The “Alternative Right"

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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 7:52 am

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/alt- ... ers-trump/

An Unholy Alliance

The “alt-right” and Israeli settlers have a shared fervor for ethno-nationalism, Islamophobia, and racism.

by Amir Fleischmann

Image
US president Donald Trump with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January 2017.


Capitalism is a flurry of contradictions, and one of its strangest is the burgeoning alliance between the antisemitic forces of the “alt-right” and Israeli settlers.

This alliance is not exactly new. For some time, the far-right parties of Europe have been outspoken in their support of Israel, all while courting hardline nationalists who often hold racist and antisemitic views. Even in the United States, this alliance has been around for a while. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon — a severe antisemite — provided significant financial and military support for Israel, allowing the country to prevail in the Yom Kippur War.

What is different now, however, is how closely the two are working together — and how willing the Israeli right has been in embracing these unlikely bedfellows.

The alt-right is antisemitic. This point should not be controversial. We can see it when Milo Yiannopolous referred to a reporter as a “thick-as-pig shit media Jew” or when the Trump administration released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention Jews (or any other targeted group, for that matter). Antisemitism has been central to the alt-right’s program. When they speak of “global special interests,” they are really just rebranding the old antisemitic trope of a global Zionist conspiracy.

Moreover, it should also be obvious that the recent rise in antisemitic incidents in the aftermath of both Trump’s election and the Brexit vote are a direct consequence of the increased acceptability of white nationalism in public discourse. These threats, which include bomb threats and cemetery desecrations, are serious.

Despite all this, the Israeli right, ever quick to denounce the smallest critique of Israel as antisemitism, has largely embraced the alt-right.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been possibly Trump’s biggest cheerleader among foreign leaders. After Steve Bannon officially became Trump’s chief strategist, Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken defender of Israeli apartheid, eagerly spoke out to shield him from accusations of antisemitism. (This is the same Steve Bannon, mind you, who said he didn’t want his daughters going to school with “whiny brat” Jews.)

Israeli backing for Trump is easy to understand: they gladly welcome the increased support from their greatest ally at a time when the rest of the world is beginning to wise up to their system of apartheid. But the alt-right’s affinity for Israel is a bit stranger.

Trump has vowed to be the best friend Israel has ever had and has floated the idea of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer has actually praised Zionism for helping inspire the ethno-nationalism that he has made his own.

Herein lies the key to understanding this alliance. The state of Israel was founded at the end of World War II, when the major powers sought to redraw the world map in a way so that (nearly) every minority got their own country. This way, there would be no minorities. In order for Israel to become a Jewish state, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had to be ethnically cleansed in what is now known as the Nakbe.

This ideology — that ethnicities should be separate and that minorities should be expunged — is precisely what is driving the alt-right. This allows us to understand why the alt-right can simultaneously hate Jews and love Israel. The alt-right is fine with Jews, as long as they’re over there, far away from the United States.

And because they consider Jews “more white” than Arabs, the alt-right is happy to use them, through the state of Israel, to keep those uppity Muslim states in check. This has been Israel’s historical role. It was the case in 1956, when France and Britain entreated Israel to invade Egypt in order to stop Gamel Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.

More recently, the Mossad has also helped the United States assassinate Iranian scientists and otherwise sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. The alt-right is happy to give support to the state it sees as the West’s first line of defense against the dreaded Muslim invasion.

As shocking as it might seem to see orthodox Jews eagerly jump into bed with rabid antisemites, we should really know better than to be surprised. What the alt-right and Israeli settlers (and their supporters) have in common is a shared fervor for ethno-nationalism and a strong inclination towards Islamophobia and racism.

Israel is useful to the alt-right both as a tool for wreaking havoc in the Muslim world and as an ideological fellow traveler, willing to support their nationalist and chauvinist policies. Without acknowledging this, we cannot hope to understand either movement. The Left must be vigilant in opposing this alliance and refuse to let the alt-right’s support for Israel be a cover for their extreme antisemitism.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 31, 2017 10:34 pm

https://itsgoingdown.org/solidarity-iww-gdc-member-hex/

At College Campuses, Antifascists Get Bullets, White Nationalists Podiums


On January 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration, Hex, a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and the General Defense Committee of the IWW came to protest a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington, Seattle.

In an act of political violence, an alt-right supporter of Milo shot Hex in the stomach, sending him in critical condition to the Harborview Hospital in Seattle. Luckily, Hex has recovered and was able to give this inspiring interview about the incident and his desire for restorative justice outside of the judicial and prison systems. Despite turning himself into the Seattle Police Department, the shooter was released from custody and so far has not been charged with any crimes. This contrasts starkly with the mass arrest of 230 protesters at the inauguration, who are now facing sentences of up to ten years. This is the reality of our current moment: those guilty of the “crime” of protesting against fascism and capitalism face draconian prison sentences, whereas someone who intends to kill and severely injures an anti-fascist gets away with impunity. This is why we must look outside of the legal system for justice.

