Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by 82_28 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 11:18 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 14, 2015 11:28 am
82_28 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 10:18 am wrote:I keep thinking about that too. Everything is dumb. BUT we are free to write what we want in the US still and send it forth. Something must still work.
by brainpanhandler » Sun Jun 14, 2015 12:05 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 14, 2015 10:28 am wrote:
My dad told me "we have freedom of speech because speech doesn't fucking matter." I thought he was wrong right up until the past 5 years of my life. I don't necessarily think he is right, at this point, but I'm open to either interpretation.
by Searcher08 » Sun Jun 14, 2015 1:18 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Sun Jun 14, 2015 2:34 pm wrote:There is so much lynch-the-bankers rhetoric on RI it would impossible to enforce that.
As Jakell points, out, there's also a whole universe of second-order, quoted material that goes light years beyond that. We have investigated genocides and ideologies aplenty, and quoted a hundred thousand thinkers who are far beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. And that's all called "research."
My apologies to those of you who live under Harper, but I'm moderating this board from a country with dumb but very admirable and open laws about political speech. If you're honestly concerned that visiting RI might make you subject to prosecution, take steps.
Edit: I would like to emphasize that my core objection to this is not "ha, you're Canadian," but "the amount of work it would take to sanitize the content here amounts to a full-time job for the rest of my life."
The Crown Prosecution Service have this:
The phrase "substantial adverse effect on ... usual day-to-day activities" is not defined in section 4A and thus its construction will be a matter for the courts. However, the guidelines (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/about-us/c ... /018-2012/) issued by the Home Office suggest that evidence of a substantial adverse effect may include the following:
(a) the victim changing their routes to work, work patterns, or employment;
(b) the victim arranging for friends or family to pick up children from school (to avoid contact with the stalker);
(c) the victim putting in place additional security measures in their home;
(d) the victim moving home;
(e) physical or mental ill-health;
(f) the deterioration in the victim's performance at work due to stress;
(g) the victim stopping /or changing the way they socialise.
by American Dream » Wed Jun 17, 2015 10:03 pm
Why We Fight II: Anarchism vs. Fascism
People associated with class struggle anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the like, love to say that anarchism really is a specific iteration of worker and class politics with a libertarian, anti-oppression edge. They hate to answer with more poetic renditions of what anarchism is, if only to be dumped into the “lifestyle” camp with post-leftists and primitivists. The reality is that it is as much a mindset and set of values as it is a specific politic coming out of the split in the IWA between Marx and Bakunin. The anarchist idea is one that goes to the heart of authority, challenging its illegitimacy and all forms of social hierarchy and oppression. In this way anarchism is fundamentally opposed to all forms of social stratification and bigotry, looking not just at its independent and personal forms, but also the social systems that put prejudice into systemic practice. Not only are we against racism, but also against institutional white supremacy. Not just opposed to sexism, but looking to smash patriarchy. Abhorred by homophobia, but also looking to overthrow heterosexist hegemony. Anarchism is the core urge to throw off the shackles of control, to share resources and community in equality, and to get rid of our masters politically, spiritually, and socially. The key values then return us to the most direct, and unmediated forms of social organization based on direct democracy, direct action, mutual aid, and solidarity. These tools are today used as forms of resistance and perseverance, but only through struggle will we form the basic social structures of a post-revolutionary society.
It is in every feature we see anarchism as the mirror opposite of fascism, the direct negation of everything it stands for. In this way anarchism, in practice, is anti-fascism, hopefully to be realized in a post-revolutionary society as well as an improvement to our current world.
From Marx to Total Liberation
Traditionally, Marxism is usually associated as the primary force standing at odds with fascism. Both the far right and the conventional far left enjoy this narrative as it gives them both legitimacy. For Marxists, it helps them draw on their past to give ever greater meaning to their own political legacy. The same is true of fascists, who often use the spread of Bolshevism as a historical double back to justify the excesses of interwar European fascist states. Marxism existed, as a revolutionary force that took their assumed base, the working class, and subverted what the aristocracy and ruling class thought should be a perpetual underclass. One of fascism’s core ideals, as presented by Mussolini, is “class collaboration,” which essentially means that all current classes are necessary. For this to be the case then the working class must gladly serve their role, as must their overseers in the ruling class. Class warfare then pulls as the threads of the caste system, where by there is a clear social hierarchy and the peasants and workers are not seen as capable of ruling society. Communism was then a counter agent, often associated with Jews, and thought of as the metastasized cancer of Western Civilization. This worked really well with communism existing on the far left of the political spectrum and fascism on the far right to create antagonisms, but no political distinction is this simple.
The post-WWII fascist and leftist narratives both moved based orthodox Marxism in similar ways. Today, fascists vaguely blame what they call “cultural Marxism,” a term only they use to describe socially left aspects of culture. One of the core anti-Semitic myths is that the Frankfurt School, which produced culturally focused radicals like Theodore Adorno, was secretly both an organization for Jewish ethnic interests and were so successfully subversive that their ideas have now begun to dominate not just the left, but the subconscious of Western culture as a whole. The idea here is then that the ideas of the Frankfurt School were secretly cooked up by Jewish intellectuals to create decadence, perversion, and relativism in otherwise straight and upright white men, and they are doing this to protect Jews from anti-Semitism. If they can destroy the sovereignty of white civilization by undermining their conservative religious values and then debasing their racial hegemony with third-world immigration of people of color, they can then subvert the white population’s aversion to the Jews as a parasitic class. Neatly put: they create dangerous ideas to destroy white people so that they will be safe and on top. While this idea sounds so insane as to need little denouncement, its position as an Illuminati type conspiracy theory has given it repeated resurgence in the Internet message-board collective basement of the far right. Not only does it make outrageous claims that could never be proven and have no ability to be true, but it fundamentally misses any of the key concepts, historical trajectory, and antagonisms of the Frankfurt School. What is more important, it really has bypassed the key role that anarchism has made as both its adversary and its ideological polar opposite.
Over many of the historic, and more recent, clashes with fascism, anarchism has played an incredibly key role in its defeat. This comes in part because of the history of anarchist movements erupting during the same crisis that often breeds reactionary movements, but also because it has a unique interest in seeing fascism smashed.
Today many are pointing out that anarchism, though often vaguely practiced and understood in first-world countries, has become the leading form of left or post-left political ideology. As Andrej Grubacic and David Graeber so eloquently state in Anarchism, or the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-First Century:“It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty first century will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism. Everywhere from Eastern Europe to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves “anarchists”. There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy… Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun.” (1)
There have been scores of volumes as to why anarchism has both diversified and been popularized from the 1980s onward, all of which we could never do justice here, but we have to see that this anarchist spirit is what is driving the movements of today. From the anti-globalization protests to mobilizations against the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. From the massive Occupy movement to the uprisings of Black Lives Matter, the Marxist parties that once led America to the brink of revolution are almost completely irrelevant, and instead the anarchist spirit is spreading as the fundamental way that we can create a new world. The obvious reasons here is that the anarchist project is both always evolving and always headed to the root of the issue. It doesn’t just seek to just overthrow capitalism and the state, but all forms of hierarchy and oppression. This means that it is a constant ongoing process, and that it has the ability to evolve and change according to the personalities and cultures of those practicing. It is not steeped in rigidity like most determinism-infused Marxism, and its different strands, such as syndicalism, can act as complimentary strategic points rather than limiting ideological dogmas.
The other reality is that most people have already seen revolutionary Marxism, at least of the Leninist party variety, as an incredible failure. The most powerful “movement for liberation” became the most genocidal tyranny of the 20th century. It is this resulting beauracratic State Capitalist failure that almost destroyed the revolutionary left, and there are few who are willing to do Trotskyist backflips in logic to pretend that somehow it will be different next time. What we are left with is one revolutionary trajectory that is, though diversified, the only place we have to go to create a transformative alternative to the waves of reaction.
