False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

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False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 10, 2015 11:01 am

False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

by Bromma

As popular resistance to globalization and Western imperialism strengthens around the globe, something disastrous is happening: Leadership of the opposition is swinging steadily from the Left to the radical Right.

Right-wing forces around the world are gearing up to fight against capitalism’s new world order. Every day on the streets of Baghdad, of Mosul, of Tikrit, of Fallujah, of Samarra, of Basra, there is living, dying proof that rightists are in the vanguard of the fight against the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq. It is the same in Afghanistan. Indeed, as Western capital struggles to penetrate and control the so-called Islamic world, clerical fascist and other hard-core reactionary trends have spearheaded opposition in country after country. This right wing “anti-imperialism” isn’t confined to the Moslem-inhabited countries, either. Militant rebellious political movements on the Right are gathering strength everywhere, including North America. Often these trends are more radical, better rooted in popular culture and better armed than the current Left.

One would think that the Left would be galvanized by this phenomenon of right-wing “anti-imperialism”; would be bending every effort to understand it and combat its poisonous influence. In fact, the Left, with few exceptions, is doing its best to ignore it.

It’s not like we haven’t been warned. The catastrophe in Iraq is hardly the first time that the Left has witnessed powerful right-wing influence over anti-imperialist movements.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Left anti-imperialists fighting the Shah of Iran and his U.S. sponsors embraced a united front with radical right-wing Islamist fundamentalists. Most Iranian leftists (and their Western supporters) were convinced that anti-imperialist popular sentiment would “naturally” benefit the Left; they were sure that patriarchal fundamentalism would be quickly isolated and out-maneuvered after the revolution.

So when Iranian women struggled for their human rights, leftists criticized them for being “divisive.” It was alleged that women’s demands would weaken the anti-imperialist united front against America and its agents. Azar Majedi, an Iranian activist, recalls:

Women who had never before worn a Hejab [the Islamic head cover for women], put it on voluntarily for the sake of ‘society and revolution’….One common slogan in the demonstrations [was], ‘Sister, your Hejab is more potent than our guns.’

The sacrifice of women’s rights in order to appease the fundamentalists played a major role the violent decimation of the Iranian Left.

And again, in the 1980s, when Afghans were struggling to expel the Soviet invaders, many leftists around the world downplayed the difference between freedom fighters and right-wing fundamentalist criminals. Most of the Left (Soviet apologists excepted, of course) heartily endorsed any and all “popular resistance” to the Soviet imperialists, turning a blind eye to the actual program and practice of the rising Islamist reactionary groups. Afghan women’s criticisms of the fascist mujihedeen fell on deaf ears. After all, the jihadis were fighting for “national liberation”—that seemed, within the dominant Left paradigm, to trump everything.

Meanwhile, Afghan women’s organizations, and the secular resistance generally, were viciously attacked from two sides: the Soviets and the Islamist hard Right. It was the radical Right which ended up dominating that “anti-imperialist” war in Afghanistan. Today they dominate the armed resistance to U.S. intervention. The result is a shattered nation, endlessly brutalized within shifting combinations of imperialist genocide and clerical fascist terror.

Years after the Soviet defeat, some of the Western Left still clung to bizarre illusions about the political potential of the reactionary mujehedin. An Afghan revolutionary complained to the Journal of the Centre for Women and Socialism in 2001:

When Ahmad Shah Masood [the charismatic military leader of the Northern Alliance] was visiting France we heard that even ‘left’ organisations have supported him. A journal of [the] communist party of Italy had pictured him as the unique leader of Afghanistan and had suggested that Osama Bin laden and other terrorists should instead of blowing trade centres, use their ability to lead a revolution against ‘America’s Imperialism’ …Such organisations insist that they are leading the movements for freedom and justice. These kinds of attitudes make other left organisations unreal…in the eyes of people.

And now, there is the war in Iraq. Most of the Left was wildly euphoric about the early resistance in Iraq and the outpouring of mass global anti-war sentiment. Triumphal statements about the emergence of a new movement for social justice were the common currency of left-wing discourse. Larry Wing of “War Times” exulted that, “Most important of all, and underlying all the other developments, is the emergence of a new superpower: the world’s people. As one we rose up on Feb. 15 to smite the empire. Antiwar sentiment is so great in most countries that even most reactionary leaders dare not cross us.” Tom Hayden, not to be outdone, proclaimed, “There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s.” “A global anti-war movement unlike anything that has existed for three decades — that is, since the close of the Vietnam War,” trumpeted International A.N.S.W.E.R. According to the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, “The issue of the war and Bush military policy is beginning to coalesce an incredibly wide range of social forces: anti-globalization, anti-capitalists, labor, national movements, students, greens, liberals, anarchists, etc., etc. This movement is beginning to reflect, in embryonic form, the coalition of social forces that can ultimately transform society.”

Yes, but transform it in what direction?

Can it really be that leftists didn’t notice the actual politics of the forces leading the armed struggle against the Western imperialists in Iraq? Has the Left somehow missed the virulent global opposition to the Iraq war that comes from the Right? Can it be unaware that the “incredibly wide range of social forces” opposing the Bush and Blair regimes’ war includes millions of right-wing political Islamists, Baath Party torturers, reactionary Japanese nationalists, Hindu fascists, dozens of right-wing dictators, former heads of the CIA and NSA, the Pope, capitalists in every country, conservative Republicans, antisemitic Russian nationalists, Pat Buchanan, the hard right British National Party, generals and admirals, David Duke, and most neo-nazi organizations worldwide?

For some time after the anglo-american invasion, it was difficult to find mention—let alone serious analysis—of the role of right-wing religious fundamentalism, antisemitism, fascism and reactionary populism among the global forces opposing the invasion and occupation. In fact, the Left usually spoke and acted as if there were one big progressive anti-intervention coalition on the rise. There seemed to be an assumption that the Left was the natural vanguard of these forces. This assumption was—is—as false as it is dangerous.

With the passage of time and events in Iraq, this delusional attitude has become less and less rational. But that hasn’t provoked any self-criticism. Most of the Left still tries to downplay or evade the whole uncomfortable issue of right-wing anti-imperialism, hoping it will go away by itself. In fact some leftists have adopted an even more reprehensible course: They have decided to participate in an open alliance with the fundamentalists. These “super” anti-imperialists demand “unconditional support” for the “resistance,” and consider anyone uncomfortable with this formula to be liberal and chauvinist.

It’s as if the tragedies in Iran and Afghanistan had never happened. Once again, the Left is pushing women’s freedom to the sidelines, supposedly in the name of anti-imperialism. Once again, “politics” is being twisted into a struggle between imperialist men and “anti-imperialist” men—even if those “anti-imperialist” men enslave women.

It’s now glaringly obvious that right-wing Islamist fundamentalism has become a major actor in world politics; that fact puts the pathological denial among leftists into stark relief. But we should be clear that Islamist radicalism is only one version of the right-wing “anti-imperialism” in motion today. It might be most accurate to say that right-wing Islamist insurgency is the leading edge of a worldwide phenomenon. Right wing populism, with fascist elements contending for vanguard leadership, is coming to life in country after country. Including much closer to home than Iraq.

Militant right-wing “anti imperialism” is growing in the U.S. White supremacists and fascists like Louis Beam, Matt Hale and Tom Metzger hate the neo-cons and Bush; they despise globalization’s New World Order. Therefore they study Left-led movements, coopt their language and even try to attract the activists working within them. They reason that, as Beam writes, “The New American Patriot will be neither left nor right, just a freeman fighting for liberty…The new politics of America is liberty from the NWO [New World Order] Police State and nothing more.”

