Nick Griffin goes Stateside
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2184
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2203 (with video)
by Nick Griffin
Coming down to land at Chicago’s massive O’Hare Airport the city suburbs stretch as far as the eye can see out of both port and starboard windows. It’s a giant example of how our civilisation revolves around the internal combustion engine.
There’s no doubt that late industrial capitalism has been unbelievably “efficient,” and the last couple of generations of Westerners have been extraordinarily fortunate, at least in material terms. But when ultra-efficiency spills over into the hyper-consumption of finite fossil fuels, there must inevitably come a time when those unfortunate enough to be in the chair at the time get to pick up the mother of all bills. It’s been one hell of a party, and it’s going to be one hell of a hangover.
From Chicago we take a connecting flight to Charlotte, in the old Confederate state of South Carolina. Our host and the organiser of the whole tour, Preston Wigington, is there to pick us up for the two hour drive to Clemson, which is the first university at which I’m speaking.
We arrive in the late evening their time, which means that by the time we’ve finally had something to east other than in-flight pap, our British-set bodyclocks are convinced that it’s actually time to get up. Not a great night’s sleep.
At least Wednesday is a fairly light day. I do three radio interviews over the phone, write my lecture, deal with a few calls from the UK and meet with members of the conservative student group that invited me to their campus. One of the interviews is with a Southern radio talkshow host – a way OTT near-caricature of his type, loud, self-opinionated and extremely politically incorrect and proud of it. The others, one of them a Christian station, are much more restrained, but still very friendly. All are shocked when I tell them that one of the reasons I’m speaking at American universities is that I’m banned from doing so at British ones. The fact that the four 7/7 London bombers had between them collected more than half a million dollars in welfare benefits courtesy of the British taxpayer also caused a fair bit of justifiable incredulity.
The university buildings are an architectural cut above the cultural-Marxist boxes that disgrace many modern British university campuses. We pass a magnificent multiple fountain to enter the six storey library and the auditorium where I’m to give my first ever lecture in a university (on account of the “No Platform” policy imposed by the Marxist cranks who still manage to deny British students the right to listen and make up their own minds on certain taboo subjects).
Among those students and guests already waiting are Bob Whittaker, an old friend from previous visits and late-night Bourbon sessions, and author of, among other things, the brilliant critique of the liberal indoctrination system “Why Johnny Can’t Think.” The opposition is represented by little group of leftists and Afro-Americans on one side of the room, and a bearded Muslim of clearly North African origin on the other.
To be honest, I really don’t feel like speaking and answering questions for well over an hour as scheduled – my body is now convinced that it’s two or three in the morning and that I’m part way through some experiment in sleep deprivation. Still, the anticipation of some barracking or awkward questions from the leftists produces a little shot of adrenaline and I get to work.
In the event, they all listen attentively and politely for a while. About halfway through my forty five minute main talk, the group of blacks and white feminist types get up and leave quietly. My guess is that they’ve come expecting to hear rabid hardcore racism and anti-Semitism, and are somewhat confused by a message that includes the threat posed by radical Islam to some of the causes dearest to their own hearts.
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2203.
At the end of the event we find that they’ve left a message on one of the question cards that were left on the seats: “This is bullsh!t. Hope you enjoyed tonight. Your reception at Michigan will be rather different.” They’ve also drawn a Peace sign, which is a little odd given that the Reds up at Michigan have already vowed to stop the lecture there by force.
When I finish – with a warning that, with 100,000 “legal” Muslim immigrants a year, the USA is merely not as far down the road to Islamisation as Europe – the Muslim does not applaud. Strange really, because I don’t think I’ve said anything to belittle or insult his Faith but have simply pointed out its incompatibility with Western values, the rapid rate at which it is advancing in Europe, and the role of our own liberal “elites” in the process.
The questions are wide ranging, from sympathetic and politically astute gifts to polite but hostile ones which are supposed to be awkward. At the end of the event we say our goodbyes and are escorted by a very round and jovial policeman to a police car waiting to drive us back to our car on the other side of the campus.
It’s now eleven in the evening local time, 4 or 5 a.m. Griffin body time. And we’ve got to get up at just gone four local time in order to drive back to the airport and our flight to Houston, Texas.
