Thus begins The Uprising, a new book by veteran British National Socialist Colin Jordan. This latest novel continues the story and line of exposition which the author began in a previous work of fiction, Merrie England 2000 (1993). Newcomers to the White Nationalist movement (especially Americans) may not know who Colin Jordan is; to the rest of us he is a living legend.
For those unfamiliar with his life and works, a brief introduction is in order. Jordan's interest in racial nationalism goes back to the 1930s, when, as a teenager, he visited Hitler's Germany and was favorably impressed. He served briefly as a conscript with the British armed forces during the Second World War. After demobilization, he attended Cambridge University, where he was awarded a degree in History (with Honours).From the late 1940s onward, Jordan was involved in a series of White Nationalist enterprises. He was associated with another famous British National Socialist, Arnold Leese, who declared Jordan to be his political heir. Jordan's first book, Fraudulent Conversion, was published in 1955. It dealt with the Jewish origins and nature of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union.
Jordan went on to found the White Defence League, which merged with other organisations into the first incarnation of the British National Party. In 1962, he founded the National Socialist Movement, and that same year was instrumental in setting up the World Union of National Socialists, along with George Lincoln Rockwell, Savitri Devi, John Tyndall, and others.NSM activities brought Jordan two gaol sentences: one in 1962 for giving an anti-Jewish speech in Trafalgar Square and conducting paramilitary activities (10 months), and another in 1967 for publishing and distributing a leaflet critical of Coloured immigration to the U.K. (18 months).
The NSM became the British Movement in 1968, which Jordan led until his retirement from active political life in 1975. In 1979 he revived Arnold Leese's publication Gothic Ripples, which provided him with a platform from which he could continue to espouse his political ideas and comment on current events.Jordan's ongoing activities as a political commentator earned him the anger of the British establishment, and apparently the particular attention of then Home Secretary Jack Straw. In 1991, his home in Yorkshire was raided by Special Branch, acting on information that Jordan was producing literture which contained thoughts forbidden to the British people. Among the items they confiscated was the incomplete manuscript for Merrie England 2000. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and the manuscript returned.
In 1998, a similar raid by Special Branch resulted in the seizing of the manuscript to The Uprising. Jordan notes in his Preface to the book that "the rough draft was with difficult and long delay regained from the Crown Prosecution Service, allowing this book to appear at long last." Few books have had such a turbulent history before they were even published!The Uprising is set in the immediate future. It tells the story of a revolution in Britain, in which a White Nationalist guerrilla army, known as the British Freedom Fighters (BFF), overthrows a corrupt and anti-White political establishment, which is slowly but surely leading the British people to its destruction. The revolution is accomplished through the force of arms.
The story opens with a BFF assassin (codename "Cedric") executing a particularly odious politicians. This sets the stage for a series of shoot- outs, bombings and kidnappings, which rock the foundations of the corrupt British establishment.To deal with the growing insurrection, the government creates the State Security Police (SSP), "incorporating and going beyond the former Special Branch of the Police and MI5 (Military Intelligence Department 5). The revolution that unfolds pits the BFF and the SSP against each other, while the military stands aside.
Jordan's story, which readers may safely assume has a happy ending, is told in the form of a series of episodes. These episodes are roughly sequential but are relatively independent of each other. There is no personal narrative thread, as in other White revolutionary fiction. The only character to appear more than once is the BFF leader, known as "The Herald," and he shows up only briefly and sporadically. Instead, each episode highlights a different individual facet of a diffuse revolutionary struggle. Some of these episodes are presented more effectively than others. The tone switches back and forth from the serious to darkly comic, and frequently spills over into broad farce.The most notable example of farcical treatment is in Chapter 6, in which a hotel full of homosexual activists get their just desserts. The author is clearly a strong believer in poetic justice, and the BFF repeatedly engages in operations which are inconceivable from a military standpoint but hilarious nonetheless. Imagine something like Monty Python meets Adolf Eichmann. One Solomon Abel, an aging Jewish Communist who writes for an "anti-Fascist" rag called The Stoplight, is among those who meet an elaborate but much- deserved end.
These lighter moments, however, do not indicate that Jordan is not deadly serious about the subject of White revolution. He has clearly given this topic careful consideration over the years. His BFF employs tactics ranging from the garden-variety guerrilla operations already mentioned, to those incorporating extremely sophisticated and modern technology. Here we should mention both his thoughts on pirate radio broadcasts (see "Radio Freedom," pp. 18-19) and the section "The New War in Cyberspace" (pp. 22-23).From the standpoint of the contemporary White Nationalist movement, the most controversial aspect of The Uprising is the underlying notion that violent revolution is the best option open to it. Jordan takes pains in the Prefact to stress that the story he is telling is "imaginary" and should not be taken as "a personal incitement ... to violence." One cannot help but notice, however, that the book is dedicated to Bob Mathews, founder of 'The Order', a group which drew its inspiration from The Turner Diaries, a previous work of White revolutionary fiction. (For the record, it should be noted that Colin Jordan specifically told this reviewer that he had read neither The Turner Diaries nor Hunter prior to writing The Uprising.)
It is Jordan's contention that participation in the electoral process is a political dead-end for White Nationalists and that the only logical and realistic option open is armed insurrection. He summarises his argument agains electoral involvement in Chapter 2:"The unimaginative nationalists of the conventional parties, captivated by their ingrained veneration of majorities in the masses derived from the illusion known as 'democracy,' propagated by the exploiters of that illusion, had always decried militant, political warfare as an impractical fantasy, the immature dreaming of boyish bravado. Their argument had been that the indispensable and preceding requirement for the success of such political warfare is a sufficiently substantial, and indeed massive, base for it within the general public, something conspicuously lacking at the present and likely to remain so for the immediate future." (p. 21).
In other words, it is unlikely that any racial nationalist party will ever receive enough public support to attain total control of the state. That well may be, but in itself that is hardly an argument against utilising elections to build a base of support from which to conduct other, non-electoral operations. When this reviewer put this objection to Jordan directly, he responded that even apparent electoral victories work against the long-term success of the Movement, by encouraging the false belief (both among racial nationalist activists and among the White public in general) that democracy can be made to work in our behalf if only we try hard enough. Rather, he feels, democracy is just a con game, and that the Powers-That-Be will simply change the rules to ensure their survival if, by some slim chance, a White racialist party ever even remotely threatens to unseat them. The resources used in fighting elections would be put to better use in a different type of fighting.For our part, however, we think that now is not the time for armed insurrection, not while so many opportunities to advance the cause of Race and Nation exist within the framework of existing law. But we encourage everyone to read The Uprising for himself or herself and draw his or her own conclusions.
________________ Martin Kerr is a commentator and writer, whose numerous articles have appeared in various National Socialist publications. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia.