Ex-BNP leader Nick Griffin tells right-wing conference Russia will save Europe

[pampango]

Griffin spoke at the International Russian Conservative Forum last weekend

Undeterred by his waning power over the extremist right-wing in the UK, Nick Griffin has kept with his cause by declaring that Russia will save “Christendom”. In an interview with the US newspaper, Griffin said Russia is “more free” than the West as a similar event would be banned in the US or the UK.

At the International Russian Conservative Forum in St Petersbury over the weekend, which was organised by a pro-Kremlin ultranationalist party, Griffin warned the audience that Christendom would succumb to “a terrible civil war”, become and Islamist caliphate “or perhaps both”, BuzzFeed reported. He added that “the survival of Christendom” is “absolutely impossible without the rise of the Third Rome: Moscow.”

Other guests included Udo Voigt, a senior figure in Germany’s extreme-right National Democratic Party, and members of the ultra-right Greek party Golden Dawn.

Speakers at the event mirrored Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent message that the West is facing a “profound moral crisis, and argued that the region is also blighted by ill including abortion, atheism, Freemasonry, homosexuality and unbridled immigration that, if unchecked, will wipe out the Caucasian race.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/exbnp-leader-nick-griffin-tells-rightwing-conference-russia-will-save-europe-10128994.html

You have to wonder why the BNP was even invited to the conservative conference in St Petersburg. It has declined so much it is a fringe group now. The Greek Golden Dawn and Germany's far-right Udo Voigt are still on the rise.

It seems that Griffin is a little behind the times in his list of groups that conservatives should hate. Hating freemasons seems like it belongs to a bygone era, while hatred of abortion, atheism, homosexuality and immigration are right in line with current far-right thinking both in Europe and the US.

[Igel]

1. There's a giant mass of conspiracy theories lurking in the underbrush.

Illuminati, CFR, Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove, black-helicopters/contrail/HARRP (HARPP?). Some are old fashioned, but all from time to time serve as shorthand for a kind of small-group/1%er conspirators controlling everything in the world.

I've seen some of this stuff posted here. Mostly I've known it from some pretty far right RWers. I view it as "underbrush": You get a small, fringist incestuous group and they can easily lapse into it. The Koch-envy often seen here (paralleled by Gates-phobia) is less fringy variety.

Many older societies believed that they were not at the mercy of random chance, nor of consequences that resulted from many small decisions made by them and their communities. Bad things that happened to them from outside could not be accidental. Instead, agency and will must be involved in order to give their world order and provide inner peace--even if their inner peace required a reified, anthropomorphized foe. They produced a series of gods and demigods that controlled their fate--and which they could, possibly, control. It reduced their personal responsibility and also said they weren't at the caprice of impersonal, uncontrollable forces that they didn't understand. It made the universe personal: If they fail, somebody *wanted* them (or their group, however small or large and however defined) to fail. When there's success, often they say that's their own; other want to praise some outside person, even if that person had pretty much zilch to do with it.

Many people today are the same. If the results of billions of individual economic decisions and trends in communities leads to a recession or recovery, they have to find a single person or group to give credit to. They can understand one but not the other. If there's something that's occurring completely naturally that's bad, they want to blame some individual or group, preferably one that they already loathe. It spares them responsibility; it makes what's happening beyond their control and responsibility comprehensible; and often it gives them a way to control, at least in principle, their own fate. Occam's razor isn't an edge on which to balance competing theories; it's a tool to remove unwanted and irritating data and information.