Off topic: BNP sockpuppetry

A while ago an indi­vidual left a racist com­ment in response to a post on the far right Brit­ish National Party. It didn’t get through mod­er­a­tion. Today that indi­vidual emailed me again, from rhoryfraser@hotmail.com.

Let’s take a look at the com­ment trail left by that email account.

Here’s a recent one from the Inde­pend­ent [cached]

Being a mem­ber of the BNP doesn’t make you a fas­cist. Most of the cur­rent Labour lead­er­ship have communist/far left back­grounds and I wouldn’t want them in any sort of pos­i­tion of power but they are. Indi­vidual BNP mem­bers should be allowed the same freedoms as any­one else

So Rhory is a polit­ical neut­ral, but with sym­pathy for the BNP as an ordin­ary polit­ical party. Fair enough. But take a look at another com­ment. Rhory actu­ally appears to be a UK Inde­pend­ence Party sup­porter, regret­ting a decline in its elect­oral fortunes:

I’m afraid this res­ult (and the res­ult in Bed­worth) are nails in UKIPs coffin. If we can’t pick up votes in a place like Croy­don with the cur­rent Con­ser­vat­ive lead­er­ship doing their best to imit­ate the Lib Dems, then when can they? We were saved at the last Euro elec­tions by Kilroy-Silk’s media-staged inter­ven­tion. It is time for a major re-think.

But no! He/she/it is actu­ally an old-fashioned social­ist:

Fas­cism is a creed that believes in using viol­ence to achieve polit­ical ends. The UAF are more fas­cistic than the BNP. Your activ­it­ies are a dis­grace to the ordin­ary, hard-working socialist.

I’m Irish and a social­ist and to see so-called social­ists attack­ing a 75 year old politi­cian made me phys­ic­ally sick

These com­ments are, of course, clas­sic sockpuppetry .

It’s often said — by people like rhory, in fact — that the BNP is not racist, and its mem­bers should be judged at face value. You can see from the activ­it­ies of people like rhory that this view doesn’t look very con­vin­cing. And yes, there is likely no real rhory, just an anonym­ous email account — prob­ably one of several.

The moral? The world can­not — alas — be taken entirely at face value. But if part of your life con­sists of leav­ing fake com­ments on web­sites then it might be time to re-evaluate it.

++UPDATE++

And ‘Mr Fraser’ responds:

[C]an you ima­gine the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing opin­ions like mine about immig­ra­tion — shared by most ordin­ary people I know — and facing the com­plete omertà in the National and local media?

…It is get­ting harder and harder for the likes of you to char­ac­ter­ise people like myself and the BNP as extrem­ists. Can you ima­gine if you removed the media oppro­brium and allowed us a fair say? We would win National elec­tions and the whole­sale betrayal of the indi­gen­ous pop­u­la­tion would cease.