A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 14, 2014 11:53 pm

Failed ‘Hasbara’ insults just bounce off Alice Walker

by Stuart Littlewood


Hasbara has become a dirty word, thanks to it’s dirty practitioners and the dirty job they are trained to do.

It’s a Hebrew word for Israel’s sophisticated public relations machinery that’s set up to cynically justify the Jewish entity’s crimes and to create for Israel a ‘brand image’ completely at odds with the ugly truth.

Fiction and distortion are among hasbara’s standard propaganda tools for spinning fairy tales and propagating disinformation. And it is very effective… up to a point. The reason why it ultimately fails is that it has very poor material to work with. You cannot behave like psychopaths and disguise it forever. You cannot trample other peoples’ rights and freedoms, and destroy their property, and expect to be loved. You cannot keep your jackboot on your neighbour’s neck for 65 years and expect to call yourself civilised and in tune with Western values. You cannot steal his lands, water and livelihood at gunpoint and claim the moral high ground.

And you certainly cannot create a wholesome brand image from bullshit.

These basic truths manage to escape the Anti Defamation League when it chooses to attack a truthteller like Alice Walker.

The ADL claims Walker’s new book The Cushion in the Road takes her “extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level”, and complains that she devotes 80 pages to “a screed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict replete with fervently anti-Jewish ideas and peppered with explicit comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”.

Any comparison of Israelis to Nazis is bound to ruffle Zio feathers. But if some of them insist on behaving in a way that calls Nazism to mind, why are they surprised?

The moans and groans of the ADL, when you examine them, have little or no substance. For example their press release http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-r ... cL5s9gfh21 states: “On several occasions Walker seems to indicate that the purported evils of modern-day Israel are a direct result of Jewish values, alleging that Jews behave the way they do because they believe in their ‘supremacy’. She suggests that Israeli settlements are motivated by the concept that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’…”

If the Jewish state’s conduct is not guided by Jewish values, what does guide it? And what other concept motivates the seizure of a neighbour’s land for the transfer of the Jewish state’s vilest citizens in blatant contravention of international law?

Look at this statement by Abraham H. Foxman, ADL’s National Director. “Alice Walker has sunk to new lows with essays that remove the gloss of her anti-Israel activism to reveal someone who is unabashedly infected with anti-Semitism. She has taken her extreme and hostile views to a shocking new level, revealing the depth of her hatred of Jews and Israel to a degree that we have not witnessed before. Her descriptions of the conflict are so grossly inaccurate and biased that it seems Walker wants the uninformed reader to come away sharing her hate-filled conclusions that Israel is committing the greatest atrocity in the history of the world.”

Note his uncalled-for language. This is a Pullitzer Prize-winner he’s talking about… let’s have some goddam respect here. And when was Foxman last in Gaza, anyway? If Israel’s unending terrorisation, murder, imprisonment and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians since 1948 (and before) is not the greatest atrocity since World War Two it comes pretty close. Foxman should not throw stones while he resides in the hasbara glass house.


Blame Israel’s problematic policy, not failed ‘hasbara’

Recognising that Israel has been losing the propaganda war, Israeli think-tank Molad recently carried out a study on the regime’s hasbara operations hasbara operations “If Israel suffers from diplomatic isolation and a negative image internationally,” it concludes, “the reason is not to be found in the failure of its hasbara….

“The Israeli hasbara apparatus is large, sophisticated…. It is difficult to find any nation, even those embroiled in long-term conflict situations, that trains civilians to take part in hasbara messaging for its policies while abroad, or that sends groups of young citizens to advocate its position on campuses worldwide. It is no less difficult to find other nations that enjoy such well-developed, global support on institutional, communal, and private levels, especially in North America and Europe. In light of this, sweeping criticisms of the Israeli hasbara apparatus are spurious; Israel’s ‘hasbara problem’ is nothing more than a myth.”

Israel’s real problems, says Molad, are the results of “problematic policy”.

How clever of them to have spotted that!

The think-tank also touches on Anti-Israelism and Delegitimization and how to identify it, recommending a definition based on the Reut Institute’s delegitimzation thesis. Thus we arrive at a definition that’s “employed by the Israeli hasbara authorities in defining their function”. An act or statement is ‘anti-Israel’ to the extent to which it contributes to the delegitimization of Israel in the world.

“Delegitimization has three central characteristics:

a) Denying Israel’s right to exist.

b) Employing double standards regarding Israel in contrast to other nations (for example, focusing on human rights violations in Israel while ignoring similar violations in China, Russia, or Syria).

c) Demonizing Israel (for example, defining Israel’s policies using morally charged concepts such as ‘apartheid’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

How feeble; and not worth responding to. The regime itself, and those who support it and stooge for it, have created Anti-Israelism and brought Delegitimization down on their own heads.

As for the book that’s causing all the fuss, I’d sooner believe Pullitzer girl Alice than all the hasbara pimps strategically positioned across the globe.


Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 14, 2014 11:53 pm

dupe
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Sat Feb 15, 2014 12:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 12:02 am

Slad, I asked you nicely before to please post on this thread only things directly related to the theme of the thread. You did not listen then- and now you are posting yet more Hasbara critiques.here.

I do agree that Israeli State-sponsored propaganda is a problem in the world but you are not respecting this thread.

Don't you recognize the validity of the feedback from PW?

Should we have a conference with her either on a dedicated thread and/or by pm?
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 1:26 am

Europe.....Ireland.....Image

anti-semitism .......Israel’s foreign ministry is suggesting it is Image

Islamophobia.....Such attempts also show contempt for the Palestinian.... Image

Is the color yellow anti-Semitic? (Israel says yes)
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Thu, 11/07/2013 - 18:11

Image
The sticker that reminds Israel’s foreign ministry of Nazism. (Ynet)
Is the use of the color yellow a sign of racial and genocidal hatred targeting Jews?

Israel’s foreign ministry is suggesting it is, after a “pro-Israel activist” discovered a sticker in a Dublin supermarket that states “For Justice in Palestine - Boycott Israel.”

The sticker, as can be seen in the photograph published by Israel’s Ynet, was attached to a package of dates that were produced in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Ynet reported that the activist was “shocked” and quoted “sources” in the Israeli foreign ministry stating “it is not by chance that the BDS organization chose to express its protest with a yellow sticker – which is reminiscent of dark days of racism and incitement.”

“BDS” stands for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

The foreign ministry’s statement about the color yellow can only be meant to evoke the yellow stars, often emblazoned with the word “Jude,” that the Nazi regime in Germany notoriously forced Jewish citizens to wear.

But there is absolutely no resemblance between the insignia Nazis forced Jews to wear and the sticker. Except, of course the color yellow.

IPSC stickers

The stickers were distributed by the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC). A spokesperson for the group explained to me in an email: “We give them away to people, we have no control over how they are used. Some people wear them, some stick them on copy books or laptops or bikes, and some apparently even put them on Israeli products.”

In response to the allegation from the Israeli foreign ministry, IPSC said: “We reject out of hand any accusation of anti-Semitic intent regarding these stickers. The stickers are yellow and red, with black and green writing; yellow and red being internationally recognized colors associated with hazards and danger.”

Well that makes sense. But it got me wondering, what if the Israeli foreign ministry is right? What if the use of the color yellow really does indicate a malevolant intent?

So I decided to look for examples of the color yellow being used by Israelis. Here is what I found.

The color yellow

Israel, like many countries, has a Yellow Pages phone book. Although they call them the “Golden Pages,” the website is brightly emblazoned with yellow everywhere.

Israel even has a chain of gas station convenience stores called “Yellow” with a shopper’s club called “Yellow Club.” Here’s a screenshot from the company’s website showing unrestrained use of the color yellow.

yellow_mvd_hbyt.png

Shoppers at Israel’s “Yellow” chain of convenience stores can get discounts if they join the “Yellow Club.”
Image

But is doesn’t stop there. The logo of the Beitar Jerusalem football club, whose fans are notorious for their racist anti-Arab rampages, is a menorah – a Judaic candlestick – set against a yellow shield.
Image
During matches, the players and supporters form a sea of yellow flags and shirts.

Then there is the Israeli army’s Golani brigade, notorious for its war crimes and human rights abuses against Palestinians. The colors of its official flag and logo? Green and yellow.

Image

Two Israeli soldiers look relaxed wearing the Golani Brigade’s yellow insignia. (Instagram)
The flag of Kach, the violent racist Jewish nationalist movement, is a black Star of David and a fist set against a yellow field.

Image
The flag of Kach.
Finally, the picture below is an artifact that I have in my possession. It is a sign once placed by the “Israel Lands Administration” on a fence closing off a piece of confiscated Palestinian land in eastern occupied Jerusalem. It warns of the danger of entering the land without permission from those who have seized it.

The sign may be traumatizing for Palestinians whose land is routinely stolen and then rendered off limits to them in this criminal manner, but not because of the color scheme.

Presumably the “Israel Lands Administration” chose yellow, black and red for precisely the same reasons as IPSC: these are internationally recognized colors associated with hazards and danger.

Image

“Israel Lands Administration” sign claiming ownership over confiscated Palestinian land. (Ali Abunimah)
“Crass and cynical”

By now it should be crystal clear – if it wasn’t already – the sheer stupidity of the Israeli foreign ministry’s reported suggestion that anything racist could be read into the color of the boycott Israel sticker.

IPSC affirms that it is “categorically opposed to all forms of racism including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and any ideology that seeks the domination by one ethnic/racial group over another. In other words, we are opposed to apartheid.”

