"Community": What It Is, And How to Build It What Is To Be Done Part 6By Nick Griffin
“We need to build community”. These days nearly everybody in the broad nationalist movement in Britain seems to be in agreement with this sentiment, with several organisations on the ‘far-right’ frequently claiming to be making progress in this direction. This is clearly a good thing, and it is a significant advance on previous periods, when all concerned were generally busy fighting and (your author and comrades sometimes excepted) losing elections, or engaging in the much more enjoyable but even more useless pastime of brawling with Communist students. There were two points back in the old days when the tactic of engaging in what we called “community politics” did emerge from the ideological and tactical debates and experimentation of the times. Both the National Front in the mid-80s and the British National Party in the noughties not only articulated the idea of Community Politics, but also made efforts to develop it in practice.
Door-knocking, house-to-house surveys, asking residents to bring us their problems and then badgering officialdom to address them, litter-picks, foot patrols against anti-social behaviour, even street food stalls. All were tried out, and all were found to be effective to one degree or another at building support within a ‘target ward’ – within the community. But it was all about getting support from within the community, not building a community – neither our own, nor helping local people to build one. There was an interesting experiment in a different direction: A group from the British Movement Leader Guard in South London, finding themselves without a leader to guard when Mike McLoughlin abruptly retired from active politics (to write some very good books, but that’s another story), decided to build a sort of community of their own. They established first a boxing gym and, later, a fully functioning pub. I have no idea if the group still exists, or if it has been swept away by the tide of demographic change, but the experiment did help to bring some of a second generation up within the same close-knit group. To that extent, the experiment could be deemed successful, but it is stretching it to describe it as a ‘community’. It may well have seemed to be one among those involved but, one thing is clear: Even if it was a community, it wasn’t part of the community. Local people probably liked the fact that young lads who might otherwise have been hanging around on street corners were being kept out of mischief and given purpose in a boxing gym, but that is not at all the same as being part of the wider community. Furthermore, those were the exceptions, the very rare occasions when British nationalists used the C-word. For the rest, for decade after decade of well-intentioned but marginalised irrelevance, it never even crossed their minds. Real ProgressThe stress on “community building” over the last few years is therefore real progress, particularly since the rallying cry is heard not only in Britain but throughout the Anglosphere and in various European countries too. Even better, real efforts are being made to turn theory into practice; I know of several such efforts, spread widely both geographically and by subject. No doubt there are many more of which I do not know, for nearly all of them are below the radar, as they generally need to be in a time of totalitarian liberalism. What, then, of the ‘movement’ in Britain? There are several organisations which often speak of ‘building a community’, highlighting frequent events online – including playing computer games as well as holding discussions – IRL meet ups, hikes and summer camps.
All this is very commendable (with the exception of the online gaming, which is inherently unhealthy, only made worse when grown men spend hours playing with adolescents who are not their own children. Let’s be blunt, that’s not normal; it’s borderline grooming). Now I must be equally blunt about the fact that, contrary to all the rose-tinted claims, none of this is building community in the true sense. This is not to condemn summer camps, hikes, a visit to the pub after giving out leaflets, or even online political discussions; all of them are self-evidently good things. But they are tools for building organisations and comradeship, and for educating individuals; they are not ‘building community’. Indeed, when they are coupled with extremist imagery and cultish politics, the very process of involving young people in such groups actually tends to cut them off from real community. Later in this essay we will consider what real community work in modern Britain would look like in practice, but first we must consider briefly the theory of community. What IS a Community?There are many forms of socialising which are common, and useful, in human societies. Political and cultural organisations, for example, or groups of individuals are brought together – sometimes across great distances – by a shared interest. But while these involve comradeship and common goals, none of them can properly be described as a community. If the word and the concept are not be diluted to irrelevance, a community must first be geographically based. Next, it must be small enough, and be made up of people with enough things in common, for them to feel some sort of kinship and shared sense of belonging. To be an effective community – as opposed to a dead sociological label – its members must on occasion come together in some way, through joint celebration or endeavour. The concept of the ‘national community’ is, of course, a fundamental of nationalism, but for it to have any practical meaning it is first necessary for the movement to have a serious level of national support and power - not necessarily in political institutions; it could at least as easily be through cultural ones. Given that nationalists do not have such a position anywhere in the Western world, we could talk about the importance of building the national community until the last cow is destroyed by the last Net Zero Great Resetter. But it wouldn’t do us any good, so we’ll return to the place where community building is actually possible and useful – the local level. All local areas have some degree of community. Multicultural hell-holes have it, demographically hollowed-out post-industrial slums have it, yuppified old industrial areas have it, even posh commuter belt suburbs have traces of it. But the areas most likely to have it, and to be the most responsive to intelligent nationalist efforts to strengthen it further, are broadly working-class small towns, or estates in larger population centres. They will tend to have natural geographical boundaries, such as main roads, a large park, waterway, the edge of town, or the start of a rival ethnic area. Why should nationalists seek to get involved in such a place? Anyone who seriously has to ask this has, to be frank, a serious problem, and may as well stop wasting their time reading this, but, in brief: We know from long experience that such places are the most receptive to nationalist ideas. In local elections they regularly gave the BNP at least 20% of the vote with a scratch campaign of just a couple of leaflets, and elected British National Party councillors where we had small teams willing to put in real and sustained effort. They went on to vote for Brexit, and in 2025 started electing Reform councillors and put up more flags than anyone else. Allowing for national differences, the same sort of places are the backbone of indigenous resistance to mass immigration and related ills in just about every nation in the West.