Houston Airport is magnificent – one of the most strikingly designed but still practical modern building complexes I’ve ever visited. We pick up our luggage within minutes (so far, on this visit, we’ve been spared the mayhem created last time I visited the USA for a conference in Louisiana, when our bags all ended up thousands of miles away somewhere on the West Coast) and pass gleaming stainless steel, plate glass and plain rendered pillars to board an ultra-modern monorail to the car park where Preston left his vehicle a couple of days earlier.
First stop is the HQ and studio of one of the most influential and respected Christian TV companies in the USA – indeed, worldwide – DayStar TV. We step into an ornately decorated foyer and are warmly welcomed by both the receptionist and an enthusiastic young producer. I’m actually due live on air in twelve minutes, which presents a potential problem as I’m wearing a travel-creased T-shirt and haven’t yet shaved.
The moment I explain the problem I’m whisked upstairs and through another ornate-to-the-point-of-excessive Italianate sitting room to a washroom. Once shaved and changed, it’s off to see a make-up artist in a room of a way higher standard than any I’ve seen in a mainstream British TV studio.
It’s nearly half past eleven and we’ve had nothing to eat all morning. I emerge to find that Martin and Preston have been shown the snacks we’d been told would be available on our arrival. Martin’s face is a study of misery as he picks at a small plate of raw celery, carrot and broccoli! Personally any earlier hunger has now been replaced by slight butterflies in the stomach. I’ve been interviewed on US Christian radio shows a fair few times before, but this is a full half-hour live TV slot to an enormous audience on the same lines.
The studio itself again outdoes anything I’ve seen outside of the main London news studios of the BBC and ITN. I’m the guest on a comfy sofa with the husband and wife presenter team. We chat briefly and into the opening credits to give them a better idea of what I can bring to their huge audience this morning, and he checks our web and PO Box addresses as these will be read out and flashed up on screen.
Fortuitously, he’s got the splendidly Christian sounding Waltham Cross address, but as he’s asked if he’s got it right I point out that his “Hertz” pronunciation of the “Herts” abbreviation of Hertfordshire should in fact be “Harts.” He tries it out and instantly reminds me of Trevor McDonald. Preston later tells me that the couple are absolutely typical of the best of the old fashioned but still very common Southern black Baptists, as sincere, genuine and generous of spirit as their white neighbours.
I tell him he’s got it so perfect he actually sounds English, but he laughs and says that he’ll stick to the pronunciation that his viewers would expect. This one’s a good example of how in many cases modern American actually preserves long-gone snippets of the English of Shakespeare’s time. The “e” in words like Hertfordshire and Derby only mutated into an “a” sound in late Georgian and Victorian times as the result of an upper class affectation – people trying to sound posh.
I gather that the actual programme – or at least clips from it – will be on YouTube soon, if not already, so won’t go through what was said here. Suffice it to say that we agree on all points, from the dangers posed by radical Islam through to the fact that mass immigration is a threat to the existence of the separate nations that all pre-liberalisation Christians knew were ordained as such by God.
Many black Americans are particularly concerned about Mexican and other Third World immigration on working class jobs and on social cohesion. Add in the natural worries that true Christians have about the seemingly http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1529 spread of the Arabic moon cult, our common belief in the importance of traditional values – including the “minor” ones like good manners and human respect that come naturally rather than being extracted by intimidation – and our getting along is really not the surprise the clips will be to left-liberals who simply haven’t got the faintest idea what makes people like me tick.
We finish the programme and chat for a few more minutes. The efficiency and thoughtfulness of the whole operation is epitomised by the fact that we’re handed two DVD copies of the live broadcast as we walk out of the studio. Then it’s back to the car park in the bright sunlight, and the two hour drive to College Station, home of the next University on the list.
The scenery out of Houston isn’t worthy of the name. Flat sprawling suburbia gives way to miles of shopping malls, giant used car lots and a vast array of places where already fat Americans can eat their way to full-blown medically registered obesity and thus welfare handouts.
The waffle shops are particularly good examples: A waffle is really only a pancake – I know, because I made one from a pre-mixed cupful for yesterday as our hotel had only self-service continental breakfast available. But while a French crepe or an English pancake could well have maple syrup poured on it, there is a strict limit to how much liquid obesity one can get to stay on a flat circle of cooked flour, egg and milk. So the Americans hit on the idea of turning it into a three dimensional set of open top boxes – each one of which can then hold a sickening quantity of syrup, a miniature reservoir of calories.
