American Friends of the British National Party

Last updated

American Friends of the British National Party (sometimes abbreviated as AFBNP) was a political activist group founded by British far-right expatriate Mark Cotterill in January 1999 that facilitated financial assistance for the British National Party (BNP) from American supporters. It also fostered links between far-right groups and individuals in the United States and the United Kingdom. [1] According to BNP Chairman Nick Griffin, the group made a "significant contribution to the BNP's [2001] general election campaign".

Contents

History and activities

It operated from a small apartment in Falls Church, Virginia for much of its history. [1] Griffin and party figure Richard Barnbrook attended meetings to give support and to connect with American far-right activists. In an April 2000 seminar in Texas, Griffin met with David Duke, Samuel T. Francis, Kirk Lyons, chairman of Southern Legal Resource Center and Roy Armstrong, a member of the National Democratic Party of Germany. [2] He gave a speech in which he said:

The BNP isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined to sell them. Basically, that means to use saleable words – such as freedom, identity, security, democracy. [...]

Once we're in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, 'yes, every last one must go'. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you're not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity. [...]

There's a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas, and the British National Party isn't about selling out its ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them, and that means basically to use the saleable words, as I say, freedom, security, identity, democracy. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas. They are saleable. [3] [4] [5]

He met with white nationalist Don Black in another meeting. [6]

Issues advocated by the AFBNP included opposition to the NATO's intervention in the former Yugoslavia and the importance of "pan-Aryan" internationalism. Members of far right movements such as the Christian Identity, the Council of Conservative Citizens, American neo-Nazism, and various neo-confederate groups participated in their meetings. The AFBNP also published a bimonthly magazine called Heritage and Destiny. In fall 2000, it attempted to gain influence within state chapters of the American Reform Party, but it was unsuccessful. [1]

On November 7, 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service prevented Cotterill from re-entering the country, saying that he lied about his initial reasons for coming in 1999 and summarily violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Cotterill stated that he would modify the organization into the "Overseas Friends of the British National Party". However, the group has since essentially folded. [1] [6] [7]

White supremacist and anti-Semite James W. von Brunn was a member of the AFBNP in its short history, and he said that he met Nick Griffin twice through its connections. Brunn committed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting, in which museum guard Stephen Tyrone Johns was murdered. A BNP spokesperson later said that the party had "never heard of" Brunn. [3]

See also

Related Research Articles

The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right, British fascist political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton, Cumbria, and is led by Adam Walker. A minor party, it has no elected representatives at any level of UK government. The party was founded in 1982, and reached its greatest level of success in the 2000s, when it had over fifty seats in local government, one seat on the London Assembly, and two Members of the European Parliament.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Tyndall (far-right activist)</span> British neo-Nazi (1934–2005)

John Hutchyns Tyndall was a British fascist political activist. A leading member of various small neo-Nazi groups during the late 1950s and 1960s, he was chairman of the National Front (NF) from 1972 to 1974 and again from 1975 to 1980, and then chairman of the British National Party (BNP) from 1982 to 1999. He unsuccessfully stood for election to the House of Commons and European Parliament on several occasions.

International Third Position (ITP) was a neo-fascist organisation formed by the breakaway faction of the British National Front, led by Roberto Fiore, an ex-member of the Italian far-right movement Third Position.

John Edward Bean was a British political activist and writer, who was a long-standing participant in far-right politics in the United Kingdom, and a number of its movements.

Mark Adrian Cotterill is a far right political figure who has been involved in a number of movements throughout his career. He is noted for activity to establish links between the far right in Britain and America, by founding the American Friends of the British National Party.

Andrew Henry William Brons is a British politician and former MEP. Long active in far-right politics in Britain, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Yorkshire and the Humber for the fascist British National Party (BNP) at the 2009 European Parliament election and held the seat until May 2014. He was the chairman of the National Front in the early 1980s. He resigned the BNP whip in October 2012 and became patron of the far-right British Democratic Party. He did not seek re-election in 2014.

Martin Guy Alan Webster is a British neo-nazi, a former leading figure on the far-right in the United Kingdom. An early member of the National Labour Party, he was John Tyndall's closest ally, and followed him in joining the original British National Party, the National Socialist Movement and the Greater Britain Movement. Webster also spent time in prison for helping to organise a paramilitary organisation, Spearhead, and was convicted under the Public Order Act 1936. Rumours of his homosexuality led to him becoming vilified in far-right circles, and he quietly disappeared from the political scene.

Mark Adrian Collett is a British neo-Nazi political activist. He was formerly chairman of the Young BNP, the youth division of the British National Party (BNP), and was director of publicity for the party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourteen Words</span> White-supremacist slogans

Fourteen Words is a reference to two slogans originated by David Eden Lane, one of nine founding members of the defunct white supremacist terrorist organization The Order, and are accompanied by Lane's "88 Precepts". The slogans have served as a rallying cry for militant white nationalists internationally.