This shooting also demonstrates the very real danger posed by fascists organizing on college campuses. Here in New York, alt-right “comedian” Gavin McInnes and neo-eugenicist Charles Murray have spoken at both NYU and Columbia in recent weeks. Both McInnes and Murray have tried to distance themselves from associations with neo-Nazism and white nationalism. However, McInnes’ true colors showed earlier this month when The Rebel sent him on a “fact-finding mission” to Israel. During that trip, McInnes said on The Gavin McInnes Show, “I’m becoming anti-Semitic.” He also defended Holocaust deniers, accused Jews of an unhealthy obsession with the Holocaust, and accused Jews of disproportionately influencing the Treaty of Versailles, in effect blaming them for their own mass-execution.

McInnes’ comments earned him rave reviews from both former Klan leader David Duke and neo-Nazi alt-right founder Richard Spencer. Even more vile comments, hidden behind a paywall, were uncovered by the news site Canadaland. McInnes revealed himself as equally racist toward Jews and Palestinians, saying, “Palestinians are stupid Rottweilers. And I had a Rottweiler before. And the way we would discipline him is we’d punch him in the face really hard.” He also accused “Jewish Marxist professors” of indoctrinating liberals with a hatred of white men.

On his own college tour, Charles Murray has insidious attempted to peddle his pseudo-scientific theories on class under the guise of “libertarianism.” Murray told students at NYU, “I know that you’ve heard that I’m a white nationalist. It’s real hard to be a libertarian and a white nationalist.” This, of course, is far from the case, as recent examples of fascist entryism to libertarian circles, and associations with Richard Spencer and fascist Augustus Invictus demonstrate. Murray himself has admitted to burning a cross on a hill in his Iowa hometown as a high school student. His “academic” career has consisted of promoting discredited ideas about genetic correlation with intelligence that are meant to justify racism as scientifically valid. His most famous book, The Bell Curve, was heavily based on research funded by the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist organization, founded in 1937 by American Nazis and eugenicists. In spite of this, mainstream media sources like the New York Times have written dismissively of students who came to protest Murray, and smugly defended Murray himself with lines such as, “[The Bell Curve] did not advocate the practice of eugenics.”

The ideas of alt-right and fascist figures like Milo, McInnes, and Murray can have very real and violent consequences. This was demonstrated by the shooting of Hex, as well as by the murder of a black man by an alt-right supporter in New York last week. This is why we need to come out and continue to protest every time one of these white supremacists comes to recruit students on college campuses.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 01, 2017 8:18 am

UNDERSTANDING ALT-RIGHT ANTISEMITISM
Ben Lorber

(Note- This article references many alt-right/white supremacist websites. All hyperlinks to these web pages go to ‘cached’ replicas of the pages, not the website itself.)


For the American Jewish community, these are strange and frightening times. With a wave of bomb threats to Jewish community centers*, attacks on Jewish cemeteries, and antisemitic graffiti on college campuses, American Jews face the largest grassroots surge of antisemitism in living memory. Yet, while over 75% of American Jews did not vote for Trump, the state of Israel has rushed to his side. Stranger still, the white supremacist alt-right movement seems to simultaneously hate Jews, and love Israel. Steve Bannon, Trump campaign mastermind and former architect of the antisemitic and white nationalist Breitbart News, shows firm support for the Jewish state, while neo-Nazi hipster Richard Spencer compares himself to Theodore Herzl, and calls his movement ‘white Zionism’.

This confusing reality has scrambled the coordinates of the American Jewish community, whose leaders have spent decades painting criticism of Israel, and more recently the BDS movement, as ‘the new antisemitism’. Even though it is well-known that the same forces of white supremacy put all our communities in danger, many Jews and non-Jews still struggle to understand exactly how this new anti-Semitism fits in with other forms of bigotry in the far-right, such as Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, anti-blackness, and anti-immigrant racism.

This article examines the ideology of antisemitism on the alt-right, and its intersection with alt-right Zionism, in comparison with anti-Jewish ideologies of the 20th century. By unearthing the inner logic of fascist mentality, we do not seek to grant legitimacy to their beliefs, or pretend they can be defeated through reasoned debate alone; rather, by situating these anti-Jewish ideologies in their historical context, past and present, we hope to orient ourselves in our current political moment, in order to understand how to transform it.



ALT-RIGHT ANTISEMITISM

For years, the online white nationalist movement has been obsessed with the ‘Jewish Question’, or ‘JQ’. Dredging through the swamps of the alt-right internet, on sites like the Daily Stormer, forums like 4chan and podcasts like the Daily Shoah, it is common knowledge that, alongside all sorts of racist and sexist drivel, one is inundated with raw, in-your-face neo-Nazi memes, slurs and clickbait recycling the crude anti-Jewish tropes of the last century.