It’s more than an hour’s drive before we start to see woods rather than featureless scrub and billboards, then gently rolling hills and some lakes. It’s much greener than I expected, apparently the Texas that springs to our mind is much further west in a state which would comfortably swallow England twice.
Texas A&M, like Clemson, is renowned for its faculties of agriculture and engineering, and is also well known as a generally conservative university. Not so many decades ago their strict honour code even extended to ensuring that students kept their rooms ultra clean and tidy. Any student who dared to let the side down was liable to be beaten up and thrown out of the university! Standards have slipped since then, but the place still looks spick and span.
We meet up with the “Aggie Independents,” an organisation of free-thinking students who believe that people should be able to hear all points of view and then make up their own minds. We’re in a coffee and pastries shop with settees and armchairs as well as tables and a bar. Some students are using it to study, others to sit and chat. It’s got a great atmosphere and we sit and talk about all sorts of current affairs and historical issues for a couple of hours.
A&M is a major army officer training corps university and several of the lads will be off to Iraq or Afghanistan or even – they suspect – Iran. They are all agreed that they’d gladly go off to fight and, if necessary, die, in a war in which genuine American interests were at stake. But they know that this current wave of foreign adventures don’t fit that bill. Oil, the corporations, the Israeli lobby, the Sunni Saudi fear of Shia military superiority, and the vanity of individual politicians – all these factors come into play, and I’m impressed by their grasp of the real picture. The ignorant “gung-ho” image often shown on our TV is way off beam.
The lecture this evening is in a normal classroom. It’s packed with more than a hundred people despite the fact that some leftist clown had earlier put a “Cancelled” sign on the door. The crowd ranges from committed nationalists through to conservative and Christian sympathisers, through genuinely liberal free-thinkers to libertarians, and thence on to Mexican and black racists and to a couple of Muslims and a handful of Marxist cranks. Plus a few dark horses that emerge during question time.
This is an intelligent and adult audience. Even the oppo are influenced by the Aggie and Southern tradition of good manners; they listen intently, laugh at my jokes and recommendation not to trust any politician, present company included, and applaud when my hour-long talk ends.
Then we have an hour plus of Q&As and debate. The Muslim in traditional garb tries to convince people I’ve taken things out of context, several of the leftists try to sidetrack the debate down the Holocaust road although that does at least allow me to set the record straight and deal with the combination of Wikipedia lies and out-of-context propaganda and to put on record the fact that – while I used to be very angry at (and rude about) the way the left-liberals use the Holocaust as a moral club to silence debate on the key issues of our time – I have never denied the fact that the Nazis murdered huge numbers of Jews in one of the great crimes of a century of terrible inhumanity.
One asks me how my demonisation of Muslims differs from Hitler’s demonisation of the Jews. The answer is simple: The Nazi critique was largely based on a hoax – The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. It was this work of fiction, combined with the fact that the Bolsheviks carrying out mass murder on an unprecedented scale all over Eastern Europe included a disproportionate number of radicalised secular Jews (itself a reaction to Czarist anti-Semitism), that set the scene for the tragedy of European Jewry.
The Koran and Hadith, on the other hand, and their inspiration for hatred, violence and oppression of Unbelievers, are not forgeries.
A middle aged Mexican is the darkest of the horses. Far from being a La Raza type, he is a passionate opponent of mass Mexican immigration. He fought in Vietnam, and his dad served in World War Two. His son introduces himself too, an intense, wiry young man with flashing dark eyes and a huge knowledge of European history and philosophy, and a fierce attachment to our culture and freedom. Apparently a number of freedom-loving Mexicans fought with the Texans against Santa Anna’s corruption and tyranny back in Alamo days. You learn something new every day.
One of the non-student guests is a British expat who has driven five hours to meet me. He’s a great character, formerly from Stoke (and still missing the oatcakes). We find several ways in which he can help advance the Cause in Britain and I think he heads off for home happy that his long journey was worthwhile.
For us, there’s just a few hours clock-watching sleep before having to get up at four in order to drive back to Houston for a three hour early morning flight north to Chicago, a wait in O’Hare airport (during which time I do yet another radio interview over the mobile) and then a shorter connecting flight on to Detroit.
In the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me is a Sky Mall magazine, 280 pages of mail order advertising for a huge array of obscure gadgets, must-haves, things you wouldn’t give house-room and the plain eccentric. There is, for example, a snow flurry generating snowman (works in cold or hot weather, snowflakes evaporate without residue); a mobile alarm clock that rolls away and hides so that you have to get up to turn it off; a laser-guided pool cue ($79); the fish finder watch sonar sensor (detects fish in a 75′ radius and to a depth of 120′).
