Political Soldier

Political Soldier was a political group within Britain's National Front, centred on young radicals Nick Griffin, Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland, that began to emerge in the late 1970s with new destinations in mind for the movement. They were at times also known as the Official National Front.

The subgroup called for the building of a fresh ethos within society and for the emergence of a new man, to be known as the Political Soldier, who would reject materialism and devote himself to the fascist struggle with religious zeal. Basing their ideas on those of Julius Evola, an Italian fascist philosopher who sought the creation of a new elite to combat the decadence of modern bourgeois society, the Political Soldiers rejected the traditional British racial nationalism in favour of a Europeanist outlook and an equality of separate races. One remarkable issue of NF News even featured a front cover depicting the “new alliance” of the NF with Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Black Nationalist Nation of Islam, effectively endorsing an ethnopluralistc form of racial separatism (although critics were quick to point out the anti-Semitism linking the chosen allies).

Holland published "The Political Soldier-A Statement" in 1984. The pamphlet called on supporters to become consumed by their nationalism and to make it the driving force behind everything in their lives. The book offered four historical examples of a Political Soldier i.e. the Spartans, the Roman centurion, the Crusaders and the Iron Guard of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, a Romanian movement of fascism and religion. The book also made the Celtic Cross the emblem of the Political Soldiers.

The Political Soldier movement alienated many of the rank and file members of the NF and the 1980s were hallmarked by divisions over the issue. The skinhead movement, which had been brought together in 1987 by Ian Stuart Donaldson and British Movement member Nicky Crane under the banner of Blood and Honour (using as its emblem the three armed swastika associated with the far right in South Africa), abandoned the increasingly odd NF and took most of the White Noise bands, who were interested only in crude racism and Nazi imagery, with them.

Attempts to gain funding from a trip to Libya had resulted in only a consignment of copies of Qaddafi's Green Book, leaving the NF once again impoverished. Griffin eventually drifted away from the NF to form, along with Holland, the International Third Position (ITP), which advocated anti-capitalist “Strasserite” views, whilst Harrington also departed in January 1990, along with about fifty NF members, to form the Third Way (UK), which continued to offer a programme akin to that of the Political Soldier movement. The NF was left behind as a demoralised, disorganised and largely irrelevant group, robbed of some of its deepest thinking young members. Nonetheless the Flag Group, as the traditionalists led by Martin Wingfield and Ian Anderson had been calling themselves since 1986 when they briefly split from the NF, had established themselves as the sole group in the NF, and sought to base themselves on France’s increasingly growing Front National (FN), albeit without their mass movement capabilities.

The idea of the Political Soldier, that is to say one who devotes all his time and energy to the nationalist struggle, was one that had long existed on the extreme right in Europe. Jean-Francois Thiriart was amongst those to argue for this need for complete devotion from activists and had set up camps to train Political Soldiers in the 1960s.

With two books written by Derek Holland and even a website called politicalsoldier.net this form of nationalist thinking is still seeking converts.