Last week's Tuesday column appeared on Thursday (pushed back by pressure on space). This week's appears on Monday (to preserve topicality). It is my account for The National, Abu Dhabi of Nick Griffin's debut on a Question Time panel. The cartoon strip is from the sundayfunnies blog.
As Voltaire might have said but didn't, I find the man's views despicable but would vigorously defend his right to express them ...
The big television event in the UK has been the appearance on the BBC programme Question Time of Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party.
Outside the studios, there was a noisy demonstration. Inside, from the presenter David Dimbleby and fellow panellists to the audience, there was relentless hostility towards this figurehead of an odious political group based on the hatred of those its adherents consider to be different.
Mr Griffin claims to be a superpatriot, proud of his father’s Second World War service in the Royal Air Force. But he cannot deny that his party is supported by people who have, if not now, then at an earlier stage of their thinking, regretted that the war did not have a different outcome.
His wriggling as the questioning and rhetoric grew more combative reminded me, indirectly, of my afternoon with Daniel Rouxel, who began life as a Franco-German “war baby” and whose story I recounted in The National a couple of Saturdays ago.
Thinking of Mr Rouxel as I watched Question Time, a melange of reflections flooded back into focus about a tragic but fascinating period of modern history.
Our meeting, in the French city of Le Mans, was mentioned, hardly more than in passing, in last week’s East/West musings on home town memories.
But the eloquence with which he defended his late mother, a woman who would have been punished severely as a collaborator had the Resistance got hold of her as war ended, was something I shall probably never forget. “When they met, she hated his uniform,” he said. “But love triumphed over those feelings.”
A couple of readers have written to me since the article appeared to say how moved they were by Rouxel’s account of being tormented and mistreated at his French village school as the “son of a Boche and a whore”.
I have always been reluctant to condemn too harshly those French people who chose, to one extent or another, to get along with the enemy. I like to think I would have been strong and brave enough, in circumstances I have never had to confront, to risk all and resist. But I understand why, with mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, lives to protect, many saw somehow getting through the war as the priority.
And I also believe that had Britain been invaded and overrun, collaboration would have occurred on much the same scale as it did in France, while resistance would have started, as it did there, on the extreme left.
Nick Griffin, when not making repellent statements about Islam and immigrants, can argue until he is blue in the face that he descends, politically, from the sort of far right that would also have done its bit.
He is entitled to his view. Others are equally entitled to feel that, as in France, such elements would have magically rediscovered their patriotism only when it was clear the tide was turning, And then they would have been at the front of the mob baying for vengeance against women like Daniel Rouxel’s mother.
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