Connolly
3rd July 2008, 00:32
Fascists who have had a change of heart and abandoned their beliefs and activities make fascinating reading. A few such stories are summarised below.
Ray Hill
Ray Hill got into nazism in the 1960s when he was in his late twenties. He became a dedicated nazi but in 1979 had a change of heart and began passing information to undermine his extremist comrades. He worked as a mole for Searchlight for four years during which time he caused havoc for the far right.
Ray Hill was born in 1939. He grew up in a working class family in Mossley which is in what is now Tameside, Greater Manchester. He describes Mossley as a tough area but his secondary school in Ashton as a battlefield. “Punch-ups in the playground were a daily way of life.”
He hated teachers and authority and was punished with the strap and cane frequently. “I was by nature a bit of a rebel, and would argue the toss with anyone over anything.”
He left school without any qualifications but was bright and says of his early twenties that he scraped “a living as best I could in a variety of jobs, often taking up challenges in fairground boxing booths and spending every moment of my spare time reading. It was this instinct for self-education which kept me alive intellectually, and which has stayed with me all my life.”
By 1967 he was married with a baby daughter, living in Leicester in poor accommodation and earning meagre wages. This was a time of rapid immigration to Leicester.
He felt “that as a breadwinner I was inadequate. That feeling of shame evaporates quickly if you can identify someone else who is to blame for your misfortunes. So, in my own mind, racial prejudice restored my standing as head of my family. The difficulties we had no longer reflected badly upon me as provider. The blame lay with the immigrants, and it followed that to fight immigration was to fight for my family.”
He went to a meeting of the Anti-Immigration Society and then discovered the Racial Preservation Society. He read pamphlets and books. “Over a period of time, under their influence, my views came to change dramatically.”
He met Colin Jordan one of the most influential nazi leaders in Britain in the post war period who became his political mentor.
He became a leader, a capable organiser, a rousing public speaker and involved in violence. He “was totally committed to the national socialist ideology I had embraced.” After he was charged with assault he emigrated to South Africa in early 1970. Eight years later he became active once again in far right politics, quickly becoming the chair of the South African National Front.
His turning point came in 1979 when he met an Indian family squatting by the roadside. They had been evicted by police from a house as a result of demands by SANF to strengthen apartheid.
“I felt a knot tighten in my guts. How on earth could I begin to tell him that I was responsible for what had happened to him? On one level I wanted to show my sympathy for this poor family, stuck out here in the streets with nowhere in the world to go, but this simple human response was ruled out by the knowledge that I was to blame for their predicament….I fled feeling thoroughly ashamed….My days as a racist were over.”
He decided that he had to make amends, some kind of reparation for all the damage caused over the years by his political activism.
He had become friendly with a couple of Jewish chaps who had been extremely kind to himself and his family when times had been hard. He made contact with a leading figure in the Jewish community and fed inside information on SANF and its activities.
When he returned to England in 1980 he made contact with Searchlight. Over the next four years as a senior figure in the nazi movement his information helped to disrupt nazi organisations and activities.
In 1984 he took part in a TV exposure based on his undercover activities following which his cover was blown. He spoke at meetings around the country to anti-fascists. “Everywhere I spoke, I was received with remarkable warmth and affection.”
For further details see: The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe 's Neo-Nazi Network 1988 by Ray Hill and Andrew Bell, Grafton Books.
Matthew Collins
Matthew Collins was active in the BNP and Chairman of South London National Front in the 1980s until he became sickened with the violence. He became a mole for the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight and helped to expose Combat 18.
He grew up in a deprived area of south London. When he was 15 years old he was attracted to the extreme right by literature from the National Front. He was mentored by Richard Edmonds, a senior member of the BNP and began working full-time for the BNP.
His change came in 1989 when the BNP got a group of football hooligans to break up a meeting of elderly people who were protesting about the BNP setting up their head office in their locality.
“I'd been been involved in lots of fights but I'd never seen anything as terrifying and pointless as this.
“I left and ran off - feeling physically sick. I sat in my bedroom for the rest of the evening, I couldn't believe anyone wasn't killed.”
Two days later he went back to the local BNP headquarters. “They were sitting around, talking about how they'd bashed those Reds and those Pakis. But they weren't - they were women. Old women.”
He contacted Searchlight and over a period of four years provided inside information to help undermine the BNP and Combat 18.