This could be used to find your two foot long remote controlled robotic shark if it goes beyond the 40′ radius at which its submersible remote can control it. Or you could leave the water behind and relax in your total body massage lounger (total 800 square inches of massage area) while listening to your life-sized Elvis Animatronic Robot bust (real leather jacket, curling lip, sings eight songs including Heartbreak Hotel and relates key moments from his life. $299).
You can get a vendor-style hot dog cart or a machine and the mixes to make a gallon of margaritas; a remote-controlled mouse for your cat ($25); a solar-powered talking Bible (English or Spanish), or a personalized branding iron for your barbeque steaks ($90). Only in America!
We’re already being promised a lively reception much later today at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Various far-left and “minority” groups have announced their plan to bus people in from all over this vast northern state and to close down the lecture by force.
At Detroit’s rather down-at-heel airport we pick up a rental jeep and head northwest for about 120 miles.
In East Lansing we meet another group of very well informed patriotic students. They’ve joined an organisation called Young Americans for Freedom and, in addition to having YAF button badges (routine stuff), have developed a habit of suing the university over failures to uphold their civil rights to meeting halls and security (unusually advanced).
Here too we talk about various subjects including, again, the woeful failure of Americans to develop even the embryo of an effective political response to the multi-cult, anti-human, globalising treason of their liberal capitalist elite. Yet again, however, I get the feeling that this need not be the case for much longer. This group too have realised that the neo-Nazi crankery and “This World is Ours” racial supremacy nonsense have got to be faced down and driven into gutter of defeat where they belong.
We head for the auditorium we’re using tonight and, on the way, pass the antis “marching” in the same direction. They assemble in front of the main entrance, but as we’re already inside and the police ensure that other people can get in, their promised blockade comes to naught.
By the time they come to the large, sloping lecture theatre, our team have already moved out of the lecture theatre every chair or bin capable of being thrown if things turn as ugly as they might. We end up with about thirty supporters and a few neutrals, and some seventy chanting, F***-banner-waving leftists and minorities.
Kyle from YAF explains that this is a free speech issue, asks that everyone displays good manners, then calls on the audience to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance to the Stars & Stripes behind us. Thirty rise and recite; seventy sit and hurl abuse at the land whose bounty has made them the most spoilt and pampered brats in history.
I begin my speech to howls of protest and a barrage of hostile questions every couple of sentences. The mob is the all-too-familiar mixture of truly hideous lesbians, semi-dwarves of indeterminate sex, full-sized freaks, chip-on-shoulder anti-white racist minorities, angry Muslims, a half-handy looking lad who acts really hard and a couple of strikingly attractive blondes – typical of the people descended from the Swedish farmers who did so much to settle this part of the USA.
There are just two police officers in the hall, but Martin and Preston (a tough, lean winner of strongman competitions) take a seat on either flank. Fortunately too I have a clip on microphone linked to a good PA system. I begin with quotes from historian Niall Ferguson and Muammar Gaddafi, in order to show that both the British Establishment and key figures in the Muslim world agree that the looming future of Europe is to fall to Islam. The mob howl their approval.
I’m determined to get through the first section of my speech, which lays out just what Islamisation would mean for several of the groups and concepts which the far-left claim to hold so dear. Widespread female genital mutilation, universal chattel status for women, the religiously determined apartheid of the dhimmi system, and the spread of the crude racist contempt and exploitation displayed in Saudi Arabia against “lesser breeds” such as converts, Pakistani and black labourers, and Filipina sex slaves.
There’s a continual barrage of awkward questions (like their British counter-parts, this crowd of oddballs and ultra-conformists seem unaware that the real art of devastating heckling is to pick up on things your opponent says and shoot them down with ridicule and quick-fire put-downs. Simply trying to shout down a confident speaker who has the advantage of a powerful PA system leads those who attempt it first looking like loudmouths and then losing their voices).
This in fact happens very quickly to the most striking of the blondes, who by now is going hoarse (some of the others already look like horses). I offer her a drink of water, which is actually a bit risky because if she takes me up on my considerate gesture she could throw it at me. But, as I expected, she’s too angry to think straight.