Rather than attempt to glean a coherent ideology from Pepe-the-frog memes or angry white dude trolls, it is more worthwhile to turn to the ‘suit-and-tie’ white supremacists, who wrap their hate in a pseudo-intellectual veneer. In online publications, like Alternative Right, CounterCurrents, Radix Journal, and the Occidental Observer, that appear, at first glance, more like academic journals than hate sites, the alt-right attempts to develop a coherent American white nationalist ideology, grounded in 20th-century anti-modern, anti-liberal thought and situated alongside other far-right movements across Europe. Epitomized by clean-cut, upper-middle-class ‘hipster intellectual’ fascists like Richard Spencer, this new movement seeks, in the words of one anti-fascist blogger, to make neo-fascism “just as much of a philosophic project as Marxism and anarchism…using jargon and rhetoric that feels more like the Frankfurt School than like the [neo-Nazi group] National Alliance.”

Most attempts, on the alt-right, to ‘theorize’ antisemitism rely heavily on the work of Kevin MacDonald, a retired evolutionary psychology professor who still collects a pension from California State University, Long Beach. Dubbed ‘the neo-Nazi movement’s favorite academic’ by Southern Poverty Law Center and ‘the Marx of the anti-Semites’ by conservative writer John Derbyshire, MacDonald began his academic forays into the ‘Jewish Question’ in the late 90s, by claiming, in books like ‘A People That Shall Dwell Alone’, that Judaism represents a ‘group evolutionary strategy’, developed and perfected over two millennia of Jewish adaptation in the diaspora, whereby a tight-knit Jewish ‘ingroup’ embeds itself, like a virus, within the pores of its host nation, siphoning off resources, rising to the elite and disarming all defenses against their invasion. Once the formal legal structures separating Jews and gentiles were dissolved in the 18th-century European Enlightenment, MacDonald argues, liberal ‘emancipated’ Jewish activists “construct[ed] highly focused ethnic networks in politics, the arts, the media, and the social sciences—all the critical centers of power in the modern world”, building progressive movements for multiculturalism and universalism within Gentile society while, hypocritically, maintaining covert ‘hyperethnocentric’ networks of support among fellow Jewish activists.

The alt-right turns to MacDonald’s later books, particularly The Culture of Critique, to understand the ‘Jewish problem’ underlying basically all progressive legal, political and cultural forces of modern American history. Throughout the 20th century, claims MacDonald, American Jewish political figures, lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, activists, and other ‘opinion makers’ spearheaded, from behind the scenes, both the civil rights movement and the movement for relaxed immigration policies. It was Jewish political and social capital, ultimately, that opened the gates of the USA to millions of non-European immigrants, integrated our schools, cities and neighborhoods, and worked behind the scenes, in various ways, to engineer “the racial reconstruction of America”.

During the same time period, MacDonald insists, a liberal Jewish elite engineered the hegemonic takeover of the humanities and social sciences, using the disciplines of Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School to propagate cultural relativism, sexual liberation, and the deconstruction of all ideologies deemed ‘authoritarian’, respectively. Through movements like the New Left, finally, Jews brought the ‘culture war’ to the streets of America. Today, therefore, Jews have successfully transformed American sensibilities, mainstreaming white guilt, moral relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, political correctness, ‘cultural Marxism’, and the thousand other evils of liberalism.

Another common alt-right trope portrays Jews as the ‘globalist elite’, the secretive cabal that controls global institutions, like the IMF and the EU, to impose an exploitative neoliberal agenda of austerity, deregulation and debt servitude upon the nation-states of Europe. The much-villianized progressive Jewish philanthropist George Soros embodies, for the alt-right, the conviction that the ‘globalist elite’ is ‘socially liberal and fiscally conservative’, or, put differently, that the same ‘Jewish power’ underlies both the economic agenda of the 1% and the social-cultural agenda of the 99%.

All things considered, for the alt-right, “the organized Jewish community,” writes Greg Johnson, editor-in-chief at Counter-Currents, is the principal enemy — not the sole enemy, but the principal enemy — of every attempt to halt and reverse white extinction.” While other hated ethnic and religious groups, such as blacks, Latinos, Arabs and Muslims, represent external threats, Jews, they claim, destabilize White European-American society from within, through the gradual, imperceptible institutionalization of creeping white genocide. The Jews are the master puppeteers, the hidden architects of white dispossession- in the words of neo-Nazi leader Victor Gerhard, “to rail against blacks and Hispanics without mentioning Jews is like complaining about the symptoms and not the disease.”

The Jewish question, accordingly, is the esoteric secret of the alt-right cult, a meta-narrative reserved only for the initiated, those who, through a leap of reason, learn to see beyond appearances to the essence of white dispossession. “I think it is easy to understand black crime, illegal immigrants, that’s in your face,” said Richard Spencer in an interview with the Forward. “But the Jewish question is extremely complicated.” Or as Kevin MacDonald says, “my general impression in talking to Alt Righters is that many begin with an awareness of White decline, race differences in traits like IQ, and minority hostility, and then progress toward an understanding of Jewish influence as they read more widely.”