Later he took part in a TV documentary. Subsequently he had to leave Britain for his own safety. Aged 21 he went to Australia for 10 years.
He is now back in Britain working on a project to help young white males avoid being sucked into fascism.
For further details see The Observer, March 10, 2002.
George Burdi
George Burdi was one of the most significant figures in the nazi scene in North America during the 1990s. Yet he abandoned his leadership role, his nazi friends, his extreme racist views and a lucrative hate-record business. His story is of a complete life changing experience.
A Canadian, born in 1970, he grew up without any racist inclinations. He had black friends and a good relationship with his parents who set an example of acceptance of people from different backgrounds.
At 18 years old he came across racial literature and a racist mentor. “I was looking for meaning in life. And here was this heroic challenge in which my blood was calling me to rise up and save my people from destruction. That kind of epic theme really appealed to me….. People find meaning for their lives in many different places….The white power movement was a way for me to find purpose and meaning in my life.”
In 1989 he started a race-hate band. This led to his forming Resistance Records, Detroit which became the world leader in nazi, racist music. He also produced the influential associated magazine Resistance.
The turning point came in 1997 when he was imprisoned for his involvement in an assault on an anti-racist.
“When a week seems like an eternity and you've got months ahead of you, it's easy to sit back and think about your life. I decided I was going to get out of the movement when I left prison. The three biggest things for my decision were the pain I gave my parents, the futility of my cause, and the judgment of the 12 jurors who were all whites…here I was, supposedly fighting this fight for white people like them. I started thinking that there must be something to their perspective.”
For further details see: http://www.onepeoplesproject.com/burdispeaks.htm
Maureen Stowe
Maureen Stowe, 65, was elected as a BNP councillor in the local elections in Burnley , Lancashire in May 2003. In February 2004 she cut her links with the BNP and became an independent councillor. Now she is speaking out against fascism and the BNP.
“I know I must sound stupid to have ever gone along with them,” she said. “What's frightening is that I got elected last May without campaigning and on a BNP ticket when I had no idea what they really stand for. The BNP really hid the racism, certainly in my presence.
"I could never understand why all those people were calling the BNP fascists. Well I do now. Don't vote for them. They are not what they seem and, like me, you'll regret it."
She is well known and active in her community, working in a charity shop. The BNP local activists approached her to stand for the local election without explaining their agenda.
What the BNP didn't know was that when she was much younger Maureen had adopted a mixed race boy. Nelson Mandela was her hero. Also, she had helped a Kosovo refugee who was facing deportation.
In August 2003 she attended the BNP annual rally in nearby Ribble Valley . "I was only there for ten minutes on the Sunday and I didn't like what I saw. It was really nasty."
The turning point came when the leader of the council called her a racist. This rankled with her when she knew she wasn't. He explained that the BNP is a racist party and that she was their representative.
When she finally cut her ties with the BNP she was warmly welcomed by anti-fascists in her locality.
For further details, see the Searchlight (http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/default.asp) archive.
Andy Sykes
Andy Sykes was the Bradford organiser for the British National Party. He changed his mind after being told by a BNP organiser to attack a community fun day in Bradford.
He became interested in the BNP in 2001 after being told by one of their organisers that lots of young white girls were being attacked in Bradford and “that there were up to 1,000 asylum seekers and Asians about to move in. He told me there was a media blackout because the authorities didn't want people to know what was happening. I was really shocked.”
Andy attended a meeting at which Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, spoke. “He turned up with 12 security people and it was all very cloak and dagger – even at this stage alarm bells were ringing because it looked like he was either very paranoid or some people were out to get him.”
This meeting was on the eve of the Bradford riots of July 2001. Griffin stoked the tension. “He told the audience that we had to defend our communities from Asians coming into the area. He said we had to be prepared to fight to protect what was ours.”
After the riots, Andy said that BNP members were “over the moon”.
“They thought it was the best thing that could have happened. All across the country party members were talking about it. But I was devastated by the harm it had done to Bradford , and it didn't seem right for them to be so pleased.”
When Andy looked into some of the claims of the BNP he found “99% of them were rubbish”.
Then came the turning point for Andy. A BNP organiser from Leeds instructed him to arrange the fun day attack.
“It had been organised by Bradford TUC and the local community in an attempt to begin the healing process after the riots, and I got this call telling me to get as many lads together as I could and go and attack any TUC members or Labour people or lefties.