Accusations that its choice of color had some ulterior motive are “simply crass and cynical attempts to exploit the memory of Nazi crimes against the Jewish people and which show contempt for those victims,” IPSC said.

“Such attempts also show contempt for the Palestinian victims of Israeli injustices today, for whom the BDS movement is a non-violent method of securing their rights.”

I could not agree more.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 7:25 am

The first sentence here makes me wonder why attempts by this outfit to build a base (lots of talk of bases here, is this the new scare-word?**) in the US would alter their 'strategies' in any way, unless they are actually coming around to admitting their failings, which would be a start I suppose.
Is Golden Dawn the new Al Qaeda, but for anti-establishment types?

I'm going to continue attempting some analysis of the stuff pasted here, but as it comes so thick and fast it will unfortunately be shallow and maybe innaccurate as I try to keep up, any corrections and assistance are welcome.

**makes me thing of Gerry Gable's talk of 'infiltration' on the previous page, note the subtle similarities to ideas of infection.

http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/anti-repression-anti-fascist-strategizing-suggestions/

Anti-Repression, Anti-Fascist Strategizing Suggestions

Posted on October 16, 2012 by mamos206

With the rise of the Golden Dawn fascist group in Greece, and their attempts to build a base here in the U.S. (link) , anti-fascist strategies are becoming more and more crucial.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the police continue to “out- source” political repression to private groups (fascists, gangs, white supremacist populists, private security forces, etc.) as budget crises deepen.

This weekend, after anti-colonial marchers were arrested, San Francisco papers published their photos and someone put up posters calling for violence against Bay Area anarchists. All of this could be part of a trend in this direction, and this blog post is an attempt to prompt a discussion about how to deal with these forms of repression and violence.

I’m not suggesting the posters themselves are a secret plot by the state, and I am not suggesting that they are produced by fascists or by gangs. It seems they represent some sort of political beef emerging out of Occupy Oakland that is related to racial and class divisions within Oakland and within Occupy Oakland. I am not there, and I don’t know the context, so I won’t hazard a guess. If anyone wants to clarify in the comments below what is really going on, I welcome any corrections.

I do know that the papers publishing photos of arrested activists opens up the possibility of vigilante attacks from various political tendencies, or private repression in the form of people being fired from jobs, blacklisted, tracked by private security agencies, etc. So we need to think about how to deal with this from a variety of angles. How can we get to the point where we are deeply connected with our neighbors, our coworkers, etc. where we support each other on a daily basis, so they will support us in situations like this? I do think that we are making progress toward this goal in Seattle, and the Who You Callin’ Illegal group emerging to support our comrade Dede against deportation is a good example. But we still have a long way to go. I also know I am not saying anything new here – most radicals want to build communities that are this strong; it is simply a question of how to do it.

When I was in the Philippines recently, I spoke with activists who face much more severe repression than we face here - from the state, from private security forces, and from vigilantes and gangs that serve corporate interests. They rely on fellow workers, fellow poor people, and fellow peasants to back them up. They are part of the communities they are organizing in, they are not separate- so people understand an attack on them to be an attack on the whole community. This is a result of decades of patient organizing where they have earned people’s respect and trust.

Recently, some revolutionaries have made criticisms of slow patient base-building work (what’s often called “community organizing” or “labor organizing”), pointing out that political developments might happen much faster in this time of crisis, and revolutionaries need to be flexible enough to put specific organizing work on hold temporarily in order to intervene in mass ruptures and upsurges like Occupy, ruptures which are impossible to predict ahead of time, no matter how good our theories are. I agree with this. However, if you aren’t doing any community building and day-to-day organizing, when you do intervene in a rupture, it’s easier for the state to isolate and crush you once that rupture subsides.

I think this debate between ruptures and base building is largely a function of our existing radical circles being so small that we don’t have time to do both. As we grow, this will become less of an issue – it is also a good argument to prioritize growing. I also want to highlight that this is not an anarchist vs. Marxist issue. At least in Seattle, both anarchists and Marixsts do community base buidling, and both intervened aggressively in the Decolonize/ Occupy movement, alongside lots of people who don’t identify with either philosophy.

In my view, our goal should be to build mass-based communities, networks, and organizations that can intervene together in ruptures, go through the experience together, and grow. Also, we should get to the point where we can consolidate mass communities, networks, and organizations out of ruptures – so that ruptures create communities that are not isolated and cliquish, that are open to the rest of the working class and oppressed people. Again, I know most radicals want to do something like this - only a handful of radicals are actually against being social. The question is how to do it better.

As we think about that, I’d also like to share some resources that might help us strategize about how to deal with privatized repression and rising vigilante threats. Not only is this crucial for building a revolution, but it may be necessary to make sure we can stay alive long enough to see the revolution.

1) on the privatization of repression, check out Barack, Badiou, and Bilal Al Hasan by Don Hamerquist. This article argues that the US is increasingly governing via gangs, vigilantes, and private mercenaries in the Middle East, developing forms of counter-insurgency that could spread to other zones of conflict around the world. While I don’t agree with all his points in this article, the core point relevant for this discussion is Don’s necessary focus on how state forms are changing in the current moment.

As anti-authoritarians, we tend to focus on the state apparatus as the biggest oppressor, partly to compensate for the statism of past communist movements. We do need to oppose the state.

However, we need to recognize that state forms change over time, prompted by contradictions within the capitalist economy and clashes of class forces, and that the ruling class governs through a whole other set of apparatuses outside of their formal state institutions. As states become “hollowed out”, they might increasingly rely on private forms of repression. We need to oppose hierarchy and repression everywhere, not just in the state apparatus.

2) On that note, check out the website of John Robb, one of the ruling class’s most intelligent counter-insurgency experts. He advocates privatization of repression because he thinks the US military and police are unable to deal with “open source”, decentralized revolutionary movements that can outthink and outmaneuver slow state bureaucracies.

I’d highly recommend reading his book Brave New War which summarizes the most cutting edge theories of guerilla warfare from movements around the world and then makes a case to the US rulers for how they can defeat these through new forms of privatized repression that mirror them.

In other words, he acknowledges that decentralized movements can outpace, outsmart, and outmaneuver clunky and slow state bureaucracies, so he is trying to convince the capitalists to organize their counter insurgency efforts in similarly decentralized forms – guerilla cells for the global capitalists.

Robb argues that movements like Occupy represent “nonviolent” guerilla movements and open source protests.

Sometimes it’s unclear whether he’s cheering on these protests or calling for open source warfare against them in order to defeat them. In either case, this is some bizarre and brilliant ruling class strategizing that we need to pay attention to so we don’t get caught off guard by followers of Robb who want to co-opt and/or kill us.

3) Privatization of repression has already started to happen in parts of the US through the police dividing and conquering gangs against each other – because they can only kill a limited number of Black people without prompting uprisings, they rely on gangs to do the rest of their work for them. The police sometimes operate as the largest gang in the city, and they sometimes position themselves as a force to destabilize any peace efforts between gangs, in order to keep Black neighborhoods divided and conquered.

For example, when the Bloods and Crips tried to form an alliance in 1992 against the LA police, the police allegedly confiscated a Crip O.G.’s car and did a drive by out of his car in a Blood neighborhood to re-start the war. This sort of divide and conquer strategy, coupled with deindustrializing inner cities and the rapid expansion of public and private prisons, is partially how the state neutralized the Black Power movement over the past 40 years. This is documented in the movie “Bastards of the Party” by Athens Park Blood O.G. Cle ”Bone” Sloan

4) I am not a Trotskyist and disagree with Trotsky on many things, but I happen to think that some of his strategic thinking on how to oppose Nazism in the 30s is highly relevant to the situation in Greece today and possibly in the US in the future. Here is a summary of his work.

I haven’t read his original book yet, I just ordered a copy of it, so I’m just going off this piece because it is free online. But based on what I read here, if anarchists in Greece today were to apply his strategy, they would invite Syriza and the socialists to form a united front coalition against Golden Dawn, and to confront them directly in the streets, instead of through parliamentary maneuvers. The socialists are running for office through Syriza, thinking that the state apparatus will keep them safe, but it won’t – the police often side with the fascists. If the fascists grow, they will kill immigrants, anarchists, socialists, union members, LGBTQ people, an anyone else in their way. Perhaps the anarchists and anti-state communsits could try to convince the socialists that they need to think outside of the state in order to stay safe.

Together, Syriza and the anarchists might have the physical force necessary to stop the fascists, but alone they are weaker. If the anarchists try to go it alone without Syriza’s support they could all be murdered by the fascists and the cops. Trotsky would probably say that only together can they prevent the rise of fascism, but it needs to be an alliance on radical terms, not something that relies on petitioning the state for protection from the fascists.

My only caveat with this is that a lot of Trotskyists seem to push this toward a Popular front – telling the anarchists they need to tone down their message in order to reach out to working people who still support reformist groups, electoral politics, etc. This is reminiscent of the Communist Party’s Popular Front, where they said fascism is the bigger enemy than imperialism, and revolutionaries should stop being militant in order to unite with the liberals (Democrats, etc.) against the Nazis. The Communist Party even red-baited radicals who lead strikes during World War II . We need to oppose this Popular Front logic, because it led to opportunistic outcomes, like subordinating the Black liberation struggle in the US , telling Black people to wait to rise up against US white supremacy in order to secure American national unity in World War II vs. the Nazis. We need to argue firmly against anyone who wants to repeat this today.

