A white supremacist friend of Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, was banned from entering Britain yesterday as he headed to speak at the BNP’s Red White and Blue festival this weekend.
Preston Wiginton (pictured below), one of the world’s most active nazis and antisemites, was refused entry by immigration officers at Heathrow airport under laws to keep out “undesirables”. He was to have been the star overseas guest at the BNP’s tenth RWB festival, which opens today in Derbyshire.
It was Wiginton, 44, who organised Griffin’s anti-Islam tour of three US universities at the end of October 2007. As well as financing the trip, Wiginton appealed to users of the Stormfront nazi internet forum to donate money to Griffin while he was in America.
Wiginton had been unknown in the UK before Griffin’s trip and it was Searchlight that exposed him and revealed his extensive nazi activities and connections. This was no doubt what brought him to the attention of the UK Border Agency.
Shortly after his tour Griffin wrote an open letter to “European Colleagues” endorsing Wiginton’s involvement in organising a march in Moscow at which leading nazis addressed a crowd of fascists giving the Nazi salute while shouting “death to the Jews” and “Pure Russia”.
Griffin praised Wiginton as a “very effective organiser [who], rarely among American nationalists, understands the importance of image and popular acceptability to all nationalist parties”. The letter explained that Wiginton “is very well connected in Russia, with good contacts with various nationalist organisations and elected politicians”. The organisations to which he refers are some of the most racist and murderous neo-nazi groups and skinhead gangs in Russia who have been responsible for dozens of racist murders.
Referring to Wiginton’s role in planning a “major march and rally” in Moscow Griffin continued “the BNP supports this endeavour wholeheartedly and asks all our European comrades to do likewise, hopefully thereby creating the beginnings of an effective cooperation between patriots of both Western and Orthodox Christendom against our common enemies: Mass immigration; radical Islamism; Western liberalism and Wall Street/White House dollar imperialism”. The language is typical of neo-nazis.
Griffin and Wiginton have collaborated for many years. Wiginton spearheaded US support for Griffin during his trial for inciting racial hatred, setting up an online petition calling on the British government to drop the prosecution. Together with Jamie Kelso of Stormfront, he also organised a protest outside the British consulate in Houston, Texas in January 2006.
Wiginton’s connections and activities are wide-ranging. He caused a furore at Texas A&M university some years ago by arranging a series of meetings for Frosty Wooldridge, a prominent opponent of immigration. The two men ran a joint campaign to repeal a 2001 Texas law that allows immigrants to pay the same reduced fees at state universities as Texas residents.
These days Wiginton works with the Texas chapter of the Minuteman Project, a group of would-be vigilantes who take violent exception to Mexican immigrants, or the “mestizo parasite” as he prefers to call them.
Kevin Strom, leader of the neo-nazi National Vanguard (NV), was another associate until his arrest on child pornography charges when Wiginton and Griffin dropped him like a ton of bricks.
Wiginton boasts of being friends with perhaps the most famous NV member, April Gaede, mother of the nazi pop twins Prussian Blue. Their act is named after the chemical residue left by Zyklon B, the gas used to murder the Jews in the Nazi death camps.
Wiginton also has close ties to Denis Gerasimov, lead singer of the notorious Russian white power band Kolvorat (Swastika), for whom he wrote a racist ditty on how immigration is diluting the purity of Russia’s “blood” and “soil”.
Despite repeated denials to the contrary Wiginton regularly posts antisemitic vitriol to Stormfront to which he also donates money. A typical posting of his, on 13 July 2007, read: “And the jew – how many nations and economies have they destroyed – yes they were doing this in many centuries ago as well. The jew has infested every nation – there is no where else to go.”
That Griffin should invite this hardline nazi to help celebrate his election to the European Parliament at the BNP annual festival shows yet again that the BNP’s claim to legitimacy is just a pretence and that Griffin has not moved far from his fascist roots.
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