Far-right politics in the United Kingdom have existed since at least the 1930s, with the formation of Nazi, fascist and antisemitic movements. It went on to acquire more explicitly racial connotations, being dominated in the 1960s and 1970s by self-proclaimed white nationalist organisations that opposed non-white and Asian immigration. The idea stems from belief of white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to all other races and should therefore dominate society. Examples of such groups in the UK are the National Front (NF), the British Movement (BM) and British National Party (BNP), or the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Since the 1980s, the term has mainly been used to describe those groups, such as the English Defence League, who express the wish to preserve what they perceive to be British culture, and those who campaign against the presence of non-indigenous ethnic minorities and what they perceive to be an excessive number of asylum seekers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Redwatch</span> British website

Redwatch was a British website associated with members of the far-right British People's Party. It published photographs of, and personal information about, alleged far left and anti-fascist activists. It typically targeted activists in political parties, advocacy groups, trade unions and the media. The website's slogan was "Remember places, traitors' faces, they'll all pay for their crimes", a quote from neo-Nazi musician Ian Stuart Donaldson.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Griffin</span> British politician

Nicholas John Griffin is a British politician who represented North West England as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2009 to 2014. He was chairman and then president of the far-right British National Party (BNP) from 1999 to 2014, when he was expelled from the party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting</span> 2009 terrorist attack in Washington, D.C.

At approximately 12:50 p.m. on June 10, 2009, 88-year-old James Wenneker von Brunn entered the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with a slide-action rifle and fatally shot Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other special police officers returned fire, wounding von Brunn, who was apprehended.

Arthur Kemp is a Rhodesian-born writer and the owner of Ostara Publications, a distributor of racist tracts, who was from 2009 to 2011 the foreign affairs spokesperson for the British National Party. He was born in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and worked as a right-wing journalist in South Africa before moving to the United Kingdom in 1996.

The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right political party in the United Kingdom formed as a splinter group from the National Front by John Tyndall in 1982 and was led by Nick Griffin from September 1999 to July 2014. Its current chairman is Adam Walker. The BNP platform is centred on the advocacy of "firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home", as well as the repeal of anti-discrimination legislation. It restricted membership to "indigenous British" people until a 2010 legal challenge to its constitution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Buckby</span> British politician

Jack Buckby is a British far-right political figure and author who was previously active in a number of groups and campaigns, including the British National Party, Liberty GB and Proud Boys. In 2017 he was associated with Anne Marie Waters and the For Britain Movement party.

Todd Blodgett is an American conservative Republican political writer, who served as a member of the White House staff of President Ronald Reagan and on the Bush/Quayle election committee. Following the 1988 presidential election, Blodgett, who was a protege of the late Lee Atwater, then served on the staff of the Republican National Committee, where he worked until 1991. He was a one-time co-owner and operator of Resistance Records, the world's largest neo-Nazi music label. As has been reported by the Associated Press, The London Independent, Fox News, newspapers published by Lee Enterprises, Inc., Washington Post and in other media, Blodgett worked as a full-time, paid informant for the FBI. In this capacity, he was assigned to infiltrate/surveil neo-Nazis, KKK members, fascist Skinheads, professional anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the Caribbean.

The London Forum is a loose organisation of far-right individuals based in London but with regional headquarters across the United Kingdom. Emerging in 2011 out of a split within the British far-right, meetings were regularly held by the organisation. These have been met with significant protests by anti-fascist activists and have been infiltrated by journalists, most notably a 2015 investigation of the group by The Mail on Sunday with the help of Searchlight, an anti-fascist magazine that focuses on the British far-right.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Hands Across the Water. Southern Poverty Law Center: Intelligence Report . Fall 2001.
  2. ↑ April 2000 meeting
  3. 1 2 Burgess, Kaya (12 June 2009). "White supremacist gunman James W. von Brunn had links to BNP". Times Online . London. Retrieved 12 June 2009.
  4. ↑ Cahal Milmo; Kevin Rawlinson (22 October 2009). "10 things you should know about the BNP when you watch Question Time tonight" . independent.co.uk. The Independent. Archived from the original on 2009-10-23. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
  5. ↑ "PANORAMA: UNDER THE SKIN [Transcript]". news.bbc.co.uk. BBC. Retrieved 19 January 2015.
  6. 1 2 American Friends of the British National Party. The Guardian 12 June 2009.
  7. ↑ Neo-Nazis. Southern Poverty Law Center: Intelligence Report . Winter 2002.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.