“I was horrified. I told him this was a fun day with women and children and he said that if women wanted to support the TUC they deserved what they got.
“I made up my mind there and then to do what I could to stop the BNP, not just in Bradford but across the country.”
He spoke to Bradford TUC about the planned attack. They put him in touch with Searchlight. This led to him helping set up the BBC1 documentary, The Secret Agent, shown on 15 July 2004, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated Bradford BNP. The programme showed BNP members, including senior officials, involved in racism, violence and anti-semitism.
For further details see: The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/), 16 July 2004; The Secret Agent, in which Andy Sykes appears, on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/); Searchlight magazine, August 2004.
Harry Jones
Harry Jones founded the racist British Immigration Control Association in 1961 in the West Midlands but distanced himself from the fascist label. Later he regretted his racism when he came to meet immigrants regularly through a change of job.
He was one of the most militant anti-immigrant campaigners and a powerful speaker. Paul Foot wrote: “He had whipped up audiences of ordinary people into feelings of fear and horror about the immigrants in their midst….calling down fire and brimstone on uncontrolled immigration….When a BICA branch had wanted a speaker from outside, they had almost always sent for Harry.”
After the Immigration Act of 1962 he wound up the Association. His business subsequently folded and he took a job as a receptionist and telephonist in a hospital in East Birmingham.
“Since then I've seen quite a lot of these people, these immigrants…West Indian mainly, but some Indians too. Before I'd never really met any in the course of my work and the only ones I knew at all were those who used to come along to the meetings.
“Since moving into the hospital and meeting these people, I have to a very great extent changed my views about them. I think there must be a better class of immigrant coming in now, or something. They are trying to live more as we live, and we can't expect them to change their habits overnight. You can't expect West Indians suddenly to like the idea of marriage after years without it.
“I still blame the Government for letting them come in such big numbers. But I couldn't go back now and say the same sort of things as I was saying in 1961.”
Foot comments: “Once his life had settled down into a set pattern, once the insecurity of small business was removed, once he associated at work with immigrants, Jones found himself revolted by the out-right racialism and hate which he himself had propagated.”
http://www.rvar.org.uk/pages/FAQs/recant.htm
Ray Hill
Ray Hill got into nazism in the 1960s when he was in his late twenties. He became a dedicated nazi but in 1979 had a change of heart and began passing information to undermine his extremist comrades. He worked as a mole for Searchlight for four years during which time he caused havoc for the far right.
Ray Hill was born in 1939. He grew up in a working class family in Mossley which is in what is now Tameside, Greater Manchester. He describes Mossley as a tough area but his secondary school in Ashton as a battlefield. “Punch-ups in the playground were a daily way of life.”
He hated teachers and authority and was punished with the strap and cane frequently. “I was by nature a bit of a rebel, and would argue the toss with anyone over anything.”
He left school without any qualifications but was bright and says of his early twenties that he scraped “a living as best I could in a variety of jobs, often taking up challenges in fairground boxing booths and spending every moment of my spare time reading. It was this instinct for self-education which kept me alive intellectually, and which has stayed with me all my life.”
By 1967 he was married with a baby daughter, living in Leicester in poor accommodation and earning meagre wages. This was a time of rapid immigration to Leicester.
He felt “that as a breadwinner I was inadequate. That feeling of shame evaporates quickly if you can identify someone else who is to blame for your misfortunes. So, in my own mind, racial prejudice restored my standing as head of my family. The difficulties we had no longer reflected badly upon me as provider. The blame lay with the immigrants, and it followed that to fight immigration was to fight for my family.”
He went to a meeting of the Anti-Immigration Society and then discovered the Racial Preservation Society. He read pamphlets and books. “Over a period of time, under their influence, my views came to change dramatically.”
He met Colin Jordan one of the most influential nazi leaders in Britain in the post war period who became his political mentor.
He became a leader, a capable organiser, a rousing public speaker and involved in violence. He “was totally committed to the national socialist ideology I had embraced.” After he was charged with assault he emigrated to South Africa in early 1970. Eight years later he became active once again in far right politics, quickly becoming the chair of the South African National Front.
His turning point came in 1979 when he met an Indian family squatting by the roadside. They had been evicted by police from a house as a result of demands by SANF to strengthen apartheid.
