Anti Fascism

Who is Arthur Kemp?

This is a cross post from slackbastard
nazi-kemp

A short while ago my blog was the subject of a complaint. As a result, I have had to temporarily remove one image. The image is of a man named Arthur Kemp. In the image — a photo — Kemp is sitting down and there is a Nazi symbol in the background. To the best of my knowledge, the image appears on (a) few other sites. Prominent examples include:

Edmund Standing, The BNP: Not very British, January 3, 2010 | [img]
Harry’s place, Arthur Kemp: BNP Reichsminister des Auswärtigen, October 25, 2009 | [img]

A former South African policeman, Kemp (1962–) left South Africa for England in 1996, joining the British National Party. According to Heidi Beirich, in 2004 he began work for the BNP and “is well respected by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany”. Having previously conducted ideological training for party members (2007), in early 2009 Kemp became responsible for selling merch for the BNP (via ‘Excalibur’), then from late 2010 administered the BNP website (a role he had undertaken previously, along with being spokesperson on ‘foreign affairs’). In March 2011 he left the party under acrimonious circumstances. You can read a fuller profile on Kemp on the SPLC site: Heidi Beirich,Dangerous LiaisonIntelligence Report, Winter 2007, No.128.

Apart from his activism on behalf of the BNP and his authorship of several crackpot treatises on race, history and politics, Kemp is probably best known for his involvement in the trial of the murderers of Chris Hani. Hugh Muir and Matthew Taylor, White supremacist aids BNPThe Guardian, June 10, 2004:

Mr Kemp was one of a number of far-right activists arrested after Hani’s murder. He was later released without charge, but Clive Derby-Lewis, to whose wife Mr Kemp was said to have supplied a list of names and addresses, including Hani’s, was one of two men sentenced to death. He was said to have organised the shooting.

The Polish-born Janusz Walus, who was convicted of shooting Hani, was found to have material drawn from Mr Kemp’s list in his flat. Their death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.

At the murder trial Mr Kemp admitted producing the list but denied having knowingly supplied a “hitlist”.

From 1989 until 1992 Mr Kemp worked for Die Patriot, the newspaper of the extremist South African Conservative party. According to the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight, he has spoken at Nazi meetings in Germany and written for the magazine Nation und Europa, which was founded by a former SS officer.

Most recently, Kemp has been denounced by former wife Karen on a now-deleted blog (and elsewhere by his son), while winning favour with the Australian Protectionist Party, which in May 2010 featured a video of one of Kemp’s “excellent” speeches on its site. Otherwise, with Ostara Publications Kemp is keeping busy (re-)publishing racy tracts, including seminal works by Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), Madison Grant (1865–1937), Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) and of course The Great Man himself. Inter alia,Nell Irvin Painter provides a really useful overview of such literature in The History of White People (WW Norton, 2010; see also the work of Theodore W Allen).

As for the BNP, it appears to be in serious political and financial decline. It may survive the current crisis or give way to some other party, of which several have formed in the few years since Griffin and Brons won seats in the European Parliament.