Many neo-fascists and Christian fundamentalists loudly “support” Palestinian struggle against Israel, and Left activists in the solidarity movement find that they are forced to weed antisemites out of web forums and events. Organizers against the Patriot Acts are consciously building a coalition between the Left and Right. “Third Position” neo-fascists in Europe and North America actively petition Leftists and progressives to a join in a common platform opposing U.S. interventionism and hegemony in the world. Today, just as in Mussolini and Hitler’s time, many fascists claim a “spiritual kinship” to the natural world and claim to “defend” it. (“Ecology is for Aryans too,” says Tom Metzger.) Criticisms of the New World Order and its negative effects on the domestic social contract in the metropolis now crop up everywhere on the Right; they sometimes sound indistinguishable from Left anti-globalization arguments.

Remarkably, some of the hard Right’s leadership is even moderating its public positions on race in order to pave the way for potential “anti-capitalist” alliances with non-white movements. Perhaps the races should be separate, they say, but we should all unite against the common enemy—global capital. James Porazzo, head of the neo-nazi skinhead group the American Front, argues for a program of “White autonomy, Black autonomy, Brown autonomy and death to the current twisted system. The only other obvious route would be an eventual winner take all race war: I don’t think anyone with any sense would want that.”

While the fascists are less developed in the U.S. than in Europe and other parts of the world, they are steadily growing in influence and organization. Their “anti-imperialist” views resonate widely within the ranks of militia members, Christian fundamentalists and ordinary conservatives, many of who are openly rebelling against the program of Bush and the neoconservatives—not just in Iraq but also on a range of domestic and international issues.

Judging by the reaction of leftists in U.S. antiwar movement, this is a good thing. Today, as rightists swell the ranks of anti-interventionists, they are being quietly tolerated, and frequently welcomed, by leftists. “What unites us is greater than anything that divides us,” says a leader of UFPJ. Anti-war speeches by Robert Byrd and writings by anti-war Christian fundamentalists appear on IndyMedia and other left-wing web sites. The Nation recently ran an entire article based on the pandering premise that Ronald Reagan, since he was a “true conservative,” would surely have pulled out of Iraq by now.

Left descriptions of the Iraqi resistance soft-pedal the right-wing forces that pervade it. Photos of huge all-male demonstrations in Muslim-populated countries are printed without comment; antisemitic slogans shouted at mass protests in Iraq and around the world are quietly edited out. Iraqi women’s fears about the possibility of a clerical fascist take-over of the country, widely reported in the mainstream press, are muted in the Left’s writings. Could it be that the Left is preparing to repeat, on a larger and larger scale, the mistakes made in Iran and Afghanistan?

It’s important to examine why there is a mass-based “anti-imperialist” right wing uprising in the world at this historical juncture and what that implies for the Left practically. Such an investigation may provide a window into the class changes enforced by the latest incarnation of global capitalism. It may also afford us perspective on the weaknesses of the post-WWII wave of revolutionary world struggle, weaknesses that allowed capitalism to surmount that movement’s powerful challenge. And finally, we may see hints of where we can look for the emergence of a new Left, able to survive and grow on the terrain of a transformed capitalist order.

A Right-Wing Class Struggle
For many years the international Left has been accustomed to thinking of the hard Right as an appendage of the ruling capitalists. To some extent, this is a conditioned reflex arising out of the realities of the post-WWII period. During this optimistic era of anti-colonial liberation and socialist revolution, anti-imperialism was virtually “owned” by the Left, whose forces were the ones challenging capital’s control over the Third World (and defending social contracts in the metropolis). The radical Right, whose international leadership was discredited and smashed in the world war, seemed to rely on patriotic flag-waving support for Western imperialists, racist frothing at the mouth, and kooky fringe politics. However, instrumentalist views of the extreme Right as a “tool of the ruling class” have never been particularly accurate, and are at any rate being rendered increasingly irrelevant by events in our time.

It’s crucial to remember that the fascist politics espoused by Hitler and Mussolini was much more than a stratagem of the bourgeoisie. In fact, prewar fascism was a mass revolutionary movement of the far Right, spun in freedom-fighting, anti-bourgeois terms. Rooted in class grievances and class ambitions, it was both populist and insurrectionary in practice. The radical Right worldwide is now adopting a similar rebellious spirit. This occurs in the context of massive global change, which is fundamentally transforming the capitalist system.

Part of what defines this change on the political level is that the wave of Left-led anti-colonial struggle in the world has largely exhausted its momentum, giving way to neo-colonialism and warlordism in case after case. The national liberation struggles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s shook world capitalism to its core. But capitalism has survived and metastasized, altering the dynamics of class struggle irreversibly in the process.

Once Left-led national liberation movements exerted an irresistible magnetic attraction on hundreds of millions of people; now we see huge reactionary mass movements gaining momentum using similar “anti-imperialist” rhetoric. This is a consequence of the onset of capitalist neo-globalization, which is shuffling the deck of world classes, causing despair and outrage among not only the most oppressed but also among middle classes desperate to protect ways of life, turf and privileges. Therefore a new social base—not just for right wing populism but also for fascist and other radical right-wing discontent—expands daily.

Neo-globalization has led to splits in the Right worldwide. Most fundamentally, it has caused a split between those who continue to cast their lot with transnational corporate capital (for instance, the neo-conservatives in the U.S.), and others, including most of the fascist Right, who see the new world order as a mortal enemy of their way of life—a threat, in fact, to the very existence of the classes out of which they emerge. Despite the ascendancy of a neo-conservative group in the current U.S. regime, the rebellious trend is the more dynamic side of this divide, growing in popularity and organization in many countries as it hones its “anti-imperialist” and “anti-corporate” message. Increasingly the international Right is positioning itself as the defender of the “little man” against an impersonal capitalist system (often seen as run by Jews) which is violating previously-sacrosanct national social contracts, caste systems, privileges and divisions of turf. It appears likely that the “blame game” sure to follow the neoconservative failures in the Middle East and the hollowing out of the U.S. economy will further energize the more rebellious tendencies.

Recipe for Rebellion
The place where the dramatic changes in class politics wrought by globalization are most sharply posed right now is in the so-called Islamic world—the very place where neo-globalization is most urgently projected by Western imperialism.

We know that capitalism must expand to survive, and Western imperialism, with its stagnant home economies, must penetrate the Moslem-inhabited countries in a whole new way to expand. On one obvious level, Western capital needs to continue to control the oil and other traditional resources in this part of the world. And from a geo-strategic point of view, whichever particular capitalists control the Middle East and Central Asia will have a tremendous advantage over their capitalist rivals, including rapidly emerging powers like China. This makes the race for penetration particularly pressurized.

But these imperatives explain only part of imperialism’s compulsion to expand—the part most familiar to the Left, since it is carried over from an earlier paradigm. On a deeper level, modern capitalism pushes to destroy and re-organize entire social structures in its drive for a new and different sort of economic expansion.

Capitalist neo-globalization seeks to enlarge and transform its presence in Muslim-populated regions, as elsewhere in the world, by means of extension, intensification and recombination. That is, it extends hungrily into all the remaining unexploited territories in the world, from the remotest regions of Central Asia to the Lacandon rain forest. In addition, it intensifies its commodification of all aspects of existence, including air, water, the airwaves, ideas, plant and animal species and human genetic material. (This is what Indian leftist Vandana Shiva calls “the new enclosure of the commons.”) It fosters and creates new “needs,” searching at an accelerated pace for ways to target, market and enhance consumption.