Instead, what Trotsky is advocating is a united front – each group maintains its politics, the radicals don’t subordinate or hide ours, we simply enter into a tactical alliance of mutual protection that operates at the street level, not the electoral level. The goal would be to mobilize all workers and oppressed people to defend each other, even if they have reformist politics. Again, this is similar to what we are trying to do now with the anti-deportation organizing in Seattle.

I’m not sure what a united front against fascism would look like in the US context since there is no analogous large social democratic force, and no large anarchist/ communist force here. Luckily, fascism has also not grown as rapidly here as in Greece. All 3 could grow simultaneously in future movements, so we need to keep thinking about this.

My last reservation with applying Trotsky’s strategy is that we need to account for how some of the fascists are an insurgent right-wing movement from below. They are competing with the Left and the anarchists to express the anger that many people feel against the capitalist system. Any force that gets too close with electoral reformism could get discredited as this reformism leads to new rounds of austerity and capitalist crisis. This could happen to Syriza too. All the other socialist electoral parties have ended up imposing austerity and subordination to imperialism and global capital. If Leftists get too close to these parties and do not criticize them, the fascists can say “look, the Left failed to fight austerity, we are the only force left capable of doing it, so side with us”.

I don’t know what Trotsky’s answer would be to this – but I do think that any adaptation of his united front against fascism should be a loose tactical alliance in which the radicals can maintain our distance from the state and from statist parties, while pledging mutual defense of all working class, feminist, LGBTQ, and people of color grassroots institutions and communities against fascist attacks, even if we do not have the same politics.

In a Seattle context, we may disagree with groups like Freedom Socialist Party, the ISO, the NAACP, or the unions. But if their offices were attacked by fascists, I hope we’d rally to their aid, and I hope they’d rally in turn if our communities were attacked.

5) Building of my concern about right-wing insurgent fascism, I would also highly recommend the book Confronting Fascism by Don Hamerquist, J. Sakai, and folks from Anti Racist Action.

It explores possibilities of insurgent / revolutionary fascism and its relationship to the legacy of colonial settlerism, and the possibility of this settlerism breaking down in the current economic crisis, opening up right-wing and left-wing revolutionary potentials among white workers.

Excerpts are available here

This builds on anti-fascist strategies developed by the Sojourner Truth Organization in the 70s, archived here and summarized in the book Truth and Revolution that just came out.

I hope we can strategize how to deal with these new forms of fascism, anti-radical vigilantism, and privatized repression. We should keep all of this in mind when we debate things like the strengths and weaknesses of specific uses of the Black Block tactic by radicals. The privatization of repression, the rise of insurgent fascism in the wake of failed reformist strategies, and the need for broad-based united fronts of mutual security are all factors we should consider in these tactical debates.
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 7:34 am

seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 5:26 am wrote:Europe.....Ireland.....Image

anti-semitism .......Israel’s foreign ministry is suggesting it is Image

Islamophobia.....Such attempts also show contempt for the Palestinian.... Image

Is the color yellow anti-Semitic? (Israel says yes)
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Thu, 11/07/2013 - 18:11

Image


I'm pretty sure that I can see 'anti-semitism' mentioned in the title of this thread, but some seem to disagree.

Am I seeing things? If so it must be a very long term halllucination
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby Searcher08 » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:02 am

Can I a few suggestions at this point?

I think this thread is very worthwhile, but is in danger of becoming just an avalanche of undigested conflicting material. Think of it like the 'salt curve' - no salt makes the dish unappetizing, a shaker-full makes it inedible, just the right amount makes it yummy...


* Let's keep anything by Greenstein / Atzmon out of here as per Jeff's ruling
* Let's establish an overview of the present state of the Far Right in Europe
* Let's keep a focus on what's happening NOW and Trends for the FUTURE

Some suggested discussion points
*Links between the Far Right in the UK and elsewhere
*Is there a Europe wide Far Right group, or is it all Nation-State level
*Relationship between the ADL and The Far Right
*Relationship between Neutarei Karta and the Far Right
*Connections between The UK Far Right and the Conservative 'Monday Club'
*The connection of Hasbara to the Far Right
*Irish Far Right groups - Splinter Republicans and Hard-line Loyalists
*What to do? - Practical anti-fascist activism - what works / what doesnt / what we could do differently

If we were able to actually TALK ABOUT some of these in a CONSTRUCTIVE way that would RESPECT newcomers to R.I., we could have a "What We Found Out About..." FAQ

I think this would involve the challenging practice of separating facts from interpretations...

Personal Notes:
IMHO the Hasbara aspect is an integral part and very relevant; it itself is a big subject but there is much that occurs within the specific remit of this thread.

and finally...
Having something to create FOR OTHERS would be a great focus...
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:27 am

Searcher08 » Sat Feb 15, 2014 1:02 pm wrote:Can I a few suggestions at this point?

I think this thread is very worthwhile, but is in danger of becoming just an avalanche of undigested conflicting material. Think of it like the 'salt curve' - no salt makes the dish unappetizing, a shaker-full makes it inedible, just the right amount makes it yummy...


* Let's keep anything by Greenstein / Atzmon out of here as per Jeff's ruling
* Let's establish an overview of the present state of the Far Right in Europe
* Let's keep a focus on what's happening NOW and Trends for the FUTURE

Some suggested discussion points
*Links between the Far Right in the UK and elsewhere
*Is there a Europe wide Far Right group, or is it all Nation-State level
*Relationship between the ADL and The Far Right
*Relationship between Neutarei Karta and the Far Right
*Connections between The UK Far Right and the Conservative 'Monday Club'
*The connection of Hasbara to the Far Right
*Irish Far Right groups - Splinter Republicans and Hard-line Loyalists
*What to do? - Practical anti-fascist activism - what works / what doesnt / what we could do differently

If we were able to actually TALK ABOUT some of these in a CONSTRUCTIVE way that would RESPECT newcomers to R.I., we could have a "What We Found Out About..." FAQ

I think this would involve the challenging practice of separating facts from interpretations...

Personal Notes:
IMHO the Hasbara aspect is an integral part and very relevant; it itself is a big subject but there is much that occurs within the specific remit of this thread.

and finally...
Having something to create FOR OTHERS would be a great focus...


Well observed, but also very belated IMO....('in danger of?')
I think this a foundational point that (If I'm allowed to blow my own trumpet for a second), I've been pointing out for several days now.

In the above list, I think I've made my own topic of choice apparent already, and is also squarely in the remit of the thread title
I like this:

I think this would involve the challenging practice of separating facts from interpretations...


TBH, I don't find this such a great challenge and will subsequently be E-priming all over the place in pursuit of this (which does take a fair bit of mental effort)
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:33 am

There is a spooky linkage- one cutting across borders- to the genesis of these Nazi type tendencies which target left/anarchist circles. There is grounds for lots and lots of future research here:


http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2010/11 ... -troy.html

Tuesday, 30 November 2010

Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction

A recent post highlighted the disparity between Troy Southgate's claims to have moved to a position 'beyond Left and Right' and his role as a founder and Chairman of the New Right. A commenter posted a link to this article by Graham Macklin on the Slackbastard blog (originally from the journal Patterns of Prejudice), which provides a useful outline of the origins and development of Southgate's 'National Anarchist' politics - Strelnikov

Graham D. Macklin: Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction
Patterns of Prejudice
Vol.39, No.3, September 2005


Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a ‘national-anarchist’ groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ‘anarchist’ agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move ‘beyond left and right’, transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism. Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident ‘national-revolutionaries’ who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization.


In his monumental A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 Stanley Payne devotes only two pages to British fascism–‘a political oxymoron’–the volume of literature devoted to which is ‘inversely proportionate to its significance’.[2] Such disdain has all but smothered the study of post-war British fascism, which is characterized merely as an ‘epilogue’ to the ‘epochal significance’ of inter-war British fascism, which in itself is only of interest as a benign footnote to the history of fascism and Nazism. Walter Lacquer is similarly scornful in his refusal to study post-war British fascism, ‘because it has not been very significant or in anyway original’.[3] Although there is an element of truth in this proposition its reductive methodological focus on the traditional canons of ideological core and electoral performance overlooks the extent to which British fascism operates outside neatly quantifiable electoral, national and legal boundaries. This inevitably underestimates the wider impact of fascist politics.

In this respect Roger Griffin’s recent elaboration of the concept of the fascist ‘groupuscule’ provides a much-needed corrective to an analytically stunted approach that obscures as much as it reveals. This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism’s cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. While the synthesis of left and right in ‘third position’ groupuscules makes their classification suitably problematic, this article demonstrates that despite a protean capacity for change ‘national-revolutionary’ groupuscules retain, at least to the initiated, the recognizable mark of Cain. These origins are equally evident in the synthesis of ‘anarchism’ with Evolian fascism, which is espoused by NRF founder Troy Southgate whose rapidly evolving political odyssey from (comparatively) orthodox British fascism to the radical, anti-capitalist, ‘post-third-position’ ideology of ‘national-anarchism’ represents a highly personalized and idiosyncratic revolt against the modern world.

