Q and A with Frank Thompson

 

[I have written a short Q and A with myself to provide you with a short, unbiased biography.]

 

Q: Do you accept that the majority will regard you as mad and a psychopath?

 

A: I not only accept it but encourage it. There will be only a few brave souls that look at my motives in any depth, another subset who believes in my theories and a last subset that is willing to follow my actions. Should I survive, I expect large parts of my trial to involve vested interests attempting to prove that I am actually mad in the legal sense, but I am perfectly lucid and certainly no less lucid than the young boys that our country sends to fight useless wars in the Middle East.

Both “mad” and “psychosis” are vague concepts. The latter word is a relatively new one and can be traced to the mid-19th century and means simply a disease of the psyche; like much of the detritus of Freud’s teachings that litter modern language, it is deliberately vague so that it can be widened to fit any number of situations. Both imply that the person is no longer able to fit in with their own community and act as methods of social control, although mad has much more theatre to it and tends to concentrate on the incoherence of abhorrent and aberrant behaviour. Psychosis is arguably an attempt to expand the scope of “madness” to people who in the majority opinion make valid but repugnant decisions.

I am happy to be psychoanalysed by people I know who are less intelligent and less knowledgeable than me. I am happy to be profiled by people I know that exist only as puppets of a regime I wish to attack.

 

Q: How would you describe your politics?

 

A: I am centre right, a libertarian and allied to no political party. I believe the current system of politics in the UK cannot create a genuine right wing party in the way that, say, America, or an African state, can create a right wing political party. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the movement towards a war in Iran, are outward manifestations of the political will of America, but reflect the clash of cultures between West and East that the UK pretend does not exist. We can only at this stage encourage such wars as cheerleaders.

The main reasons for the general population’s lack of political engagement are apathy and fear. Our politicians are in turn so scared of the consequences of expressing an opinion that might be considered racist, or homophobic, or politically incorrect that they coalesce around the point of not saying anything at all. The emptiness of political debate in the UK is one of the main reasons for the recent success of far right groups like the BNP and EDL, but many of their members are I believe moderate right wingers who have become so frustrated at that emptiness that they strike out in any way they can, including – perversely considering their patriotism – using Nazi imagery.

 

Q: Describe your family life.

 

I was born in Stroud in Kent. My father is a GP and my mother is an estate agent. It was a happy childhood and I did well at my GCSEs, A Levels and got a 2-1 in History from Essex University. My mother and father are both right-leaning, but in that mealy mouthed way in which Daily Mail readers are right wing: professional complainers, effete and parochial. We were a close family until my early twenties, when my mother caught my father cheating with one of his receptionists, who was younger than me at the time.

My uncle, Tom, was with the army and then the SAS but died when I was an infant. His picture was always around our house and my father told me lots of stories about his career. I consider him a big influence in my life although I never met him as an adult.

 

Q: Can you pinpoint a moment when your political thinking became more revolutionary?

 

No, as I said, I had quite an ordinary upbringing. I do think, however, that very few revolutionaries have one genuine moment of epiphany. That seems to be one of those areas where history and literature overlap to the detriment of history! I’m thinking of when Luther narrowly avoided a thunderbolt or when one of those Russian revolutionaries saw a peasant having his face rubbed in the dirt. In truth, most revolutionaries probably suffer a succession of personal humiliations but also have an abstract frame of mind where they see the inequalities and injustices in modern society. In my own case, I was rejected by the army and the police for reasons that are unknown to me, but in no sense did I turn against those fundamental building blocks of our society. That did however give me more time to study modern trends in immigration, meet with like-minded people and groups, write my own opinion pieces and come to my own conclusions about the future. Essentially it’s all mental preparation for choosing your path in life. I don’t think enough people make a definite decision about what they want to do with their lives, they just drift.

The moment when I resolved to take my war to the streets was in direct response to what I perceived to be a fear in right wing circles that any direct action would be counterproductive. My own reading of history is that both left and right wing streams of thought are always present but that they are rarely spoken about in explicit terms, as historians prefer to concentrate on ideologies in order to both perpetuate the idea of progress and scoff at it at the same time. Within each stream of thought are Machiavellian types and men of action, and some eras reward one group more than the other. I chose the latter route.

 

Q: How do you relax? Do you relax?

 

A: Ha! Yes, I realise it is impossible to think of me as a normal human being, but we expect our soldiers to do just what I am going to do and there is never any suggestion that it turns them into monsters. I like films, especially Guy Ritchie’s and Quentin Tarantino’s. I’m a big fan of electronica music, although I like the faster pieces rather than the mellower stuff. In terms of tv, I like the Sopranos, Mad Men and the Twilight Zone. I like nice clothes, a good aftershave.

 

Q: Do you accept that if you cause a change, you may not be given the credit for this? Why don’t you just give in and just see how things go? Is Capitalism really that bad?

 

When you are rejected from all those with power, your first instinct is to call yourself a failure, rather than to look at their failure, their pathetic female instincts, but the strongest amongst us force themselves to question closely themselves more closely than ever before.

Some people are patently not up to the task. Weaker souls sink under the pressure and seek adulation in other forms, or consolation in the form of trivia or leisure, or hope predicated on limited resources. Cowards hide even further, sometimes inside religion, and seek to perfect their lofty indifference towards the most important issues of the day.

I believe we all have numerous versions of the same life. It is only the strongest of us that are capable of grasping the essential part of who we are, and more importantly who we can be and leaving every other possibility behind. It is one of the great tragedies of this age that the multiplicity of choices presented to even the poorest amongst us by Capitalism (both financially and spiritually) takes away his vitality and leaves in him in a limbo of being forever able to keep his options open. He ends up doing nothing, being nothing, forever bemoaning the lack of interest from the outside world in the minutiae of his life and his “endless potential”, a retardation that owes more to the sentimental crib talk of doting parents or teachers who have to say something positive in their school reports. An open mind is a valuable thing but it is rarer than gold. Most people are happy to live in a dream state, taking solace from the rattle of culture inside them as they walk idly through their lives.

So I will be accused of being merciless in cutting down frauds and pretend – good people, but the rebuttal is self-explanatory. No mercy can be given to the “lost man” because he cannot why understand he was given mercy and will continue on the same path whatever occurs to him.

The only way in which we can become whole again is accepting that human life is not equal. We have liberated the wrong people in this era and we are living through the consequences. We are funding our own downfall.