Finally, it “samples” and recombines formerly fixed economic and social elements—agriculture and manufacturing, labor forces, consumer markets, privileges, old and new classes, races, genders and nationalities. Thriving on fluidity, mobility and, significantly, on chaos, the new imperialism breaks down old borders, social formations and cultures, builds new ones, then breaks them down again.

In its drive to extend, intensify and recombine, neo-globalization promotes new technologies, especially biological and information technologies that allow capitalism to exploit human and natural resources faster, farther, more thoroughly and more flexibly. A central focus of neo globalization (as it has been for each stage of capitalism) is a dramatic reconfiguration of the means of controlling the proletariat, and especially proletarian women, whose exploitation is the foundation of the entire system. This is transforming traditional family and gender relations.

From the point of view of many classes in the Muslim-inhabited countries, the arrival of Western-led neo-globalization is an unmitigated disaster. Most of the Left is acutely aware of the savage impact of IMF-World Bank loansharking, commodity agriculture and hit-and run manufacturing on the poorest sectors of the colonial world. This pauperization leads to a tremendous rise in de-classed and desperately immiserated populations which constitute tinder-boxes for warlordism, ethnic conflict and radical populism of various sorts.

But we should also consider what Western globalization means for diverse middle classes, some of which comprise large populations and occupy significant niches in the national, regional and local capitalist economies of the “Islamic world.” For instance, the encroachment of globally integrated factory farming destroys the class position of even prosperous farmers in the Muslim countries. The new reach and thoroughness of global commodity markets undermines established ways of life for merchants, small bankers and regional or national manufacturers. Global homogenization of trade wipes out whole classes based on local or regional trading, transport and smuggling. (This is very much at issue in Afghanistan, which sits on top of one of the world’s most profitable smuggling routes.)

Local functionaries, clan leaders, intellectuals and professionals leading middle-class lives within existing national and local societies are well aware that they risk class demotion or extinction as global culture and centralized global authority moves onto their turf. Military officers, accustomed to influence and privilege, face an unpalatable choice between ceding power to a higher authority with its own agenda, or being replaced completely. Established religious leaders, who currently control dense networks of social, cultural and economic influence, realize that neo-globalization could eliminate or seriously weaken their position in society.

This is a pattern emerging in every part of the world: Many classes, including middle classes, are recognizing the new fragility of their economic and social status as the neo-globalization juggernaut advances.

Of course, some classes are actually benefiting, or hoping to benefit, from the changes. For example, some Indian middle classes which have caught a wave of cutting edge information technology and are riding it to a new standard of living. But overall, the pressure is downward on existing middle classes, since the whole former basis for social contracts between nationally based capitalists and “their” middle classes is disappearing.

During this time of transition, as the deck of classes is shuffled, old patterns of metropolitan privilege still provide some advantages. People with access to these privileges still do have a leg up in the competition for middle-class life within the new imperial order.

But this is likely to be a relative and temporary advantage, unlike what existed a generation ago. There’s not a whole lot of security of privilege today—in safety, in standard of living, in employment. One day you are a subsidized white settler in “Rhodesia,” the next day your farm is occupied by Africans, and you are planning your escape from Zimbabwe. One day you are sitting in a café in Belgrade sipping cappuccino, the next day NATO bombs are falling and you have no running water or electricity. One day you are a hot-shot systems designer in New York who can practically name his own salary, the next day your unemployment insurance is running out and you are reading about how well things are going in Bangalore. All this is excellent from the point of view of the giant corporations and finance capitalists. Global capital is shaking off the constraints of the old social order. Classes are being transformed and recycled at an accelerated pace; today’s social contract will likely end up in tomorrow’s dumpster.

At the end of the last capitalist era, middle classes had more options. Sometimes they supported the existing capitalist order (which, after all, had established roles for them). Other times they supported or allied with proletarian struggles that seemed to advance their class interests beyond the existing order. Today, many middle classes feel completely trapped. The former capitalist order is falling apart, and so is the former proletarian struggle. Global change is impacting their way of life, but they have virtually no political control over it. Therefore many middle-class populations are worried, angry, frustrated and nostalgic.

This is especially true in parts of the colonial world that are culturally and politically isolated from the centers of modern imperialist power—places like the Muslim-populated countries. Already angry about generations of old-style colonialism, discrimination and racist disrespect emanating from the Christian West, many middle classes in the Middle East and Central Asia now clearly recognize that they have little or no access to the levers and portals of the new global economy; that their social and economic functions are being treated as mere pawns and obstacles within Western-led globalization.

The middle classes endangered by neo-globalization are not all going quietly. And despite the hopes and expectations of the Left, some of them are linking up with desperate and de-classed populations of the poor—refugees, guerrillas looking for another war, the chronically unemployed, street gangs, etc.—in an alliance of reactionary anger against global capital. Frequently welded together by an ideology of cultural superiority and a traditionalist mythology, these political movements reflect a powerful yearning to turn back the clock to a time when their classes had leverage and hopeful futures.

But although they often fetishize the past, the forces of the rebellious Right are not just some exotic “traditional” holdovers from an earlier time. In fact the rebellious Right’s various trends embody very up-to-date attempts to defeat, influence or get a piece of the action within the new world order by struggling against the current leadership and agenda of world capital. This reflects an entirely correct understanding that only those who are prepared to fight will be able to survive and carve out space for themselves in the new capitalist landscape.

Men Against Neo-Globalization
Above all, various classes of men (worldwide, not just in Muslim-majority areas) have a special hatred of neo-globalization because it challenges their traditional ownership and control over women.

One of advancing neo-globalization’s key characteristics is that it accelerates the breakdown of traditional patriarchal family structures, in which individual men directly supervise and control women and benefit privately from their labor. Familiar forms of male dominance over women are being gradually replaced with post-modern systems of oppression that cut ordinary men out of the parasitic loop. For many men of the dispossessed classes, this is the ultimate loss, the ultimate insult.

Just as it did during earlier waves of genocide and colonialism, Western imperialism postures today as the world “protector” of women’s rights. And we are in fact witnessing the elevation of some women within the new capitalist order as a means of controlling the rest more effectively. This is part of the new style social contract that capitalists want and actively promote. Butch Lee puts it with characteristic bluntness:

Right now “post-feminist” women in the capitalist metropolis think life is just getting better and better. Hillary, women’s pro sports, flying jets over the Third World bombing away, and business opportunities, too. Who woulda imagined? It couldn’t be whiter for us. I think we are like those newly-enfranchised German women in the liberal Weimar Republic days during 1919-1933. Sleep walking on the edge of the precipice. For patriarchal capitalism is always dangerous to us. Deadly dangerous.” —(The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)

Needless to say, neo-globalization has nothing to do with “liberating” the masses of women. Quite the opposite.

Modern capitalism demands that more and more women and children be marshaled in concentrated, efficient commodity production and transnational service industries. It gathers them into large flexible labor pools directly tied to the world economy. Where this process is already well underway—for instance in the maquiladoras along the U.S.-Mexico border or the brothels of Bangkok or the burgeoning transnational domestic worker industry—it is revolutionizing gender relations: ripping young women out of traditional rural patriarchy and concentrating them into communities of women organized around their new work. Women’s lives are in many cases disciplined directly by the employer, who may control not just the workplace but also housing and access to health care, education, childcare and entertainment.

Simultaneously, neo-globalization creates significant sectors of unemployed, de-classed and often women-less men. Male street terror and warlordism feeding on this conveniently growing reservoir of outcast men plays a significant role in repressing women’s attempts at self-organization. This is a post-modern horror fitting to the current incarnation of imperialism on steroids.

The radical Right internationally is characterized by a united front of men of various threatened classes trying to protect or augment their role—their share of power—within capitalist patriarchy. From the perspective of many of these men, it’s better to die than to lose ownership of “their” women.