Origins

The origins of the NRF can be traced to the collapse of the National Front (NF) in 1979. From its formation in 1967 the NF grew rapidly in strength until by 1973 it had approximately 17,500 members, though approximately 64,000 people passed through its ranks during the course of the decade.[4] Following its comparative success in the May 1977 Greater London County Council elections — which masked an overall decline in its political fortunes — many commentators feared the NF was on the verge of a major political breakthrough.[5] Buoyed with hubris the NF fielded 303 candidates in the 1979 general election, more than any insurgent political party since the Labour Party in 1919.[6] However, a resurgent Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, which usurped its anti-immigration platform while taking an equally draconian line on law and order, trounced the NF, which polled a derisory 191,706 votes (1.4 per cent).[7]

It was Götterdämmerung. The resulting trauma accelerated the decline and fragmentation of the NF and led to the departure of its titular chairman, John Tyndall, who was blamed for its humiliation. Riven by internal dissent and struggling to cope with its failure, the NF entered a period of frenetic ideological radicalization. The catalyst for this development was the arrival in England of approximately forty fugitive Italian fascists belonging to Terza Positione and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, several of whom had been involved in the horrific bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980 that killed eighty people.[8] As well as supplying the NF with funds they also introduced its membership to the ideas of Julius Evola, the aristocratic Italian racial theorist who had assumed centre-stage after 1945 as the inspiration for generations of youthful Italian fascists.[9] The radicalization of these younger, educated, ambitious activists created a further rift within the NF, which culminated in the departure in 1983 of Martin Webster, the National Activities Organiser.[10]

Webster’s departure paved the way for the ascendancy of the ‘leftwing’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ tendency within the NF inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite and the ‘anti-Nazi’ writings of Otto Strasser.[11] The absorption of these ideological imports led to the development of a more intellectually sophisticated, internationalist, ‘third position’ ideology showcased in the NF’s theoretical journal Rising. Modelling itself on the esoteric elitist pretensions of Evola and Corneliu Codreanu, the NF sought to transform itself into a ‘revolutionary’ cadre-based organization and to rid itself of ‘armchair nationalists, tin-pot dictators or refugees from old political parties’.[12] By January 1985 membership had declined to 1,000.[13] The NF’s ideological inspiration was Derek Holland’s The Political Soldier (1984), which envisaged an elite form of racial nationalism led by ‘a new type of man who will live the Nationalist life every day’ while preparing for a ‘holy war’ against the iniquitous British state.[14] Abandoning electoral politics, the NF extolled grassroots, community-based activism and aspired eventually to replace parliamentary politics with direct democracy or ‘popular rule’ adapted from Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book, which was eulogized alongside Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and Louis Farrakhan’s black separatist Nation of Islam. Not everyone accepted his ideological evolution, however. In 1989 the NF split into two separate groups: the Third Way led by Patrick Harrington, and the International Third Position (ITP) led by Derek Holland, Roberto Fiore and Nick Griffin, currently the British National Party (BNP) chairman.[15]

Troy Southgate

Born in Crystal Palace, South London in 1965, Troy Southgate’s political odyssey began in 1984 when he joined the NF as it was completing its rapid transformation into a ‘revolutionary organization’. Southgate claims he was attracted by its platform of ‘popular rule’ and Catholic distributism, rather than its ‘racial separatism’, which he accepted only later. Of immediate influence was Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and I Believed, the autobiography of Douglas Hyde, former editor of the Stalinist Daily Worker who became a minor cause célèbre in the 1950s when he renounced Communism and converted to Catholicism. Southgate followed suit in 1987, joining the ultra-conservative Lefebvrist sect, the Society of St Pius X. It was during this period that Southgate was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for serious assault during a streetfight. Following his release in 1989 he took over NF operations in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.[16] As the NF disintegrated into rival factions that year Southgate joined the ITP, believing it to be ‘the legitimate heir to the National Revolutionary Movement in Britain’, acting as its Kent organizer and editor of the Kent Crusader, Surrey Action, Eastern Legion and Catholic Action.[17]

Despite its radical origins the ITP quickly degenerated into an insignificant though fanatically ‘pro-life’ and homophobic Catholic sect, eulogizing the self-same ‘reactionary’ figures like General Franco and Mussolini it had previously denounced. Southgate became increasingly dissatisfied with the ITP leadership, particularly Holland and Fiore, whom he believed were far more interested in the possibilities of developing a rural fascist enclave in Northern France (and later in Spain), into which they had invested the group’s finances, than in sustaining the ITP as a cadre-based organization. Accusing them of gross financial impropriety, hypocrisy, racial miscegenation and of practising a ‘bourgeois’ form of reactionary ultra-Catholic fascism incompatible with the ‘revolutionary’ nationalism that, he claimed, they had betrayed, Southgate acrimoniously departed from the ITP in late 1992.[18]

Southgate immediately formed the English Nationalist Movement (ENM), which was intermittently active in Dover, Kent with small cadres in London and Bradford. It had ‘a small fluctuating hardcore’ of between 25 and 35 committed activists, though anti-fascist estimates put the figure as low as 4.[19] Signalling that the ENM represented the genuine embodiment of ‘national-revolutionary’ essentials Southgate established the knowingly titled Rising Press and reprinted influential articles from NF magazines like Rising, New Nation and Nationalism Today.[20] Vehemently opposed to the spiritual enslavement emanating from the twin materialistic poles of ‘Capitalist greed and Marxist servitude’ the ENM sought to define a usable ideological inheritance, untainted by its association with ‘classic’ fascism. Thus Hitler and Mussolini were denounced as ‘reactionary charlatans’ and enemies of ‘genuine’ revolutionary nationalism.[21] Corporate economics was also dismissed as the perpetuation of capitalism ‘behind a nationalist facade’.[22] The BNP was rejected as a mere ‘pressure valve’ for closet Tories and ‘small time drug dealers’.[23]

In contrast to the increasingly ‘reactionary’ ITP Southgate paid fulsome tribute to the pantheon of ‘forgotten’ dissident fascists that had motivated the original third position, including Strasser, Codreanu, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Léon Degrelle, not to mention the Welsh nationalism of Plaid Cymru. The resulting ‘patriotic socialism’ was assimilated with the writings of Victorian socialists like William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Robert Owen and William Cobbett to create a native Anglo-Saxon völkisch tradition that desired the reclamation of an English pastoral idyll supposedly swept away by the Industrial Revolution.[24]

This was coupled with Southgate’s desire for a ‘mono-racial England’, which he claimed was not ‘racist’. Borrowing his terminology from the Nouvelle Droite, Southgate claimed to seek only ‘ethno-pluralism’ (i.e. racial apartheid) to defend indigenous white culture from the ‘death’ of multiracial society. Defending ‘human diversity’ Southgate advocated ‘humane’ repatriation and the reordering of the globe according to racially segregated colour blocs. Within this framework Southgate advocated a radical policy of economic and political decentralization: England, Alba (Scotland), Cymru (Wales), Ulster, Mannin (Isle of Man) and Kernow (Cornwall). These regions were to be governed according to the economic principles of Catholic distributism and a wealth redistribution scheme modelled on the mediaeval guild system. The ensuing growth of private enterprise and common ownership of the means of production would end ‘class war’ and, ergo, the raison d’être for Marxism, and would also encourage an organic nationalist economy insulated from ‘foreign’ intervention.[25] Politically the regions would be governed by the concept of ‘popular rule’ extolled by Qaddafi. The resulting restoration of economic and political freedom would re-establish the link between ‘blood and soil’ enabling the people to overcome the ‘tidal wave of evil and liberal filth now sweeping over our entire continent’. ‘Natural law’ would be upheld and abortion, race mixing and homosexuality forbidden.[26]

This desire to create a decentralized völkisch identity has its roots in the ideological ferment gripping National Front News and Nationalism Today in the 1980s. Southgate’s continued ideological morphology was stimulated through contact with Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective formed in 1989 to discuss ‘European identities, autonomies and initiatives’ and which emerged from the NF’s cultural appendage IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic). IONA organized joint symposia with Michael Walker’s Scorpion magazine at which ‘former British Nationalists’ met to discuss finding a ‘rooted radicalism’ to challenge the nationalism of the NF that was ‘out-dated, discredited and overtaken by events’.[27] Despite such ideological innovation Southgate betrayed signs of remaining wedded to older biological fulminations espoused by Nazi racial scientist Hans “Rassen” Günther and American racist Lothrop Stoddard.[28] Even his assimilation of Noam Chomsky’s scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[29]

Anarch(y) in Britain: the National Revolutionary Faction

In 1998 Southgate disbanded the ENM and founded the National Revolutionary Faction, a new cadre-based groupuscule that embraced a far broader range of dissident fascist positions than the ENM, reflecting Southgate’s increasingly occult and esoteric trajectory following his break with Catholicism in 1997, which he blamed for the ‘complete stupefaction’ of the ITP.[30] Ironically, many of Southgate’s esoteric ideas were reconstructed from his own reading of the key texts of liberal ‘fascist studies’ rather than originating with any organic tradition.[31] Through the NRF Southgate pushed ‘third position’ thought on decentralism and regionalism to its ‘logical’ conclusion, rejecting the very cornerstone of fascist ideology itself: nationalism. While retaining the ‘palingenetic’ component of its ideology, the NRF nevertheless rejected the ‘artificial’ nation-state and the ‘reactionary’ nationalism emanating from it as the focus for rebirth. Drawing on Evola’s ‘spiritual racism’ Southgate rejected abstract geography, advocating instead a ‘tribal and organic’ Indo-European ‘ethnic heritage’, extending from Europe to Iran, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, which offered an impregnable racial defence against the ‘quagmire’ of globalization and the faltering security provided by national borders.[32] Added to this ‘spiritual racism’ was C. G. Jung’s concept of the ‘collective subconscious’, which provided the NRF with further evidence of the existence of a ‘primeval Aryan psyche’. In this respect Southgate admired Heinrich Himmler’s activity at Wewelsburg Castle as ‘one of the most significant developments in modern history’, which had contributed to a ‘deeper’ occult understanding of race, even though in the same breath Himmler could be derided as a ‘fascistic pig’ funded by ‘secret wall street financiers’ who had murdered many of his own ideological heroes.[33]

