Past issues of Nationalism Today are full of anti-Semitic caricatures: in one, a cigar-smoking, hook-nosed businessman is blamed for acid rain in an illustration accompanying an article titled ‘Capitalism Poisons Europe’.11 Numerous articles about ‘black crime’ (a favourite 1970s NF propaganda theme) appear along with adverts for The Turner Diaries, a novel by the American white supremacist William Luther Pierce in which he imagines a violent revolution and ensuing race war in the United States. The novel has inspired neo-Nazis around the world – most notably Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.
The day-to-day reality of the National Front in the 1980s was more prosaic. It had been smashed as a serious political force, while Webster continued to recruit the most thuggish elements to its cause. Its propaganda was based on crude racism and little else. Under Webster’s direction, the Young National Front launched a youth magazine, Bulldog, aimed at the skinhead subculture and edited by Pearce, who spent two spells in prison for incitement to racial hatred as a result. It also established a music venture, White Noise, which promoted ‘white power’ punk rock and was centred on the racist skinhead band Skrewdriver. Griffin organized festivals for Skrewdriver and other bands on his parents’ land in Suffolk. Webster’s leadership lasted until 1983, before he too was forced out of the National Front – by the Strasserites. This heralded yet another ideological twist.
Run by a couple of well-spoken graduates named Nick and Michael, on the face of it Heritage Tours seemed much like any other company offering to take tourists on trips around London’s landmarks during the mid-1980s. But away from the day job, the ‘guides’ were committed racial nationalists, working to formulate a political creed that combined ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, fascist mysticism and ideas about building a social movement derived in part from Marxist philosophy.
Heritage Tours was run from the central London flat of Michael Walker – one of several money-making schemes Griffin took part in to fund his political activities. Walker, a former regional organizer of the NF and a talented linguist, was convinced that the British far right lacked theory. He developed an interest in ideas circulating among a group of intellectuals within the French far-right Front National, associated with the Groupement de recherches et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (the Research and Study Group for European Civilization) or GRECE. Led by the philosopher Alain de Benoist, GRECE attacked what it saw as the soulless nature of consumer capitalism. Liberal, multiracial America was seen as the worst embodiment of this phenomenon, against which de Benoist advocated a revival of European national cultures. Rather than arguing for the superiority of one race over another, he maintained the issue was one of difference: keeping races and cultures separate would lead to a national spiritual rebirth and end the alienation of contemporary life.12
De Benoist also took ideas about strategy from the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. Drawing on Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ theory, he argued that the far right needed to achieve cultural hegemony before it could gain political power, pushing key ideas and values among groups of influential people. As the GRECE journal Eléments explained, ‘We want to attract those few thousand people who make a country tick. A few thousand is not many in absolute terms, but a few thousand of such importance, sharing the same thoughts and methods, represent the potential for revolution.’13
Meanwhile, Heritage Tours became the subject of a press exposé thanks to the involvement of Roberto Fiore, a friend of Griffin’s.14 Only a few months older than Griffin, he had fled to London from Italy with the help of the League of St George, a clandestine far-right network that provided ‘safe houses’ for neo-Nazis on the run. Fiore, despite maintaining his innocence, was wanted by Italian police because of his association with a terrorist group, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei), which had bombed a Bologna train station in 1980, killing eighty-five people.
Fiore was part of a new generation of Italian fascists who rejected parliamentary politics, looking instead to the ideas of the Sicilian mystic philosopher Julius Evola (1898–1974). Like de Benoist, Evola had criticized the decadence of capitalist society, but for him, spiritual rebirth would be achieved by an elite warrior caste. Fiore had used Evola’s ideas to formulate a creed he called Terza Posizione, which like the Strasserites claimed to take up a ‘third’ position that was neither Capitalist nor Communist, and sought to achieve its goals by building grassroots social movements.
When Fiore arrived in Britain, he was looking for activists among whom he could spread Third Positionist ideas and struck up a friendship with Griffin, who was impressed by the Italian’s knowledge and organizational experience. Together with two other young National Front members, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington, the group became known as the ‘Political Soldiers’, after a manifesto written by Holland and published in 1984. Claiming that the white race was under threat and the ‘death of Europe’ was at hand, the manifesto called for activists ‘to be moulded into National Revolutionary Warriors’, and to become a new type of man ‘who will live the Nationalist way of life every day’. The manifesto concluded with the exhortation ‘Long Live Death!’, a slogan derived from Evola.15
Such rhetoric proved unpalatable to many NF members and the party split in 1986, with the Political Soldiers naming their faction the Official National Front. They further elaborated their theory of race, arguing that ‘the racialist position now adopted by the National Front is based on the Nationalist principle that self-rule and the preservation of racial and cultural identity is the inalienable right of all the people of the world.’16 Following this logic, they began to adopt the language of black separatist and Third World liberation movements, professing support for the Iranian Revolution and Palestinian freedom. The Political Soldiers heaped praise on the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya theory of direct democracy, claiming ‘the very ideology which we hold dear is articulated in a superbly concise and direct manner in the pages of [Gaddafi’s] Green Book.’17 They also applauded the ‘true democracy’ of the Libyan People’s Committee and Gaddafi’s ‘belief in the inalienable right to self-determination of all the races of mankind’. The Green Book, then, was ‘essential reading for all who share our vision’. Griffin and Holland travelled to the Libyan capital Tripoli in search of financial support from Gaddafi, who at the time was funding a range of groups who opposed Western governments. They returned empty-handed, save for a couple of crates of the revered volume.
Beyond their own dwindling circle, the Political Soldiers had little impact. Unsuccessful attempts were made to set up a housing co-op in Northern Ireland in 1986 and, later, to infiltrate the anarchist squatters’ movement in Hackney, East London.18 The Official National Front increasingly came to resemble a cult: selected groups of recruits were reportedly taken for ideological cadre ‘training’ on Griffin’s parents’ land, while slogans such as ‘Fight Racism’ rapidly alienated members who had not kept up with the pace of change. When the March 1988 edition of the party newspaper featured pictures of Gaddafi, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and the US black separatist Louis Farrakhan on the front cover, it provoked a wave of resignations from the party.
The Official National Front disbanded in 1989 and Griffin’s clique renamed itself the International Third Position. They began buying dilapidated properties in rural France and renovating them: Griffin describes this as purely a business venture but others have claimed it was an attempt to set up a commune.19 At the same time he was becoming politically estranged from Holland and Fiore, both of whom were Catholics, and were introducing an increasing amount of religious