to happen it's head-in-the-sandism to say that if we were to reduce or limit the uk population then we would be ok, while the rest of the world politely dies in an orderly fashion in their own nations. The only solution going forward is to continue to invest in new technologies, a combination of which, combined with radical reduction in energy expenditure and greater energy efficiency, could solve the problem. Stopping a few foreigners coming into Britain is not any kind of a solution, and if it harms the economy in the short to medium term it may actually be part of the problem, since we need the prosperity brought by economic migration to help fund solutions to climate change and the energy shortfall, these require leadership and investment, and will not be helped by hair-shirtism...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6BLFdBfgfU

Fusion power may be viable in a couple of decades, it's one of the most promising energy alternatives currently in development. Used alongside solar and other renewables this could easily solve our current energy crisis for centuries to come. As I've told you many times before Jonathan, your Malthusian doomsday hypothesis totally discounts advances in technology, which in fact are a given, to the extent that resource exploitation cannot be accurately regarded as linear. It's not blind optimism to assume that technological advance will continue, but blind pessismism to imagine that it will suddenly stop and that we will be miraculously stuck with current technologies for ever.