The most intriguing ideological innovation, however, was Southgate’s conversion to ‘anarchism’ and his subsequent formulation of a doctrine of ‘national-anarchism’. At first glance the ‘total insanity’ of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism.[34] When put into its wider context, however, ‘national-anarchism’ appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated.[35]

Central to ‘national-anarchism’, however, is a far older paradigm drawn from conservative revolutionary thought, namely, the Anarch, a sovereign individual whose independence allows him to ‘turn in any direction’, a notion that reinforces Southgate’s belief that ‘the concept of humanity coming and going in the same direction is a 1960s dead-end’. Redolent of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Futurist poetry, Nietzsche’s rejection of dogmatism and even Max Stirner’s extreme egoism, the concept of the Anarch finds its fullest expression in Ernst Jünger’s novel Eumeswil. For Jünger the Anarch differed radically from the anarchist, whose acts of insurrection (‘beacons of the impotent’) only brought further state repression. For the Anarch all external poles of power, whatever their relative merits, are both arbitrary and transitory. Having undergone a fortifying process of inner migration the Anarch ‘adjusts accordingly’ to external authority as a ‘question of form’ rather than faith. Stoically abjuring from this ‘ultimate devotion’ the Anarch preserves his autonomy and ‘metaphysical integrity’. This was also paramount in Evolian thought, which also divined a ‘spiritual’ basis for genuine authority beyond naked self-glorification.[36]

By recognizing this inviolability, by gaining the mastery of himself, the Anarch personifies a spiritual, aristocratic elite. The recognition of multilayered realities sees the Anarch ‘endlessly moving nomadically with mercurial freedom through thought . . . free to explore and synthesize’.[37] In this way the Anarch appropriates authority rather than succumbs to it, thus securing his own salvation and, ergo, that of the nation. In essence, Jünger’s work provides an esoteric reworking of Southgate’s original understanding of the ‘political soldier’ as a ‘Godlike figure’ who ‘can only truly be master of his situation when he is truly master of himself’. Only this ‘new man’ can save society from the ‘corruption and decadence’ that has engulfed it.[38] The concept of the Anarch therefore provides sanction for the amorphous ideological shape-shifting and rampant eclecticism of ‘national-anarchism’, allowing Southgate to claim that he is not ‘fascist’ but that he has transcended the dichotomy of conventional politics to embrace higher political forms that are ‘beyond left and right’.

In order to ‘change society completely’ the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy, which coincidentally led Southgate to jettison the ‘socialist trappings’ of Strasserism and ‘reformist’ distributism as incompatible with his Evolian racial vision. Indeed, Southgate is vehemently opposed to immigration and miscegenation, which he believes have severely disrupted the ‘organic balance of nature’.[39] The depth of his contempt for those who contravene this ‘natural order’ can be surmised from his attack on glamour model ‘Jordan’, whose child was fathered by a black footballer. ‘She has been rewarded for her racial treason’, jeered Southgate, ‘her picaninny has been born blind. just [sic] like his father, it would appear. still [sic], he can always become a Stevie Wonder impersonator when he grows up.’[40]

As such sentiments reveal, NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism’s humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as ‘infected’ with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism.[41] In its place Southgate has propagated a ‘third position’ anarchism based not on ‘moral’ rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the ‘natural order’ from which every group with ‘insurrectionist potential’ could unite to destroy ‘One World’ tyranny with a ‘primal bloodlust’.[42] NRF propaganda revels in this discordant Conradian stereotype of anarchism, glorifying both Bakunin’s ‘propaganda of the deed’ and Sergei Nechayev’s ‘science of destruction’.[43]

Having styled itself as an urban guerrilla group, NRF propaganda pays particular attention to the avoidance of state repression and surveillance by extolling a cellular, cadre-based organization comprising ‘political soldiers’ with four degrees of membership: the cadre or ‘active unit’, the trainee or probationary cadre, the supporter, and the outer circle who do little more than receive NRF publications. These four degrees of membership are subordinate to the Revolutionary Command Council, betraying a linguistic nod towards the continued ideological attraction of Qaddafi’s Libya, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s Egypt and the Iraqi Ba’athist Party.[44]

Such political organization reveals the NRF to be closer in inspiration to the Leninist ‘revolutionary vanguard’ than anarchism, even though it eulogizes the Angry Brigade and recommends Towards a Citizens Militia, published by Stuart Christie, one of [the] anarchists who was indicted though subsequently acquitted during the ‘Stoke Newington 8’ trial.[45] Indeed the NRF appropriates its symbolism from Marxist terror cells like the Red Army Faction, and its publications regularly feature instructions on the manufacture of homemade explosives, rockets, grenades, short-range mortars and napalm. In preparation for the total systemic collapse of capitalist society NRF cells are urged to immerse themselves in survivalist literature, military field manuals and encouraged to join the Territorial Army so that, as the Irish Republican Army discovered in the 1950s, ‘you can actually be paid and trained by the State in order to deal with its consequences’.[46] The NRF found even greater inspiration in the native terrorist tradition of the American far right and its concept of ‘leaderless resistance’, which is portrayed as an ‘anarchist’ alternative to the traditional mass-based organization that is rejected as ‘self-delusion’.[47] Having abandoned the constitutional’ approach of the British National Party the NRF is free to wage its ‘war of liberation’ against the British state and ‘international Zionism’ and in doing so evokes the inspiration of liberation leaders like Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who are listed as ‘exemplars for the struggle’.[48] This synthesis leads the NRF to promote a form of ‘black’ anarchism. These ideas owe a far greater debt, however, to fascism’s own tradition of terrorism and the ‘active nihilism’ of Julius Evola who in his later life preached that the outright destruction of the state was imperative. Southgate’s concept of ‘Real Anarchy’ is therefore little more than a repackaging of the esoteric principles of conservative revolutionary and Evolian thought.[49]

Richard Hunt and Alternative Green

Southgate’s espousal of Evolian Traditionalism underwent further ideological morphology through his contact with the anarcho-primitivist ideas of Richard Hunt, the founding editor of Green Anarchist who had been forced to resign over his support for the Gulf War. Southgate was exposed to Hunt’s ideas through the pages of Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective that eventually merged with his new publication Alternative Green.[50] Hunt’s ideas found their fullest expression in his book To End Poverty (1997), which argues that poverty in the ‘periphery’ is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the core’. This ‘progress’ represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and ‘biologically unhealthy’ population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards ‘total social breakdown’. Hunt’s panacea is to return to ‘the original affluent society’ of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a ‘peck order’ of ‘respect and influence’, bound by ‘kinship’, that would reestablish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism.[51]

Impressed by Hunt’s ‘grubby sort of utopia’ Southgate recognized that it could only be implemented following the ‘complete collapse’ of capitalism. Southgate believed that this eventuality was nearer to hand than was generally imagined, counselling that ‘national-revolutionaries’ needed to create ‘alternative revolutionary structures’ and ‘independent enclaves’ away from Britain’s ‘Asian infested cities’ in order to hasten capitalism’s demise. Thus the NRF advocated a localized ‘counter-economy’ based on smallholdings and allotments whose produce and required skills could be bartered through local exchange trading systems (LETS) suffused with a racist imperative to break the ‘dominating stranglehold’ of Asian shop owners. This racist anti-capitalism had as its end the desire to foment civil and racial strife through ‘no-go’ areas for ethnic minorities and state power as an essential prelude to racial civil war and the collapse of the capitalist system.[52]

Key to this is the maintenance of a network of like-minded and ideologically committed individuals, families and groups who have ‘turned their backs upon the corrosive influence of urbanism and decay’ and might feasibly form racially segregated rural communities and build something ‘tangible’.[53] Emulating the example of the Wandervogel, the British Woodcraft folk and the ‘legionary spirit’ of Corneliu Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Southgate formed the Greenshirts and a uniformed Iron Youth to re-establish the ‘eternal’ principles of blood and soil through cross-country hikes and camping.[54] Here can be found Southgate’s attempt to create the archetypal Fascist Man who, in Codreanu’s words, ‘does not bend, who is inflexible’.[55] These activities represent an integral part of the NRF’s long-term strategy to construct a broad range of viable political, social, cultural and economic alternatives to those of ‘the Establishment’ through which the children of its activists can emerge as ‘the true vanguard of our people’s future’.[56] To insulate them from the degenerate Americanized values of their peer group and a national curriculum based on ‘reading, writing and buggery’, Southgate schools his children from home.[57]

This racist communitarianism is given an ‘anarchist’ gloss through Southgate’s reinterpretation (and limitation) of the ideas of free and instinctive association implicit in Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as an expression of ‘folkish’ identity. Proclaiming that it is ‘anarchist’ to insist on ‘our own space’, Southgate excludes from these communities the ‘unnatural’ presence of ethnic minorities, homosexuals and feminists, not to mention those who support abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, vivisection and genetically modified foods. They would be free to form their own communities.[58] Influenced by Hunt’s anarcho-primitivism Southgate’s view of ‘Traditional Anarchy’ is suffused with Evola’s advocacy of ‘self-rule by an elite’ and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by ‘genetics’ that, despite its alleged ‘anarchism’, looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial ‘kingship’.[59] Southgate’s vision also absorbs the ideas of anarchist thinkers like John Zerzan, not to mention the Luddite terrorism of Ted Kaczynski, in order to theorize a ‘more natural lifestyle’, superficially free of the taint of ‘fascism’, adding a novel green/anarchist spin to Evola’s Traditionalism in the process.[60]

This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of ‘folk autonomy’ rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization. He was quick to appreciate that the anti-globalization movement was ‘sectarian’ in its political leanings. Alternative Green and its ‘overriding aversion to the Capitalist system’ was therefore an ‘ideal platform for formulating practical strategy’ to oppose capitalism.[61] Alternative Green was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a ‘sincere’ alliance of ‘anti-system’ protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe, though admittedly ‘there wasn’t much input from the far left’.[62] To push this agenda the Beyond Left and Right website was founded, although efforts to convene further events during 2001 proved unsuccessful when Anti-Fascist Action and members of Green Anarchist (and their arch-detractor Stewart Home) mobilized to ‘smash convergence’.[63] Southgate’s aborted attempt to transcend the left/right dichotomy and open a dialogue with the (now-reviled) ‘anarcho-dogmatists’ failed utterly.