Only by uprooting the Jews from America, according to the alt-right, can whites successfully reverse-engineer the social, cultural and political processes of their own dispossession, ensure their survival, and chart the course of their future. From this perspective, bomb threats and cemetery desecrations represent the sickening attempt of American white supremacy, not only to chase away what today will corrode the foundations of the white ethnostate of the future, but also to uproot, from the soil itself, all that corroded the white ethnostate in the past.

Before we move on, let’s be clear- Jews did not covertly orchestrate the racial and social justice movements of the 20th century! This argument, while grossly antisemitic (more on that soon), is demeaning to the communities of color, LGBTQ folk, working people and others who fought, and still fight, for their own liberation. Moreover, this narrative erases the existence of Jews of color and non-European Jews, monolithically portraying all Jews as ‘white-passing’ descendants of European Ashkenazim (even while it strenuously denies, obviously, that these Jews are in fact white Europeans).



THE JEWISH ETHNO-STATE

For years, many white nationalists demonized Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as the manifestation of a uniquely Jewish power, Jewish evil or Jewish influence. ‘Old-school’ white supremacists like David Duke still depict Israeli leaders as Satanic baby-killers, thirsting for Palestinian blood, and still claim that Israel controls media, banks and ‘Zionist occupied governments’ the world over. These motifs are remakes of the ‘blood libel’ myths of the Middle Ages, and the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ myths of the 20th century, respectively. Clearly, they are far removed from the principled anti-Zionism of the Left, which views Israel’s oppression of Palestinians not as a ‘Jewish problem’ but through the structural lens of settler-colonialism, apartheid and white supremacy.

Recently, however, the alt-right has changed its tone. Many now call for a pragmatic acceptance of the existence of Israel, arguing that the only way to end the parasitic, destabilizing force that diaspora Jews exert upon Western nations is to relocate those Jews to Israel. “As ethnonationalists, we believe in the “Ein Volk, ein Reich” principle,” explains Greg Johnson, in ‘White Nationalism and Jewish Nationalism’- “one people, one state…[an] ethnic self-determination of all peoples…a kind of classical liberalism for all nations, in which each people has a place of its own”. Israel, for Johnson, is not the symbol of the wicked ’eternal Jew’, but the sign, rather, of its overcoming. “I do not oppose the existence of Israel,” explains Johnson in a chilling passage. “I oppose the Jewish diaspora in the United States and other white societies. I would like to see the white peoples of the world break the power of the Jewish diaspora and send the Jews to Israel, where they will have to learn how to be a normal nation.”

Johnson is hardly the first antisemite to reason that pesky, subversive diaspora Jews have no business in the European nation-state, and need some blood-and-soil nationalism of their own. A hundred years ago, in the heyday of European state-building, it was common for white Europeans and Americans to believe that, as Henry Ford’s early-1920s pamphlet ‘The International Jew’ put it, “in a world of completely organized territorial sovereignties, he [the Jew] has only two possible cities of refuge: he must either pull down the pillars of the whole national state system or he must create a territorial sovereignty of his own.” Early Jewish Zionists shared this view. In fact Theodore Herzl, in a diary entry, articulated a vision that, disturbingly enough, could today make him Greg Johnson’s business partner- the Zionist movement, he proposed, could work with ‘respectable anti-Semites’ willing to liquidate Jewish property in the diaspora, reimbursing these folks for their assistance in the colonization of Palestine. In the completion of this task, Herzl reasoned, “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies”.

Perhaps to the delight of Herzl, other alt-right theorists view Zionism as an ethnonationalist project worth emulating in itself. Richard Spencer, who once referred to his movement as ‘a sort of white Zionism’, dreams of an ‘ingathering of the exiles’ of white Europeans into a new white ethnostate built in North America. Striking a Herzlian pose, he explained in a 2013 speech that “our project would be a new kind of political and social order. It would be a state for the 21st century—or 22nd…a home for Germans, Latins, and Slavs from around the world…a reconstitution of the Roman Empire…the Ethno-State would be, to borrow the title of a novel by Theodor Herzl (one of the founding fathers of Zionism), an Altneuland—an old, new country.”

While the alt-right may see Zionism as an ethnonationalism much like their own, this does not mean that they see Israel as a sign that, finally, the Jews are becoming ‘a nation like all other nations’. A key motif of alt-right antisemitism holds that in the modern era, Jews act duplicitously by, as MacDonald puts it, championing “the idea that Western countries have no ethnic core…while supporting Israel as a Jewish ethnostate”. Using the specter of the Holocaust, Jews in the post-World War II era, according to the alt-right, demand that Israel remain a ‘Jewish state’ while pathologizing as ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ any attempts by whites to champion ethnonationalism in Europe and America. Thus, echoing old antisemitic motifs of the ‘deceitful Jew’, the alt-right sees the liberal Zionist Jew, progressive on all issues except Palestine, as no different than the Jewish reformer of post-Enlightenment 1800s Europe, who preached universalism by day and practiced ethnocentrism by night, or the Jewish anti-war activist of the 1960s, who preached universal brotherhood while covertly maintaining belief in Jewish superiority (a phenomenon MacDonald claims to have encountered firsthand, during his hippie years).

