Issue date: 10/31/07 Section: Opinion

Opinion Columnist: David Morris

Media Credit: Chad Stoermer [Click to enlarge]

I have been called virtually every name imaginable: Kaptain Klan, Nazi, neo-Nazi, jack-booted thug (I'm not sure exactly what jack boots are, but I'm pretty sure I don't own any), xenophobe - and those are just the creative terms people have come up with to call me a racist. One of our own esteemed professors even speculated that my parents and grandparents were members of the Council of Conservative Citizens and active members of the Klan, neatly ignoring the fact that the Klan has historically held Irish Catholics such as myself in rather low esteem. The fact that none of these insults are remotely accurate has yet to pose a problem for the accusers. So, it is not with levity or without due consideration that I say, when I went to Nick Griffin's speech on Thursday, I expected to hear the tirade of a neo-nazi.

But as I discovered, Nick Griffin, chairman of the British National Party, BNP, is too savvy to resort to blatantly white supremacist rhetoric. Instead, he has been steadily moving his party away from its racist image in an effort to increase its electability.

Most of Griffin's speech on Thursday focused on the danger that radical Islam poses to Europe. During the speech, he made few statements that could be classified as extreme, and was careful not to accidentally traipse into issues of ethnicity or race.

To understand the political positions and rhetoric of the current BNP, you have to go back through a rather sordid and splintered lineage to its beginnings. The original British National Party was formed in 1960 by the merger of the National Labour Party and the White Defence League - two organizations specifically opposed to nonwhite immigration.

In 1962, two of the National Labour Party members, John Tyndall and Colin Jordan, split from the party over a disagreement about embracing outright Nazism - specifically, that they wanted to embrace it while the rest of the National Labour Party leadership felt it would be bad for their image. This schizm resulted in the formation of the National Socialist Movement, NSM, the British version of the Nazi party.

Tyndall left the NSM in 1964 to form the Greater Britain Movement, GBM, preferring a British approach to the German-style Nationalism of the National Socialist Movement. The GBM was similarly short-lived, as Tyndall disbanded it when he joined the British National Front in 1967. Tyndall would rise through the ranks to become chairman of the party.

In the late 1980s, Tyndall left the National Front and formed the new British National Party. With the help of other members, Griffin took control of the BNP in 1999.

According to Ryan Becker, president of the Aggie Independents, the organization was put in touch with Nick Griffin by Preston Wiginton - an association that immediately made me cringe.

I had a run-in with Preston a year ago when I was still chairman of the Texas A&M chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas.

Preston contacted me out of the blue to let me know that he had a speaker who wanted to deliver an anti-HB 1403 and anti-illegal immigration speech on campus, but he needed a student organization to sponsor him. He assured me that he had already spoken to the state officers of YCT and received permission to have similar events sponsored across Texas. With that assurance in mind, I went about setting up the speaking event.

It occurred to me to check up on Preston before I finalized the event, so I called the state officers to talk to them about it and, to my suprise, they had never heard of Preston Wiginton and, in fact, had no idea what I was talking about.

So I decided to look into Preston's background on the internet and was quite surprised by what I found.

The first place my search led me was a website called stormfront.org where Preston posted under the handle "True American Patriot." If you aren't familiar with the website, stormfront.org is the largest white nationalist website on the Internet, home of the Stormfront White Nationalist Community. Many of the posters on the forum are outright neo-Nazis, and the use of flagrantly racist language, for example referring to ethnic minorities as "muds" or "rabid beasts," is commonplace.

Needless to say, I canceled the event immediately and attempted to break off contact with Wiginton. Unfortunately, he came to campus anyway and distributed pamphlets that, among other things, opposed illegal immigration because it is making North America less white.

I thought then that I was done with the ordeal of Preston Wiginton, until the following semester when he approached YCT's table at MSC Open House. I tried to speak to him as little as possible, but he still managed to tell me about his events, even bragging that skinheads show up to some of them. I was speechless.

And so, that is the last I saw of Wiginton until I saw him again at Griffin's speech.

A poster at thebatt.com mentioned Preston's connection to Stormfront wondering why a speaker sponsored by a known member of Stormfront would be allowed to speak on campus. In his own defense, Wiginton claimed that his involvement at Stormfront was simply a phase, that he hasn't posted at the website in over a year and that he has moved on.

Before writing this column, I wanted to check the veracity of his claim to have turned over a new leaf, so I did a few more searches and discovered that Wiginton was active in anti-immigration movements in Russia several years ago, even writing for tworca.com, a Nationalist website that denies the Holocaust and sports white supremacist imagery.

I also found out that Wiginton's Facebook profile was deleted after he joined the BNP's Facebook group. Prior to his deletion, Wiginton debated other Facebook users, defending blatantly racist positions while using the logo for the National Alliance as his icon. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, for decades the National Alliance was one of the most powerful white supremacist organizations in the world until its collapse in 2005. These Facebook debates were occurring as recently as six months ago.

I was also able to find a picture of Wiginton posing with America's most famous white supremacist, David Duke.

So what is the point of all this? Here in America, Wiginton and Griffin have the right to say their piece - but students also have the right to know where these speakers really stand.

Unfortunately, the freedom of speech that we take for granted here in America is not enjoyed so freely across the pond. In fact, the government in England has instituted a number of thoroughly Orwellian speech codes. Nick Griffin is a "convicted racist," having been found guilty of inciting racial hatred.

On Oct. 1, a new speech code went into effect which would have made Griffin's speech illegal had it been delivered in England.

The racialist, political activities of politicians like Nick Griffin and activists like Preston Wiginton worry me. But what actually frightens me is the creeping tyranny of speech codes meant to chill free speech in the name of tolerance. I don't agree with what these men have to say, but I hope to God the United States never insitutes speech codes to silence them.

- David Morris, a senior psychology major, is opinion editor.

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