Members of the anarchist trade union, the International Workers of the World, founded an anti-nationalist-anarchist e-group to refute the assertions being made by ‘national-anarchists’. Black Flag, the backbone of British anarchism, provided its Internet audience with a vast archive of online texts refuting Southgate’s assertion that racism and nationalism were ‘anarchist’. Individual members of Anti-Fascist Action have also been particularly active in challenging NRF activity in online newsgroups. The furore led to Hunt’s further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate’s frequent contributions to Alternative Green, his views have not permeated further within the far right.[64] Denounced as a ‘fascist’ Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green.[65] Having become ill Hunt finally relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green to Southgate; it was, however, suspended after only one issue and replaced with a new publication, untainted by the furore, entitled Terra Firma.[66]

The brief existence of the ‘Beyond Left and Right’ project hinted at its nebulous potential. Two veteran socialists, Gary Holden and Terry Liddle, both prominent in the Greenwich branch of the London Green Party, its Green Socialist Network and the South London Republican Forum, attended the 2000 Anarchist Heretics Fair. As news of their attendance emerged members of the UK_Left_Network e-group (unsuccessfully) lobbied the London Socialist Alliance and the Republican Communist Network (RCN), with which they were involved, to institute an enquiry. Liddle offered a somewhat unconvincing defence of his actions in both Republican Communist and Weekly Worker, organ of the minuscule Communist Party of Great Britain, which was closely aligned with the RCN, that stated that he had ‘no case to answer’. Calls for an enquiry were dismissed as a ‘witch hunt’ motivated by the ‘paranoid’ fantasy of Green Anarchist, thus sidestepping the actual content of the accusations. A parallel Green Party enquiry ended with Liddle’s resignation, however.[67]

As these events unfolded it became apparent that the NRF was practising a form of virtual entryism through the eco-anarchy e-group, an arm of the Canadian-based anarcho-green forum, in order to enquire into, among other things, the viability of forging a green/black bloc. Its moderator Joseph Catron had previously posted a number of messages to ‘national-revolutionary’ e-groups announcing his opposition to the ‘multicultural and imperialist nightmare’, and it has been suggested that the eco-anarchy e-group was a ‘honey trap’ designed to lure genuine and unsuspecting greens and anarchists into its orbit.[68] This thesis was given some credence by the fact that Dave Parks, the Anti-Fascist Action activist who exposed these machinations, was barred from the list rather than those he exposed.[69]

Mindful of the contemporary success of the red/brown coalition in Russia, NRF cadres sought to create ‘a working synthesis’ between anti-capitalists of both the left and right.[70] Indeed, with the collapse of ‘really existing’ Communism in 1989, the NRF abandoned ‘third position’ fascism as ‘irrelevant’. Having immersed himself in the writings of both Hunt and anarchist theorist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), Southgate reconceptualized the coming struggle in terms of a Manichaean division between ‘those for Capitalism and those against Capitalism, Centralists versus Decentralists’.[71] In this respect ‘national-anarchism’ was ‘transcending the very notion of beyond’ by taking synthesis to its ‘logical’ extreme and uniting all anti-systemic opposition against a single enemy: global liberal capitalism deemed to operate as a front for the ‘shadowy financiers’ of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and therefore ‘International Zionism’.[72]

There was little evidence that this ‘synthesis’ represented anything more than a strategy for infiltration as NRF cadres gradually shifted from low level antisemitic demonstrations against traditional fascist targets to the permeation of ecological and anarchist concerns, like direct action protests against a proposed multiplex cinema in Crystal Palace, the ‘Stop the City’ protests in 1999 and the May Day protests in 2000.[73] Southgate claims to have been active in the increasingly violent protests surrounding the Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection laboratory in Cambridgeshire during August 2000.[74] He also claims NRF cadres are active in the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the Animal Liberation Front.[75]

Discord in the Middle East has offered the NRF further scope to enhance its anti-imperialist credentials. Unlike the BNP, which has transformed its virulent Islamophobia into a virtue since 11 September, the NRF supports Islam because ‘many of its adherents are vigorously opposed to International Zionism’.[76] NRF members often participate in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and, in one symbolic act of support, burned American and Israeli flags outside Downing Street as an ‘anti-Zionist’ protest against continued attacks on Iraq. Although the NRF opposes organized Islamic groups in Britain like Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun, which seek to establish a ‘global Caliphate’, NRF publications regularly eulogize groups such as Hamas for the ‘purity of thought and action’ with which they attack ‘the obnoxious disease that is World Jewry’.[77] Keen to build bridges with British Muslims the NRF claims a ‘handful’ of Arab members and has published a faux Islamist publication, Semitic Voice, which purports to be the work of ‘a group of young Muslim students’. In an attempt to foster greater enmity against Israel the NRF repackages traditional far-right concerns in an Islamic context, blaming the ‘holohoax’ for Palestinian dispossession and inciting Islamist militants to violence against the Jews by advocating the formation of ‘cells of God’ (leaderless resistance).[78]

This strategy had a limited virtual success through an online bulletin board called Jumeirah Beach: The Society of International Thinkers for Peace, run by Qasim Khan from Karachi in Pakistan, which purports to have a wide audience in the Middle East. Khan, who is linked to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the third largest political party in Pakistan whose activists were recently involved in the wave of sectarian violence in Karachi, describes the NRF as an ‘international think tank’ and acts as the ‘national-anarchist’ contact in Pakistan. Through this site Southgate has sought to acquaint Middle Eastern readers with Julius Evola and ‘lone wolf’ resistance and, in doing so, to transform national-anarchism into a ‘global idea’, thus hastening the ‘destruction of international Capitalism’.[79] Another contributor to the site is former BNP organizer for Hull and Lincolnshire, David Michael, who left the BNP because of its ‘disgraceful’ anti-Islamism after 11 September.[80] Michael views the American-led invasion of Iraq as potentially cathartic and argues:

All the people of the world who want peace and who fear America must unite now more than ever before, Muslims, anarchists, communists, nationalists, all of us . . . we must join together, put aside philosophical and religious differences, and start to work together against the American murderers and the British pig, Blair. Divided, we will accomplish nothing. Together, we might slowly begin to rid the world of this evil.[81]

In an effort to further such an alliance Michael founded Voice of the Resistance, which purports to act as a forum for resistance against the ‘new American Capitalist Empire’.[82] Using rhetoric traditionally associated with left-wing protest Voice of the Resistance bills itself as ‘George W. Bush’s worst nightmare’. Southgate and Michael soon encountered ‘insurmountable differences’ and ceased their co-operation.[83]

Geopolitics

One of the paradoxes of post-war fascism has been the repeated effort to transcend the ‘narrow’ nationalism of ‘classic’ fascism by becoming truly international through a series of grand designs for European unity. To compensate for their debilitating numerical deficiency, ‘national-revolutionary’ groups like the NRF have internationalized both their ideology and their organizational frameworks in order to reach out to similarly isolated groups abroad, globalize their struggle and consolidate their strength. In its attempts to realize this Eurasian ideology Southgate founded the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism (LCRN) in early 1993 to unite the American Front, Canada’s National Liberation Front and Kerry Bolton’s National Destiny in New Zealand. These groups did little more than exchange publications and information, however. In September 1998 the LCRN merged with Christian Bouchet’s Front Européen de Liberation (FEL) under the shadow of the Front National’s annual Red-White-Blue festival. The FEL was inspired by the ‘one vision’ of European ‘liberation’ espoused by Otto Strasser, Jean Thiriart and Francis Parker Yockey, after whose original organization the FEL was named.[84] Southgate sought to anchor the NRF within this ‘living tradition’ by reprinting Yockey’s The Proclamation of London (1949), ‘a fully-fledged ‘‘Declaration of War’’’ against the ‘Zionist, Capitalist New World Order’. By February 1999 despite repeated efforts to organize these disparate ‘national-revolutionary’ sects the FEL had atrophied, although Southgate continued to ‘work closely’ with Bouchet.[85]

Geopolitically Southgate has shifted away from the older paradigms of Europe as a ‘third way’, gravitating towards the spiritual and esoteric national-Bolshevik solution advocated by Jean Parvulesco and Aleksandr Dugin, ideologue of the Arctogaia think tank, who seek a new Eurasian (and in Dugin’s case Russian-led) geopolitical axis: ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow’.[86] Former Jeune Nation leader Jean Thiriart provides further inspiration through his more materially orientated idea of an economically insulated European empire stretching ‘from Galway to Vladivostok’ and acting as a third force between Occident and Orient. Despite having retired from politics in 1969 Thiriart was so enamoured with the FEL that he re-emerged shortly before his death in 1993 to lead a FEL delegation to Moscow for talks with national-Bolshevik ideologues Yegor Ligachev and Aleksandr Dugin.[87]