The alt-right watches in rage while, as one writer expressed in classic Freudian formation, the Jew fulfills, for himself, the white race’s desire for ethnocentrism, while castrating the white race with “the double standards of political correctness that condemn whites for even daring to think about the subject [of ethnonationalism], but freely allow Jews not only to express their desires for, but to actually have, their own ethnostate.” And the same fetishistic glance which Spencer casts upon Herzl, is cast by Kevin MacDonald, of all people, upon the very diaspora Jews he despises. “I have at times been accused of being an anti-Semite,” MacDonald grants in a 2004 speech entitled ‘Can the Jewish Model Help The West Survive?’, “but the reality is that I greatly admire Jews as a group that has pursued its interests over thousands of years, while retaining its ethnic coherence and intensity of group commitment…Taking seriously the idea of Judaism as a model for [white] ethnic activism is a tall order indeed.”

On one point alone, the Left agrees with Richard Spencer- Zionism is a form of ethnonationalism, racism and white supremacy. Just as Bibi and Trump, on the diplomatic stage, look like they were born for each other, Herzl and Richard Spencer do indeed strike a parallel pose in history. While we also hold liberal Zionism as hypocritical for condemning racism in America but overlooking it in Palestine, we see this, not as some mythical ‘Jewish deceitfulness’, but as a fairly typical blind spot held by liberal non-Jews and Jews alike. Perhaps liberal advocates of the two-state solution would be embarrassed to find that white supremacists like Greg Johnson support their policy proposal, albeit through the overt, rather than covert, logic of racial separatism.“I do not favor the destruction of Israel,” he says, “because I want the Jews to live there, not among my people. I favor a Palestinian state, because I want the Palestinians to live there, not among my people.”


Continues at: https://doikayt.com/2017/03/24/understa ... isemitism/
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 05, 2017 12:51 pm

http://class-struggle-anarchism.tumblr. ... ol-racists

On Nuance and Grad School Racists


They understand how to pose subtle and sophisticated questions, but they swamp the sewers of their questions with the tidal sludge of their answers - that unfiltered wealth which is beneficial for a few and detrimental to almost everyone.” – Walter Benjamin

On Saturday night I founds myself at a little dance night in an ex-squat in a quiet corner of Amsterdam. A first year PhD student who had been at the seminar I had attended during the day was there too. His studies were apparently critical in nature, but it was difficult to tell. At the beginning of the night he pulled a few pick-up artist moves on the female friend of a friend who was there with us, before insisting on sitting at the bar and engaging a couple of us in conversation. The discussion didn’t go very far, but centred on his claim that the Netherlands was not a racist country, while quietly justifying elements of its racist culture from Zwarte Piet to the near election of Geert Wilders. Yet perhaps most significant was his repeated insistance that his position was “more nuanced” than ours. Eventually, frustrated and annoyed at his ignorance and intransigence, we left.

Such a claim, of subtlety, sophistication, and nuance seems common these days. Over the last weeks such a position has been put prominently by a number of people who have defended racist events in the art world and the academy such as the LD50 gallery, DC Miller’s talk on Evola in a Neukölln bookshop, or Nick Land’s lecture course at the New Centre in New York. “Look,” they scream on their facebook profiles, “we really are on the side of Enlightenment, of anti-racism, but we just have to let these racists speak in order to show the left where it is going wrong. The anti-fascists who have tried to close down these projects are crude in their actions while we are sophisticated theoreticians.”

There are of course some problems with Antifa, which everyone knows: traditionally it has been a mode of organising that goes after fascists who already recognise themselves to be fascists. Little effort is put into attacking cultures of fascism that are less self-conscious, or into the transformation of latent fascism as an element of the dominant culture. Often too there can be hints of an unwelcome righteousness gained only from the fact that the enemies are fascists, a confidence that one is in the right from the fact that ones opposition are most definitely in the wrong. But these issues are well known, not least by those involved in anti-fascist activism. Amongst those involved in practical anti-fascist politics these issues are routinely discussed - not least because those involved are often, albeit quietly, talented theorists too. Amongst those involved in the protests over the last weeks are extraordinarily acute and thoughtful theorists of racism, of the history of fascism and of resistance movements, of questions of theory and practice, of fascist aesthetics, and of many elements of contemporary culture. If the critics of Antifa spent more time listening to them instead of promoting racists they might have noticed this. Indeed they might have noticed that these recent actions really mark a change in anti-fascist work with an increased focus on fascist cultures and the tendency of certain markets and demographics to produce them.

