Win by appearing to lose?

Acknowledgements to the Heretical.com web site, from which the following extract of an article first published in January 2008 is taken.

BNP Religion: The Psychology of False Messiahs...

By Simon Sheppard

Is Griffin a Psychopath?

I now know from personal experience that Nick Griffin is a liar and a charlatan. This is no great revelation, but the evidence is now so blatant that it demands comment. The following is from Griffin’s New Year’s Message on the BNP website:

"A small clique (relentlessly backed by the far-left) has been plotting behind the scenes to use lies, character assassination and deceit to hijack the BNP and drag it back into an ugly past of mythical ‘Jewish conspiracies’, juvenile cross-burnings and crude race hate.

"Meanwhile, someone within the same clique has now provided (sold?) the addresses of an unknown number of BNP members to an openly neo-Nazi outfit to send them advertising material for clearly illegal and deeply disgusting extremist propaganda. To those decent BNP members who have in the last couple of days received unsolicited mailshots from one Simon Shepherd I can only apologise and urge them to consign the filth to the bin. Shepherd is the hardcore and unreconstructed extremist who set up and ran John Tyndall’s Spearhead website, and will no doubt have taken malicious delight at the thought of disturbing decent people’s New Year’s Eve with his political pornography. Greater proof of the bad faith of the Smith/Graham/Blake gang, and – apart from our former web editor’s hacking of the private email accounts of national and local BNP officials – a greater betrayal of the trust that was placed in them, it is hard to imagine."  [Emphasis mine].

Due to disaffection within the BNP I was given a list of addresses (how it came to me I will not say), who were among the people mailed around 40,000 free copies of the Don’t Be Sheeple newspaper. I did indeed set up the Spearhead website. Everything else however is pure fantasy, wrong both in substance and in fact. I will further point out the misspelling of my name and that the Don’t Be Sheeple was cleared by lawyers. These are not innocent errors: Griffin has a law degree and such misspelling is a Searchlight trick.  [Emphases mine].

Rather than being drawn into a point-by-point refutation of the above and the other personal attacks and false accusations Griffin has made against me, I would like to discuss the nature of the psychopath. The term is used here in its more general sense to describe someone with a mental disorder: the common-or-garden variety of psychopath, not the extreme case who has already found his way to a secure hospital. I am sure I have met several in my time, but the most memorable, providing the model for my working definition, is an individual with a grudge who broke into my flat in Hull and stole a computer I had spent weeks building. His grudge concerned that computer and a possible working arrangement which had been floated as an idea but never came to fruition.

The syndrome was that this individual simply had to feel that he had come out on top. This could have been due to subconscious inadequacy, or an overly inflated ego (due perhaps to absorbing too much adulation). The key point is that if you engage in battle with someone who will stop at nothing, where laws, respect, honesty and decency will be cast aside as secondary to winning at all costs, when with the power of obsession they simply have to get the better of you, it is better to retire gracefully and ‘lose.’ One can readily imagine where such an ongoing vendetta might lead.

Griffin’s attacks against me appear not to have been tempered in any way by the fact, evident to all, that the Don't Be Sheeple contained no criticism of him or the BNP whatever. It has been stated twice to my knowledge that "Griffin will destroy the BNP rather than relinquish control of it." These observations are consistent with my working definition of a psychopath.  [Emphasis mine].

Finally, interesting comparisons might be made between Nick Griffin and the late L. Ron Hubbard. [See Bare Faced Messiah].

Concluding Thoughts and Tentative Predictions

A seasoned political observer (somewhat surprisingly, still a BNP member) has ventured that the situation will not change until the establishment has lost faith in itself. This may be near at hand, with what appears to be a coming economic meltdown. Gordon Brown’s habitual indecision does not indicate confidence, and few even in his own party continue to have confidence in him.

It must now be obvious to anyone not in a thrall to quasi-religious dogma that Griffin’s strategy has failed. According to that strategy, membership and electoral gains will increase; the BNP’s financial strategy relies on the former. However BNP membership must certainly now be falling and what electoral gains have been achieved have been modest. In my view skirting around the problem by negating core policies, playing clever with the electorate, and trying to play the opposition at its own game, adopting its language ("We’re not racist") was always doomed to fail.

If by failing the BNP succeeded in exposing the corrupt system for what it is (e.g. by making the government ban the BNP as a political party, thus forcing it to show its true, anti-democratic colours) that in itself would be an achievement. However the BNP in its current form could not even achieve that.

If ideology is divorced from reality, reality will always ultimately prevail. Unless the BNP can be restored to a truly nationalist party it will be, ideologically and politically-speaking, in the wrong place at the wrong time when the denouement comes.