It is never good publicity to be attacked by a bona fide war hero.
Coming from a family with many members who served in World War 2 such as my uncles Jessie and Lloyd Holmes, twin brothers, who were captured at the Fall of Singapore February 15th 1942 and who were held in various concentration camps and death camps including at Selarang Barracks near Changi Prison and also an uncle who fought in Burma, I have seen the toll that war wears into men.
My great uncle Lloyd died six months after returning home to Britain at the end of the war due to the mental and physical torture inflicted upon him by the Japanese guards and his ordeal.
I stood alongside men like him a few years ago when the Japanese Emperor paraded down the Mall in London, where I turned my back on him as a sign of protest for the lack of a full apology from the Japanese monarchy in whose name the cruelty was undertaken. A tiny act of thanks to men like my uncles for such a massive sacrifice.
My grandfather was in the Royal Navy, torpedoed twice and survived and then was wounded in a convoy in the pacific by a Japanese Kamikaze attack and then spent months in Baltimore being treated for his injuries, including the loss of an eye, two fingers and a severe wound in the chest.
My Great uncle, my Grandmothers brother, was in Burma and fought alongside the Gurkhas. His wife used to find him standing in the kitchen in the dark in the middle of the night washing himself down in the sink. She knew not to ask. He was washing the blood from his hands and face and arms whose presence forever haunted him, the blood that had squirted out as he cut the throats of Japanese soldiers in the dark. That was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before it was given a name.
I have never fought in a war. I have never been in the armed services, but coming from a family where every generation, except my father and I, had served in the military I have been taught to respect the military and military personnel.
Friends of mine are presently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lads I know half my age are training to go right now.
BNP members serve, and have served in both wars, and in every war where veterans are still alive. A chap I knew in the BNP served as a Lancaster Bomber squadron leader.
In fact, the BNP probably contains more ex-servicemen than most other political parties in relation to proportion of membership.
Therefore the words of Andy McNabb are particularly stinging ;
" Andy McNab has told the BNP, “give me my books back”.
The ultimatum comes after Nick Griffin announced that signed copies of Brute Force and Seven Troop would be auctioned to raise money for Help for Heroes.
McNab – ex-SAS hardman, Gulf War veteran and best-selling author – told Nothing British, “When someone called me to say that the BNP was using one of my books in a publicity stunt, I was sick to the stomach. I served with men of all colours and from many nationalities. They were all equal to me. That’s what the army teaches you. Nick Griffin thinks differently. He thinks the British Army should be for whites-only. He thinks heroes like Johnson Beharry, our only living VC, should be sent back to Grenada.
“He doesn’t understand that what makes the British Army great, and what makes this country great. It’s the way we draw together people from all around the world and give them ideals worth believing in: tolerance, fairness, decency, looking out for the little guy. It’s the British way of doing things. That’s why I’ve asked for my books back. Because I don’t want anything to help the BNP promote their poisonous politics of segregation and hatred.”
Harsh words indeed, and coming from a man like Andy McNab they carry great weight, and therefore they must be responded too.
First all lets deal with the issue of the books.
I suggest the BNP still raffle the books and the money donated and raised go straight to the Help For Heroes charity. Then Andy McNab, a succesful author, should be offered a chance to match the figure of money raised by BNP donations and procure the books from the BNP member who wins the raffle and that Andy McNab then donates his money straight to the Help For Heroes charity thereby ensuring they get his money as well as the money raised by the raffle.
That way Andy McNab gets his book back, the charity gains from the money raised by the BNP raffle and the charity also has the bonus of the money from Andy McNab also coming into its coffers.
I am sure Mr. McNab would agree to such a plan, seeing as he gets his books back and the charity doubles its money.
A few thousand pounds is nothing to a successful author like Mr. McNab and as the charity assists the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, this is something that Mr. McNab would obviously wish to support.
In relation to the issues raised by Mr. McNab, well I cant speak for Nick Griffin but I can tell him what I believe the BNP stands for as regards the British military.
Under a BNP government there would be no British soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There would be no young British men and women returning home blinded, limbless and maimed.
This because we would not have sent them to fight a war for oil in Iraq and oil pipelines in Afghanistan.
The national security we wish to maintain and secure is based within the home front, and has no part in the oil imperialism of the US, UK and the global oil corporations.
Therefore the same men and women that Andy McNab would have served alongside would not be dying today. They would be home with their families, where they belong.
Andy McNab served alongside brave men of all races who wore uniform of the Britain. All who volunteer to serve our nation deserve honour. Yet it is the Labour government with the blessing of the Tories that sent them to war without the right kit, with sub standard equipment, and then when they returned abandoned many of them to homelessness whilst going to court to cut from other wounded soldiers their disability payments.
It is the Labour government that stopped the Gurkhas coming into the UK, not the BNP.
Those of all nationalities who volunteer for service deserve our respect, but these men are volunteers who signed onto the British military knowing that they would not be offered citizenship in the UK. That is the way it has always been and the way it is right now. The foreign recruits in the military are not offered a ' French Foreign Legion deal' where they are given British citizenship after a period of contractual military service - it is a job, and that’s it.