What is striking though, from the position of the self-aggrandizingly “nuanced” critics, is the lack of nuance in their arguments. These arguments tend to run as follows: 1) All attacks from the left against racists are moralist in tone and juridical in character. That is to say, they take the form of the sort of lawmaking with which modern states control the public sphere. The left, in attempting to refuse racists a voice are taking part in the same sort of action as a supposedly liberal government that curbs the free speech of the press or the revolutionary or the heretic. 2) Racists and fascists are most effectively combatted in debate and discussion. Where this is refused they are likely to be pushed underground and remain unchallenged, meanwhile without engaging racists in discussion the left will fail to understand what it is facing. 3) Where action against racists leads the way before a theoretical understanding of them, it is always premature, always instrumental, always involves some unaccounted for and unreflected upon barbarism. It is better that we complete our understanding and then we will know what to do.

Indeed these arguments are nothing but pieces of caricature: The political world, despite being obviously full of oppression, is transformed into a blank cartography in which everyone is able to speak equally loudly and easily without fear (although especially those willing to pay 400 bucks for an online course); the activist left are mass-produced figurines in the model of Joseph Stalin; racism, especially when enounced by someone with a high enough profile, needs to be listened to, considered and understood before it can be criticised. The fact that these arguments and inferences are so preposterously stupid, so idiotic in fact that those who make them must notice too, suggests that the protestations of nuance and sophistication must be playing some other role.

It is in these self-assurances of nuance that these critics express their sickness, which Walter Benjamin once described as “left-wing melancholia.” Alongside the conviction that they are the most nuanced participants in these disputes is the confidence that they too are the most radical: that their opponents must be liberals, reformists, or plain barbarians. Yet this supposed radicalism remains wholly in the mind. In truth their claims of nuance are the only political moments in their thought, and their politics amounts to quietism. They are not thinkers of the not-yet-actualised but rather of the never-quite-ready. Indeed the twin convictions of nuance and radicalism, which remain at the level of speculation, are great barriers to action and to politics proper. Locked in the cage of the mind these critics never have to negotiate the diremptions of thought and action. They are beautiful souls whose hovering above the world today takes on the form of a drone. As Benjamin wrote of their historic counterparts, a left-wing literary intelligentsia of 1931 who were nourished by poems and paintings describing just how terrible the world was:

This left-wing radicalism is precisely the attitude to which there is no longer, in general, any corresponding political action. It is not to the left of this or that tendency, but simply to the left of what is in general possible. For from the beginning all it has in mind is to enjoy itself in a negativistic quiet. The metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption - that is this literature’s latest hit.

Those of us who are involved in anti-fascist activism tend not to be so righteous. Reality for us is in the fracture and non-identity of our thinking and action. Politics and learning comes most often in the failure of either or both, although at times we might have small victories. Yet for our critics, the conviction that they will one day be sure of what is right has hardened itself into a sureness. These critics with all their “sophistication” are involved in an infinite regress that freezes them out of politics proper: for them there is never a moment of decision which hasn’t already been made or which won’t have already been made too early when it finally happens, never a moment of failure, never an experience of non-identity. These apparent experts in irony haven’t noticed that while criticising those who plead for a bit of safety, it is they who have already occupied all of the safest positions, free from any need to make decision, unable to enter into a moment of danger.

But then none of this is much of a surprise. Most of them are the ever-more wealthy purveyors of middle-class lifestylism, whether it be in galleries or bookshops or (pseudo-)universities. It makes sense for them to see their apparently critical role as ultimately resting on the intellectual identity and autonomy of the individual who speaks and speaks and speaks but does nothing. They provide for him. Our crude thinking and action against fascists may well get in the way of that. But they can’t see why we would get involved, because in their position of security they fail to notice how threatened, how oppressed, how damaged we are already. They wrongly assume that our thinking is just like theirs but worse, another left-lifestylism that attempts to form self-identical subjects ready for action, but which got off the bus on the way to absolute consciousness a few stops too early. Perhaps then we should accept their terms of sophistication because our own learning in action has taught us what they mean. Perhaps we should accept that we can at times be crude, but at least we are not politically silent or worse.

Crude thoughts have a special place in dialectical thinking because their sole function is to direct theory toward practice. They are directives toward practice, not for it; action can, of course, be as subtle as thought. But a thought must be crude to find its way into action.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:48 am

RACISM AS DEEP TROLLING AND OTHER NEW CENTRE DIVERSIONS

By Shut Down LD50, 4 April 2017

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On one level, our broadside against Land’s racism, ‘No Platform for Land’, had the intended effect, provoking the New Centre’s public statement against future associations with Land and throwing light on the circulation of far right racism in cultural and academic scenes. But in the New Centre’s statement and associated social media postings, it has sought to rewrite its sorry history to position itself as a leading edge in the critique of Land, and to deflect attention from this shameless manoeuvre by positioning its anti-racist critics as vengeful and reactive ‘Red Guards’. Now it’s not only a matter of saving face. Attempting in this way to discredit and divert those who would challenge the content and circulation of far right ideas cannot but serve the agenda of the far right. Hence it’s no surprise to find that this trope of the ‘Red Guard’ is not the sole preserve of the New Centre but is integral to today’s far right, to be found, for example, every time Land looses his prized ‘coldness’ to Twitter-rave at those who would object to the spread of racism.