Broad support for the Right arises among men who live in traditional family settings and who feel endangered by the encroaching changes in capitalism. But the rebellious Right, and especially its rising fascist vanguard, is also populated by men who have basically already lost that battle. Within the warlord armies of the hard Right are whole populations of women-less men, such as the mujihedeen flowing out of the madrassas of Pakistan. Because of the chaos and radical reorganization of post-modern society, these men have little prospect of becoming the patriarchs of traditional, stable families. Many have hardly any “normal” contact with women at all. Instead, they have become outlaws in search of male power, dreaming of warrior empires where they can take whatever they want by force, especially women. At times, this fascistic fantasy becomes reality: post-modern world politics offers them chances to rule neighborhoods, whole cities (as in Iraq), or countries (like Afghanistan and Iran). There are endless opportunities to dominate, rape and terrorize women on a local scale.

The struggle around globalization currently raging between the rebellious Right and Western imperialism pivots around which men get to control women, and how. It’s no coincidence that gender figures so prominently in the unfolding of the dramatic confrontations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. It will probably play a central role in every struggle over neo- globalization to come.

The approaching tidal wave should alert us. In country after country, right wing men are re-enslaving women as a subhuman class….This is the largest mass political movement in the world by far. (Butch Lee, The Military Strategy of Women and Children, 2003.)


Continues at: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/false-fro ... ist-right/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Jun 10, 2015 2:19 pm

I live in a city where a supposed "anarchist" pamphleted my house with weird publications from "kersplebedeb". This guy was a son of rich factory owners and was always preaching "revolutionary violence". He tried to intimidate my girlfriend and myself into giving him food for free when he was squatting at my house. He tried infiltrating a First Nations warrior society and he got kicked out since he's white. He openly admitted to me that he'd received military training from an ex-IDF colonel and I looked through his personal belongings and they were full of boks on fascist spirituality, etc. contrary to the extreme leftism he preached. He also used to put on disguises and stalk well-known activist women from my school. His rhetoric was extremely strange and unlike anyone else I've really met - definitely different from your typical social justice or anarchist types.

Oh yeah he was also "homeless" but could somehow afford a rich lawyer.

This is just an anecdote but relevant here I think.
Last edited by tapitsbo on Wed Jun 10, 2015 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby NeonLX » Wed Jun 10, 2015 2:39 pm

OK, the original post bent a lot of stuff around in my head. I'm going to follow this thread carefully because I need lotsa help unpacking the message(s) from that "False Front" article.
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Jun 10, 2015 2:42 pm

Interesting, relevant, and wide-ranging: http://mitrailleuse.net/2014/08/06/were ... eans-here/

Also, impossible to summarize. Caveat Lector, etc.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Sounder » Wed Jun 10, 2015 4:56 pm

tapitsbo wrote...
I live in a city where a supposed "anarchist" pamphleted my house with weird publications from "kersplebedeb". This guy was a son of rich factory owners and was always preaching "revolutionary violence". He tried to intimidate my girlfriend and myself into giving him food for free when he was squatting at my house. He tried infiltrating a First Nations warrior society and he got kicked out since he's white. He openly admitted to me that he'd received military training from an ex-IDF colonel and I looked through his personal belongings and they were full of boks on fascist spirituality, etc. contrary to the extreme leftism he preached. He also used to put on disguises and stalk well-known activist women from my school. His rhetoric was extremely strange and unlike anyone else I've really met - definitely different from your typical social justice or anarchist types.

Oh yeah he was also "homeless" but could somehow afford a rich lawyer.

This is just an anecdote but relevant here I think.


Ah, so as one may say; beware the strident leftist, as he may be no leftist at all.

People such as this are selling divisiveness(evil), for which there is a very large market.

They use women, gays and minorities as props for their professions of righteousness, while secretly maintaining their white supremacist pretenses
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:00 pm

Interesting article, but I would venture to say that the imperialists are not interested in women's rights either, once you dig beyond the image. Capitalism loves surplus workers. The more the merrier and women are cheaper than men.

I'm sure all those women killed in recent factory collapses were benfitting from the social liberation that western capitalist empire promotes...

A pox on both their houses.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 10, 2015 5:48 pm

tapitsbo » Wed Jun 10, 2015 1:19 pm wrote:I live in a city where a supposed "anarchist" pamphleted my house with weird publications from "kersplebedeb". This guy was a son of rich factory owners and was always preaching "revolutionary violence". He tried to intimidate my girlfriend and myself into giving him food for free when he was squatting at my house. He tried infiltrating a First Nations warrior society and he got kicked out since he's white. He openly admitted to me that he'd received military training from an ex-IDF colonel and I looked through his personal belongings and they were full of boks on fascist spirituality, etc. contrary to the extreme leftism he preached. He also used to put on disguises and stalk well-known activist women from my school. His rhetoric was extremely strange and unlike anyone else I've really met - definitely different from your typical social justice or anarchist types.

Oh yeah he was also "homeless" but could somehow afford a rich lawyer.

This is just an anecdote but relevant here I think.



This is a parody?
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby DrEvil » Wed Jun 10, 2015 6:10 pm

^^Sounds legit to me.

Most anarchists I've run into are either dumb as bricks or have their heads so far up their asses they can taste their food twice. :scaredhide:
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Jun 10, 2015 6:22 pm

It wasn't a parody - it was my real life run-in with "kersplebedeb" : )

where I live is full of people with insane politics - and that includes plain old nazis as well as insanely far left people.

another "anarchist" told me that believing that social services and police were involved in the kind of corruption discussed on this website was "like believing in holocaust denial or 9/11 truth". She also thought universities shouldn't teach anything from before Marx (she was a part-time professor).
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 10, 2015 11:54 pm

The Shock of Recognition

Looking at Hamerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism
by J. Sakai

(an excerpt from Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement)


HAMERQUIST’S MAIN THESIS

The main thesis of Fascism & Anti-Fascism rejects the traditional left view that fascism is just “a tool of big business”, racist thugs in macho costume carrying out repression to the max under the orders of their capitalist masters. Hamerquist sees no short term danger, in fact, of a fascist period over the u.s.a. Or even a significant “racial holy war” led by white fascists against Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, Jews, Gays & lesbians or others anytime in the near term future. Instead, he sees the danger of a new fascism that’s more independent, more oppositional to capitalism. A “potential …mass movement with a substantial and genuine element of revolutionary anti-capitalism…The real danger is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through a historic default of the Left.” He sees fascism not as a brutish prop for major industrial capitalism, but as a possible new form of barbarism. With mass support.

That is the main argument, but the paper is also dense with related insights and questions. Unlike the old left analysis of fascism, this analysis catches the vibe of Ruby Ridge and the Turner Diaries, of Ted K. and the Taliban. But it’s still flipping a new page to think of fascism as a rebellious, oppositional force to u.s. capitalism. We should get used to it – quickly.

This critique cannot deal with all of the ideas in Fascism & Anti Fascism. What we can quickly do here is, of necessity, somewhat ragged. We define fascism in relation to other modes of capitalist rule. Major points in Fascism & Anti-Fascism are explored, such as the meaning of the “left” anti capitalist fascism vs. “classical” 1930s fascism; fascism’s mass appeal and how “revolutionary” it is; whether fascism is “a tool of the big bourgeoisie” or has its own agenda. Midway into this, we dive into a series of brief historical discussions of German Nazism, since it is the standard case for any analysis of fascism. Throughout, we are looking at Hamerquist’s work, putting out analyses of our own, but most importantly trying to open up more questions. i apologize for whatever difficulties the reader encounters in this preliminary work.


