As I was walking out of the railway station in Staines, Surrey, along the path next to the tracks that connects the station to the town centre, I noticed that all lampposts on the way had been plastered with stickers reading “Africa for Africans! Asia for Asians! Europe for Europeans!”, over a brief blurb on the benefits of “racial separatism” and contact details for a group called “England First”, including their website and a phone number. A further version declared “Open Your Eyes! To Media Lies! Multi-Racism Failed!” (I suspect the person behind these probably is a multi-racist..) One, oddly enough, adhered to the back wall of the police station.
Has anyone heard of this lot? The TUC’s anti-fascist magazine Searchlight produces no less than 87 search hits for “England First”, but none of them seem to refer to the group (if it is a group), and I can find no reference for them in the otherwise excellent archives. So it was clearly time to Google. Amusingly the no.1 result was for “England’s first living wage campaign”..link, and no.3 was for “England’s first gay minister, Rev. John Church”..link..in fact, there was reams more good stuff, like blogs by immigrants, reports about England’s first black sportsmen, old sports reports…but the fascists seemed elusive. This is of course a function of how Google works – sites are ranked for importance by the number of others linking to them. And that’s why I’m not going to link the page I found in the end. They turned up at politicalsoldier.net, a name that should tell you all about it. Here are links to “International Friends of Germany” (“Campaigning for the rights of German Nationalists in Germany” – which weirdly has an address in France) and stickers snarling “The Queer Plague Must Be Stopped”, in alliance with some mob from Northern Ireland (the mind cringes). To get to the meat of the story, this lot declare that they are “the new campaigning name of the Third Position in England” and claim among other things to have “prevented two new homosexual pubs opening in Yorkshire”. They further claim to have “raised awareness of race attacks” in Oldham before the race riot and to promote the work of Horst Mahler. Mahler, who I think I’ve ranted about before, is a former Red Army Faction terrorist turned nazi who operates something called the “Deutschen Kolleg” (“The Thinktank of the German Reich” according to its website).
How these boys manage to demand a day of remembrance for the victims of communism whilst promoting a man responsible for some of those victims beats me.
Anyway, a neat little window offers us the information that “The Secretary” has an address in the London postcode WC1N 3XX. There are supposedly further and equally nameless secretaries in Halifax, Birmingham, and Ryde. Email addresses are given for two other regions, but as these have no phone numbers or postal addresses I assume them to be noms de guerre used by the others. Curiously the stickers I saw had the Midlands phone number – 0121 241 7916, for the record.
Here are the WHOIS results for that website:
Organization:
Final Conflict Magazine
Kenneth Schmidt
877 Valley Road Unit 6
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
US
Phone: 9737443302
Email: jukjs2@aol.com
Registrar Name….: Register.com
Registrar Whois…: whois.register.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.register.com
Domain Name: POLITICALSOLDIER.NET
Created on…………..: Wed, Jun 13, 2001
Expires on…………..: Sun, Jun 13, 2004
Record last updated on..: Wed, Jun 11, 2003
Administrative Contact:
Final Conflict Magazine
Kenneth Schmidt
877 Valley Road Unit 6
Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
US
Phone: 9737443302
Email: jukjs2@aol.com
Technical Contact:
Netfirms, Inc.
System Administrator
1054 Centre St.
Thornhill, ON L4J 8E5
CA
Phone: 416-661-2100
Fax..: 416-661-0700
Email: domain-registrar@netfirms.com
Zone Contact:
Netfirms, Inc.
System Administrator
1054 Centre St.
Thornhill, ON L4J 8E5
CA
Phone: 416-661-2100
Fax..: 416-661-0700
Email: domain-registrar@netfirms.com
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.NETFIRMS.COM 216.32.198.6
NS2.NETFIRMS.COM 216.32.198.12
So, the magazine EF claim to publish is actually in the USA. Curiouser and curiouser.