Smashing the Peace Stone

November 18, 1993 and onto a field at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, some 15 miles south of Glasgow, Scotland, came persons carrying leaflets, placards and paint. Their objective was an engraved, upright stone, placed there some months before by veteran National Socialist Tom Graham with the permission of the farmer, Craig Baird. It read: "This stone marks the spot where brave, heroic Rudolf Hess landed by parachute on the night of 10th May 1941 seeking to end the war between Britain and Germany." It marked the spot where half a century earlier another and much different visitor had arrived, descending by parachute at night. Whereas his purpose had been benevolent in its bravery, theirs was malevolent in its banality, pursued while the farmer was away at the cattle market.

Followed, as prearranged, by a television crew, the hate-filled vandals of 1993 proceeded to daub the memorial with paint and then plaster it with leaflets. After a pause for media attention to their handiwork, they came to their climax as shown on Scottish Television's news programme the same evening. Their Asian leader, Anwar Aamer, West of Scotland organizer of the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), a communist front organization devoted to violence, took up a sledge hammer and proceeded to smash to pieces the memorial to the visitor of 1941. The next day the Scottish Daily Record published on its page 7 a photograph of this "hero of the hammer" in his act of destruction.

Despite this irrefutable evidence of criminal responsibility, Tories, Reds and other sections of the Old Order immediately closed ranks to protect Anwar and his accomplices, and mendaciously to defame the man who those five decades ago flew alone across the wartime sky to try and stop the brothers' war between Britain and Germany. Lured by the stratagems of the British Secret Service, serving a regime intent, not on peace, but on exploiting him in the war of revenge against his country. Rudolf Hess was then subjugated to 46 years behind bars before finally being done to death in a fake "suicide" plot in Spandau Prison, Berlin in 1987 to silence him forever from disclosing the truth behind his arrival at Floors Farm.

Back in 1941 Churchill allied himself with Stalin, the biggest butcher of all time, in preference to peace. Now, in 1993, the British authorities allied themselves with Stalin's heirs of the ANL in rejection of justice. When the local police at Giffnock sent their report of the criminal damage to private property on private ground to the Procurator Fiscal in Paisley, as the prosecuting official of that area of Scotland, he passed the item onto the Crown Office in Edinburgh for decision. This is the department of the chief law officer for Scotland, the Lord Advocate, to whom Procurators Fiscal are accountable, and whose sanction is necessary for a criminal prosecution by the state in the High Court on indictment. The Crown Office refused this sanction, and this decision also then meant that the local Procurator Fiscal would neither institute summary criminal proceedings himself in the local Sheriff Court, or give his necessary sanction for a private criminal prosecution.

Thereupon an approach was made to the Crown Office for the Lord Advocate's requisite sanction for a private criminal prosecution, but this was refused by him also. While in theory one can apply to the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh against the Lord Advocate's refusal, in practice that court can be deemed virtually certain to endorse the Lord Advocate's decision, and in Scotland, unlike England, there is no final avenue of appeal to the House of Lords in criminal cases.

Neither the Prosecutor Fiscal nor the Lord Advocates can present a civil action for damages, but among the impediments to this alternative course of redress was the fact that the local authority, Eastwood District Council, had hastened to declare the memorial to be illicit, as lacking the needed planning commission permission, and to demand its removal. There is also the fact that, while such proceedings could certainly be costly for the Plaintiff, who would be Tom Graham, Anwar Aamer the Defendant, would equally certainly, as a "student," purport to be without means if the case did go against him, so that no recompense would be forthcoming.

The play of pressures within Eastwood District Council -- whose area one journalist had the temerity to describe as "the Jewish capital of Scotland" -- was indicated by the pronouncements to the press of its Chief Executive Michael Henry. "We are appalled by the sentiments which the wording of the stone conveys," he said, to which he added that, if an application had been made for planning permission, "I am sure the Council would have found reason to refuse it." This local authority not long afterwards, not surprisingly, provided a public reception for a visiting contingent from the Jewish Board of Deputies in London in association with the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council.

When called on to cite the precise section of law relied on in declaring that the small memorial out of public view in a back field was subject to planning permission, Chief Executive Henry refrained from doing so. Consequently a complaint was made to the Provost of the Council, who turned out to be one Leslie Rosin, who in turn simply and blandly endorsed the conduct of friend Henry. When a complaint was therefore laid before the Commissioner for Local Administration in Scotland (Ombudsman) against both Henry and Rosin, this only brought the response that "the Commissioner does not consider that there are grounds for him to be involved."

Separately approached, the Scottish Office in Edinburgh claimed that Section 19 of the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1972 applies to such a memorial, precluding its erection without permission.

Thus, both left and right of the Old Order of national and racial ruin join forces in fear and fury at a mere stone bearing witness to the heroic arrival of Ambassador of Peace Rudolf Hess. The same fear prompted the demolition of Spandau Prison immediately after his murder in order to prevent its stones becoming a memorial to his monstrous martyrdom.

Yet in London today stones of memory of another kind, redolent of the foul forces underlying the brothers' war which Rudolf Hess strove to stop, remain in tact and protected. We have in the centre of the city the memorial to war criminal bomber Harris, mass murderer of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, and in Highgate Cemetery the memorial to Karl Marx, the spiritual father of both yesterday's Stalin and today's ANL.

C. Colin Jordan