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BEING BOTH REVOLUTIONARY & PRO-CAPITALIST

Fascism & Anti-Fascism has bold conclusions. i think that they are true in essence but not exactly in the way that Hamerquist suggests. A key passage in his paper is: “The emerging fascist movement for which we must prepare will be rooted in popular nationalist anti-capitalism and will have an intransigent hostility to various state and supra-state institutions.”

This is really not a guess. Hamerquist is accurately recognizing the reality already on the ground, seeing without any old left ideological filters. This passage describes much of the current fascism that has emerged around the world. Not just small bands of third positionists in the West, but Osama bin Laden and the Israeli ultra-orthodox zionist settlers in the Middle East, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the “Anarchist party” in Russia, etc. New populist neo-fascists in the wealthy imperialist metropolis, such Jorg Haider in Austria or the rapidly growing British National Party, are already anti-Globalization and anti-u.s. and could easily swerve much further leftward if the social crisis deepens.

But when Hamerquist says that this wave of fascism is both seriously anti-capitalist and revolutionary, i would have to qualify that. His insight is deep, but his exact breakdown is not and i think that serious misunderstandings could arise. Reading Fascism & Anti-Fascism too literally could get one disoriented, wondering if fascists are really “revolutionary” and “anti-capitalist” like socialists or anarchists are, then maybe anything can be anything and right could be left and oppressors could be oppressed?

The truth here is startling and it isn’t in the least bit vague. The new fascism is, in effect, “anti-imperialist” right now. It is opposed to the big imperialist bourgeoisie (unlike Mussolini and Hitler earlier, who wanted even stronger, bigger Western imperialism), to the transnational corporations and banks, and their world-spanning “multicultural” bourgeois culture. Fascism really wants to bring down the World Bank, WTO and NATO, and even America the Superpower. As in destroy. That is, it is anti-bourgeois but not anti-capitalist. Because it is based on fundamentally pro-capitalist classes.

Fascism, in this slowly accelerating global crisis of transformation, believes in what we might call basic capitalism, o.g. capitalism. It is the would-be champion of local male classes vs. the new transnational classes. Enemy of emigrant Third World labor and the modern supra-imperialist State alike, fascism draws on the old weakening national classes of the lower-middle strata, local capitalists and the layers of declassed men. To the increasing mass of rootless men fallen or ripped out of productive classes – whether it be the peasantry or the salariat – it offers not mere working class jobs but the vision of payback. Of a land for real men, where they and not the bourgeois will be the one’s giving orders at gunpoint and living off of others.

Against the ocean-spanning bourgeois culture of sovereign trade authorities, Armani and the multilingual metropolis, it champions the populist sovereignty of ethnic men. The supposed right of men to be the masters of their own little native capitalism. In the post-modern chaos, this part of the fascist vision has class appeal beyond just simple race hatred alone.

Fascism is revolutionary far beyond that, and not as a pose. But by “revolutionary” the left has always meant overthrowing capitalism and building a socialist or communal or anarchist society. Fascism is not revolutionary in that sense, although it may use those words. Fascism is revolutionary in a simpler use of the word. It intends to seize State power for itself. Not simply to sit atop the old pile, but in order to violently reorder society in a new class rule. One cannot read “The Turner Diaries” seriously or understand Timothy McVeigh’s politics (he was slaughtering the federal government not the Black Radical Caucus) without facing this. The old left propaganda that fascism is “a tool of the ruling class” is today just a quaint idea.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby kool maudit » Thu Jun 11, 2015 4:18 am

Global capital has adapted to the cultural changes that characterized the second half of the 20th century. It has now shape-shifted in such a manner as to allow for a mile-wide, inch-deep simulacrum of social leftism on the domestic front while behaving in an aggressively imperialistic manner on the foreign one.

Witness President Obama making headlines for his congratulation of Caitlyn Jenner while at the same time heading a drone regime whose excesses (it's very being is an excess, in fact) in Pakistan and elsewhere would have a million people in the streets of New York were he some sort of right-signifying cowboy like Bush.

Saying the right things about causes favoured by social liberals is cheap and it both defuses and diffuses a lot of criticism from the domestic left. With the global proletariat having been re-allocated to an array of developing nations, the hard and expensive leftist choices have been made less visible.

If I were a behind-the-scenes type, I would find it simple and expedient to push social rightist buttons, and alleviate social leftist criticism, with any number and manner of provocative identity issues at home whilst maintaining a hard, cruel and bloody imperalist knife-edge overseas. What will the right do? Assemble draped in Chinese-made T-shirts featuring Bible verses on the Mall in Washington? We will laugh at them on the Daily Show. They're so visibly a rump movement. As for the left, we will distract their fluffier members, the liberals, with identity causes whilst cutting throats near every disputed border, every oil pipeline, every not-totally-in-line capital around the world.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 11, 2015 7:59 am

http://blackcatnotes.com/2015/06/09/why ... rganizing/

Why We Fight I: What Is the Real Threat of Fascist Organizing?

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The numbers quickly broke three hundred as the Rose City Antifa called for an action to stop the White Man’s March in the spring of 2014. Under the now common banner of taglines like “Anti-Racism is a Code Word for Anti-White” and “Stop White Genocide,” the White Man’s March was a poorly constructed idea for white nationalists to rally around. The event was pushed by members of the American Freedom Party in Portland, though as the counter-protester’s numbers swelled it became clear that the far right had skipped town. It was true, actually, as the main caller for the march spoke on The White Voice, a now defunct white nationalist podcast network, about how they headed up to Spokane, Washington. They then went on to brag about their massive turnout and banner drop. There were less than a dozen in total.

With numbers like these seeming increasingly dismal for many of these open neo-Nazi actions, the question should be rightly asked what kind of actual risk do neo-fascists hold? There has always been the obvious one, as was mentioned in Movement of Long Knives and will be discussed in a later essay, that for the militant skinhead and Ku Klux Klan factions, the risk is with disorganized bits of random extreme violence. This is a very real, if dwindling, threat, and will always be a small part of the racist right. When it comes to the more organized and “intellectual” far right, what potential do they actually have?

They certainly are not going to sway electoral politics in any meaningful way, which is actually quite contrary to the rhetoric the left usually uses when discussing the threat of the racist right. While there are some connections of what’s left of the paleoconservative and paleolibertarian Republican establishment, who will be focusing on immigration in the coming years, but this is a clouded connection at best. Websites like VDare link together anti-immigrationists from the mainstream to the white nationalist fringes, but any explicit connections between people or ideas from the fascist edge will be the death knell for any politician. Just ask House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was publicly roasted after it came to light that he spoke at the European-American Unity and Rights Organization organized by David Duke. There were, in previous years, a minor connection between those on the conservative side of the party and the less militant white nationalist organizations. People like Mike Huckabee even spoke at the conferences for organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, but today they would never be caught dead at one of these events.(1) In response to being abandoned by the conservative establishment, most of these groups have begun to likewise abandon hope for the conventional electoral sphere entirely.

To put it straight, while racism is still alive and well in American politics, open fascist rhetoric is not.

The threat from fascist groups could then be in the general social sphere, where their ideas can influence the majority of public opinion. This, again, seems doubtful while the public face of racism today is one that is implicit to the social structures and less one that is openly advocated. Instead, ideas of ethnic pluralism and equality have, in name only, won out in the public conversation. This does not mean that they have actually been implemented in the American system, which would be functionally impossible to do as capitalism drives inequality into the heart of our communities. Instead, idea of publicly advocating inequality and racism has become socially unacceptable. It just is not cool to argue for an ethnostate on CNN.