They contain the people who have been betrayed the worst by the way the old socialist parties turned away from the white working class to globalism and multiculturalism. While all populations contain at least their fair share of anti-social elements and selfish scum, these areas also contain the biggest concentration of the people best described as “the salt of the earth”. They are, in short, the best places possible in which a serious nationalist movement can seek to root itself. Further, being already towards the lower end of the scale in terms of material wellbeing, and – in the BBC’s notorious phrase – still “hideously white”, they are also going to be the hardest hit in the new age of austerity which is biting as all sorts of Establishment treachery, incompetence and societal sabotage really start to take their toll. These neglected and abused areas, more than any others, need the energy and idealism of nationalism, and the mutual support provided by real community spirit and organisation. In the (still, at present, unlikely) event that the Counter Jihad provocateurs manage to spark the civil war they are being funded to foment, some of these areas will also suddenly be on the front line of ethno-religious conflict. In addition to extensive studies of how things developed in Northern Ireland in 1968, I was also present in white streets near overwhelmingly Muslim Glodwick and Werneth in Oldham during the riots of 2001.
Oldham riots, 2001. As well as fighting with young Asians, the police brutally attacked white men who had gathered to defend their homes and pubs.My experiences there helped to inform both my opinion that trying to throw working-class communities into communal conflict is indefensibly wicked, and my conviction that – if the worst comes to the worst - areas with a strong sense of community and strong pre-existing networks are best prepared to muster disciplined and responsible self-defence efforts. Nationalism is supposed to be about mobilising its true believers to work for the benefit of the nation and its people. There are, therefore, few things more reprehensible than the present tendency among some nationalists to spend their time cheer-leading on social media for ‘Remigration’ policies which - requiring state power to be implemented – could only possibly be delivered by populist governments, rather than working in real life to help actual communities withstand certain austerity and possible conflict. The protective value of community works the other way too. The more unstable the liberal ‘order’ is, the more intolerant it becomes. Nationalists who isolate themselves in their own principled/uncompromising/ We are, in effect, political guerrillas, operating in occupied territory. To stand on open ground, directly challenging the Powers That Be with slogans and activities which are red rags to an insane liberal bull, is more or less suicidal. Nationalist activists should instead aim to merge into receptive communities, ideally actually living in them but, at the very least, devoting themselves to constructive activities within their boundaries and among their residents. This doesn’t necessarily provide total protection from repressive actions by a nervous and bigoted state apparatus, but it makes it much more likely that any such attacks are perceived by local people as system aggression against them. That turns repression directed against individual nationalists into an error which can help radicalise and mobilise the entire community – and others who hear about it.
No, I’ve not turned into a Maoist, but the old pederast was right about this!Mao, Che Guevara, Marighella and Giap all insisted on this point, albeit in very different circumstances. But just as “moving among the people as a fish in water” protected Communist armed-struggle insurgents from physical extermination at the hands of superior military forces, so too will it give nationalist political and cultural insurgents protection from the legal oppression and demonisation attacks of the liberal state. This, then, is the true meaning of “building community”. It is not helping a community in search of votes. It is not building comradeship in an isolated nationalist organisation. It is finding ways to help to strengthen the bonds within an existing community. Having clarified what the concept really means, the question we now have to answer is what can be done to turn it into reality. Read The Next Part of the Essay On Nicks SubstackSubscribe for free because that way you’ll get notified of all my new posts. Become a Paid Subscriber if you appreciate the fact that I’m breaking new ground here and want to support my efforts and help spread my message of hope. |