What Political Spectrum?
For any part of the anarchist vision to be made reality, from the local to the post-revolutionary, it requires a loss of fascism in equal measure. Every key element of anarchism sees fascism as its inverse, meaning that the goals can never exist simultaneously. While both the left-right paradigm and most criticisms of that paradigm are weak and not withstanding under scrutiny, one of the better of these would be the structure Nolan Chart, though we will need to redefine which corner each one has. We need to say upfront that this still does not accurately represent the role we see of anarchism in the political, but for discussion’s sake it helps to map out its relationship to other political tropes.
A more correct version of this chart might have Marxism and Liberalism in direct opposition while anarchism and fascism are in opposite corner as well. Anarchism is then seen as the mix of socialism and autonomy, which could also be interpreted purely as one of social freedom and social equality. By exact parallels, fascism is socially conservative and represents a strong state. The more apt description would be against equality and freedom or democracy. It would be more accurate to actually just put anarchism and fascisms at the very top and bottom corners, respectively, since they display the core extremes as represented here. The polarities would be extreme state communism on the far left, free-market minarchism on the far right, anarchism at the top and fascism at the bottom. This would then represent fascisms disavowal of free-market capitalism, but its respect for things like essential property rights and the right of private corporations over market sectors. From here you can go through and take specific ideological manifestations and place them accordingly, even though anarchism is ever changing and diverse enough to never fully be positioned on any political spectrum.
So, in this context, what is anarchism?
The simplest answer is a libertarian form of communism, but this really misses the core values at the center. Anarchism seeks to liberate us from oppressive systems of illegitimate authority and hierarchy, with the actors of this being the oppressed classes. In terms of economics, this means the working class taking the means of production in a form of stateless communism that is founded on the necessity of freedom and individual identity. It also means the confrontation of existing forms of social oppression, as well as the ongoing process of challenging new forms and subverting oppression whenever it comes up. The foundation then is that a free and healthy society is one that is fully socially and economically equal, where differences between people are no longer expressed through hierarchy, and an ongoing process of living lives with more direct control and less mediation is key. Anarchists believe that race, gender, and other identities as social constructs, as well as nation states that must be abolished in favor of internationalism.
In direct contrast, fascism and related ideologies is best expressed by the title of Tomislav Sunic’s book on the European New Right, ‘Against Democracy and Equality.’ They agree with radical traditionalist mystic Julius Evola when see stated that society is most healthy when stratified. They are against democracy, as they don’t see the masses as having the ability to rule. They are in favor of an upper controlling elite with aristocratic interests, as they believe that there is inherently a class best meant to rule. They believe in the pure rule of genetics over identity, where things like racial ethnicity as having a determining factor over internal qualities like temperament and intelligence. They believe in nationalism, where a set people have interests in each other rather than the rest of society. They are often also opposed to capitalism, but this is because they capitalism creates too much equality and takes the importance away from nation and race. They instead want to purposely re-enforce social stratification and separation instead of just allowing some measure of this to happen on its own, as is the neoliberal situation. They may or may not support totalitarian state measures, but they always support a form of social authoritarianism where a society has strict social mores set by elites whose interest is maintaining a social order.
The term fascism itself is rarely going to be used in these circles, as it has been permanently marred with its association with the Holocaust of the Third Reich. This new brand of the far right is also hardly historical re-enactors as they have modernized the ideas that birthed the interwar movements. The fascism of Italy, Germany, Romania, Austria, and Spain were all somewhat unique in structure, and there were hundreds of movements and ideologues that you never heard of because their version of these essential fascist ideas did not end up taking state power. Today the far right likes to separate itself from ‘fascism,’ which it sees as failed movements of the Second World War. Instead it has rebranded its ideas and modernized its goals and political programs, but the core ideas and values remain the same.
A great example of this rebranding has come from Counter Currents publisher Greg Johnson, who has fashioned himself a sort of “intellectual” of this far right brand. His publishing house, which is mainly made up of republishing tomes by people like Savitri Devi and Jonathan Bowden, has tried to establish a right-wing intellectual current similar to what they have in France. What he is calling the North American New Right, which is essentially just him publishing what he can after having to leave the Occidental Observer, is established on taking the core values of fascism away from its archaic political manifestations (2). As he laments in his key essay “New Right vs. Old Right,” he sees it as an important re-establishment of right-wing principles that only a fascist movement can.“The true Right, in both its Old and New versions, is founded on the rejection of human equality as a fact and as a norm. The true right embraces the idea that mankind is and ought to be unequal, i.e., differentiated. Men are different from women. Adults are different from children. The wise are different from the foolish, the smart from the stupid, the strong from the weak, the beautiful from the ugly. We are differentiated by race, history, language, religion, nation, tribe, and culture. These differences matter, and because they matter, all of life is governed by real hierarchies of fact and value, not by the chimera of equality. The true right rejects egalitarianism root and branch. The true right has three species: traditional society, the Old Right, and the New Right. Every traditional society known to man is inegalitarian. All forms of traditional society have been destroyed—or are in the process of being destroyed—by modern, egalitarian, mass society. For our purposes, the Old Right means Fascism, National Socialism, and other national-populist movements, which are the pre-eminent attempts to restore traditional hierarchical social forms within the context of modernity. Fascism and National Socialism were not merely reactionary, rear-guard resistances to modern egalitarianism by partisans of corrupt hierarchies. They represented a genuinely revolutionary impetus to restore vital, archaic, hierarchical values within the context of modern science, technology, and mass society. Our ideal is a hierarchical society free of exploitation and injustice because the sole justification of political inequality is the common good of the body politic, not the factional good of the ruling stratum. So how does the New Right differ from Fascism and National Socialism? This is a vital question, because of the intense stigmas attached to these movements since the Second World War. The North American New Right, like the European New Right, is founded on the rejection of Fascist and National Socialist party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide.” (2)
This sums up the breadth of the movements in general. The coloring of each of these subsets tends to take on many of the aesthetics from which it is dissenting. The Traditionalist Youth Network, White Student Union, and Youth for Western Civilization use the grassroots student-organizing model, and often look more like more confrontational brown-shirts. The National Policy Institute, American Renaissance, Radix Journal, Occidental Quarterly, and VDare, when it applies, often looks and sounds more like the paleoconservative splits from the Republican Party. Institute for Historical Review, Mankind Quarterly, Counter Currents, and many others put on the vein of academic intellectualism. All of these share key ideas and social visions, while they rarely use the term “fascist” to describe themselves.
In many ways, these far-right movements are an effort to create a coherent right wing that is in opposition to the fractured ideologies of the mainstream right. They’re assessment of the lack of ideological consistency and true opposition to the left’s values is correct, and they instead want to develop something that has an “entirely different starting point,” as Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute and Radix Journal likes to say. What you will notice is that there is often a similar estimation of contemporary politics between anarchists and those on the far right in as much as the far right is completely willing to accept their own racism sexism, and homophobia, and is completely willing to estimate the issues with capitalism, globalism, and contemporary party politics in ways that are real and meaningful. The difference is where they fall on these things, not in the way that they interpret them. Many of the accusations that they throw at the far left, like the desire to destroy white hegemony and the nation state, are entirely valid and correct. The difference is that the left sees them as a positive while the right sees them as apocalyptic.
You can look at a number of social forms and goals and assign a sort of positive preference from anarchists and direct opposition from fascists. Equality, pervasive democracy, multiculturalism, a sexually liberated and diverse society, and the destruction of gender roles, are all core ideological principles of the anarchist project, as well as direct fighting points for fascists to target. Anarchism, as the furthest political point away from fascism, actually takes the elements that fascism abhors and finds its political footing on the most extreme version of that. So, fascism openly opposes democracy because it violates their self-avowed elitism. Anarchists, on the other hand, support direct democracy, which intends to hand the democratic process even more directly to the people. The far right strongly opposes equality seeing that people are not made that way. Anarchism goes one further and opposes every single form of hierarchy, from political structures to social relations.