So why are we continuing a battle against fascism as a social idea and political force? Why do we fight?

When It’s Broke, They Offer the Fix

Fascism, today, is an integrated philosophy that takes on numerous titles, like white nationalism, ethnic nationalism, ethnopluralism, neo-reaction, radical traditionalism, identitarianism, and many others. The ideas that are center remain ethnic tribalism, masculanism, authoritarianism, hierarchy and inequality. While there are differences in political, religious, and social structures, the core values and ideas remain constant.

Where this ideological force has led itself in the 21st century is to exist in points of social fracture rather than to insert itself into dominant social institutions. This means that fascism is being targeted at radicalism of all sorts and towards the possibility of a social collapse. Within what many call the “suit and tie” fascist crowd in the United States, the battle they are waging is over the fate of radicalism itself, rather than the country as a whole.

The key element here is that fascism presents itself, and honestly believes itself to be, against the current “system.” This system, which we can leave completely undefined here, is the complex order that results in what you see around you. For those on the radical left, who are steeped in organizing and theory, this can be see as the result of class and social hierarchy, the developments of late capitalism, the bourgeois state, and the rest. But this is not a natural development for everyone who begins a process of dissent. Instead, the miseries that are experienced in daily life, the beauracracies and poverties, the alienation and desperation, all are the result of a complex set of forces working against their best interests. People on the verge of this radicalization are often looking for iconoclastic, revolutionary ideas that can both explain the current order in a deep and meaningful way, while also showing a transformative option that completely reorganizes society. This orientation can exist almost supra political in that it is not necessarily assigned a political ideology, yet it is more guttural and a response to the commonly understood failures of the system. Often times there are critiques shared by both the far left and far right, such as of international finance, though the values that drives such critiques are radically different. What is needed then is to have the ideological gap filled, and this is where fascists today are finding their niche.

There are a lot of reasons while fascist ideas have been provided an open space or any legitimacy to fill these ideological spaces. One of them is the left’s position within the current order of things. The first thing in this discussion that needs to be acknowledged is the success the historic left has had on reshaping the values in America. While avoiding an actual egalitarian society, we have crafted an almost universal value set that instinctually supports ideas like equality, democracy, individual freedoms, and diversity. These ideas are shared openly and must have lip service paid to them by everyone in polite society if they are to be seen as decent. This does not mean, however, that they have to then act on those ideas in meaningful ways, but that those are the moral ideas that have come to dominate the general social fabric. This actually presents an issue for the revolutionary left in that they still need to see themselves as being in opposition to fundamental aspects of the current order. When fascist ideas are presented by far right organizations, they immediately present their key ideas as being anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, and anti-diversity. In essence, they are in opposition to the key moral arguments of the current order. This goes a long way for their argumentation as they present themselves as the antecedent to the current “system,” even if this framework seems absurd to those on the left. The reactionary ideas the fuel the intellectual fascist milieu are actually at the heart of the American experience, which has, while professing leftist values, has internalized class exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other social hierarchies. It may seem obvious to those with a left analysis at play that the fascist notions are the opposite of transgressive, yet with the leftist coloring that we have given to society it is easy to say that these fascist ideas are in direct opposition. From here it is not a far step to say that the left-liberal paradigm is what actually drives the negative effects of the current order, and therefore the radical right holds the keys to subversion.

What fascists next use to attack the left’s credibility as a revolutionary force is probably the most obvious, and a critique we should be taking to heart for more reasons than one. When Matthew Heimbach, formerly of the White Student Union and now lead organizer with the Traditionalist Youth Network, was discussing his counter-action at May Day in Washington, DC, he repeatedly pointed out that he saw the left as the “militant wing of the system.” “The Weathermen Underground are professors now,” he quipped to Richard Spencer, director of the white nationalist National Policy Institute. Spencer himself has repeatedly discussed the institutionalization of the radical left, pointing out that you cannot really be dissenting from the system if you are a “tenured faculty member” at a place like Harvard(2). This is fundamentally a true statement, and one that can be legitimately hurled at the radical left sphere. Radical Marxist and anarchist ideas have become commonplace in academia, but you are never going to see a national socialist or Mussolini revivalist getting tenure in a philosophy department. Likewise, community and labor organizers, with ideas firmly planted in the radical left, are a common career path, but no one is going to be paying ethnonationalists a comfortable wage with benefits. We should be happy that there is little institutional support for these people, and that their careers are always at risk when they are exposed for who they are, but it also lends credibility to their argument. They say that we are the system, while they are the true challenge to the system.

It is important to note that the way they describe the left is always a complete mischaracterization at best, often times relying on a less than clear understanding of what the ideas we are putting into practice are. This is especially true when it comes to anarchism, which the far right loves to co-opt the language of. But even if it is a mischaracterization, there are enough small kernels of truth that they can exploit to make the argument that the left lacks any real threat to the current order. Again, without a clear ideological and class analysis, this makes their arguments seem to have merit. Once the ideological framework is laid, it can be difficult to uproot.

The Problem of “Identity”

The core challenge that fascism then presents to us is when they first acknowledge the failure of the current system in very key and fundamental ways, and then attach their critiques to it, followed by their own solutions. To do this they have to seek out, or make themselves available to, people with a vague critique of the “system.” In our current period this has meant to go after venues where there is a strong anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian current that also lacks clear directives and ideas. The Occupy movement opened these gates at several points, but so has the allowance of conspiracy theory to become prevalent in radical circles, general anti-statist rhetoric, and the use of intergroup squabbling and disagreement. This becomes incredibly clear in the white working class that is squeezed in times of crisis and often has to choose between trying to maintain the small amount of privilege that they have, or to join a revolutionary movement that challenges class hierarchy. As Ba Jin points out at length in “Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order,” this creates a dual form of radicalism present at all points of struggle, one that runs to the radical left and one that stakes its claim on the right.

Whites remain a privileged stratum in the U.S. by definition, though the “wages” of whiteness have shrunk in absolute terms for 30 years, and have grown more porous with the adoption of colorblind public policy. The bourgeoisie remains overwhelmingly white, and the white proletariat continues to waver in its allegiance between white supremacy and class struggle. Whites retain access to the housing, education and employment benefits from which most blacks and “dark” racial groups are excluded; yet the defeat of de jure segregation has limited the extent of these benefits, and allowed some “middle layer” racial groups, and a few black, to gain access to them as well. At the same time deindustrialization and neoliberalism have steadily eroded the living standards of the lumpen and working class whites in most parts of the country, driving many into poverty or extreme debt. Proletarian whites have responded with bewilderment and outrage to these developments, giving rise to contradictory political trends. On one side, they have engaged in fascist militia-ism and the Tea Party movement, on the other, they have predominated in the ranks of the Occupy movement and the trade union battles, which the unions must now embrace for their very survival even as they work to limit their potentials. In opposing the regressive gender regime of the far with, white women, queers and trans people undermine support for potentially fascist politics among the white proletariat. (3)

When the rhetoric available to growing sectors of the working revolutionary class, this can split the potential populations. This should also be noted that, while still heavily dominated by whites, this issues has come up in communities of color as well where anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and conspiracy theory has often been placed alongside revolutionary racial politics.

