Searchlight magazine and anti-fascist groups warned that last weekend’s ‘British National Strike’ would enable the most extreme forces to spread their bile in public. But even we were astonished at the video that emerged of Peter Lawrence, a British Democrat Parish Councillor in Cornwall, unashamedly holding forth with a torrent of neo-nazi lies.
Questioned publicly by enterprising local anti-fascists at the Truro gathering of the so-called strike, Lawrence, who sits on the parish council of Mylor, near Falmouth, just could not resist spitting out a very public anti-Jewish rant.
This was shameless Holocaust-denial in real time.
Seeds of the Holocaust
“Hitler didn’t have an issue with the Jews,” he says in the video. And yet any school child can tell you that Hitler’s Mein Kampf, the book he wrote in Landsberg prison with Rudolf Hess, was an antisemitic document from start to finish.
Its call for violence against Jews, exposure of supposed “Jewish plans” to destroy the imaginary “Aryan race” by interbreeding”, went hand on hand with his insane ideas about lebensraum, living room, for a new and expanded German Reich in the East.
These were the seeds of Holocaust.
Hitler’s “wicked imaginings” started in Vienna when, as a failing artist, he came under the influence of antisemitic publications and ideas that were casually accepted by some sections of society.
His hatred for Jews, combined with a fascination for so called “German Art” and the music of Richard Wagner, encouraged him.to see society as a fight between the “bearers of culture” (racists like him) and the “destroyers of culture” (everyone he hated and blamed for his personal failures).
Cleansed of Jews
It was of course World War 1, his time in the trenches and the German defeat of 1918, that formed his final, and unchanged, belief that Germany and Europe must be “cleansed” of Jewish and Marxist “influence”.
But from the start it was about the Jews. And yet Cllr Lawrence would have people whom he represents believe that this is a lie.
“Hitler had no problem with Jews.” Tell that to European Jews who were the victims of a genocide so well documented that it is in no doubt.
Unless, that is, you’re in a political party run by veteran nazis like Andrew Brons who was a member of the Hitler-venerating National Socialist Movement in the mid-1960s, and described would-be synagogue bombers as “well-intentioned”.
Another hideous lie that Lawrence spouts is that there was no “No direct order from Hitler” demanding the killing of Jews, despite the fact that removal of Jews was the primary focus for Hitler’s nazis and his henchman Himmler and the SS.
Lawrence will no doubt be able to explain what Himmler meant in that infamous, and recorded, speech where he states that his policy is, die ausrottung der Judische Volkes – the elimination of the Jewish people
Lawrence admits that he gets his ideas from, “the revisionist historians that I’ve read”.
Like David Irving, nazi apologist and disgraced Hitler historian, who launched the notion that there was no evidence implicating Hitler, and also claimed that Himmler didn’t mean elimination and that ausrottung meant something else.
Worse still, his argument, ever popular with nazis and Holocaust deniers, is that “it depends what you mean by semitic.”
We know the language: it’s straight out of the Holocaust Deniers Handbook.
Attacks on Jews
Not yet finished with his disgusting rant, Lawrence then brings up yet another neo-nazi go-to favourite, the 1933 newspaper headline where “Judea Declares War on Germany” (Daily Express, January 30th 1933).
But this, and a call from some Jewish organisations to boycott German products, was precisely a response to the massive rise in violent attacks at the time on Jews in Germany and on German businesses.
The German police, known for its Hitlerian sympathies, was widely seen as being “blind in the right eye” concentrating instead on harassing Hitler’s social democratic, leftist and Communist opponents.
Councillor Lawrence neglects to mention these small details.
The Holocaust lie
The finale of this depraved catalogue of anti-Jewish statements comes when he concludes that the Holocaust has been “massively over-exaggerated”.
This is a specific neo-nazi lie that is rolled out by activists on the far right of politics and repeated often.
But never before at a demo in Truro. At least, not until last Saturday…
The finale of this depraved catalogue of anti-Jewish statements comes when he concludes that the Holocaust has been “massively over-exaggerated”
Millions of Jews were murdered by the nazis. Read Hitler. Read Himmler’s own writing.
Read the documents from the Wannsee Conference where leading nazis planned the final solution.
Listen to the few people that survived. Watch the films, if you can stomach them.
Listen to Richard Dimbleby’s incredible May 1945 broadcast from inside Bergen Belsen concentration camp.
It’s all there.
But Councillor Lawrence isn’t telling you that. Not because he doesn’t know or can’t find out but because he’s a neo-nazi hiding in plain sight within an organisation that includes veteran, hardcore neo-nazi activists.
Hoodwinking voters
It’s neither British nor Democratic.
It uses elections to try and hoodwink voters into believing that this is a genuine party, not a neo-nazi outfit still obsessing about the things that brought Adolf Hitler into politics.
When we discover specimens like Peter Lawrence spreading this kind of anti-Jewish filth, which is already illegal in many countries, it confirms for us the urgency and immediacy of our anti-fascist work.
This is why it is our job to expose and confront people like Lawrence and his shocking words, and why we must always be on our guard against this most dangerous set of ideas imaginable.
