Appendix – Chris Tame interview, February 4, 1993

 

[The following is a verbatim, approved transcript of an interview with Chris as dated; it was intended for publication sometime after being recorded. The original plan was to publish a series of short pamphlets exposing the perfidious Searchlight Organisation, which I did, but I also published a full length book, and with the litigation that resulted from the November 1993 hammer attack, (3) and the aggravation I suffered from the Metropolitan Police from March the same year but especially from November 1996, the pamphlets were not published in the form originally intended. This interview was originally to be called Part Six: Chris Tame – Libertarian Nazi? I believe this was to be the final part, and the second interview; the first was with Piers Merchant, which was published here on September 25, 2009. For more background to and my complete bibliography on the Searchlight Organisation, the reader is referred both to the Baron/ITMA Bibliography from 1993, and to SearchlightArchive.

I noted at the time that Chris was already working on his massive bibliography of freedom, which he said had been commissioned by a major publishing house. He had already compiled one such work, albeit a relatively short one; the second edition of which was published in 1980.]

AB: In its March 1983 issue, Searchlight claimed you were involved in a conspiracy with Alan Winder of the British Movement, a “Nazi” named Charles Hanson, (8) and an unamed or unknown barrister to smash Searchlight. What is the truth about this article?

CT: It’s the biggest load of cobblers you could imagine. I’d never heard of any Alan Winder; the idea of being involved in a plot to smash Searchlight is simply bizarre. The background to this was that Searchlight suddenly started attacking me, and my organisation the Libertarian Alliance, claiming that we were associated with an allegedly anti-Semitic and Nazi resistance group in the [then] Soviet Union called the NTS, (the Association of Russian Solidarists). (9)

The core of truth behind that was that an organisation called the Anti-Soviet Society, which my colleague Brian Micklethwait ran, and which I had nothing to do with, was in fact cooperating with this group, the Association of Russian Solidarists, which is not a neo-Nazi or anti-Semitic group, and my friend Brian would in no way have cooperated with them [knowingly] if they had been. This allegation was used to link the Anti-Soviet Society with the Libertarian Alliance and claim that I or the Libertarian Alliance were somehow sympathetic to anti-Semitism and fascism. In other words it was a smear, an attempt on the basis of false allegations about this other group, it was an attempt to imply that we were somehow sympathetic with fascism. A whole lot of funny things started happening at this time. As a matter of fact, we did find out that our group had in it a number of people who were sympathetic to Holocaust Revisionism.

AB: Can you name any of them?

CT: Yes, Mr Mark Brady, who’d been a friend and associate of mine; David Ramsey Steele, and a couple of their friends. When I discovered this, I kicked them out.

AB: What do you think of Holocaust Revisionism?

CT: I think it’s nonsense, (10) and I don’t wish to be involved with anyone in an organisational sense who’s promoting those particular views. Although I don’t think people should be silenced however.

[After Chris had kicked the Holocaust Revisionists out of the LA, Searchlight, he maintains, were in contact with those people and were in some way trying to assist them in ruining it and him. In other words, this “anti-fascist” magazine was aiding and abetting a group of Holocaust Revisionists, its avowed enemy!]

CT: If Searchlight was a genuinely anti-fascist publication, why on Earth didn’t it contact me to warn me about these people instead of siding with them and try to get involved in some way of disrupting my organisation? So here we have the fascinating scenario of Searchlight trying to smear me as anti-Semitic while at the same time they’re meeting with a couple of real anti-Semites, and are trying to promote them.

The background to this story is that one day someone whom I don’t know came into the Alternative Bookshop and said, “I see you’re having some trouble with Searchlight, I’ve got some interesting information on them; I’ll bring it up if you’d like to meet me.”

I didn’t have any idea who this fellow was, and in fact met him in the company of a friend of mine, who’s a barrister. [A sensible precaution, as things turned out. Chris continued...]

He then brings out some documents all of which are completely nonsensical, about how Searchlight is part of an international Jewish conspiracy and so on. All complete crap! There was nothing on them of any value or importance whatsoever. I then, as the News Of The World reporters usually say, made my excuses and left. It now turns out that this person was a well-known fascist and anti-Semite named Charles Hanson. He was accompanied by a woman named Mary Page.

This story then appeared in Searchlight claiming that I’d been involved with people I’d never heard of and never met.

[Neither was the nature of this “plot” made clear. Chris assumed that a lot of people who don’t like Searchlight do not wish to reveal their identities, and rightly so. Therefore he didn’t ask Hanson for his name on the first meeting. The last sentence of the Searchlight smear reads: “Just a word of advice, Mr Tame: you are on the edge of a world that is full of arsonists, cranks, police spies, anti-nazi infiltrators and just plain traitors.”]