“I felt a knot tighten in my guts. How on earth could I begin to tell him that I was responsible for what had happened to him? On one level I wanted to show my sympathy for this poor family, stuck out here in the streets with nowhere in the world to go, but this simple human response was ruled out by the knowledge that I was to blame for their predicament….I fled feeling thoroughly ashamed….My days as a racist were over.”
He decided that he had to make amends, some kind of reparation for all the damage caused over the years by his political activism.
He had become friendly with a couple of Jewish chaps who had been extremely kind to himself and his family when times had been hard. He made contact with a leading figure in the Jewish community and fed inside information on SANF and its activities.
When he returned to England in 1980 he made contact with Searchlight. Over the next four years as a senior figure in the nazi movement his information helped to disrupt nazi organisations and activities.
In 1984 he took part in a TV exposure based on his undercover activities following which his cover was blown. He spoke at meetings around the country to anti-fascists. “Everywhere I spoke, I was received with remarkable warmth and affection.”
For further details see: The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe 's Neo-Nazi Network 1988 by Ray Hill and Andrew Bell, Grafton Books.
Matthew Collins
Matthew Collins was active in the BNP and Chairman of South London National Front in the 1980s until he became sickened with the violence. He became a mole for the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight and helped to expose Combat 18.
He grew up in a deprived area of south London. When he was 15 years old he was attracted to the extreme right by literature from the National Front. He was mentored by Richard Edmonds, a senior member of the BNP and began working full-time for the BNP.
His change came in 1989 when the BNP got a group of football hooligans to break up a meeting of elderly people who were protesting about the BNP setting up their head office in their locality.
“I'd been been involved in lots of fights but I'd never seen anything as terrifying and pointless as this.
“I left and ran off - feeling physically sick. I sat in my bedroom for the rest of the evening, I couldn't believe anyone wasn't killed.”
Two days later he went back to the local BNP headquarters. “They were sitting around, talking about how they'd bashed those Reds and those Pakis. But they weren't - they were women. Old women.”
He contacted Searchlight and over a period of four years provided inside information to help undermine the BNP and Combat 18.
Later he took part in a TV documentary. Subsequently he had to leave Britain for his own safety. Aged 21 he went to Australia for 10 years.
He is now back in Britain working on a project to help young white males avoid being sucked into fascism.
For further details see The Observer, March 10, 2002.
George Burdi
George Burdi was one of the most significant figures in the nazi scene in North America during the 1990s. Yet he abandoned his leadership role, his nazi friends, his extreme racist views and a lucrative hate-record business. His story is of a complete life changing experience.
A Canadian, born in 1970, he grew up without any racist inclinations. He had black friends and a good relationship with his parents who set an example of acceptance of people from different backgrounds.
At 18 years old he came across racial literature and a racist mentor. “I was looking for meaning in life. And here was this heroic challenge in which my blood was calling me to rise up and save my people from destruction. That kind of epic theme really appealed to me….. People find meaning for their lives in many different places….The white power movement was a way for me to find purpose and meaning in my life.”
In 1989 he started a race-hate band. This led to his forming Resistance Records, Detroit which became the world leader in nazi, racist music. He also produced the influential associated magazine Resistance.
The turning point came in 1997 when he was imprisoned for his involvement in an assault on an anti-racist.
“When a week seems like an eternity and you've got months ahead of you, it's easy to sit back and think about your life. I decided I was going to get out of the movement when I left prison. The three biggest things for my decision were the pain I gave my parents, the futility of my cause, and the judgment of the 12 jurors who were all whites…here I was, supposedly fighting this fight for white people like them. I started thinking that there must be something to their perspective.”
For further details see: http://www.onepeoplesproject.com/burdispeaks.htm
Maureen Stowe
Maureen Stowe, 65, was elected as a BNP councillor in the local elections in Burnley , Lancashire in May 2003. In February 2004 she cut her links with the BNP and became an independent councillor. Now she is speaking out against fascism and the BNP.
“I know I must sound stupid to have ever gone along with them,” she said. “What's frightening is that I got elected last May without campaigning and on a BNP ticket when I had no idea what they really stand for. The BNP really hid the racism, certainly in my presence.
"I could never understand why all those people were calling the BNP fascists. Well I do now. Don't vote for them. They are not what they seem and, like me, you'll regret it."