But at least the New Centre has finally cut loose from Land? Well, sort of. It was astonishingly reticent in doing so, and at least one of its Board of Directors seems to think the matter not yet closed, posting this on 30 March in reply to the New Centre announcement about ending relations with Land: ‘whatever decision we come to on this – and there’s been nothing like a consensus yet – i think we can agree that we shouldn’t in any way encourage the extortionary, red-guard tactics of these goons’.

In what way has it been reticent? The New Centre’s public position is that breaking ties with Land is due to his recent Twitter activity, that from early 2017 it was ‘displeased and angered by several tweets by Land in which he espoused intolerant opinions about Muslims and immigrants.’ Yet the New Centre has known since at least summer 2016 of the odious nature of Land’s ideas, which are far more extensive and integral to his philosophy than some ‘intolerant opinions’. We refer to an attempt by the New Centre to host Nick Land at an e-flux conference in July 2016, of which the organisational discussion stream on e-flux is eye opening (see the screen-grabs below). Three participants who opposed Land’s presence at this conference drew attention to his eugenecist and ethnonationalist screeds. New Centre director, Mohammad Salemy, took the opportunity to clarify, dismissing the ‘false accusations’ of one critic and claiming Land as some kind of double agent, his racist proclamations not to be taken at face value. Another member of the New Centre chimed in to argue, in a delusion of grand proportions, that Land is in fact a rigorous anti-fascist and Marxist critic of media and economy.


More at: http://www.metamute.org/community/your- ... diversions
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 07, 2017 9:53 am

#NoMoreJewishWars: The Alt-Right Turns on Trump Over Syrian Bombing

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News just broke that the U.S. launched between 50 and 60 Tomahawk missiles at Syria in retaliation for the recent sarin gas attack in the Idlib province on Tuesday. Prior to the most significant military action of Trump’s presidency, his legions of alt-right fans were already warning the “God Emperor” against taking action. In their view, any wars in the Middle East are done for the benefit of Israel and Jews in general.

In an effort to convince Trump to uphold his pledge to keep “America First,” they briefly got the hashtags #SyriaHoax and #NoMoreJewishWars trending. Well, it turns out that the Pentagon is impervious to meme magic, and his white nationalist supporters are furious.

4chan’s /pol/ is already thick with buyer’s remorse. In a comment thread simply titled “IT BEGINS,” anonymous users blasted the President for breaking his promise to stay out of Middle Eastern entanglements. “Nice. More refugees. Thanks faggot kike US,” complained one. “WHAT THE FUCK. HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE /OURGUY/,” declared another. Several just spammed the phrase “it’s over” in all caps.

Others were more nihilistic. “DIGITS AND A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST BEGINS BY THE END OF THE WEEK. THANK YOU TRUMP FOR BRINGING OUR MISERABLE EXISTENCE TO AN END YOU TRULY ARE THE GOAT. HAIL TRUMP HAIL DEATH.”

Mike Peinovich, founder of The Right Stuff, wrote on Twitter that “it’s over” if Trump “falls for obvious Jewish tricks and invades Syria.” “The alt-right will turn against him,” he warned.


Continues at: https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/04/06/no ... n-bombing/
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby tapitsbo » Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:44 am

And The Resistance learns to love Trump (literally!)

The names of every person supporting this horseshit will be remembered, just like with Iraq.

Each time around the shit is spread even thinner on the sandwich, may it crumble soon.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:27 am

Yeah- clearly Alt-Right/Fascoid types will be divided on these sorts of issues...
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby tapitsbo » Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:37 am

As opposed to The Resistance astroturfer shitheads (he will not divide them...)

Seriously though, Trump just lost any shred of credibility with his entire base. The US population will want blood and the factions people like you have counted on keeping apart will increasingly come together (the dreaded "horseshoe")
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:51 am

It think you're overestimating the role of far right elements within the Trump Coalition. Putinophilia and the anti-Imperialism of Fools (loving Baathists, Iranian Fundamentalists and any other such misguided militants just cause they fight Uncle Sam's empire) is a minority position, generally. The fissure point between system-loyal rightists and the far Right is an important one.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 07, 2017 1:38 pm

http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/again ... -anon/6347

Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left — ANON

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The William Buckley debates was political discourse at its finest. Although watching Norman Mailer throwing shade at Gore Vidal is entertaining, James Baldwin taking Buckley to task holds a special place in our hearts. Baldwin defending his, and by extension, the black underclass’ right to exist With persuasive reason and eloquence is a relic of a bygone era. Gone are the nuanced with engagement with your opponent, self-gaslighting is on trend these days.

“I don't know too much about Karl Marx, but there was this man who wrote The Decline of the West, Spengler— he had another book that's a little lesser known, called The Hour of Decision.” - Malcolm X on Oswald Spengler.