What has become an incredibly common tactic is to have the focus shifted to more problematic areas of the populist left. The far right has staked much of its claims to the left’s demise on things like political correctness, personal anecdotes of bigotry disconnected from a larger narrative, and “call out culture.” These are some of the easiest points at which they attempt to discredit the left because they show the largest amount of error and the least bit of connection to a revolutionary politic. Political correctness, in general, refers to the focus on correct language and behavior that is not deemed offensive to those with oppressed identities. While this is a good barometer to consider when considering what language to use, it is by no means the endgame of a radical left political analysis. Larger stories dealing with the political correctness narrative often come from people outside of radical left or organizing circles, and these stories certainly lack the ability to tie this momentary lapse in liberal judgment with the larger issues of systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. These also create some of the more embarrassing forms of movement infighting, as well as incredibly toxic online debate culture. The issues of interpersonal politics are not the most structurally sound elements associated with the left, and are easy to draw up reactionary fervor around because they lack accountability. Simply put, it is easy to create a right wing backlash when your example of the radical left is people arguing about who spoke over who in your reading group.

From here it is often an easy direction to provide a litany of reactionary political frames that can relate to someone’s identity, in the same way strains of the left deal with individual identity based oppressions. White nationalism is the most obvious of these, but Men’s Rights Activism and the new “straight pride” movements are increasingly relevant. Here they can reverse an oppression narrative, stating that the dominant case for whatever identity it happens to be is actually oppressed because of left-wing anti-oppression politics. Men are oppressed by feminism, whites are oppressed by multiculturalism, straight people are oppressed by queer theory, and so on. All of these continue to use deconstructionist language that uses these specific theories of oppression as a sort of “base and superstructure” explanation for why the larger “system” is so corrupted. A great example of this would be the popular white nationalist critique of global capitalism’s failure being rooted in the abandonment of tradition for modernity, homogeneity for globalism, and hierarchy for egalitarianism. None of this makes any sense in any kind of linear logic, of course, but that is not really the point.

This process is an important one since it brings up issues that are often discussed in anti-racist circles where by white often lack positive identity as it has been robbed by privilege. In general, the quest for identity is an incredibly human one, and white have often been socially placed into a position where their identity is based on a struggle to maintain social power above other racial groups. In the long-standing academic quest to find the “Generic Fascism,” which is to say an outline of exactly what fascism “is” in the most common case, Umberto Eco created a great outline of common features that the fascist movement often needs to inspire mass potential. In Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, the seventh primary element is one who sees the politic feeding on those who lack identity.

To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others. (4)

Eco’s outline also sees the establishment of tradition, the conflict between that tradition and modernity, and the inclusion of diversity and intellectualism as distinct features of modernity. With this it is easy to develop a narrative of identity rooted in tradition by stripping away all forms of critique and counter-point. Here you can develop an entire “theory of the world” in ways that will not even leave itself subject to radical critiques from anywhere else, and therefore can instinctually operate in cult-like ways. In a sense, this creates an “idea virus” that obliterates all other facts and logics so that they can reinforce the “in group” and “out group” dynamic that they have defined by their appropriation and validation of social constructs like “race,” “nation,” and “tradition.” In just the way that those with an anti-oppression analysis see things like sexual orientation and gender presentations that are identities based on experience and therefore used in survival and struggle, fascist will see categories like “white” and “male” as individual groups that need to be first identified with and then defended.

The complexity of identity that fascist ideologies attempt to answer and exploit are very fundamental to our understanding of how nationalism has always worked. In Stuart Hood and Litza Janz’s very basic introduction to fascism, they observe that it is actually the abolition of individuality that can help people in times of crisis to feel as though they have found some kind of personhood.

Paradoxically, submersion in the mass gives you identity, the shared power of nationality and race. Fascism appeals to the romanticism of youth, the lure of self-sacrifice to a common cause, the rediscovery of comradeship in battle. Social differences vanish in the unselfish experience of danger, discomfort and suffering. Fascism gives you a clear and identifiable enemy. (5)

The same can be true of identification through struggle on the left, primarily anti-oppression and/or class struggle, but these are identities of social category rather than essential ones. Fascist categories, such as gender and race, are seen in their eyes as being biologically and spiritually concrete, and those on the left see them as social constructs. These reactionary ideas then hope that they can strip away the progress of modernity to find something “real” that works much better, a process that is regressive and intent on returning monstrous inequality and tyranny into the public world.

Hijacking Revolution

For a long period many of these strands of reactionary politics were disparate, but in recent years organizations like the National Policy Institute, American Renaissance, Counter-Currents Publishing, and others have worked hard to make these simply different fingers on the same hand. These coalesce in movements dubbed things like the Alternative Right, the Dark Enlightenment, or other movements challenging “modernity.” It is with these kinds of critiques that they fade directly into the kinds of deeper fascist philosophical traditions like the racial traditionalism of Julius Evola, the conservative revolution of Ernst Junger and Carl Schmidt, and the New Right of people like Alain De Benoist and Guillaume Faye. Whether it is a “cult of masculinity,” regaining “organic societies,” or “preserving European civilization,” they hold certain “truths” to be self-evident.

The final purpose of these fascist narrative generators is to create a revolutionary narrative where one is needed yet entirely lacking. In the past fascist “philosophy” was roundly ignored as anything coherent because it was usually a façade for simple racist ideas, the personality cult of this leader or that, or simply a retrograde interpretation of conservatism. We shouldn’t give contemporary fascist ideologues more credit than they are due, but they have worked for decades to create a seemingly coherent set of ideas that can blend in amongst the menu of radical philosophies that we are used to in a hyper connected information age. Here they can trace the failure all the way back to the “left’s” victory in the French Revolution as the start of the fall away from aristocracy, nobility, and ethnic heritage governing society. All of these things are misinterpretations of feudal monarchies, but what is important is that they superimpose modern conceptions of race, gender, and social stratification on something that appears to have continuity to romanticize periods of the past. This is classic fascist mental architecture that has been similar since its start in the interwar period.

The next primary area where the far right attempts to stake its claim on revolutionary politics is in movements that are commonly associated with the left, but can transmute to the right for whatever reason. The most popular and notable of these has been animal rights and radical environmentalism. The reasons for this are more piecemeal than actually ideological; which was ironically termed “idea clusters” by far-right academic Paul Gottfried. His term originally was meant to describe the mainstream Republican Conservative Movement started by William Buckley on an anti-communist crusade, where by different perspectives that have no ideological connection are mashed together and then touted as a coherent ideology. This would mean things like conservative sexual mores, mixed with free market economics and interventionist foreign policy. This can actually be applied to the far right as they stake their claim on many of these fields previously given to the left. Environmentalism, as British right-wing impresario Jonathan Bowden commented, can be attributed to the right in that it is the preservation of nature as a guiding force. He sees the left as using egalitarian control over nature rather than letting nature guide the way, which he sees as inherently anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. This view of ecology is actually shared by many Marxists, who have a sort of anti-nature, bioengineering view of how to preserve the biosphere. At the same time, however, there are enough voices in radical ecology that speak to the balance and social harmony necessary in preserved ecosystems that it seems people like Bowden are simply placing their ideology upon ecology, rather than deriving it from ecology. At the same time, the desperation that often comes in radical environmental politics has led people to increasingly totalitarian ideas in some cases, and often shift into the blaming of the third-world, immigration, and increasing populations. This has led to the far right shift toward Third Positionist ideas that are specifically racist and anti-Semitic, which was seen in the right-wing co-optations of publications like Green Anarchist. It was again seen very recently as two former Earth Liberation Front prisoners were released and then shown to have joined openly fascist movements. These went under the radar because of their focus on things like the esoteric Nazism advocated by people like Miguel Serrano and the racist Hindu heretic Savitri Devi, really focusing on the kind of alt-religious interpretations of white nationalism. (6)

Palestinian solidarity movements have been one of the more obvious culprits because of the associated anti-Semitism, and unfortunately a lot of this rhetoric has been accepted in movements like Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions, though open anti-Semitism is condemned. The anti-war movement has seen some of their largest mobilizations, especially in “liberal” areas where nationalists will often attempt to go under the radar or be allowed to participate because of “freedom of speech.” This has created clashes when members of many of the larger fascist movements, including open neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance and National Socialist Movement, will come out for anti-war protests based on an Old Right notion of isolationism. This is the same logic for which they join the classical left and Big Labor to oppose “free trade” deals like the coming TPP, where they propose a kind of “economic nationalism” in opposition to the outsourcing of American jobs. While the largest thrust of these movements would never stand with the values that drive the politics of these groups, on the very surface they do share similar sentiments. This is what has allowed the more esoteric and complicated organizations to go under the radar, though a Swastika will still get someone thrown out quickly even by the most accepting liberal participant.