Southgate’s vision of western culture is saturated with a profound pessimism tempered by the optimistic belief that only by ‘complete and utter defeat’ can tepid materialism be expunged and replaced by the ‘golden age’ of Evolian Tradition: a return of the Ghibbelines of the Middle Ages or the ‘medieval imperium’ of the Holy Roman Empire before it collapsed into the ‘internecine struggle’ and ‘imperialistic shenanigans’ of the nation-state.[88] This panacea has been injected into the contemporary Russian national-Bolshevik milieu through Southgate’s analysis of Evola’s Men among the Ruins that appeared on the Pravda.ru website.[89] The Eurasian geopolitical solution is not conceived by Southgate as a cynical extension of Russian imperial chauvinism, but a ‘golden opportunity’ to create a ‘decentralised imperium’. Adopting the slogan of Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré, Southgate advocates a ‘Europe of One Hundred Flags’ wherein ‘each historic nation can assert its own political, social and economic freedom within the ancestral boundaries of its racial and cultural heritage’. This Eurasian ethnic ‘federalism’ is to serve as an impermeable barrier to the culturally enervating forces of MTV ‘musak’ and ‘Coca-McDeath’. To liberate Europe from the all-encompassing ‘blanket cosmopolitanism’ of American-led consumerism, not to mention the ‘occupying force’ of its military presence in Europe, Southgate advocates relinquishing ‘the very idea of the West’. Enmeshed in a vortex of materialist society and therefore ‘deep within enemy lines’, Europeans are encouraged to reach out to the ‘common struggles’ waged by the heirs of Che Guevara, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and Patrice Lumumba, whose revolutions on the ‘periphery’ should be supported as part of a dual strategy of ‘encouraging dissent and resistance from within’.[90]

Paganism

Southgate, who has a degree in theology and religious studies from Canterbury University, rejected Catholicism and moved towards neo-pagan and heathen groups that are ‘very loyal to the Gods of the Northern Tradition’, including the Odinic Rite, the Tribe of the Wulfings and the Asatru Alliance, a pagan movement concerned with practising rituals and magic and led by Valguard (Mike) Murray, a former member of the American Nazi Party.[91] Further evidence of this transition from Catholicism to paganism emerged in an interview with Wotan, the organ of the Charlemagne Hammer Skins.[92] Southgate believed that Wotan’s celebration of the heroes of the Norse pantheon represented ‘the most genuine expression of European spirituality, culture and identity’.[93] Another key expression of this ‘identity’ is exhibited by Southgate’s interest in the militaristic cult of Mithras and the ‘pagan spirituality’ of the apostate Roman emperor Julian II.[94]

This rejection of Christianity has an avowedly antisemitic dimension. Through the figure of Christ, Christianity has Judaic roots and is therefore irredeemably tainted; only the ‘weak’ continue to worship a ‘dead Jew’.[95] The emphasis on the Judaic roots of Christianity, however, is regarded as of secondary importance to its usurpation of the rituals, sacraments and hierarchy of the ancient pagan solar religion Mithras, which was introduced into Iran and India by marauding Aryan tribes from the Russian steppes between BCE 2000 and 1500 before spreading to the Roman empire. Although it failed to defeat early Christianity in the battle for religious supremacy during the fourth century, Mithras continues to be viewed by esoteric thinkers (including Evola and Jung) as an alternative path the West could have followed. It retains its appeal as an initiatory cult or aristocratic order akin to the Knights Templar or, latterly, Himmler’s SS which, the NRF claims, had its origins in various ‘Anarchist droite’ circles like the Black Sun and the Thule Society. While Christianity tried to neuter this vital expression of the ‘Aryan psyche’, the awareness of Europe’s ‘Faustian’ destiny is currently enjoying a renaissance within the occult milieu. These ideas were also absorbed by thinkers like Evola and René Guénon who discerned in them the fragments of a ‘hidden albeit distinct and fundamental truth’.[96] For Southgate, as for Evola, Tradition is an ‘an underlying current which both permeates and transcends all’.[97]

Southgate’s discovery of Evolian ‘Primordial Tradition’ and his consequent rejection of Catholicism as ‘the sole cosmological truth’ ran in tandem with his immersion in the industrial music scene.[98] This ‘cultural vanguard’ is spearheaded by a number of Gothic-Industrial, Dark Ambient, Black and ‘Viking’ Metal bands, including Allerseelen, Blood Axis, Burzum, Current 93, Dark Holler, Death in June, Endura, Mayhem, Ostara, Puissance and Sol Invictus, though it also encompasses more commercial bands like Cradle of Filth.[99] Although it would be an exaggeration to say that these groups conform to a defined political agenda, their music serves to diffuse the ideals of Mithraic paganism and Nordic folk myths within this youthful underground subculture far more effectively than any number of meetings and marches could, thus providing the ‘perfect antidote’ to the spiritually enervating, multiracial values of a globalizing ‘system’. Southgate has also noted the potential of the Straight Edge punk movement and its hard core of puritanically intolerant followers, an interesting development given (exaggerated) reports of an emerging ‘anti-anti-establishment’ pro-Bush right-wing punk movement.[100] Although Southgate realizes that the groupuscular right cannot control music-orientated youth cultures, he believes a minority can be induced ‘to take a direction basically conducive to our aims’.[101] Southgate seeks to do this through his online magazine Synthesis, which features a music section replete with interviews and gig reviews.[102]

This is not simply cynical manipulation. Southgate appears genuinely interested in the counter culture he seeks to target. His fanzine, Tribal Resonance, ‘the voice of the racial avant-garde’, reveals Southgate’s strategy of linking his ideas to ‘the common language and the big ideas of our culture’.[103] Through the medium of musical subcultures and the creation of alternatives ‘from without’, Southgate hopes to permeate existing political subcultures transversally, as the Nazis did, through a process of ‘cultural osmosis’ that aims to recode the ‘social symbology’ of the host culture so that its ideas can metastasize throughout the body politic, recalibrating its genetic inheritance. By creating ‘cultural hegemony’ the groupuscular right believes it can forge the ‘political space’ necessary for political and racial hegemony.[104]

The struggle for cultural hegemony is greatly enhanced by the Internet, with the NRF establishing its own website in July 2001. As its name suggests, Synthesis, the online Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire, seeks a fusion of ‘Anarchy’, ‘Occulture’ and ‘Metapolitics’ with the contemporary concerns of the ecological and global justice movements. It provides a huge, counter-cultural resource (‘a junction box for esoteric, third positionism on the web’) including a vast archive of articles, essays, interviews, music and book reviews not to mention providing opportunities for its readership to showcase their art, photography, poetry and fiction. This is accompanied by a profusion of interlocking e-groups acting as a forum for ideological exchange for the more esoterically and intellectually inclined.[105]

Synthesis was originally envisaged as a forum for the NRF, Evolians and members of the defunct White Order of Thule (Michael Lujan, former WOT secretary, is the Synthesis webmaster). However, borrowing the ‘template’ of Action Française’s ‘study groups’ Synthesis projects itself far beyond the confines of rigid definitional taxonomy to attract, so it claims, ‘Crowleyites, communists, anarchists, greens, libertarians, fascists and separatists’ who can use its facilities and e-groups to engage in debate and ideological refinement. This online convergence has the benefit of being insulated from the failure of the ‘Beyond Left and Right’ project. With a global reach, it ‘is far more useful than putting a few stickers on lamp posts’.[106]

This extensive Internet presence masks the weakness of the groupuscular right. Obsessed by the importance of its long-term, counter-cultural projects the NRF disengaged from ‘political’ activities and retreated into the realm of ideas.[107] Such was Southgate’s alienation from the groupuscule as an organizational form that on 29 January 2003 the NRF was disbanded altogether as Southgate concentrated on reorganizing as a ‘political think tank’ to promote and develop ‘national-anarchism’ as a philosophical concept that he hoped would come to exert a ‘formidable influence’ on the ‘anti-Capitalist struggle’.[108]

The significance of the NRF

In itself the NRF is completely irrelevant as a political force. Its importance lies in the case study it supplies of fascism as an amorphous and continually metamorphosing phenomenon. It is symptomatic of the transient nature of far-right groupuscules that by the time this article was completed the NRF had been disbanded. Southgate’s latest activities have shifted almost entirely to the Internet, which is seen as offering the best opportunity of turning ‘national-anarchism’ into a ‘global idea’. Although these developments are taking place on the farther shores of the cultural and political fringe, this miniature struggle for cultural hegemony should not be ignored. The Anti- Defamation League (ADL) recently argued that, with the increased use of traditional anarchist symbolism by white supremacists in the United States, the circle-A should be listed as a hate symbol. The ridiculous nature of this assertion ignores the fact that it has been precisely those left-wing and anarchist subcultures maligned by the ADL who have actively fought back against the genesis of ‘national-anarchism’, disrupting and exposing it both on the street and in cyberspace. Indeed, anarchists and the radical left in Britain appear alive to the validity of Charles Peguy’s observation made over a century ago: ‘Qui dit “ni droite ni gauche” dit de droite’. It was this hostility to Southgate’s calls for ‘convergence’ that forced him to relocate his activities to the Internet where a wider audience can be reached, ‘particularly abroad where the left/right spectrum is far more blurred and open to interpretation’.[109] As the antipathy for Green Anarchist reveals, this resistance has not always been generated by a sophisticated analysis of Southgate’s own activities but rather because it fell within the framework of pre-existing antipathy.