It is in this direct contrast that we find the fundamental point about the battle between the two polar opposites: to fight for anarchism is to be implicitly anti-fascist. Success in the revolutionary anarchist sense would be the negation of every fascist goal so successfully that you create the purest form of their opposition. You cannot cohabitate with the far right since their ideological principles would mean to undermine every single element you look for, whether it is in projects for survival in the current world or projects that are for revolutionary implementation.
The only way that anarchists can win is if fascists lose in every conceivable way.
Introduction to Civil War
The history of modern revolutions is often the history of ideological civil wars where different sides represent ideological oppositions. Competing political factions vie for control, and we see that this point of pressure can often force the more extreme polarities of the political spectrum to mark these different parties. Though this doesn’t break down into the clean “anarchist vs. fascist” dichotomy, it does tend to take on a separation between the left and the right based on values, even if the political ideas are not always so well defined.
If we look to the 1917 Russian Revolution we see a history where the Menshevik majority, the direct-action focused Narodniks, and the anarchist populations heavily infiltrated the left insurrection. These factions headed even more to the left as the Soviets headed towards October, and the “white” forces doubled down on the traditional hierarchies of the Czar. While the more conservative Bolshevik’s ended up dominating the other factions and eventually purging them from the early days of Soviet Russia, there was a clear ideological split that affected the populations. Many people in the peasantry and working class shifted dramatically to a reactionary pro-Czarist position, often times defending what little privilege they still had.
The example of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 is possibly the most telling example of this ideological civil war in the 20th Century. The coup in 1936 from General Francisco Franco, with the support of the nationalist Fallange party and financial backing from Germany and Italy, overthrew the newly formed republic. Engaging in the civil war for the republic took as a coalition with the Abraham Lincoln brigade being the notable army of volunteers, many from the United States. The CNT, which had been directly clashing with Fallange forces for several years prior, began collectivizing land and industries into what many call the most comprehensive Anarchist social revolution in history. With the support of Stalin back communist forces they took on the fascist insurgency, only to have the Soviet armies turn on them to sell them out to state forces. This eventually weakened the revolution and allowed for Franco’s victory, but it saw as the countries political divides became a sharp line for how Spain was to end up. Catalonia ended up as the marker of Anarchist revolutionary forces against the fascist armies coming from the south, supported by a broad coalition of ideological forces that had some differences yet remained in unity on their fundamental values. (3) This period does not just mark anarchism’s position in challenge to European fascism, but really its most profound modern growth in theory and practice. The Spanish Revolution defined anarchism until the New Left, and still overshadows every current that has come later. It is through anti-fascist struggle it was able to realize the most key parts of a community transformation.
In the modern context, the street battles that have marked anti-fascism have been marked by movements such as Anti-Fascist Action and Anti-Racist Action, as well as hundreds of groups taking on similar positions and strategies. The primary component here is “physical resistance,” which has been an important point in shutting down the kind of resurgent nationalism. The conflicts have raged in European countries most apparently, which has a longer history of organized fascist currents, but in the U.S. this often has come into clashes with the KKK, skinhead gangs, and now many of the intellectual and culturally “alternative” fascist groups. The foundation of these movements has been on anarchist participation, often with ties to anarchist cultural and art subcultures, but always drawing from an anarchist tradition towards direct action problem solving. While non-violence remains a trend inside anarchist circles, it is the more nuanced “anti-violence” position that sees self-defense and removing racist elements as a primary vessel to actually rid a community of violence in the macro sense.
No Ideology Beyond Ideology
The modern conception of radical politics has seen a lot of issues in recent years as fragmented ideologies that lack full political analysis have dominated many conversations. Many have actually made calls for peace between the radical right and left based on the fact that they share mutual interest in the abolition of our current state and economic system, and that both are considered enemy terrorists of the state in the post-9/11 security infrastructure. The majority of these calls are coming directly from the right itself, which has a vested interested in blurring the lines between their ideological differences. There has even been a strong push on the right to absorb many of the radical ideas of anarchists, which often times appear outside the current left-right spectrum because anarchists hold such a fundamental critique of all elements of the current socio-political order.
The two forms this tends to take are with so called National Anarchism and Anarcho-Capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalism is one that many have encountered for years, which was proposed by Murray Rothbard in the 1980s as a way of co-opting and subverting their enemies on the left. While they utilize much of the libertarian language we know from individualist anarchism, the New Left, and even some legitimate left sources, they instead focus on absolving any state protections against unfettered capitalism. This is essentially tyranny to the purest degree, maintaining the coercive elements of capitalism without any of the state concessions that organizers have fought for, such as labor and housing restrictions. Many on the American libertarian side have created narratives about how this deregulated capitalism would actually break up monopoly and create diversified wealth, but this is based on pseudoscientific understandings of free market capitalism. In general, they have close associations with paleoconservatives and others on the fringes of the right that consort with racialist factions.
The first of these two is one of the more bizarre cults of syncretic paleogenisis that has come in recent years. Essentially coined by former National Front organizer Troy Southgate, National Anarchism draws on many of the anti-capitalist notions of Third Positionism to essentially create a “tribalist” ideology. This calls for a form of “pan-Anarchism” where by small tribal communities based on affinity replace the current associated order. Instead of being federated in a standardized anarchist conception, these communities would have only minor interaction and trade and could provide their own criteria for membership. In the rhetoric of the National Anarchists you will find that race and ethnicity is the defining characteristic they work with, and there is a strong anti-Semitic and anti-Feminist strain running through all of it. Because of its strange use of left wing imagery and social structures, it has gone under the radar for many anti-fascists until recently. They also often times put themselves as being anti-fascist as well, but their ideological framework still holds the exact same values about hierarchy, tradition, race, gender, and authority that even the most state oriented fascists do. Concepts like “racial holy war” still permeate their literature, as does this notion about the purity of “natural divisions” between peoples. Just being anti-statist does not make you an anarchist or give enough to make them allies.
The anti-statism of anarchism comes in the fact that the state is coercive and institutionalized violence in support of the current classes, both economically and socially. It is designed as a method for stratifying society through the use of force and, as a social form, will always do this. Anarchists oppose the state because of their opposition to this illegitimate authority and hierarchy, but not just because it is a dominant institution. Anarchists do not seek to abolish the state because it penalizes white nationalists or because it regulates the banking industry. There is a fundamental value set that drives this anti-statism.
If there is to be a long-term vision of success for anarchism then it has to be implicitly anti-fascist because it represents the open advocacy of every single element of society that anarchists seek to abolish. As we fight for different intersecting elements in society we need to see where those threats are, both from the immediate system and from the organized forces of reaction that will be challenging these victories on some fundamental level. Every victory that that is struck directly against fascism is a victory for the anarchist project since it undermines the enemies of these goals since anarchist values cannot be fully successful with any organized fascist presence.
From the White Working Class
We also must understand that the same popular classes for revolution are recruited from in both the far right and left, and we need to understand the split in consciousness that takes place in the white working class. Noel Ignatiev, known for his seminal book How the Irish Became White, writes as a part of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation that anarchist struggle will also be paired on the flip side by a more militant fascist movement as the two are birthed out of the same forms of crisis.“Alongside class struggle, it is to be expected that militant white-supremacist movements with anti-capitalist slogans would grow among the poorest and most alienated sectors of white society. The fascists are the vanguard of the white race; however, the big problem right now is not the white vanguard, but the white mainstream. Any anti-fascist struggle that does not confront the state reinforces the institutions that provide the seedbed for fascism. Moreover, every time the fascists are able to depict their opponents as defenders of the existing system, or mere reformers, they gain support among those whites that believe that nothing less than a total change is worth fighting for. An anti-fascist counter-rally where people gather to hear speeches, chant slogans, and shake their fists in rage is a display of impotence, and the more people who attend, the more they reveal their futility. Fascism and white supremacy will only be defeated by a movement aimed at building a new world. It is not enough to declare this commitment abstractly, by waving the red or black flag; it must be expressed in the content and forms of the struggle itself. How to do that is no easy question. But it is the question of the hour.” (4)
What is implicit here is that the most successful anti-fascist movement is to have a successful anarchist movement that is based more in material goals and movements than ideological baggage. The best fighting is going to be done on the ground and by creating a real viable alternative to racialism.