If service in the British army equated to a right to citizenship and to live in Britain then this would be an absurdity.
It does not, and it never has.
Whilst in the British army each man of every nation demands equal respect, and it could be no other way. Without such discipline and efficiency then a modern, functional army could not exist or operate.
The BNP does not think the army should be 'whites only' - the BNP believes that as much as possible the British army should rely on well trained British troops with British citizenship. The numbers of foreign troops allowed in the British army is pegged at 10 % of the total, though we believe this should be reduced. A British Army that fights around the world requires troops from around the world, a British Army that defends the home front needs no foreign volunteers other than regiments such as the Gurkhas.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article589974.ece
As quoted in the above Times article, “ “It is after all supposed to be the British Army, not the Commonwealth Army,” one defence source said. “
As the BNP is anti-globalist, then our global military role must be replaced by a national defence role. The era where British politicians in the cosy confines of the Houses of Commons send British troops to die in foreign wars will be over when the BNP gets into power. No more Wars for Oil disguised as ‘Moral Imperialism’.
In fact nations such as South Africa are proposing new laws that will effectively strip citizenship rights from South African volunteers to the British Army, and therefore we must start to recruit more British troops into the military and not rely on foreign volunteers simply in order to ensure ;
1) we do not have a choice because volunteer numbers from outside Britain will drop when such laws are enacted.
2) the future emphasis of the British military will be to defend the home front, and therefore a national based military force ensuring British national security will need to be created. The BNP do not intend this nation to get involved in any more globalist interventions in the guise of some inane moral principle of interventionism. Therefore less foreign troops will be required anyway.
http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/10790.html
Even the Gurkhas may be prohibited from joining the British Army in the near future as the Communist government of Nepal wishes to pass laws that prohibits Nepalese citizens joining foreign armies such as the British Army ;
http://beacononline.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/gurkhas-face-ban-from-british-army-report/
As for Johnson Beharry, he was a volunteer soldier from Grenada. His injuries require he remains in the UK for treatment and the BNP would never remove decorated war heroes such as him who deserve a home amongst us. He is loyal to Britain, so we are loyal to him.
There are millions of terrorists, foreign criminals, colonists, bogus asylum seekers, sex slavers, gun smugglers and gangsters in this country who we will deport when we get the chances - we will never deport men such as Johnson Beharry. To say we would is utter nonsense.
What makes the British Army great, and what makes this country great is when we all come together to benefit our nation.
But that doesnt mean we should forget the fact this is Britain and it is the British Army.
Andy Mcnab believes we should act as a 'moral beacon' for the world standing for 'tolerance, fairness, decency, looking out for the little guy'. Fine words, but meaningless in relation to military strategy and the demands of a 21st century British army. We can no longer draw people into the army from all around the world for the reasons explained above. The world has changed.
We need to look out for own people, our own country and our way of life. These are all under attack from colonists into this country who also use the rhetoric of liberalism as a way to remove the rights of the majority and replace them with the dictates of minorities. Such endless surrender of our liberties to liberalism and its cant must be resisted. Political correctness kills.
The idea that Britain should be perpetually 'looking out for the little guy' is how we got into bombing Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the rhetoric of Tony Blair, with his agenda of 'moral warfare' that led us into those wars. The problem is such rhetoric eventually has to be backed up with bullets and bombs, and people die, both innocent civilians and British soldiers.
As the poet William Blake wrote, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions'.
Regardless of whether we wish too or not, such rhetoric of moral interventionism has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and hundreds of British troops and thousands of American dead.
The BNP believe that the price of such moral imperialism paid in the lives of British soldiers is too much.
We are not the worlds policeman or social worker.
Nor should we be the worlds arm dealer.
One of the reasons why Andy McNab was sent to fight in the first Iraq War was because the Tory government that sent him to war had also been secretly, along with the US, been arming Saddam Hussein.
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/books/preface_leigh_1993.html
The same Conservative government that sent Andy McNab to war also prosecuted innocent men in the Matrix Churchill trial. The Conservative government put its own political interests before the interests of justice and were even prepared to send innocent men to jail ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms-to-Iraq
Therefore the war that Mcnab fought in, and was tortured by Saddam Husseins henchmen, was based on Britain, and British arms companies, disarming a tyrant that it had been secretly arming and assisting for decades with British weapons.
British soldiers in Iraq were killed with British weapons sold to Saddam Hussein by British arms companies with the blessing of both Labour and Conservative governments.
To have a cheap shot at the BNP about the utterly irrelevant issue of ‘racism‘, whilst the war criminals and war profiteers that armed Saddam Hussein remain unpunished and still fund the Conservative Party coffers, is frankly perverse.
These examples of greed, criminality and profiteering are also the very ’ideals’ of those British politicians and political parties that Andy McNab supports and endorses - the sick, corrupt and criminal ideals of a political system and Establishment politicians motivated solely by the profit margin and never principles of morality. These are the values of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party that have misruled our nation for generations.
