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

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

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:57 am

http://www.libcom.org/library/youre-dif ... tish-asian

'You're different, you're one of us':
the making of a British Asian


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Interesting interview with a Sikh man who grew up in Manningham, Bradford, and was one of the founders of the Asian Youth Movement. Here he talks about his experiences growing up as one of the first Asian children to go through the city's education system and his eventual politicisation.

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the making of a british asian.pdf 2.92 MB
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:10 am

American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 2:57 pm wrote:http://www.libcom.org/library/youre-different-youre-one-us-making-british-asian

'You're different, you're one of us':
the making of a British Asian


Image

Interesting interview with a Sikh man who grew up in Manningham, Bradford, and was one of the founders of the Asian Youth Movement. Here he talks about his experiences growing up as one of the first Asian children to go through the city's education system and his eventual politicisation.

Attachment
the making of a british asian.pdf 2.92 MB


Not sure what the 'Asian Youth movement' is, but I would think that, as a Sikh, he possibly had a different experience to the overwhelmingly Pakistani nature of 'British Asians'

The British far right (and the Left to an extent) still often make the mistake of lumping all immigrants together. and here they miss a big trick, which is taking into account of the sometimes quite significant tensions between immigrant communities, which have also had a formative effect on British race relations.
This will have had an effect on their ability to form a consistent and effective response to white racism, and the issues here are not that different to those discussed in the 'Class vs Race' J Sakei article (the Chinese bit)

As ever, I am pleased to be able to add some relevent detail to your links and pastes
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:12 pm

http://www.libcom.org/library/politics- ... ramamurthy

The politics of Britain's Asian Youth Movements - Anandi Ramamurthy

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Excellent study into the politics of the Asian Youth Movements, groups of radical working class Asians who fought against the racism of both the British state and far-right as well as conservative elements within the south Asian community itself.


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politics of asian youth movement.pdf 1.78 MB
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:28 pm

Possibly quite appropriate use of the past tense there. As these were very likely an extension of white leftist movements, I suspect that they didn't form enough of their own identity to become a self sustaining movement in their own right. The culture of invasive and patronising political correctness developed during the 80's (aka 'The Loony Left') sort of confirms that the white Left took the reins again eventually.

Looking at the situation on the ground today, it seems they were not successful in tackling the patriarchal elements in their own cultures either. The lack of women in the above picture is quite telling, and quite predictable
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:35 pm

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/03 ... -to-fight/

here to stay, here to fight

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary this week by Zaiba Malik on the history of the Asian Youth Movements. For many of us who grew up in 1970s and 1980s, the AYMs were a central feature of our lives. Radical and secular, the movements challenged both the vicious racism that defined Britain in that era and many traditional values too, helping to establish an alternative leadership in Asian communities that confronted the conservatives on issues such as the role of women and the dominance of the mosque.Today, in an age in which communities are defined in terms almost solely of faith and culture, when identity politics has ripped apart any sense of radical unity, and when the idea of a ‘secular Muslim’ seems to most people an oxymoron, a movement and a tradition that thirty years ago was highly influential is barely remembered. Zaiba Malik’s documentary was enjoyable, good on the struggle against racism, less sure about the struggle within the communities.

I have written of the AYMs in my book From Fatwa to Jihad. Here is an extract that delves into the roots of the AYMs and how they came to be formed. I will publish a second extract later this week which will look at how the British state and religious conservatives within Asian communities joined forces to marginalise secular radicals. For more details about the AYM, the Tandana archive set up by Anandi Ramamurthy is a good place to start.


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On 17 April 1976 the far-right National Front organised a march through the centre of Manningham, the main Asian area in Bradford. It was to end with a rally at a local school. The National Front was in the late 1970s a minor force in British politics, but more than a bit unpleasant. In 1974 it took 44 per cent of the vote in a parliamentary by-election in Deptford in South London; three years later more than 120,000 voters supported it in London-wide elections. It was on the streets, however, rather that at the ballot box, that the NF preferred to strut its stuff. It had a cadre of thugs often involved in racial assaults and was fond of organising provocative marches through predominantly black and Asian areas. And it was on the streets that a new generation of blacks and Asians decided to take on the NF. This brought them into conflict not just with the fascists but often with their own community leaders, too.