Nick Land is a smarter, poorer Martin Shkreli. A comic book villain with an over-inflated ego. He understands post-truth very well, and at this point, he’s just a versatile rhetorician. The Kellyanne Conway of the Marxist academia. His reactionary defection has been theatre and pure hyperstition. At one point, his “Dark Enlightenment” read as a prophetic dead canary to the Left: a prognosis of what type of program lies ahead.

Sometimes we suspect even he's confused by his right wing hyperstition and oscillating between having no real politics and being a cryptofascist. Whatever the case, we believe refusing to engage with him or his work will not get to the crux of what is going on right now.

The rise right-wing populism in the 21st Century shows a significant portion of the population is open to postmodern, authoritarian demagogues like Trump or Le Pen. Until we confront the historical demons and pathological deterritorialization that brought us here, we will continue to see this problem evolve.

Land himself even remarked that the Alt Right is a mass political movement against capitalism incubating, unexpectedly, from the right. Don’t get the wrong impression, this is no apologia for Nick Land. He is, indeed, the enemy, politically and philosophically. He deserves to be indicted, but not in the court of public opinion. Attack him in the academy, then shit on him over Twitter when seminars end. That’s what we do every weekend.

Some of us, the members of Anon, have been attending Land's seminars at The New Centre for Research & Practice. The virtue of taking his seminar on Accelerationism gives us a chance to engage with him directly and challenge him in a way that is rare and helpful. The seminars have a flexible structure, structure and accommodate multidirectional conversations. Thus, we seize every opportunity available to both learn what we can from him and others attending the seminar while protesting and pushing back on his ideas when necessary.

As leftists, we should learn to engage with materials that make us uncomfortable at times, if only to better learn how to effectively resist. The “shut it down,” no platforming culture has its own limits and is partially responsible for the emergence of the Alt-Right as a mobile online force.

The marriage of the memetic SJW to tactless AntiFa is a hurdle the Left needs to overcome. Our first document skewers the “woke” Left because, a). they are our cohort, for better or worse; and b). the Left should feel more culpable for the state of affairs than it does. Thank you, AntiFa and SJWs, for proving us right. Congrats, on shutting down the LD50 gallery! But when are you going to take on The Whitney for Dana Schutz’s crass painting? Does the spectacle of LD50 hide the fact that there are left wing galleries that are far more complicit in gentrification, worker exploitation, misogyny, and racism?

ANON is a collective of “Other.” Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer. There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us. Nevertheless, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of People of Color (PoC). Our social disciplines are as varied as our identities, from journalists to dominatrixes. ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter divorced from liberalism. All inquires should be directed to: xenochan@protonmail.com
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 08, 2017 2:37 pm

Mike Peinovich is ‘Not Defending Trump Ever Again’ Following Attack on Syria

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In the aftermath of last night’s unilateral military strike against Syria, Donald Trump’s rabid “America first!” crowd immediately revolted.

CONTINUE READING
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 08, 2017 4:01 pm

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After the Syria Strike, Conspiracy Theorists Are Out to Get Trump

Also on the long list of gas truthers is the crew at Alex Jones's Infowars, who claim that the actual culprits in the attack were most likely members of the Syrian search-and-rescue team called the White Helmets, who are often accused by Assad allies of being part of al Qaeda. After the strike, Infowars columnist and YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson—the David Miscavige to Jones's L. Ron Hubbard—was livid, tweeting "It's been fun lads, but the fun is over. I'll be focusing my efforts on [French far-right leader Marine] Le Pen, who tried to warn Trump against this disaster."


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/afte ... -get-trump
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 08, 2017 5:30 pm

http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2017/ ... nnopoulos/

The absolute worst reason to oppose Trump’s Syria strike, courtesy of Milo Yiannopoulos
APRIL 8, 2017

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Milo: Still a sad clown

Remember Milo Yiannopoulos, the At-Rightish Breitbart “journalist” who used to call Donald Trump “daddy?” He apparently wants the world to know that:


He still exists
He’s no longer on the Trump Train
He’s one of the worst people to walk the face of this earth


In a recent statement to Mediaite, Milo explained that he was breaking with his former political idol over his missile attack on a Syrian airfield — but hasn’t yet given up on calling Trump “daddy.”

“This is not why people voted for Daddy,” he told Mediaite. “It’s the opposite of why people voted for him.”

Yes, who could possibly have foreseen that the guy who wants to increase our military budget by $54 billion while cutting funds for Meals on Wheels might have a hankering to use military force?

But don’t worry! Milo’s opposition to “POINTLESS FOREIGN WARS” — as he put it, in all caps, in his brief message to Mediaite — doesn’t mean he’s suddenly become a decent person. Far from it!

Here’s why Milo says he’s against intervention in Syria in particular:

I’m as troubled by violence toward innocent children as the next sociopath, but those kids are only growing up to be oppressors of women and murderers of homosexuals anyway.


So everyone in Syria who practices a certain religion deserves to be killed, even the children? Milo Y may no longer be a Trump fan, but he’s still a fascist at heart!
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