Although Southgate’s impact on left-wing counter-cultural concerns has been completely negligible, this case study of the NRF’s wanton intellectual cannibalism shows that groupuscular fascism poses a clear danger, particularly for ecological subcultures whose values are profoundly different from the ecological agenda mooted by the far right. The increasing ability of groupuscules like the NRF to absorb and mirror left-wing and environmental causes, effortlessly refracting their concerns about globalization and liberal democracy through their own antisemitic and racist framework, creates a dangerous conflation between ecology and anti-immigration as a way of restoring the ‘organic balance’ of nature. If this article is anything to go by, then anarchist, ecological and global justice movements need to remain on their guard in order to ensure that the revolution will not be national-Bolshevized.

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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:44 am

Troy Southgate is not particularly well regarded** amongst those who term themselves 'national anarchists' in the UK, and his repeated mentions here on sound to me like boogeymanism. (the exact same info above has cropped up several times now)

It is also a mistake in my opinion to attach too much specific significance to individuals in the area of anarchism (as anarchists try not to), especially as then become a lazy label for something.

**anecdotal I know, which is why I am clearly labelling at such.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:47 am

Europe....Ireland.....Image

Anti-Semitism...hasbara....Image

Islamophobia.....If Jesus and mother Mary were alive today,
they would, as Jews without security, probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians”.Image

Image


The Israeli embassy in Dublin has apologised and taken down a post on its Facebook page that said that if Mary and Jesus were alive today they would “probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians”.

The post, which was made on the Israel in Ireland Facebook page at about lunchtime yesterday, showed a picture of Mary and Jesus, accompanied by the comment: “A thought for Christmas . . . If Jesus and mother Mary were alive today, they would, as Jews without security, probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians”.


Netanyahu's Christmas message: More anti-Muslim public diplomacy
Prime Minister radicalizes traditional holiday greeting on YouTube, suggests that Christians in the Middle East are under existential threat.
By Barak Ravid | Dec. 24, 2012 | 5:25 PM | 40

Netanyahu Christmas message - Dec. 24, 2012
Image
A screenshot from the YouTube video of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Christmas message, Dec. 24, 2012.


By Jonathan Lis | Dec. 24, 2012 | 12:10 PM | 16



Every year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publishes a Christmas message for Christians in Israel and abroad. One of the message's objectives is hasbara, or public diplomacy, to the Christians of the world. But this year's greeting was especially political. Netanyahu chose to radicalize his traditional greeting into an attack on Muslims in Arab countries.

In his December 2011 greeting, Netanyahu made do with pointing out the fact that in the Middle East “Christians are persecuted in a routine manner, and there is little tolerance toward them.”

In his 2012 greeting, Netanyahu, who continuously cautions the world that Israel is under existential threat from Iran, asserted that the Christians in the Middle East are in danger of extermination. No less.

“Today Christian communities throughout the Middle East are shrinking and many of them are in danger,” said Netanyahu, according to the announcement published by his bureau in Hebrew and English. “...this is of course not true in Israel. Here there is a strong and growing Christian community that participates fully in the life of our country.”

Netanyahu did not specify in his greeting exactly who is threatening to annihilate the Christians, but it's clear from the wording that he means the Muslims. As he did last year, he emphasized that the Christian community in Israel is large and that it enjoys freedom of religion and freedom to worship, but this year he added a hinted reference to the “Judeo-Christian heritage.”

The reference is to a sensitive term taken from the conceptual world of the rightist-evangelical anti-Muslim wing of the Republican Party. After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. conservative politicians and intellectuals used this term in criticizing American multi-culturalism and claimed that the Muslims were engaged in a culture war against Judaism and Christianity.

Paul Ryan, the Republican candidate for vice-president in the recent U.S. election, employed this notion. “Obama is threatening the Judeo-Christian values of the United States,” Ryan told evangelical Christians in a conference call.

“So as you celebrate Christmas and your holy holidays, we hope that you will recall the places where Judaism and Christianity emerged and then come see our ancient land with your own eyes,” Netanyahu said. “Visit Nazareth and Bethlehem, wade into the Jordan River, stand on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and next year come visit our eternal capital Jerusalem.” Incidentally, in last year's message Netanyahu did not refer to Jerusalem as Israel's eternal capital.


In this year's message, Netanyahu referred to attacks on Christians in Israel over the past year. “Israel will continue to safeguard places of Christian worship throughout our country,” he said. “We will not tolerate any acts of violence or discrimination against any place of worship; this is not our way and this is something we cannot accept.”

Netanyahu's statements on freedom of worship for Christians in Israel come against the background of a highly critical investigative report on the subject broadcast on the CBS-TV “60 Minutes” program and a record number of “price tag” attacks against churches and monasteries in Israel over the past year.

The escalation of attacks against Christian institutions in Israel was heavily criticized by European and U.S. Christian communities, and was strongly condemned by France, the U.K. and the Vatican. Criticism intensified after it became apparent that not one of the attackers had been apprehended and brought to justice.

Israel's use of Christmas in its public diplomacy became a topic for discussion last week, after the country's embassy in Ireland posted a picture of Jesus and Mary on Facebook together with a caption asserting that if the two of them now resided in Bethlehem, they would be murdered by Palestinians. Strong protests prompted the embassy to remove the photo and caption from its Facebook page and apologize.

Netanyahu did not go so far as to use the Christian holy figures for political purposes. But it is possible to understand what the diplomats in Ireland were thinking after viewing the Christmas message distributed today. When they published their Facebook post, they were merely acting in the spirit of their leader.
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:48 am

Searcher08 » Sat Feb 15, 2014 8:02 am wrote:Can I a few suggestions at this point?

I think this thread is very worthwhile, but is in danger of becoming just an avalanche of undigested conflicting material. Think of it like the 'salt curve' - no salt makes the dish unappetizing, a shaker-full makes it inedible, just the right amount makes it yummy...


* Let's keep anything by Greenstein / Atzmon out of here as per Jeff's ruling
* Let's establish an overview of the present state of the Far Right in Europe
* Let's keep a focus on what's happening NOW and Trends for the FUTURE

Some suggested discussion points
*Links between the Far Right in the UK and elsewhere
*Is there a Europe wide Far Right group, or is it all Nation-State level
*Relationship between the ADL and The Far Right
*Relationship between Neutarei Karta and the Far Right
*Connections between The UK Far Right and the Conservative 'Monday Club'
*The connection of Hasbara to the Far Right
*Irish Far Right groups - Splinter Republicans and Hard-line Loyalists
*What to do? - Practical anti-fascist activism - what works / what doesnt / what we could do differently

If we were able to actually TALK ABOUT some of these in a CONSTRUCTIVE way that would RESPECT newcomers to R.I., we could have a "What We Found Out About..." FAQ

I think this would involve the challenging practice of separating facts from interpretations...

Personal Notes:
IMHO the Hasbara aspect is an integral part and very relevant; it itself is a big subject but there is much that occurs within the specific remit of this thread.

and finally...
Having something to create FOR OTHERS would be a great focus...


I think you're on a generally good track here, though I do have some issues and concerns with all this, too. Here are a few:

For me, this thread is about neo-fascist organizing in Europe and how it evolves- sometimes utilizing Judeophobic and Islamophobic forms but not requiring them- sometimes crypto-racist and crypto-fascist, sometimes openly so- articulating nationalisms in various ways, etc.

I I haven't seen a linkage to Hasbara to this that seems particularly relevant other than European "ultra nationalists" and neo-fascists attempting butter up the Hard Right in Israel.

I think the idea of working on shared research goals is great in general for this board but I fear that the ideological differences are too great for that to be possible here.

Et Cetera...
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:48 am

(Duplicate Post).
Last edited by American Dream on Sat Feb 15, 2014 10:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 9:58 am

Speaking from experience**, British nationalists are not interested enough in Middle Eastern issues to utilise them in any meaningful way, and regard them as a distraction from local (ie national) concerns.
I would tentatively extend this to the continent too and it would be nice to hear from non-British Europeans on this matter (sije comes to mind)

Terms such as 'Neo' and 'Crypto' seem to me to be ways of simply repackaging the snarl-word 'fascist', so that it takes on a newer sheen. It's also a way of reviving the obsession around this where the real deal is apparently fading.

**Anecdotal, I know.

also makes me think about the place where Slad wishes to store her fuzz
Last edited by jakell on Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:38 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:20 am

Another error is to assume there is such a thing as 'European white nationalism'. This is something that was thrown at me when I was trying to drive the wedge a little bit further in between British nationalists and White nationalists.

British WN enthusiasts like to say there is no difference, and I counter this by saying that they are trying to devolve 'Britishness' into the image of some American import, this is hard for them to argue with, WN is foreign to Britain, and can exist independently of Britain.
They then termed themselves 'European White Nationalists', but this is easy to counter too. If 'whiteness' alone is supposed to be the significant decider (which they claim), then geography cannot be, it is a worldwide thing or nothing.

I'm not offering the above as some sort of great truth , just one of the many points they can be practically countered on if one keeps a level head, and doesn't get distracted by shrill binary ideologies.
Last edited by jakell on Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:27 am, edited 2 times in total.
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