As for the 'Nothing British About the BNP' blog site - this site is run by Tim Montgomerie and James Bethell of ConservativeHome, two activists of the same party that once sold Saddm Hussein the weapons that killed your comrades.
Their party is a party of war profiteers and war criminals, you should be ashamed in aiding them. The Conservative Party voted for both the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, their hands are as bloody as Tony 'The Butcher' Blair and his lickspittle lackey Gordon Brown.
Andy, you can have your books back.
Just match the money made by the BNP raffle, donate it to the Hope for Heroes charity and they are yours.
Next time you want to know about the BNP just ask. The next time you want to write fiction, then put it in your books.
Andy McNab has become one of the darlings of the establishment and speaks as such.
ReplyDeleteHe is (allegedly) not at all popular amongst other ex SAS men, especially the ones who have not sold their stories for cash.
Great post Lee.
ReplyDeleteWhat's so incredible (and interesting from a psychogical perspective) is how people like Andy McNab can go from being an intelligent individual into a deluded, stupid moron at the mention of the BNP. It's a form of reversion, a instanteneous degenration to a lunatic rabid state. McNab knows nothing of what the BNP actually stand for, and yet rants against some purely fictional creation, that being what he has been brainwashed the BNP stands for. NcNab is a fool.
McNab ... told "Nothing British"
ReplyDeleteSays it all.
McNab has sold his soul to anti-British racist scum!
What next?
He turns up with "hardman" Labour lickspittle Ross Kemp plus drug-addicts and perverts with a clawhammer in his hand?
You've shit on Britain, McNab!
Re: “He doesn’t understand that what makes the British Army great, and what makes this country great. It’s the way we draw together people from all around the world and give them ideals worth believing in: tolerance, fairness, decency, looking out for the little guy. It’s the British way of doing things. That’s why I’ve asked for my books back. Because I don’t want anything to help the BNP promote their poisonous politics of segregation and hatred.”
ReplyDeleteRe: "poisonous politics" an example or two would be useful. Anti-BNPrs never seem capable of coming up with any.
Re: the greatness of the British Army, here is an excerpt from In Flanders Fields by American writer Leon Wolff, Corgi, 1958, p 254-255, about the battle of Passchendaele or 3rd Ypres, July-November 1917, my emphasis:
"The dogged courage of the British infantrymen persisted; a phenomenon almost beyond the understanding of neutral observers separated from the event by a long span of years...by and large they faced death obstinately, if not cheerily. Sir Douglas Haig was to a degree fortunate in possessing this army; and one is entitled to doubt whether any other would have demonstrated such dour bravery in the fields of Flanders that appalling year."
When you inspect photographs of the British and Old Dominion soldiers who fought at Passchendaele, don't bother trying to spot the black face. There aren't any.
I suggest that where the severest tests of an army's greatness, in terms of what it could endure, are imposed, no-one has ever surpassed the steadfastness of the 'hideously white' British and Old Dominion Army in Flanders, 1917.
It's also noteworthy that the British forces engaged in the current conflicts are still pretty much 'hideously white,' like the latest ones killed.
Wherever British military and/or national greatness actually arises from (a subject worthy of a separate discussion), multi ethnicity, which McNabb is implying, doesn't seem to be a key factor.
I also seem to recall that Johnson Beharry basically drove his vehicle through an ambush and backed a vehicle away from another hot spot. I don't claim any specialist knowledge on this subject but I thought that was standard operating procedure in those sorts of circumstances.
A long time friend who served with the Rhodesian Army in the Bush War, 1972-1979, once recounted how he had fired off two 20-round magazinefulls from a 7.62 mm self-loading rifle at the attackers while the lorry he was in drove through a black Marxist terrorist ambush.
I don't think any kind of award was even contemplated for that degree of determination, it was SOP according to discipline and training. But I don't see how it differs materially from the incident(s) where Johnson Beharry was involved.
Andy McNab stands his feet and spits his dummy out: "Mummy, I want my books back."
ReplyDelete"Therefore the words of Andy McNabb are particularly stinging"
ReplyDeleteOver-reacting i think. The bloke was probably minding his own business when some red media types turned up, mentioned the BNP angle on his books and gave him a choice of bad publicity for him or bad publicity for the BNP.
For all anyone knows they might even have brought his publisher along with them.
The people behind this will be red filth who hate the country and despise him for risking his life for it. Something for him to ponder on.
No big deal.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDIGG Lee's article here:
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/mzvua8
then DIGG and COMMENT on the original article here:
http://tinyurl.com/ldn96f
FYI Comments on that Tory blog seem to be unmoderated :^)
Let darling Maurice know how you feel about this and ask him to forward it to Andy:
ReplyDeletemaurice@nothingbritish.com
The Japanese were indeed cruel people, and regarded those who surrendered cowards. This may explain their cruelty towards prisoners.
ReplyDelete