BNP's new 'family friendly' image is exposed! Robertson is 'Stormfront' fanatic!
The May Queen | 07.05.2004 11:38 | Anti-racism
Who’s the family man in the BNP’s new family friendly image? Andy Robertson, AKA ‘JohnJoyTree’, The obsessive controller of the worlds most notorious openly neo-nazi bulletin board, that’s all! Read his sad and lurid tale here!
In the run up to the Euro-elections, the BNP has had a makeover. They are now desperately trying to ditch the skinhead thug image they had used to recruit hardcore neo-nazis in the 1980’s. They now want to project a fluffy family friendly image to woo the voters.
Part of this image change involves putting a new masthead on the front page of its website. Off comes the party’s previous online logo, a photo of Nick Griffin, the ubiquitously pictured wannabe Furhur, (an image which still leers unattractively from the top of virtually every other page on the site). Instead, up go some family snapshots, which flank the new slogan “striving for a better Britain for people just like you”.
To represent the “people just like you” is a middle aged man in an orange shirt with his arm around his young daughter, posed in front of the rolling green English countryside of Sussex. So who is this new icon chosen to represent us ordinary folk? A bit of digging, and we find a somewhat more sad and sinister reality lies beneath the image the BNP are trying to project.
The man with his daughters in the picture is Andy Robertson, a single father from Lewes in Sussex. Andy could once be seen as a nice guy, even bit of an old hippy, with a love for the Sussex landscape, trees, the works of JRR Tolkein and science fiction.
However, his friends have noticed a change in Andy since the tragic early death of his wife a few years ago. In his lonely shock and depression, Andy took to the internet to find solace. His interest in romance, fantasy fiction and folklore intensified into obsession. He particularly became increasingly drawn into old Norse mythology, and its wonderful story of the tree of life, Yggdrasil.
However, in his despair he became beguiled by the writings of an American neo-nazi, who had twisted the myth of Yggdrasil into doctrines of white power and neo-fascism. While in ancient Norse belief, Yggdrasil, the tree of life connected the nine regions of the cosmos, the American Nazis had perverted it to the nutcase claim that:
“In the context of White Nationalism, one can assume that Yggdrasil binds together different classes of Europeans and reminds them of their ancient (and modern!) tribal obligations.”(!)
This is a good illustration of how alienated North American white folks often romanticise their European past in order to try to escape their suburban and mundane emptiness as modern consumers. However, for the American neo-nazi scene, these myths have become twisted into tools for race hate and fascism. Here, all the beliefs and myths that motivated Hitler still abound, from the belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, to holocaust denial and white Aryan supremacism. It was in these murkey depths that Andrew W. Robertson’s mind was to become entangled.
Robertson is now known as ‘JohnJoyTree’ on the North American based websites he frequents. Indeed under this pseudonym he has become the senior moderator on the notorious openly Nazi ‘stormfront’ bulletin boards! As ‘senior moderator’ of the website he allows posts which fantasise about killing all Jews, the violent repression of black and Asian people, and the elimination of gay people and the disabled. In other words, the usual diet of Nazi propaganda which the BNP claims to have left behind! Since joining ‘stormfront’ in November 2001 Robertson himself has written a staggering 20,649 posts on this website alone.! His obsessive rantings include speculations on magic, the plots of sword and sorcery fantasy fiction, paranoia about Jews and singles ads for Aryan-only dating! His list of links to recommended websites included at the bottom of all his postings includes the BNP and the hate site called ‘Jew Watch’. Accompanying all these postings are diatribes praising the deeds of Adolf Hitler!
As if to exemplify where Robertsons confused and dangerous ideas can lead, he himself is attacked by other Nazis on the internet as not white enough! This is because he himself is descended from Puerto Ricans. Others accuse him of not being sexist and right wing enough, deriding him a feminist and a Jew! Such is the shady and terrifying world of the fascist far right he has become embroiled in.
So this is the new ‘Mr Family man’ pinup the BNP has chosen to represent ‘people just like you’ on their website! A sad and twisted fanatic, who has adopted hardcore Nazi beliefs so extreme that even the old Tyndallite BNP would blush. And a single father prepared to exploit his two young daughters, Alice and Claire, by putting them on the front page of the BNP’s website! Would any normal, sane parent use and expose their young children in this way, as icons for a far right political party? Would their Mother have allowed this?
