Weaponising the Past: The extreme right’s concept of history

From Alfred the Great to Wellington, via Nelson to Churchill, and from Francis Drake to Scott of the Antarctic, the extreme right in Britain have regularly sought to appropriate individuals who they claim were the ‘greatest’ Britons of the past. The original founder of the British National Party, John Tyndall (1934-2005), for example (pictured), espousing an ill-informed and seriously flawed reading of the past, regularly complained about ‘liberal’ neglect of Britain’s ‘great heroes’.

As a historian working on both the interwar fascist and contemporary far right, I have become more and more aware of how the myths and realities of past events, especially those associated with the Second World War, can be used and abused by people with an ideological agenda, especially members of the parties of the extreme right.

This has been particularly the case, for example, with the ‘Battle of Britain’, a highly selective version of which, rather shockingly, has appeared in recent years in some British far right propagandistic literature in their desperate attempts to make dubious political claims about the nature of UK society today. In fact, it is important to realise that the extreme right has always been alive to the usefulness of ‘history’ and other forms of culture for ideological purposes.

This use (and blatant abuse) of history is one of the themes I explored in a chapter I contributed to an edited collection published back in 2015 by Routledge: Cultures of Post-War British Fascism, edited by Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson. Many of the points I made back then remain just as relevant today.

In my essay for the study, in a chapter entitled History and cultural heritage: the far right and the Battle for Britain, I explored and analysed the British far right’s general ideological landscape in the post-1945 period and up to the present, and the disturbing ways in which a variety of key extreme right writers and activists in this country have selectively appropriated ‘history’ and the past; ideas about culture, heritage, and tradition have regularly been utilized to try to give intellectual gravitas to some markedly intolerant and ugly ideas.

‘Philosophies’ about history

First, this has taken the form of grand, sweeping ‘philosophies’ about history, where extreme right ideologues have made claims about what they see as the profound underlying forces apparently at work in society and the world, both in the past and present.

Second, ‘history’ has also been used as part of the extreme right’s configuration of ideas and policies employed for ‘battles’ in the national political arena i.e. they have often sought to portray themselves as defenders of the country’s indigenous national traditions and ‘unique’ cultural heritage, pointing to past ‘great’ heroes who were supposedly doing the same thing, such as Alfred the Great or Hereward the Wake. A major theme has often been the idea of defending Britain from ‘invasion’. In 1998, for example, the British National Party’s Spearhead magazine referred to this self-appointed role in rather grandiose terms as ‘the battle to reclaim Britain’.

Admiral Domvile’s obsessions 

Interestingly, one important figure whose work was listed in BNP book sales lists, and who was discussed at one point in my chapter, was a former British Navy Admiral who had local Kingston and Richmond connections, Sir Barry Domvile (1878-1971). Domvile (pictured), who lived in a large house on the Roehampton Vale side of Kingston Hill, was one of the Governors of the Star and Garter Home for Ex-Servicemen in Richmond in the interwar period. Described by the Security Service, MI5, as ‘fanatically anti-Jewish’, Domvile had run a secretive pro-Nazi organisation called ‘The Link’, and had also upset people in the Star and Garter Home by openly predicting that Hitler was ‘going to win the war’ and would soon be in the country, but there was ‘no reason to worry about it’.

In the postwar period, Domvile re-emerged as a leading conspiracy theorist, far right ‘historian’, and early ‘historical revisionist’, claiming that the ‘Judeao-Masonic combination’ had, ‘for several centuries’, been behind most of the wars and revolutionary movements in Europe. His ideas about history and the ‘secret forces’ at work behind it are still being pedalled by the far right today.

Weaponizing the ‘Battle for Britain’

Returning back to the theme of the ‘Battle for Britain’, I also demonstrated in my chapter how the appropriation of ‘historic’ figures, glossy imagery and other historical iconography in their propagandistic literature has not always gone to plan for the far right. In 2009, for example, when the British National Party (BNP) used the famous wartime song ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ by Vera Lynn on one of its CD music compilations of ‘historic’ and ‘patriotic’ songs (without permission), there was understandable outrage on the part of veterans and from the singer herself.

