Is the British National Party primitive and racist? Or (worse) sophisticated and racist?

There are quite a few websites out there which in one way or the other give cover/sympathy to the BNP or at least its arguments against ‘elites’, yet which are evidently written by educated people. See eg some of the English Nationalist sites in the 2008 Total Politics Blog survey.

But let’s be honest. Racists and/or racist ideas come in all shapes and colours.

What about the arch comments on the inherent wisdom of ‘Latina women’ from US Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomajor? Her views and judgments on cases involving ‘racial’ quotas are being examined. This seems pertinent:

The legacy of racism, and particularly the dehumanizing oppression of generations of blacks, is a terrible blot on our history. If we try to remedy it by maintaining a new system of racial spoils – not at the expense of affluent, well-educated white elites, but of working-class, disadvantaged people who happen to be white – the blot will only deepen. So will racial division.

Or what about Black Supremacists? People who think that ‘white’ people represent some sort of inferior melanin deficiency syndrome:

Others, such as psychiatrist and writer Frances Cress Welsing, express the same idea by their use of the term "hue-man" instead of "human".

Welsing is the author of "The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation" and "The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors", which in part ascribes certain purported, inherent and behavioral differences between black and white people to a "melanin deficiency" in white people:

On both St. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, the white male gives gifts of chocolate candy with nuts…. If his sweetheart ingests "chocolate with nuts," the white male can fantasize that he is genetically equal to the Black male….

Is it not also curious that when white males are young and vigorous, they attempt to master the large brown balls, but as they become older and wiser, they psychologically resign themselves to their inability to master the large brown balls? Their focus then shifts masochistically to hitting the tiny white golf balls in disgust and resignation — in full final realization of white genetic recessiveness.

… Welsing proposes that because it is so easy for pure whiteness to be genetically lost during interracial breeding, light-skinned peoples developed an aggressive colonial urge and their societies militaristically dominated others in order to preserve this light-skinned purity.

Well, it’s a view!

The political point in all this is that in what claims to be an intelligent democracy we need political ideas to be expressed as just that: ideas. People need to be assessed not on how they look but rather on what they say, do and think. In other words, things over which they have some control and therefore responsibility.

So it makes no sense to exclude people from a party on the grounds of their racial/ethnic/cultural origin (ie factors over which they have no control), or to make policies on this basis.

Yet this is what the BNP is set up to do:

The British National Party represents the collective National, Environmental, Political, Racial, Folkish, Social, Cultural, Religious and Economic interests of the indigenous Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse folk communities of Britain and those we regard as closely related and ethnically assimilated or assimilable aboriginal members of the European race also resident in Britain…

2) The indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘Indigenous Caucasian’ consist of members of: i) The Anglo-Saxon Folk Community; ii) The Celtic Scottish Folk Community; iii) The Scots-Northern Irish Folk Community; iv) The Celtic Welsh Folk Community; v) The Celtic Irish Folk Community; vi) The Celtic Cornish Folk Community; vii) The Anglo-Saxon-Celtic Folk Community; viii) The Celtic-Norse Folk Community; ix) The Anglo-Saxon-Norse Folk Community; x) The Anglo-Saxon-Indigenous European Folk Community; xi) Members of these ethnic groups who reside either within or outside Europe but ethnically derive from them.

Zzzz.

This weird attempt at formal classification echoes the 1950 Population Registration Act in South Africa, which defined a white person as:

… one who "in appearance is obviously a white person who is generally not accepted as a colored person; or is generally accepted as a white person and is not in appearance obviously a white person."

So, yes.

The BNP is racist. And therefore stupid.

Obviously.