For the Sake of the Radical
The implicit clash between fascism and anarchism is one of a myriad of reasons that organized anti-fascism is an important point of struggle. Fascists try to co-opt the idea of “radicalism” that the revolutionary left needs to develop a comprehensive revolutionary movement. Likewise, organized racists feed into violence against people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, gender presentation, and other identities, all of which is an important intersection of confrontation for anti-fascists. In general, anti-fascists also have an impetus to fight because of the potential for organized reactionaries to literally push society backwards. All of these together gives a reason to challenge their presence that is tangible and meaningful.
Anarchists need to fight to empower revolutionary political ideas and to keep the process of working class organizing moving forward. Anything that undermines this process should be seen as a barrier to success, and fascist reactionaries will also try to take their ideas to the working class to undermine solidarity and class cohesion. Fascism is real and will crop up in times of crisis and turmoil, the same period that sees anarchism return to the mouths of people looking for a different way forward. Let’s remind them that fascism has no future.
Footnotes
Graeber, David & Andrej Grubacic. “Anarchism, Or the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-first Century.” com, May 14th, 2009.
Johnson, Greg. “New Right vs. Old Right.” New Right vs. Old Right. San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013.
Resta. “The Spanish Anarchist lives for liberty, virtue and dignity.” Militant Anti-Fascism. Oakland: AK Press 2015. Pg 85-98.
Ignatiev, Noel. “To Advance the Class Struggle, Abolish the White Race.” A New World in Our Hearts: Eight Years of Writings from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. Oakland: AK Press 2003. Pg. 80.
by American Dream » Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:47 pm
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.
by American Dream » Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:06 pm
May 27, 1989 - Around 100 anti-fascists from AFA and Red Action amongst others, occupy the announced rally point at Marble Arch for a secret gig, aka ‘The Main Event’ [sic], “somewhere in London” organised by the neo-Nazi Blood and Honour group [protests had already forced the not-so-secret’ original venue at Camden Town Hall to cancel]. The anti-fascists spend all afternoon picking off the fash as they arrive in ones and two, groups and via coaches.
[photo: “A fascist gets taught a lesson at speakers corner, Hyde Park 27/5/1989” – ‘Beating the Fascists’]
by coffin_dodger » Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:34 pm
American Dream wrote:http://antifainternational.tumblr.com/post/120026236134/may-27-1989-around-100-anti-fascists-from-afa
May 27, 1989 - Around 100 anti-fascists from AFA and Red Action amongst others, occupy the announced rally point at Marble Arch for a secret gig, aka ‘The Main Event’ [sic], “somewhere in London” organised by the neo-Nazi Blood and Honour group [protests had already forced the not-so-secret’ original venue at Camden Town Hall to cancel]. The anti-fascists spend all afternoon picking off the fash as they arrive in ones and two, groups and via coaches.
[photo: “A fascist gets taught a lesson at speakers corner, Hyde Park 27/5/1989” – ‘Beating the Fascists’]
by jakell » Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:47 pm
by American Dream » Tue Aug 11, 2015 9:52 am
American Dream » Wed Jun 17, 2015 9:03 pm wrote: http://blackcatnotes.com/2015/06/12/why ... s-fascism/Why We Fight II: Anarchism vs. Fascism
People associated with class struggle anarchism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and the like, love to say that anarchism really is a specific iteration of worker and class politics with a libertarian, anti-oppression edge. They hate to answer with more poetic renditions of what anarchism is, if only to be dumped into the “lifestyle” camp with post-leftists and primitivists. The reality is that it is as much a mindset and set of values as it is a specific politic coming out of the split in the IWA between Marx and Bakunin. The anarchist idea is one that goes to the heart of authority, challenging its illegitimacy and all forms of social hierarchy and oppression. In this way anarchism is fundamentally opposed to all forms of social stratification and bigotry, looking not just at its independent and personal forms, but also the social systems that put prejudice into systemic practice. Not only are we against racism, but also against institutional white supremacy. Not just opposed to sexism, but looking to smash patriarchy. Abhorred by homophobia, but also looking to overthrow heterosexist hegemony. Anarchism is the core urge to throw off the shackles of control, to share resources and community in equality, and to get rid of our masters politically, spiritually, and socially. The key values then return us to the most direct, and unmediated forms of social organization based on direct democracy, direct action, mutual aid, and solidarity. These tools are today used as forms of resistance and perseverance, but only through struggle will we form the basic social structures of a post-revolutionary society.
It is in every feature we see anarchism as the mirror opposite of fascism, the direct negation of everything it stands for. In this way anarchism, in practice, is anti-fascism, hopefully to be realized in a post-revolutionary society as well as an improvement to our current world.
So, in this context, what is anarchism?
The simplest answer is a libertarian form of communism, but this really misses the core values at the center. Anarchism seeks to liberate us from oppressive systems of illegitimate authority and hierarchy, with the actors of this being the oppressed classes. In terms of economics, this means the working class taking the means of production in a form of stateless communism that is founded on the necessity of freedom and individual identity. It also means the confrontation of existing forms of social oppression, as well as the ongoing process of challenging new forms and subverting oppression whenever it comes up. The foundation then is that a free and healthy society is one that is fully socially and economically equal, where differences between people are no longer expressed through hierarchy, and an ongoing process of living lives with more direct control and less mediation is key. Anarchists believe that race, gender, and other identities as social constructs, as well as nation states that must be abolished in favor of internationalism.
In direct contrast, fascism and related ideologies is best expressed by the title of Tomislav Sunic’s book on the European New Right, ‘Against Democracy and Equality.’ They agree with radical traditionalist mystic Julius Evola when see stated that society is most healthy when stratified. They are against democracy, as they don’t see the masses as having the ability to rule. They are in favor of an upper controlling elite with aristocratic interests, as they believe that there is inherently a class best meant to rule. They believe in the pure rule of genetics over identity, where things like racial ethnicity as having a determining factor over internal qualities like temperament and intelligence. They believe in nationalism, where a set people have interests in each other rather than the rest of society. They are often also opposed to capitalism, but this is because they capitalism creates too much equality and takes the importance away from nation and race. They instead want to purposely re-enforce social stratification and separation instead of just allowing some measure of this to happen on its own, as is the neoliberal situation. They may or may not support totalitarian state measures, but they always support a form of social authoritarianism where a society has strict social mores set by elites whose interest is maintaining a social order.
The term fascism itself is rarely going to be used in these circles, as it has been permanently marred with its association with the Holocaust of the Third Reich. This new brand of the far right is also hardly historical re-enactors as they have modernized the ideas that birthed the interwar movements. The fascism of Italy, Germany, Romania, Austria, and Spain were all somewhat unique in structure, and there were hundreds of movements and ideologues that you never heard of because their version of these essential fascist ideas did not end up taking state power. Today the far right likes to separate itself from ‘fascism,’ which it sees as failed movements of the Second World War. Instead it has rebranded its ideas and modernized its goals and political programs, but the core ideas and values remain the same.