She is well known and active in her community, working in a charity shop. The BNP local activists approached her to stand for the local election without explaining their agenda.
What the BNP didn't know was that when she was much younger Maureen had adopted a mixed race boy. Nelson Mandela was her hero. Also, she had helped a Kosovo refugee who was facing deportation.
In August 2003 she attended the BNP annual rally in nearby Ribble Valley . "I was only there for ten minutes on the Sunday and I didn't like what I saw. It was really nasty."
The turning point came when the leader of the council called her a racist. This rankled with her when she knew she wasn't. He explained that the BNP is a racist party and that she was their representative.
When she finally cut her ties with the BNP she was warmly welcomed by anti-fascists in her locality.
For further details, see the Searchlight (http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/default.asp) archive.
Andy Sykes
Andy Sykes was the Bradford organiser for the British National Party. He changed his mind after being told by a BNP organiser to attack a community fun day in Bradford.
He became interested in the BNP in 2001 after being told by one of their organisers that lots of young white girls were being attacked in Bradford and “that there were up to 1,000 asylum seekers and Asians about to move in. He told me there was a media blackout because the authorities didn't want people to know what was happening. I was really shocked.”
Andy attended a meeting at which Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, spoke. “He turned up with 12 security people and it was all very cloak and dagger – even at this stage alarm bells were ringing because it looked like he was either very paranoid or some people were out to get him.”
This meeting was on the eve of the Bradford riots of July 2001. Griffin stoked the tension. “He told the audience that we had to defend our communities from Asians coming into the area. He said we had to be prepared to fight to protect what was ours.”
After the riots, Andy said that BNP members were “over the moon”.
“They thought it was the best thing that could have happened. All across the country party members were talking about it. But I was devastated by the harm it had done to Bradford , and it didn't seem right for them to be so pleased.”
When Andy looked into some of the claims of the BNP he found “99% of them were rubbish”.
Then came the turning point for Andy. A BNP organiser from Leeds instructed him to arrange the fun day attack.
“It had been organised by Bradford TUC and the local community in an attempt to begin the healing process after the riots, and I got this call telling me to get as many lads together as I could and go and attack any TUC members or Labour people or lefties.
“I was horrified. I told him this was a fun day with women and children and he said that if women wanted to support the TUC they deserved what they got.
“I made up my mind there and then to do what I could to stop the BNP, not just in Bradford but across the country.”
He spoke to Bradford TUC about the planned attack. They put him in touch with Searchlight. This led to him helping set up the BBC1 documentary, The Secret Agent, shown on 15 July 2004, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated Bradford BNP. The programme showed BNP members, including senior officials, involved in racism, violence and anti-semitism.
For further details see: The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/), 16 July 2004; The Secret Agent, in which Andy Sykes appears, on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/); Searchlight magazine, August 2004.
Harry Jones
Harry Jones founded the racist British Immigration Control Association in 1961 in the West Midlands but distanced himself from the fascist label. Later he regretted his racism when he came to meet immigrants regularly through a change of job.
He was one of the most militant anti-immigrant campaigners and a powerful speaker. Paul Foot wrote: “He had whipped up audiences of ordinary people into feelings of fear and horror about the immigrants in their midst….calling down fire and brimstone on uncontrolled immigration….When a BICA branch had wanted a speaker from outside, they had almost always sent for Harry.”
After the Immigration Act of 1962 he wound up the Association. His business subsequently folded and he took a job as a receptionist and telephonist in a hospital in East Birmingham.
“Since then I've seen quite a lot of these people, these immigrants…West Indian mainly, but some Indians too. Before I'd never really met any in the course of my work and the only ones I knew at all were those who used to come along to the meetings.
“Since moving into the hospital and meeting these people, I have to a very great extent changed my views about them. I think there must be a better class of immigrant coming in now, or something. They are trying to live more as we live, and we can't expect them to change their habits overnight. You can't expect West Indians suddenly to like the idea of marriage after years without it.
“I still blame the Government for letting them come in such big numbers. But I couldn't go back now and say the same sort of things as I was saying in 1961.”
Foot comments: “Once his life had settled down into a set pattern, once the insecurity of small business was removed, once he associated at work with immigrants, Jones found himself revolted by the out-right racialism and hate which he himself had propagated.”
http://www.rvar.org.uk/pages/FAQs/recant.htm