We said only recently that the problem with nazis trying to be respectable is that they just can’t keep their true beliefs buttoned down for very long. Then, we were talking about antisemitic remarks at last month’s Homeland Party conference. Now, another Homeland member has got himself into trouble by shooting his mouth off online.
Simon Bennett was the Homeland Party candidate for Maidstone Rural East in the local elections at the beginning of May.
But since then, he has fallen out of favour massively and, it is reported, has been expelled from the party.
The problem? A post on X describing Slavic people as “untermensch”.
Adopting the notion of Untermensch, the notorious German Nazis term for ‘subhumans’ such as Jews, Roma, Slavs and other east Europeans, was clearly too much even for Homeland Party Chairman Kenny Smith.
Seeing the damage it might inflict on his claims that Homeland is the party of ‘sensible nationalism’, he expelled Bennett is short order.
The concept of ‘Untermensch’, of course, underpinned the Nazi’s drive to eliminate those who were categorised as such, and fuelled the Holocaust. It was earlier used by the American Ku Klux Klan.
Bennett immediately shut down his X/Twitter account, though just a little too late. The post had already been archived for posterity.
But the ‘sensible nationalists’ of the Homeland Party cannot claim they were blindsided by Bennett’s off-message rant. He has previous for exactly this kind of behaviour: only last March, shortly before the May elections, he posted this:
Even so, Homeland was still happy to run him as a candidate, unsurprisingly perhaps as this remark merely echoed Kenny Smith’s sniggery suggestion at the Homeland conference a week earlier that Jews did not belong in Britain.
Only when Bennett went full Joseph Goebbels did he become a potential source of embarrassment.
But then, you would have to go some to embarrass a party leader who sports a swastika tattoo on his chest…