The example of the Spanish Revolution of 1936 is possibly the most telling example of this ideological civil war in the 20th Century. The coup in 1936 from General Francisco Franco, with the support of the nationalist Fallange party and financial backing from Germany and Italy, overthrew the newly formed republic. Engaging in the civil war for the republic took as a coalition with the Abraham Lincoln brigade being the notable army of volunteers, many from the United States. The CNT, which had been directly clashing with Fallange forces for several years prior, began collectivizing land and industries into what many call the most comprehensive Anarchist social revolution in history. With the support of Stalin back communist forces they took on the fascist insurgency, only to have the Soviet armies turn on them to sell them out to state forces. This eventually weakened the revolution and allowed for Franco’s victory, but it saw as the countries political divides became a sharp line for how Spain was to end up. Catalonia ended up as the marker of Anarchist revolutionary forces against the fascist armies coming from the south, supported by a broad coalition of ideological forces that had some differences yet remained in unity on their fundamental values. (3) This period does not just mark anarchism’s position in challenge to European fascism, but really its most profound modern growth in theory and practice. The Spanish Revolution defined anarchism until the New Left, and still overshadows every current that has come later. It is through anti-fascist struggle it was able to realize the most key parts of a community transformation.
by stickdog99 » Tue Aug 11, 2015 3:45 pm
by American Dream » Sun Oct 04, 2015 12:49 pm
WHY WE FIGHT III: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
OCTOBER 3, 2015
As we continue to feel the pain of Dylan Roof´s massacre, followed by other racially motivated shootings such as the Umqua Community College mass killing in Oregon, another story echoes out from the past.
As Mulugeta Seraw and a friend hopped out of their ride’s car, they didn’t notice the pack of three skinheads wearing tight Levi’s tucked into leather boots, laces tied from toe to ankle. The gang were members of East Side White Pride, affiliated with the larger White Aryan Resistance. Seraw was a student who had come to Portland, Oregon from Ethiopia, likely expecting Portland’s long reputation of diversity and liberal values. It has another history, one that is caked in the KKK revival in the Northern USA and would later be marked by white expansion and gentrification. When the three men saw him on the corner of SE 31st and Pine street, a flurry of racial slurs were thrown before they took a baseball bat and caved in his head. This was just one of the many violent attacks that marked the war on the streets of Portland in the 1980s and 90s, where Antifa and anti-racist skinheads went literally up in arms with Volksfront, Hammerskin Nation, and other white pride gangs. The blood was visible on the corner of that street for weeks, and some swear you can still see it at night.(1)
This story resonates as we are inundated with recent horrors like the Dylan Roof massacre of nine church-goers after reading the Council of Conservative Citizens website, or the two men who beat an older hispanic man in south Boston after listening to Donald Trump’s speech of racial arson.
The radical right can fundamentally be dropped into two camps. There are the above ground operations that focus on propagating “ideas” or political programs. These would be things like the “HBD” scientific racist organizations like American Renaissance, Mankind Quarterly, and the Pioneer Fund. There are the neo-fascist cultural and “radical traditionalist” organizations like Traditionalist Youth Network, Occidental Observer, and The National Policy Institute. There are vague political parties and organizations like the American Freedom Party and Council of Conservative Citizens, but the time that formations like these had any mainstream power has shortly passed. There are many other subdivisions of these, but in most of them you are likely not to hear the N-word or see many iron crosses or swastikas.
The second type of organization you can likely call insurrectionary, vanguardist, revolutionary, or simply angrily racist. These are organizations whose prime mission is a right-wing racialist revolution of some sorts, or the use of direct action in the re-establishment of formal white supremacy. There have been versions of this type of organization that has formed often over the years. The uniquely American flavor of this type of confrontational white supremacist organizing has its deep history in the Ku Klux Klan. Formed first in 1866, the clan used a fraternal structure that places former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as its Grand Wizard. From 1867 forward the KKK founded its purpose to challenge the entry of freed slaves into public life during Reconstruction. In this way they acted as a sort of guerilla army attempting to, if not reverse the course of the Civil War, re-establish the kind of white hegemony that they had during the time of slave patrols. Northern politicians would essentially go to war with the Klan as they murdered seven of the first black legislators during the 1867-68 congressional convention. The real resurgence of the Klan came in the 1920s when they brought back an extensive leadership using the Greek fraternal system, and rose to the ranks of about four million people. This meant that they were a real political force, leading in Senators and Governors, as well as many that had to seek Klan endorsement if they were to be elected. This political clout certainly influenced policy of the time, but the real power was to terrorize communities of color with mass lynching and tortures of black people all across the south. This violence became institutional as the Klan infiltrated all areas of law enforcement, and lynching were so wide spread and accepted that people literally sold photos of dead black men hanging from trees as popular postcards. The political power it had in the 1920s was never again replicated, though it came out again as a powerful force for violence during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. This helped to push forward the White Citizen’s Councils that would evolve into the Council of Conservative Citizens that we have today. (2)
While the Klan is all but gone in the 21st century, the other element of white resistance was the neo-Nazi skinhead movement. This was much more inspired from their British punk-rock dissidents of the Rock Against Communism flair. This created an essentially “working class” urban racialist movement that was drawn from the organizing traditions of anti-racist Trojan Skinheads. The skinhead culture, with networks like Volksfront and Hammerskin Nation dominating the U.S. scene, operate like street gangs with initiations and requirements of members to engage in racist violence. Their connections to other essentially “white gangs,” most notably different motorcycle gangs, has cemented their association with distributing drugs like Crystal Meth and Oxycontin, though on the more militant side there is also a straight edge tradition.
The main threat of organizations like this was never successful political organizing, though semi-skinhead organizations like the National Socialist Movement maintain delusions that they will someday have political influence through bridge topics like immigration and affirmative action. The real threat here was violence on an interpersonal level, often times resulting in random violence against targeted groups on the streets. This can appear as “random” violence, but is only random in as much as there is not an overarching political goal that can be seen with any coherence. Beyond the skinhead gangs and shrinking KKK locals, these will also include groups that do have an ideological framework and some sense of revolutionary organizing in the long-term, yet do not work with the more moderate kinds of above ground organizations. This includes many of the racialist Christian Identity churches that are tied to survivalist militias. The Church of Jesus Christ – Christian, otherwise known as Aryan Nations, was one of the largest and best known of these, residing in Hayden Lake, Idaho. There they had a large compound where they held sermons about how Jews were biologically descended from Satan, how people of color were literally the “Beasts of the field” and were animals that did not have souls, and that all white people are the people called Israelites in the Bible. They tied racial revolution to Biblical eschatology for a conspiracy-laden mix of Nazism and American conservative Christianity. After several members attacked a family driving by the compound, the church and its leader, Reverend Richard Butler, were sued and the land confiscated. Today Christian Identity still plays a major role in underground militia oriented circles, though Kinism, a slightly more mainstream appearing racist Christian interpretation, is stealing many converts.
The National Socialist Movement, National Alliance, and many other militant Nazi organizations have straddled the line between organizing and revolutionary violence for most of their life. While their stated goals are often just well organized propaganda, education, and political programs, their revolutionary rhetoric has seen more results with inspiring single individuals to commit homicidal acts than having any kind of political program of any value.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of individual strands that all attempt to claim some serious legitimacy on political or ideological grounds, but they broadly can fall into the two categories and hold much of the same potential for inspiring singular acts of extreme violence. The violence that is exhibited is markedly different between groups based principally on the location and specific revolutionary vision of the organizations, but all the violence takes the form of singular acts of terrorism. What this means is that the kind of violent incidents that is seen from militia groups like The Order and Posse Comitatus is much different than the street skinheads of Vinland.
When it comes to the kind of racist violence that Anti-Fascist Action has staked much of its history on was confronting the random violence of the urban skinhead gangs. Much of the focus on these groups is that they tended to be one of the few groups that engaged in public acts of violent direct action into the 1990s, while the Ku Klux Klan and other groups had really receded or were attempting to moderate their politics. Skinheads, on the other hand, were mirroring other punk rock subcultures and creating a counter culture that engaged in gang violence in large cities. They were also coming into direct contact with left-oriented organizations by having some subcultural crossover in music venues, as well as having a high presence in drug running and prison gang culture. These were not heavily ideological groups, and those that had a stronger sense of white nationalism evolved into the more moderate path that many of the Klan splinter groups did in the 1980s.