The BNP are obviously totally out of touch with the ordinary people of this land if they think this creep in any way represents ‘people just like us’!
Part of this image change involves putting a new masthead on the front page of its website. Off comes the party’s previous online logo, a photo of Nick Griffin, the ubiquitously pictured wannabe Furhur, (an image which still leers unattractively from the top of virtually every other page on the site). Instead, up go some family snapshots, which flank the new slogan “striving for a better Britain for people just like you”.
To represent the “people just like you” is a middle aged man in an orange shirt with his arm around his young daughter, posed in front of the rolling green English countryside of Sussex. So who is this new icon chosen to represent us ordinary folk? A bit of digging, and we find a somewhat more sad and sinister reality lies beneath the image the BNP are trying to project.
The man with his daughters in the picture is Andy Robertson, a single father from Lewes in Sussex. Andy could once be seen as a nice guy, even bit of an old hippy, with a love for the Sussex landscape, trees, the works of JRR Tolkein and science fiction.
However, his friends have noticed a change in Andy since the tragic early death of his wife a few years ago. In his lonely shock and depression, Andy took to the internet to find solace. His interest in romance, fantasy fiction and folklore intensified into obsession. He particularly became increasingly drawn into old Norse mythology, and its wonderful story of the tree of life, Yggdrasil.
However, in his despair he became beguiled by the writings of an American neo-nazi, who had twisted the myth of Yggdrasil into doctrines of white power and neo-fascism. While in ancient Norse belief, Yggdrasil, the tree of life connected the nine regions of the cosmos, the American Nazis had perverted it to the nutcase claim that:
“In the context of White Nationalism, one can assume that Yggdrasil binds together different classes of Europeans and reminds them of their ancient (and modern!) tribal obligations.”(!)
This is a good illustration of how alienated North American white folks often romanticise their European past in order to try to escape their suburban and mundane emptiness as modern consumers. However, for the American neo-nazi scene, these myths have become twisted into tools for race hate and fascism. Here, all the beliefs and myths that motivated Hitler still abound, from the belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, to holocaust denial and white Aryan supremacism. It was in these murkey depths that Andrew W. Robertson’s mind was to become entangled.
Robertson is now known as ‘JohnJoyTree’ on the North American based websites he frequents. Indeed under this pseudonym he has become the senior moderator on the notorious openly Nazi ‘stormfront’ bulletin boards! As ‘senior moderator’ of the website he allows posts which fantasise about killing all Jews, the violent repression of black and Asian people, and the elimination of gay people and the disabled. In other words, the usual diet of Nazi propaganda which the BNP claims to have left behind! Since joining ‘stormfront’ in November 2001 Robertson himself has written a staggering 20,649 posts on this website alone.! His obsessive rantings include speculations on magic, the plots of sword and sorcery fantasy fiction, paranoia about Jews and singles ads for Aryan-only dating! His list of links to recommended websites included at the bottom of all his postings includes the BNP and the hate site called ‘Jew Watch’. Accompanying all these postings are diatribes praising the deeds of Adolf Hitler!
As if to exemplify where Robertsons confused and dangerous ideas can lead, he himself is attacked by other Nazis on the internet as not white enough! This is because he himself is descended from Puerto Ricans. Others accuse him of not being sexist and right wing enough, deriding him a feminist and a Jew! Such is the shady and terrifying world of the fascist far right he has become embroiled in.
So this is the new ‘Mr Family man’ pinup the BNP has chosen to represent ‘people just like you’ on their website! A sad and twisted fanatic, who has adopted hardcore Nazi beliefs so extreme that even the old Tyndallite BNP would blush. And a single father prepared to exploit his two young daughters, Alice and Claire, by putting them on the front page of the BNP’s website! Would any normal, sane parent use and expose their young children in this way, as icons for a far right political party? Would their Mother have allowed this?
The BNP are obviously totally out of touch with the ordinary people of this land if they think this creep in any way represents ‘people just like us’!
The May Queen
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