Still, by now it’s clear that there is no chance of my being able to talk to this audience about the scale of immigration into Europe, nor any point trying to do so; the moment I get off subjects on which I can actually play on their concerns to make them think a bit (wimmin’s and gay rights, and animal welfare, for example), the oppo will go berserk.
So I decide instead to sucker them into a rolling debate by answering their questions. When they try to derail me by asking more while I’m answering the current one, I am able very often to appeal to their inverted racism by pointing out that the minority member who asked the question is surely entitled to an answer? A modicum of quiet descends each time.
When I tell them that I’m going to explain why I’m a racist pig, and go on to relate the facts of the current, capitalist globalism-fueled extinction of the vast majority of the 5,000 unique cultural and ethnic groups that make up the truly wonderful tapestry of human diversity, their confusion actually shows in some of their faces. They even agree that European cultures and identities are also worth preserving. The would-be hardnut ruefully admits to supporting Celtic.
Naturally, the spell doesn’t last long, and the long battle of voiceboxes and wits continues. Since one of our supporters videoed it, you can take a http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ve2wFBMzfE for yourself. Anyone who doesn’t quite understand why we have a security team who can look a little “heavy” for polite society may get a glimpse of reality here. Our opponents are not polite and if it hadn’t been for the deterrent value of Martin on one side and Preston on the other the footage would inevitably have included unedifying shots of me and our young student hosts rolling around on the floor with the rest of the audience.
As it is, the mob leaves after about an hour when they realise they’re not going to break me, and then set off the fire alarm. We ignore it and after a while the black janitor turns it off, leaving us to finish off with a more sensible discussion among the supporters and true liberals who remain.
When we finally decide to call it a day, we head off to a bar/restaurant to celebrate a job well done (bear in mind that the antis had pledged to stop the event going ahead at all). The others eat, but by now I’m bouncing off the walls with adrenaline and I can’t stomach anything. A few bottles of Sam Adams (one of the few reliably drinkable beers in a continent dominated by tasteless iced lager) are a different matter.
We would have been heading home today but a Saturday flight would have cost our host an extra $700 so we’re going to kill a day doing not a lot. Just as well as what isn’t far off sleep deprivation has caught up and I don’t even wake up until well gone ten.
Even now there are several more press interviews to do, and I spend more time typing up this now huge blog entry (I had intended to send it in sections, but the pen drive I use to transfer the files refuses to work).
Later we meet some of our local hosts and take a look around their huge university campus; a mixture of Victorian philanthropist grandeur and modern giantism. Then we head in the late afternoon to Detroit – once one of the great industrial cities of the world.
On the freeway into the centre we see block after block of late 1960s project housing lying burnt out and derelict, then pass older factories and modern high-rise flats which are also boarded up at ground level and a mass of broken windows higher up.
Next day I have a couple of hours writing on the laptop on various things as well as bringing this blog up to date (difficult with such a packed schedule and the tendency of the battery to die). Then we’re picked up and head for Flint airport, from which we’re to fly to Chicago and thence Heathrow overnight.
We’re talking politics and so our driver misses the turn on the freeway. Which means that we don’t have time to stop to buy an extra bag for various items obtained in the last few days. Which in turn means that I have to cadge a couple of clear plastic bags from the check-in staff and put the bits and pieces in there.
As the extra baggage disappears along the conveyor belt, I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t perhaps be better if the rather unorthodox package doesn’t make it to Heathrow anyway. How, after all, would I explain to Customs what I’m planning to do with: A hobby-horse style reindeer complete with about 28″ of red velvet handle and bells on his antlers, which waggles its nose and sings “Jingle Bell Rock” (he’s going clubbing with various daughters just before Christmas – honest); a telescopic camcorder stand; two collapsible umbrellas (in fact ideal for fending off eggs and bags of unspeakableness if thrown by Red mobs), and a bottle of highly spoken-of sensual massage oil (unopened til I get home, which is all I have to say on the subject)?
On the plane, I get to watch “Blue Blood,” a brilliant if limited interest British film about the Oxford squad training for the 2005 Varsity Boxing match against Cambridge. It’s highly accurate and, to someone who went through it all several decades ago strangely moving. I’d write more about it but simply don’t have time to do it justice right now, so I’ll probably return to that subject later. For now, all I can say is, if you enjoy boxing, or want an insight into what it takes to get a sporting “Blue,” and what it means to those of us who’ve been lucky enough to do it, watch “Blue Blood.” It’s so good I could even forgive the heroes of it for having gone to the Wrong Place!