Instead of being a more overarching political program, the myth about skinheads was based in their seemingly random targeting of minorities in public locations for incidental acts of incredibly cruelty. This has led to a consistent set of attacks since the mid 1970s, where people of color are often targeted in otherwise white areas, or young queer folks are “hunted” in areas where they might frequent. This has the effect of generalized fear since the attacks seem to be randomly selected, do not have a distinct pattern, and can essentially happen “anytime and anywhere.”
People have always tried to see these gangs as part of a larger fascist movement or political vision, but this is difficult since there is not a lot of connection between them and the more mainstream intellectual movements and the violence itself would be hard to systematize. What occurs internally is to create a culture where violence is foundational to the community, and where prestige within the group is based on the history of engaging in violence. Since there is no outlet for this growing violent culture in anyway that can be a part of a larger political movement, as there would have been with the KKK in the 1920s, they instead wait in the wings for chances to let rage explode at random targets. Violence is the impetus for these groups, and recruiting often targets people who may have a history of violence and disaffection already, taking on an almost “cult like” structure of taking over a new recruit’s world. This violence is stoked so effectively internally that it doesn’t even require some type of antagonism from the left, as would happen at some kind of political protest clash. Instead, right from the start recruits are being emotionally prepared to engage in some type of violence as a way of securing a place in the social order that has chosen them.
As said earlier, the image that AFA and ARA organizers have of racist violence often comes from northern skinhead gangs because those are the street clashes that are common, the risk of larger incidents of violence are actually coming out of the woods instead of the alleys. The militia movement, though often associated with the far right, is not always considered a racialized group. While much of the rhetoric is made up of racial “dog whistle” language and vague discussions of “socialism” or “the federal government,”, a large contingent of racial revolutionaries mix with these groups and have their own agenda. Over the course of the 1980s we have seen massive trends towards violence, some of it on an almost unbelievable scale. The Order, active through 1983 and 1984, took credit for the murder of Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg as well as bank robberies totaling over $3.6 million. They were berthed out of groups like the Aryan Nations and National Alliance, which they kept in close contact with. The most famous of these men was David Lane, who went on to coin the Wotanist religion, which is essentially a hyper-racist version of folkish Asatru. He is best known for coining what white nationalists refer to at the “14 Words,” which says, “We must secure the existence of our people and the future for White Children.” The Order maintained a close relationship with Frazier Glenn Miller of the White Patriot Party. He went on to shoot several congregants at the Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom retirement center. He killed several here in a moment of mass murder, several of which turned out not to be Jewish. Similarly, Aryan Nations member Buford O. Furrow, Jr. shot and killed several children at the Jewish Community Center in L.A., as well as murdering a Filipino postal worker. All of these different members discussed the need to engage in revolution against the Zionist Occupation Government, in which subversive Jews use “mud races” to destroy the purity of the white race.
The most dramatic example of these is obviously the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people while injuring an additional 680 others. A huge number of these were children since the Federal Building that was attacked had a childcare center in it. This was carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols driven by anti-Federal ideas that were heavily racialized. McVeigh was even found to have pages from the Turner Diaries in his car. The book, which is something of a Bible from the racist militia movement, is a novel written by National Alliance founder William Pierce that describes an incredibly violent race war where blacks and Jews are exterminated at will. Their connections to the fringes of these movements were clear, yet what they actually intended to result from their actions were not. In many of these cases, the idea is for the violence to trigger the subliminal racism of middle America to rise up against their “subversive Jewish masters.”
These kinds of gun-based attacks have largely come out of the more militant groups dealing both with racialized ideologies and also having connections to broader militia groups, conspiracy theory organizations, and the new Sovereign Citizens movement. On the west coast the Posse Comitatus had been on the vanguard of this racist militia milieu for years, and more recently groups like the Northwest Front may be taking up that mantle. It would be nice to write these attacks up to a few disturbed people, and, in a lot of ways, you can. The organizations that do still exist that pushed these people into their moments of extreme violence often times denounce the actions, or passively support them. What we do see is that organizations like these use people with questionable social standing and emotional stability to commit the most violent acts against people of color, queer folks, Muslims, immigrants, and anyone else they have decided to hate that week.
What is important to also consider when thinking about these types of groups is that their lip service, and even attacks, against the government are not what is really at issue. The state is only a subject of attack because of its relationship to communities of color, Jews, and others. The real violence here is against random minority community members and, in the case of bomb attacks, low-level government workers. Their threat is still, no matter what they say they target, against individuals in our communities and not lofty government or corporate actors.
The acts of mass murder themselves have often taken on the “blaze of glory” format where the act itself is not always hidden very well, and the actor tends to see this as the culminating act of their life. This again has led many in the media and state agencies to list these people as just being emotionally disturbed, and this is a narrative that many of the larger revolutionary racist organizations have supported. Instead, it actually comes at the direct result of much of the organizing rhetoric that happens internal to these organizations.
Two primary organizing documents have led to help create the space for these acts of mass killings. The first is “leaderless resistance,” which is the name of an essay written by white nationalist Col. Ulius Louis Amoss in 1962. The notion came from the idea that the top-down “pyramid structure” used by white vanguard organizations were easy to be infiltrated and instead advocated a “phantom cell” model that lacks any kind of centralized control. Many would actually see that this is similar to many “affinity group” models used in insurrectionary left-anarchist organizing, but while there are connections in the use of anti-organizational modes, the goals are radically different. As Simson Garfinkel writes in the journal First Monday, the goals of leaderless resistance in this context is in interpersonal violence.
Under many circumstances, the “resistance” advocated by Beam could easily devolve into random acts of anarchistic violence without any formal political objective. Indeed, the effects of Leaderless Resistance can easily be dismissed as the work of “wannabe terrorists”, petty criminals engaging in copycat crimes, and angry loners participating in “sympathy attacks.” That is, it could easily devolve into traditional forms of “resistance” or “cultural resistance” employed by the poor or powerless to impede or subvert a more powerful foe. The violence of Leaderless Resistance is different from what sociologists often refer to as “cultural resistance.” While it is uncoordinated, Leaderless Resistance supports a common political goal: it is violence with an agenda. Typically, this agenda is set by political tracts or other documents that set forth objectives, demands, and classes of particular targets. Agenda-setting is also performed by specific individuals who take part in terrorist activities: when one Earth Liberation Front member attacks a dealership for sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that opens another “front” in the “battle”, and gives others the idea and motivation of attacking SUV dealerships as well. (3)
He goes on to note that there actually is a kind of de facto leadership in this format in that there tends to be public figures who advocate these methodologies. These end up existing as leadership, and the constant media feedback loop creates a sense of validation in the actions.
The second concept that was important to this is that of the “lone wolf” type action. This concept was heavily popularized by people like Tom Metzger, whose group White Aryan Resistance was a major driving force in supporting neo-Nazi skinhead formations in the U.S. He saw the potential of these groups as the KKK went into decline, seeing them as vanguardist “brown shirts.” Metzger’s concept of the lonewolf is again a form of leaderless resistance, except specifically focused on assassination-ready targets. As he says in his famous essay “Laws for the Lone Wolf,” “anyone is capable of being a Lone Wolf.”
