Ken Booth, the North East region BNP organiser, objected to a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau by a party of 130 school children from the North East, accompanied by Phil Wilson, the MP for Sedgefield. On his return Wilson vowed to keep fighting the “Holocaust denying BNP”, which polled 8.9% in the by-election in which he was elected last July.
Booth, a recent recruit to the BNP from the National Front, told the Northern Echo, which had reported the trip, that the BNP did not deny the Holocaust but went on to make a mockery of his own statement by claiming that the party refused to believe the “official figures” or recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz. He concluded by attacking Auschwitz as a money-making venture, saying “it’s become a Disneyland equivalent”.
To compare the indescribable suffering inflicted upon millions of people to an amusement park is an astonishingly malevolent outburst. But the BNP did not discipline Booth. On the contrary the party agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments, publishing an article attacking not only the Holocaust Education Trust, which organised the visit, but also the whole concept of educating children about the Holocaust, on the grounds that it is “racist” because it omits other politically motivated atrocities.
But why would the BNP object so vehemently to teaching children about the Holocaust and not other shameful historical episodes? The reason is that the moral revulsion generated by the horrors wrought by Nazism and Fascism during the Second World War has been one of the principal factors keeping the far right in check since 1945.
The BNP may be removed from the perpetration of the Holocaust by a generation or two but it remains ideologically complicit in the denial of its horror and suffering. Nick Griffin declared in 1998, only a year before he became leader of the BNP: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”
Similar views alongside other racist statements published in his The Rune magazine earned Griffin a two-year suspended prison sentence in 1998 for inciting racial hatred. Griffin has never clearly retracted or repudiated this statement. Although the BNP website claims “Nick Griffin has repeatedly stated that he has changed his views”, Griffin is on record earlier this year saying that he only believes the Holocaust happened because, “I believe what the law says I must believe”.
It is very telling that the BNP’s article attacking Holocaust education did not once mention the Nazis but only described Auschwitz-Birkenau as a memorial to the “horrors of the Second World War”.
Booth’s letter drew angry responses from Northern Echo readers. One wrote of the harrowing experience endured by his now deceased uncle who helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp, the first to be liberated by the British army. “What he saw, how for years afterwards every night he relived what he’d seen, how it damaged his health, are all matters of fact, not conjecture. The descriptions of what he saw at Belsen were not the product of fiction, but the words of an eyewitness who saw the truth the far right denies.”
The liberation of Belsen by the British Army in 1945 was a distressing but proud moment in the history of the British Army. The rescue brought to an end the inhuman suffering inflicted upon its emaciated inmates, although it unfortunately came too late for thousands of them who were sick with typhus or whose internal organs were irreversibly damaged from months of starvation. The contribution of the British Army to ending the Holocaust is worth bearing in mind for anyone thinking of joining either the BNP or its pitiful front group, the Association of British Ex-Service Personnel (ABEX), operated by Simon Bennett who runs an libellous website attacking Searchlight as a sideline.
“There are countless former British servicemen who … have more honesty, decency, courage and patriotism in one molecule of their body than the BNP has in its entire membership,” continued the same outraged reader. “And each can look any holocaust denier in the eye and call them what they are – liars.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Ken Booth, the North East region BNP organiser, objected to a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau by a party of 130 school children from the North East, accompanied by Phil Wilson, the MP for Sedgefield. On his return Wilson vowed to keep fighting the “Holocaust denying BNP”, which polled 8.9% in the by-election in which he was elected last July.
Booth, a recent recruit to the BNP from the National Front, told the Northern Echo, which had reported the trip, that the BNP did not deny the Holocaust but went on to make a mockery of his own statement by claiming that the party refused to believe the “official figures” or recognise the “authenticity” of the buildings at Auschwitz. He concluded by attacking Auschwitz as a money-making venture, saying “it’s become a Disneyland equivalent”.
To compare the indescribable suffering inflicted upon millions of people to an amusement park is an astonishingly malevolent outburst. But the BNP did not discipline Booth. On the contrary the party agreed wholeheartedly with his sentiments, publishing an article attacking not only the Holocaust Education Trust, which organised the visit, but also the whole concept of educating children about the Holocaust, on the grounds that it is “racist” because it omits other politically motivated atrocities.
But why would the BNP object so vehemently to teaching children about the Holocaust and not other shameful historical episodes? The reason is that the moral revulsion generated by the horrors wrought by Nazism and Fascism during the Second World War has been one of the principal factors keeping the far right in check since 1945.
The BNP may be removed from the perpetration of the Holocaust by a generation or two but it remains ideologically complicit in the denial of its horror and suffering. Nick Griffin declared in 1998, only a year before he became leader of the BNP: “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat … I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”
Similar views alongside other racist statements published in his The Rune magazine earned Griffin a two-year suspended prison sentence in 1998 for inciting racial hatred. Griffin has never clearly retracted or repudiated this statement. Although the BNP website claims “Nick Griffin has repeatedly stated that he has changed his views”, Griffin is on record earlier this year saying that he only believes the Holocaust happened because, “I believe what the law says I must believe”.
It is very telling that the BNP’s article attacking Holocaust education did not once mention the Nazis but only described Auschwitz-Birkenau as a memorial to the “horrors of the Second World War”.
Booth’s letter drew angry responses from Northern Echo readers. One wrote of the harrowing experience endured by his now deceased uncle who helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp, the first to be liberated by the British army. “What he saw, how for years afterwards every night he relived what he’d seen, how it damaged his health, are all matters of fact, not conjecture. The descriptions of what he saw at Belsen were not the product of fiction, but the words of an eyewitness who saw the truth the far right denies.”
The liberation of Belsen by the British Army in 1945 was a distressing but proud moment in the history of the British Army. The rescue brought to an end the inhuman suffering inflicted upon its emaciated inmates, although it unfortunately came too late for thousands of them who were sick with typhus or whose internal organs were irreversibly damaged from months of starvation. The contribution of the British Army to ending the Holocaust is worth bearing in mind for anyone thinking of joining either the BNP or its pitiful front group, the Association of British Ex-Service Personnel (ABEX), operated by Simon Bennett who runs an libellous website attacking Searchlight as a sideline.
“There are countless former British servicemen who … have more honesty, decency, courage and patriotism in one molecule of their body than the BNP has in its entire membership,” continued the same outraged reader. “And each can look any holocaust denier in the eye and call them what they are – liars.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.