CT: After this article appeared, the Alternative Bookshop was firebombed. Other violent attacks on the shop followed.

[The police caught one person, but he turned out to be a crank who was living in a squat, said Chris. The reader may draw his own conclusions from this, but one conclusion that cannot be avoided is that the whole business with Hanson stinks to High Heaven. The article in Searchlight actually claims that “Around a table, four people could be seen huddled together discussing the contents of a file that had been brought along by a barrister.” This meeting was said to have taken place in a burger bar “a few weeks ago.” (11) Chris continued...]

CT: In the first place, the file had not been brought along by the barrister but by Hanson. In the second place, how did Searchlight know this? “Earlier that evening, in response to a tip-off...”

[Who tipped them off, exactly? Obviously Charles Hanson. More nonsense was to follow. The May issue of Searchlight contained a letter from somebody called Michael Zegarac, purporting to be the Secretary of the Libertarian Alliance.

“It should be noted that he [Chris] was expelled from membership in January, 1983, and now has nothing whatsoever to do with the Libertarian Alliance.” (12)

Ten years on, when I interviewed him here, Chris was still Secretary of the organisation from which he had been expelled in 1983. Perhaps somebody should have told him! Chris explained that these were the people (the anti-Semites) who’d been expelled. The lie that was put out at the time was that the LA had split. This “faction” soon disappeared. Yet another reference to Chris appeared in the magazine the following year, this time attempting to link him to Holocaust Revisionism by a circuitous route. (13) The article claimed that Searchlight’s “revelation” had caused a split in the Libertarian Alliance; the “departing faction” forming Libertarian Alliance Limited and carrying on publishing the group’s journal, Free Life. In reality, Free Life was still published by the “Tame faction”; the other faction of course is merely a figment of Mr Gable’s lurid and perverted imagination.

“Information from the United States now shows that [Tame] has also been associated with American libertarians who enjoy a close and friendly relationship with leading historical revisionists like the anti-Semitic Willis Carto...”

It claims too that Chris was “listed as...Assistant editor for UK and Europe” of the American journal New Libertarian, which is supposedly sympathetic towards Holocaust Revisionism. Chris actually showed me a photocopy from the journal which lists him as an Assistant Editor, but he insisted that he was merely a contributor. This though is beside the point. So what is the point?

Whether or not this journal is sympathetic to Holocaust Revisionism, Chris was not. (14) What he was sympathetic to, and an outspoken advocate of, is free speech. Free speech means free speech for Holocaust Revisionists as much as Marxists and “anti-fascists”. Searchlight has long made its own position on free speech clear.

Now, let us suppose that this journal or some of the people writing for it had indeed been sympathetic to Holocaust Revisionism. Bernard Levin writes for the Times. In 1992, David Irving was commissioned by its sister paper, the Sunday Times, to translate the Goebbels Diaries; therefore, by the same logic, Bernard Levin is a fellow traveller of David Irving.

In 1992, the Libertarian Alliance (the one and only) hosted meetings at which both homosexual activists and Marxists were present. Anyone who thinks Tame is “sympathetic” to homosexuality should speak to his secretary, and if he is indeed a closet Nazi, even Mr Gable’s psychiatrist would find it difficult to reconcile this with his invitation to Asian Marxist Susil Gupta to speak at the November ’92 LA conference on AIDS.

This in fact is typical of the smears, innuendo and other nonsense which constitutes the bulk of every issue of Searchlight. This, don’t forget, is an organisation which constantly ridicules conspiracy theories, yet its own conspiracy theories are not only extremely nebulous, but are of the most fanciful kind.

Why didn’t Chris take legal action for these libels? He considered it. One of his many Jewish friends, Jillian Becker, paid for a barrister who gave a legal opinion, but in the end it didn’t seem worthwhile on the grounds that a) the thing was so confused and odd; and b) that Searchlight was a straw man and not worth suing.]

AB: A lot of persons of Jewish ancestry have been associated with Searchlight. Are you sure you don’t hate Mr Gable solely because he is Jewish?

CT: (Laughing) I think Searchlight is a quite despicable publication which not only knowingly peddles falsehoods and smears, but it is really akin to a scam, and people in the Jewish community who think they’re financing a genuinely anti-fascist publication are in actual fact financing a magazine full of wicked political smears, largely from an extreme left viewpoint. There is a constant attempt to smear anyone who isn’t a Marxist or a socialist as being a fascist, and just basically telling outright lies.


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