Always start off small. Many small victories are better than one huge blunder (which may be the end of your career as a Lone Wolf). Every little bit counts in a resistance. Knowledge is power. Learn from your mistakes as well as the mistakes of others. Never rush into anything, time and planning are keys to success. Never attempt anything beyond your own abilities, failure could lead to disaster. The less any outsider knows, the safer and more successful you will be. Keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Never truly admit to anything…I have never said their will never be a time when all small cells and lonewolves may evolve into a highly structure but ruthlessly militant organization with steel hard leaders. That time is not now and will not be for the foreseeable future. No present leader including myself will be leading that phase. We are only to prepare the way. Hopefully what we say and do now will make future victory possible. Remember, those who have come before you are counting on you, those who will come after you are depending on you. Think white, act White, be White! (4)
While Metzger tries to be vague, he is discussing the murder of high-level targets. This could be politicians that he sees as being a part of ZOG, or this could just be people in interracial relationships, anti-fascist and left-wing organizers, and people organizing the protections of LGBTQ people. This methodology has been a popular idea taken up in various KKK and neo-Nazi factions, the militia movement, and in some of the more violent racialist ideology, like the vile Creativity Movement. You can see this resulting in incidents like the recent targeting of the Sikh Temple members, the killing of the security guard at the Smithsonian Holocaust Museum, and the various Jewish Temple shootings.
Metzger’s ideas often come under a free-speech caveat, and it would be unwise to head into a liberal “anti-hate speech” line of organizing as this would end up being counter-productive. But his words do have meaning.
After all three skinheads indicted for Mulugeta Seraw’s murder, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center thought that the case needed to go further than just those with literal blood on their hands. The SPLC is known for doing its research, education, and trainings around hate groups, as well as having different court cases and lawsuits targeting these organizations and individuals. Dees wanted to target one of the overarching organizations and individuals that had been pushing these neo-Nazi skinheads into acts of individual violence. Tom Metzger and WAR became the obvious culprits, and after Dees found a letter that John Metzger, Tom’s son, had told the skinhead who committed to murder to show his town how this “Aryan Youth Movement worked.” Dees won a $7 million lawsuit against Tom Metzger, functionally bankrupting him and his organization. Metzger’s ideas have been central to the functioning of these bouts of skinhead violence, and this court case put him up for it. But he is still out there, legally allowed to keep publishing and the skinheads who continue to read his diatribes continue to stay inspired.
The question as to why violence seems inevitable from these organizations brings up a lot of complicated answers. The vanguard and revolutionary fascists groups do not have the political clout to ever engage in an actual military insurrection against the government. The fear of this type of action is much more theoretical and more based around the more organized above-ground groups since they have the potential to create a radical undercurrent that could be militant come periods of mass collapse and crisis. The current militia and skinhead groups, however, will not have enough pull in the contemporary world to actually mobilize against the state in any meaningful way. Even on their small scale, antifascist organizations, both liberal and radical, successfully shut down their growth and any resources they get their mitts on the second they do. At the same time, their rhetoric, often tied to movements so roundly reviled at this point, such as Nazi Germany, does not have enough palatability to ever be a dangerous political movement.
While they do not have the ability to put a person in congress, or even put enough people successfully in fatigues, they do tend to maintain the most radical elements in the insurrectionary racist ranks. These organizations attract and groom those prone to violence. While the people often engaging in the violence may be walking into the actions themselves with a mix both of ideology and interpersonal issues, there is still a political impetus that drives these organizations to groom people towards violence. It is actually this dynamic that reminds us of many debates on the left circles of insurrectionary anarchism, where by militant actions that may or may not be considered violent are often used to “break the spell” of the current order and inspire further action. This is the classic “propaganda of the deed” mentality that led to the assassinations of presidents and bombings of law enforcement strongholds. It is essentially this notion that actually drives many of these violent acts, the idea being that this will break the “spell of multiculturalism” and drive people to engage in RaHoWa (Racial Holy War).
The very nature of these organizations are in their dissent from the largest fascist milieu, and that point is usually on the basis of the necessity of violence. The larger organizations have differing opinions on whether or not to engage in the political system. Many still advocate running candidates in local elections, both inside open racialist parties like the American Freedom Party or through closely aligned political formations like the Tea Party or the Constitution Party. Others instead want to create a cultural and social milieu in challenge to the system, but is not advocating open insurrection. We see this in the Radix, Alternative Right, H.L. Menken Club crowd, where many actually do advocate revolutionary politics but would never openly associate with violent direct action. Groups like Aryan Nations exists, to a large part, because they are willing to acknowledge the need for violence in the here and now. It is what gives these organizations a modicum of individuality and a purpose to exist.
Because violence is at the heart of their reason to exist, it is inevitable that these formations will lead to violence. As mentioned before, since there is no chance at revolutionary militarism, this takes the form of random acts of violence towards target communities.
Outside of the existing organizations, there is one area where vanguardist fascists have made their way into that has seen a notable rise in violence. The movement against racist police violence has been given a steroid injection with Black Lives Matter rising out of Ferguson, Brooklyn, and Baltimore. It is here that the institutionalized biases lead police to use their positions as defenders of capital to lord over communities of color, engaging in lethal violence at inordinate rates against people of color. This is implicit to a racist society where capitalism and the state rely on racial inequality, and this is baked into the social order that gives police their queues as to who they see as being threatening.
In the now widely publicized FBI report of 2006 titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” gives us a sense of where much of the effort for state subversion could be for organized racists. Even the state itself acknowledges that its role as the monopolistic holder over the right to violence could allow fascists to use it to further wield violence.
White supremacist presence among law enforcement personnel is a concern due to the access they may possess to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence. (5)
The limitations of this report are obvious in the fact that the main threat they see is that those who would like to engage in the sort of “apocalyptic violence” may have access to otherwise “restricted” government officials. What they fail to address is the actual threat that racists who see people of color as subhuman will have access to them as subjects of lethal force.
Much of this draws from the obvious rise in racial extremism between 2008 and 2014, which also marked the increase for the more mainstream versions of these groups like the Tea Party. The reasons for this are obvious as Barack Obama is a bridge-too-far for many of them, but in general the changing demographics of the country is baiting those that simply cannot take the idea of a multi-ethnic society. Many of these organizations target law enforcement because they would like to personally aid in shifting towards a militarized pro-white avenue within policing, where they really do see people of color as violent threats to white society. Policing adds a lethal dimension to the existing inequality of a society, and as the vanguards of white privilege these organizations want to help further make the police force a violent protector of white hegemony. On the more interpersonal level, the petty power that many low-level police get mirrors the kind of white privilege that white nationalists and reactionaries desperately want to hold onto at the cost of the working class unity that could afford them a better position in the world. The same situation has proven true in many of the anti-Islamic threads in the military or, more appropriately, in the private military complex with companies like Blackwater. Here a racist ideological thread helps to aid in the career choice, where protecting the U.S. from “dangerous Muslims and foreigners” may seem like a morally positive choice.
The reality of this situation can only be heightened by its seeming impossibility. With the beauracratic state that essentially weeds out dissenting opinions through Human Resource apparatus, you would think that these kind of racial revolutionaries would be barred from employment. Then we see the high number of organized racists heading into the police force, or radicalizing within the police force due to the type of racialized policing methods that can warp their perception of the communities of color they engage with. We see in countries like Greece where Golden Dawn may only get a small percentage of votes from the general electorate, but have over fifty percent support from the Police. And we need to remember what kind of threat this actually holds even beyond the fact that we can expect for more racist violence from the police. In periods of revolutionary upheaval, the police can easily align themselves with reactionary direct action parties and embody the brown-shirt role they already socially hold.
One of the primary elements that anti-fascists have always confronted is that the dissemination of racist ideas will continue to increase racist violence, even if much racist violence on a daily basis are happening outside of the organized racist movement. This increase is not only due to the production of material from the revolutionary groups, but the intellectual organizing-focused fascist organizations play just as much into producing the material that eventually pushes “lone wolves” over the edge. As pointed out in Why We Fight I, the primary threat in terms of organizing is over the fate of radicalism, but there is also an intensification effect that these groups have over the violent wing of their movement. They continue to stoke racial hatred, the need for “revolution,” and other ideas that lead to conscious acts of protecting white supremacy.
by American Dream » Tue Oct 06, 2015 3:29 pm
Anti-Imperialism 2.0: Selective Sympathies, Dubious Friends
October 6, 2015
by Charles Davis
The new imperialism is caring a bit too much about the suffering of people who are being brutalized by a regime which is not currently an ally of the United States – and the new anti-imperialism is not giving a damn at all, solidarity that extends beyond the border permissible only if the drawing of attention to their plight could not possibly be used as ammunition by the “humanitarian” militarists of the American empire. The world, in this view, is divided into but two camps: those with America and those against it, with the good anti-imperialist’s outrage dialed up if the atrocity can be linked to the United States, as well it should be, but dialed down to total silence if it’s not.