The difficulty of identifying fascist currents is something that has been discussed at length in a lot of places, and this has been especially true with its presence under the guise of paganism. While people are usually fairly aware of the violently racist Wotanist movement of David Lane, it is the more moderate “folkish” Asatru and Odinism that is often associated with intellectual fascist movements that goes under the radar. Because of shared symbolism and religious structure with Wicca and neopaganist trends conventionally associated with the left, without going deep into their ideological foundations it can be easy to let this go unchallenged. This has allowed for these groups, like Stephen McNallen’s Asatru Folk Assembly, to have a lot more influence in larger pagan communities than you would expect. It is here where they are allowed to profess a soft form of ethnic nationalism by proposing lines between pagan traditions based on the participant’s ethnic heritage, which they claim is similar to the “blood quorum” requirements of Native American tribes. They fail to acknowledge that the reason for tribal use of this requirement is based on the need to defend against racist oppression, but their use of American New Age symbolism has allowed the logical conclusions of their proposals to be ignored.

In all of these sectors, from anti-war organizing to pagan Reconstructionism, what we have here are options for radical visions, with some being political and some being spiritual in nature. The participation of the far right, even in marginal areas of these movements, allows them to be a part of the conversation around radical social ideas, and therefore some of the most frightening nationalist notions become a part of the spectrum when discussing revolutionary concepts. Simply put: they have become a radical option for people on the hunt for revolutionary answers to social problems.

So, in the end, it was never the conventional political sphere that was really at risk for falling to the far right, at least as it stands now, but instead the fate of the “radical option.” This means that in the increasing crisis of international capitalism, peak oil, climate change, etc., the radical options become increasingly relevant, and, as radicals, that is what we want. But if we are to bank on providing radical critiques of the current system, we need to have these far right ideas identified and removed. Liberals who support a liberal state can expect that the state will generally suppress these far right movements. This has essentially been the focus of much of the liberal anti-fascist movement, with organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center providing training and information to law enforcement on how to combat the threat. For those who actually counter the legitimacy of the bourgeois state, this creates an issue since we need to also create a comprehensive anti-fascism within radical circles. This does not just mean an ideological opposition, but actually a functional way of dealing with it when it comes up. Even if these movements do not have the ability to shift the entire force of populist anti-capitalist movements or anti-statist movements, even a small crack can allow parts of their ideas to seep in. These would destabilize the very basis of these radical movements, which should have an anti-hierarchical equality at the center of its value set. If ideas like misogyny, racialism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, fat phobia, and other forms of oppressive hierarchy that are advocated by these movements are allowed to give that bigotry legitimacy in our movements, even in part, it could undermine the very center of what we are fighting for. We fight for a revolutionary vision because we want a world where freedom, equality, and democracy can flourish, and we are not willing to give up those values to right-wing revolutionary forces that also want to undermine the current order, but to very different ends.

Understanding the why is the easy part, it is the how that takes the work. Identifying the sources of where fascist ideas focused on entryism in left movements are coming from is critical. Right now the newly repackaged form of scientific racism known as Human Biological Diversity has seen an explosion in the blogosphere, and is creating a crossover that holocaust denial had in the 80s and 90s. Movements like the Neo-Reactionary and Dark Enlightenment are uniting internet culture and the tech world in a mystified anti-egalitarian ethos, and really just tries to make old radical traditionalist ideas hip. We know that anti-Zionism, anti-modern environmentalism, and misanthropic animal rights are all having difficulty pushing these movements out, so giving it extra thought and awareness is critical. It is going to be increasingly important to understand the fragmented nature of these intellectual strains as they further deviate from the traditional organization.

We need an open dialogue with understanding within social movements so that they trends can be first identified and then countered. Without this conversation it will be difficult to actually create the kind of common understanding as to why these ideas are abhorrent, and we need to give support for discussion that helps draw these issues out into the open. This does not, however, mean that open dialogue with fascists is useful. While internally talking to and hearing each other is critical, but radio silence has always been the best option with the right. They are developing their movements for entryism in our own, which means they are training their people to debate these issues. Do not give them the opportunity, but instead we need to inoculate each other against their subversion.

The final challenge to radicals is not going to be entirely with “purifying” movements as, in weak points, there will always be a chance for ambitious young haters to make their case to those disaffected by the mainstream. Instead, the most effective way to challenge this entryism is to create a left movement that has the kind of teeth to challenge the current order in meaningful and visible ways. This means to empower all areas of the movement while strengthening ideas and analysis about the “how and why” of it. To show a labor movement that is founded on a challenge to capitalism while also showing the ability to win. By having a housing justice movement that fundamentally goes after racial inequality in housing and the commodification of housing, while actually taking over entries areas of cities from developers. By having an anti-patriarchy movement that actually challenges male hegemony while taking real gains in the fight against sexual assault, for free access to reproductive health services, and the ability for open gender fluidity. What we need is to present a movement and narrative that is powerful enough to challenge orthodoxy on its own because nothing will rob the right’s power to claim new converts than the ability to create the most enticing radical option.

Footnotes

Brinker, Luke. “David Duke threatens to run against “sellout” GOP congressman Steve Scalise.” Salon, January 29, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/01/29/david_d ... e_scalise/
“Taking a Stand.” Matthew Heimbach Interview by Richard Spencer. Vanguard Radio. Radix Journal, May 23, 2013. http://www.radixjournal.com/vanguard-ra ... q=heimbach
Jin, Ba. “Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order.” Red Skies at Night 1 (Spring 2013): Pg 37.
Eco, Umberto. “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt,” in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges. (New York: Free Press, 2006). Pg ii.
Stuart Good and Litza Jansz. Fascism: A Graphic Guide(London: Icon Books Ltd, 2013). Pg. 95.
“Former ELF/Green Scare Prisoner “Exile” Now a Fascist.” August 5, 2014. https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2014/08 ... a-fascist/
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jun 11, 2015 9:35 am

"Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement"


I will be laughing about that for the rest of the day, my god, how perfect.

Yeah, I wonder why your militant movement is having problems with attracting Fascists.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 11, 2015 9:40 am

personally I am waiting to judge until the whole kersplebedeb blog, in it's entirety, is cut and pasted here so to digest without clicking on the link
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Jun 11, 2015 1:43 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jun 11, 2015 1:35 pm wrote:
"Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement"


I will be laughing about that for the rest of the day, my god, how perfect.

Yeah, I wonder why your militant movement is having problems with attracting Fascists.


I lost it at a headline up-thread of "Men against Neo-Globalisation", which went into the territory of untoppable self-parody.
There were several weeks without CopyPasta bollox and interminable "Antifa" noise. Previous disruptive service would appear to have re-started. Strangely enough, during this time, the board's natural healthy immune system was able to deal with dickhead posters without a single "Antifa" flag flapping. Funny that. :thumbsup
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