Missed this for time round but it needs to be tackled before in hardens into urban myth, and I don't mean on here. This is the notion, soon to be paraded elsewhere I suspect, that eventually AFA faded away, and this was due in part to RA's beligerent approach. No basis in fact.
AFA was still growing when the BNP jacked. In fact that AFA was still visibly growing particularly in places like the West Midlands (the last area to be organised following relaunch in '89) the whiteman's redoubt, was the key reason the BNP swerved away from street confrontation. Accordingly the lazy allegation that 'so many activists eventually found RA in particular hard to work with', is once again found to be without foundation.
As for the claim that those who AFA disagreed being derided as cowards and knaves and so on rather implies without quiet saying it that the these unfortunates were falsely labelled. But no evidence is presented to back this insinuation up. So why does the unnamed reviewer for AFA Ireland present it as 'a problem'?
Subliminally, perhaps readers are meant to draw that conclusion that the most celebrated example of nefarious activity mentioned in BTF was also a result of some prior political falling out. Instead the falling out was as a consequence of the aforementioned 'nefarious activity'. This dosen't stop Louise Purbeck in the foreword to her book brazenly stating that the hostility to 'No Retreat' can be put down purely to 'sectarianism', the inference being that Hann was in fact representative of a rival political tendency in order to explain away his untimely departure from the organisation of which it is again implied he was 'a/the leading light' or alternatively 'founding member'.
And even when the on line RA archives now prove conclusively that he hadn't even joined RA as a supporting which is to say prospective member (no voting rights) until sometime in 1987, Purbeck seems to want to extend his CV considerably, to not only playing a key role in the founding of AFA two years earlier, but also, perhaps carelessly, allowing the inference to be drawn that, Hann, along with Tlizsy, had also been active in the ANL squads an additional five years hence.
With the recent boast of No Retreat being translated into a number of languages and a second revisionist effort on the way, not to mention the mooted Tilzey movie or the upcoming Gable memoir, to still claim that it all amounts to little more than a 'personal spat' does begin to look complacent at best.
What in fact we are witnessing here is a determined re-writing of history and recent history at that.