This is, of course, the “anti-imperialism” of the reactionary, in more than one sense: How a person of the left responds to a pile of dead women and children is in effect dictated by how the U.S. government itself responds, the advocate of the poor and forgotten consigning foreigners to their fate – “not our problem, pal,” as one popular liberal congressman essentially put it on cable TV – if their interests have the misfortune of being perceived as aligned with America’s, the left’s commitment to internationalism abandoned for an inverted form of muddled nationalism that sees U.S. imperialism as not just one factor to consider in a complex world, but the only factor relevant in how we in the imperial core should view what happens on the rest of the globe. And if your cause is sullied by the perception it’s America’s cause too? The leftist sounds just like that liberal who sounds like Pat Buchanan: Sorry, pal, if you wanted our solidarity you should have been born somewhere that better lends itself to a black-and-white anti-imperial critique.
If “America” is reduced to the U.S. government and “help” for those suffering limited to a war in which the civilian to be saved invariably becomes the collateral damage to be denied, then surely the plight of non-Americans in unaligned states is not, or at least should not be, “our problem.” Libya and Iraq both illustrate that no matter how bad things are, there’s a way to make them worse. The problem is: If all those opposed to war can offer is a shrug and a lecture on how things were even worse in Vietnam, it should come as no surprise when good people – not to be confused with politicians – who want to help those they see suffering are tempted by the false but ready-packaged solutions on offer from the imperialists. As Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes in his book, The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War, part of the reason imperialists of the far-right and liberal variety were able to claim the mantle of humanitarianism was the fact that tragedies in places like Rwanda appeared to be the product of non-intervention. “Their motives might have been insincere,” Ahmad writes of the “humanitarian” interventionists who exploited that genocide to sell future wars, “but their position had the merit of not appearing indifferent.”
The vulgar reductionism that passes in some quarters for anti-imperialism (but looks a lot like simple abandonment of people deemed impure by those in imperialist countries), which sees every struggle as reducible to “aligned with America or not,” with no particular thought given to the fact that one country is not exactly the same as another, is what’s fashionable now that radical analysis is expressed in 140 characters or less. It’s a gift to imperialists – at least they care – while an insult to those whose existence the Western left finds it convenient to erase, the better to tar those left to the mercies of a foreign regime as undeserving of a second’s sympathy.
“My impression,” said Syrian leftist Yassin Al Haj Saleh in a recent interview, “is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate.” Perceiving the U.S. has intent on regime change, many on the left have hyped the jihadist threat posed by the opposition to the Assad regime, downplaying the many more people killed by the secular, beardless dictator or outright dismissing their deaths as propaganda (or just the unfortunate consequence of fighting a war on terror). “Do victims have different values based on who their murderers are?” asked Saleh, imprisoned by the regime for 16 years before taking part in the 2011 uprising. “Why, as the regime is bombing many regions in the country every day, killing dozens of people every day, are the leftists in the West as silent as the rightists?”
The problem with solidarity as some see it is that Syrians have the misfortune of being in Syria, not, say, Saudi Arabia or Israel. That being the case, appearing to support their struggle, or even acknowledging their suffering, doesn’t lend itself to attacking U.S. imperialism; in this view, it only serves the interests of imperialism, of which there is only one variety: American, which manifests its imperialism in Syria by providing some money and arms to some of Syria’s rebels, that some Free Syrian Army fighters received $50 to $100 a month making them money-driven “mercenaries” or “Contras” while thousands of Afghans reportedly paid $500 a month by Iran to serve as another proxy force in Syria – like the actual Contras of Nicaragua, who fought to defeat a popular revolution and restore an unpopular, reactionary regime – are simply ignored in analyses that purport to analyze foreign intervention in the conflict. Meanwhile, that Russia, another imperial power, has provided much more to the regime they are fighting – billions of dollars in fighter jets and cruise missiles and armored vehicles – is of no real concern, or at least not to be condemned, under the thinking that the actions of one’s own government shouldn’t just be one’s priority, but one’s singular focus.
Because it’s Russia and other foreign powers backing the lead slaughter in Syria, though, the crimes that would be condemned were they in Gaza are met with a yawn if they’re in Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp outside Damascus that has been subjected to a total, starvation-inducing. A February 2015 report from the United Nations’ Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, noting that Syria’s uprising turned violent when the Assad regime responded to protests with bullets, observes that the government has used this tactic – “preventing the flow of food, medical supplies, and sometimes water and electricity” – in towns across the country that are held by the armed opposition. “Infants have died as a result of the Government’s ‘surrender or starve’ siege strategy,” the report notes. In addition, the regime has used “cluster munitions, thermobaric bombs and missiles” against “civilian objectives, such as schools and hospitals,” as well as crude and indiscriminate barrel bombs filled with chlorine gas, causing “thousands of civilian casualties.”
by American Dream » Wed Oct 07, 2015 8:08 pm
Richard Seymour on John Wight
(From Facebook)
John Wight
Christopher Hitchens
An unabashed mobilisation of ancient colonial binaries, with Russian imperialism cast as the guardian of secular, modern, liberal civilization against a barbarian ISIS. Its author has stated the upshot of this perspective quite explicitly: “kill them all”. Or, to put it another way, exterminate the brutes.
One is reminded of peak Hitchens, and of the traditions of imperialist apologia that he more or less deliberately evoked. And one is impressed by how deep this goes in parts of the left. Of course, Russian imperialism is not defending secular liberalism; that’s not how imperialism works. And its targets are demonstrably much broader than ISIS. Of course, the Assad dictatorship is much more steeped in blood than ISIS at this point.
The colonial unconscious, even if it has no history, should be placed in historical context. In the aftermath of the Great Indian Rebellion in 1857, in which the British press reported (usually invented and embellished) atrocities on the part of the rebels, the response of British moralists was to blame “native fanatics”. Charles Dickens wrote that he would like to address the rebels with this threat: “it is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with abominable atrocities’.”
When the British bombed Egypt in 1882, in response to anti-British riots, Gladstone argued that they at least ensured that “the fanaticism of the East” would not be able to kill Europeans “with impunity”. The same trope of native “fanaticism” was used to justify the war against the Mahdist insurgents in Sudan. And again in Iraq during the British Mandate, when Churchill called for the gassing of “uncivilized tribes”.
One could go on, and on. Of course, ISIS does not stand in some sort of relationship of succession to anticolonial movements. The so-called ‘Islamic State’ is, among other things, a pathology of the imperialist system, its symptom. However, it is simply not as accomplished at killing as the Assad dictatorship, and its imperialist backer. The logic of such displacements, in which ISIS embodies all of the intolerable excesses, the violence, irrationality and dysfunctionality of the Assad regime and the imperialist system into which it is integrated, is not difficult to discern. This simple gesture of moral-splitting and projection, is a constant feature of imperialist ideology. It allows one to side with the most relentless torturers, bombers and military despots. It allows one to call for more murder, and soon, sooner, soonest. It allows one to externalise evil, to say “kill them all”, with full confidence that the other side has a monopoly on barbarism.
Above all, by refusing to acknowledge a genuine Syrian opposition, by denying agency to anyone but ‘head-chopping fanatics’ and the dictatorship and its backers, it denies that there could be any rational, socially grounded reasons to wage a military struggle against the regime. The unconscious fantasy at stake here is that the regime has a matchless, unchallengeable right to rule; and the right to any means in its suppression of opposition.
by Searcher08 » Wed Oct 07, 2015 8:44 pm
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