THE HATE MACHINE

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jul 2, 2000 | by words Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor

Cartwright was dispatched to America by Nick Griffen, BNP leader, to formally launch the American Friends of the BNP, a fundraising and propaganda arm of the British right. The AFBNP is backed by Pierce's National Alliance, supporters of KKK leader David Duke, and the Council of Conservative Citizens. Duke is chair of the Republican Party in Louisiana and the CCC, unashamedly racist, has a strong middle-class following and is supported by Trent Lott, the senate majority leader.

During Cartwright's visit to the states, the AFBNP raised #10,000 for right-wing groups in Britain. Cartwright, also a member of the British arm of the National Alliance, was given an audience with Pierce, taking his ideas of leaderless resistance and the globalisation of the far right back to Europe. Pierce, who is banned from the UK, staged a huge meeting in Greece in 1998 where delegates from far-right groups across the world listened to Pierce's vision of a global far-right fraternity and theories of race war.

The path from Pierce and Oklahoma to Copeland seems clear. The National Alliance are directly linked to Combat-18 and the National Socialist Movement. Pierce's ideas of leaderless resistance, an Aryan wake-up call and race war, found expression in the Nazi bomber Copeland. And Copeland was terrorising London, while other racist gangs were attempting to launch bomb attacks in other parts of Britain - a development which even Scotland Yard's elite Anti- Terrorist Squad interpret as pointing towards some kind of wider conspiracy.

In an interview with the Sunday Herald, in the middle of Copeland's bombing campaign, Pierce said: "Britain is in a very precarious position. You can't sit on your hands while your race degenerates Unless the white race is preserved, we are heading for a bloody and painful showdown. There is only an ocean between the UK and the USA We need to build bridges to ford the gaps. I am moving beyond moral support of white races in Europe to actual concrete support. We are sharing methods of resistance."

Not only are Pierce and men like Cartwright and Griffen open about their racist views, the security services, in Britain at least, have riddled far right organisations with moles. So if C-18 and the NSM were filled with informers, why did Special Branch, MI5 or the anti- terrorist squad not move against Copeland earlier, or at least have him under surveillance? His name was known to the anti-fascist campaigners and magazine Searchlight long before he started bombing London; in fact, on the day of the final bomb, Searchlight had passed his name onto the Yard as a possible suspect. Yet the bombs still went off.