Similarly, when the BNP employed images of Sir Winston Churchill and a Battle of Britain Spitfire fighter plane in European Election campaign leaflets (billed as ‘The NEW Battle for Britain’), and complained loudly about Britain being invaded and ‘taken over’ by ‘East European’ migrants, commentators and historians were able to point to the evident historical errors and vulgar distortions this entailed, including the fact that the Spitfire used in BNP literature was actually part of the Free Polish contingent of the armed forces in Britain, piloted by a brave Pole.

While fascists and the extreme right have been very keen to cannibalise and ‘politicise’ the past for current-day purposes, they have certainly not been good historians by any stretch of the imagination. When the UK held events to commemorate ‘VE’ (‘Victory in Europe’) Day and other events associated with the end of the Second World War, for example, the extreme right again sought to tap into and exploit those memories and events for their own political purposes (see photo). Veterans, however, including former soldiers who had landed on the beaches at Normandy, and who had later participated in the liberation of the Nazi Death Camps, pointed out that people such as the BNP leader Nick Griffin had a record of Holocaust Denial, and had sought to question and challenge events that veterans had actually seen with their own eyes.

Weaponizing ‘heritage’ and tradition

Another important facet of the extreme right’s attempts to construct an alternative historically-informed culture over the years has been to emphasise the role of heritage and tradition in the British story. One of the big obsessions of the extreme right’s ideologues has thus been with the supposed need to defend ‘traditional’ and ‘real’ culture from ‘false’ liberal versions of the past. The extreme right’s version of what has constituted ‘traditional’ history has mainly tended to be drawn from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, especially from military history and the ‘heroic’ history of the nation at war. However, at times, extreme right ideologues have also selected themes with much longer historical pedigrees that go, in some cases, right back to ancient classical times. Greek or Roman warriors have been held up as ‘heroic’ and pure figures to be emulated for their discipline and valour.

Similarly, the BNP liked to present an image of themselves as ‘crusaders’, defending the country from outside hordes, a message evidently designed to play upon contemporary fears of Islam. One BNP scribe, writing in 2000, looked back at Mediaeval England and argued that, far from being a time of backwardness and tyranny, the Middle Ages was something of a ‘Golden Age’ for people, a ‘Merrie England’ where the inhabitants had real freedom. 

Presenting the past today

More recently, relatively new extreme right parties have continued to appropriate history and use it for ideological and explicitly propagandistic purposes. A good example has been the ‘British Freedom Party’ (BFP), which has included former BNP leader Nick Griffin among its supporters and writers. The BFP has been especially keen to present highly selective versions of Britain’s past in its publications.

In its newspaper The Britannia, for example, which uses an image of Britannia and a lion on its masthead, the BFP has very much sought to tap into the nostalgia of potential supporters for some kind of ‘golden’ past. In 2020 the BFP claimed: ‘Our traditionalist approach means we reject the current individualistic culture… We are dedicated to ensuring that the freedoms, secured by the bloodshed of our heroes, are retained at all costs’.

The idea is regularly emphasised that mainstream experts have conspired to ‘control’ traditional knowledge and to deny ordinary citizens access to their own past. This has led to the BFP’s newspaper carrying large posters of the late Queen Elizabeth and to highly questionable articles asserting the Establishment is in the hands of a ‘liberal’ network that distorts and censors historical knowledge. According to Britannia, for example, there has been a ‘hidden history’ of White slavery which has not been taught in our schools, and the BBC and the rest of the media have been ‘supressing nationalist voices’.

Above all, the BFP is, in many ways, merely following the strategy pursued by various extreme right ideologues and parties in Britain over the decades, where ‘history’ is utilized to stir up anger and to promote the idea that history and the past is an arena or ‘battlefield’ where ‘nationalists’ must fight to preserve their race and culture from agenda-driven ‘enemies’.

As professional historians, good scholars, and serious students of the past will all know, we should remain critically aware of how history and culture is often open to abuse by such extremists. It is all the more reason why we should study the past with utmost care and attention, so that we can educate people about the realities of their history rather than see them fall victim to irrational untruths and ill-informed conspiracy theories.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was first published here in 2015.