In response to the NF march in Mannigham, local politicians and activists organised a counter-rally in the centre of Bradford. Frustrated by the fact that while racist brutes were marching past their homes in Mannigham, the opposition was rallying several miles away in the safety of the city centre, hundreds of young Asians broke away from the main demonstration, fought their way through police lines and attacked the NF marchers. Bricks were hurled, police vans overturned and 24 people arrested. It was seen by many as the blooding of a new movement. ‘It was there that we really started thinking that we’ve got to get our own house in order’, remembers the novelist Tariq Mehmood, one of those who took part in the breakaway march that day. ‘We can’t have this, we can’t leave our future in the hands of people we hated like community leaders or the Labour Party types.’ That was when, he says, ‘the seeds of the Asian Youth Movements began to be formed.’

About a year after the anti-NF riot, a group of young Asians met in a pub to form the Indian Progressive Youth Association. Why did men and women whose origins lay in Pakistan or Bangladesh call themselves Indian? In large part it was an acknowledgement of their debt to the Indian Workers Association. The IWA had originally been formed in Coventry in 1938 to agitate for Indian independence. It had been wound down after the demise of the Raj, but in the late 1950s it was reformed to give a voice to the new wave of immigrants from the subcontinent. The IWA organized both as a trade union, in factories, on the buses and in hospitals, and as an anti-racist campaigning organization within Asian communities. It had close links to the labour movement in Britain and to the Communist Party of India, and its members invariably supported any action that local trade unions were taking because, as the author and playwright Dilip Hiro put it, ‘they believed that the economic lot of Indian workers was intimately intertwined with that of British workers.’ The IWA was, in fact, often forced to organize industrial action itself, usually to the consternation of mainstream trade unions. In May 1965 it led the first significant postwar ‘immigrant strike’ at Red Scar Mill in Preston, Lancashire, involving Indian, Pakistani and African-Caribbean workers. Over the next decade, the IWA was involved in dozens of industrial disputes, trying to roll back the impact of the first major postwar recession. The economic downturn of the early 70s gutted many of the sectors for which immigrants had been recruited, such as the textile mills. In 1965 there were 50,000 textile workers in Bradford – a third of all those in Britain. Fifteen years later the number had fallen by two-thirds. Asians had always got lower wages and worse conditions than whites. Theirs were the first jobs to go when the cutbacks came. Racism shut the door on any other job prospects. The result was a series of stormy strikes in the mills, led by black and Asian workers.

For black and Asian workers, taking industrial action often meant facing down not just the employer but the casually bigoted attitudes of union officials too. In one famous, and bitter, dispute at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester in 1974, the local union organizer refused to back the mainly Asian women strikers on the grounds that ‘They have got to learn to fit in our ways, you know. We haven’t got to fit into theirs.’ But ‘fitting in’ was exactly what black and Asian workers were doing. Despite the hostility it faced from the local union, the strike committee at Imperial Typewriters insisted that ‘black workers must never for a moment entertain the thought of separate black unions. They must join the existing unions and fight through them.’

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Such strikes, and such attitudes, give the lie to the myth that Asian workers did not wish to integrate. They also challenged the belief that Britain became a multicultural nation because minorities demanded that their differences be recognized. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, black and Asian immigrants were concerned less about preserving cultural differences than about fighting for decent wages, proper conditions and equal rights. They recognised that at the heart of the fight for political equality was a commonality of values, hopes and aspirations between blacks and whites, not an articulation of unbridgeable differences. Only later were ideas of cultural and religious separateness to take hold within minority communities.

The IWA was important to Asian communities because it gave voice to the idea of the common interests of immigrant and indigenous workers, and acted upon it. It was, in the 1960s and 1970s, the most influential Asian political organization in Britain. In the West London borough of Southall, the local IWA branch had a membership of 12,500 in the late sixties. Little wonder that the IWA provided an inspiration to a new generation of activists like Tariq Mehmood.

The very name of the Indian Progressive Youth Association showed how insignificant in the 1970s were markers of ‘identity’ that appear so important today. Young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were so open minded about their origins and identity that they were quite willing to call themselves ‘Indian’, notwithstanding even the bloodshed and turmoil of Partition. But while they were happy to be labelled ‘Indian’, it never entered their heads to call themselves ‘Muslim’. As Mehmood puts it, ‘In the 1970s, I was called a black bastard and a Paki, but not a coloured bastard and very rarely was I called a Muslim’.

Nevertheless, recalls Mehmood, there were problems in calling themselves the Indian Progressive Youth Association because ‘there was this contradiction that we weren’t Indians.’ In any case, for all the inspiration that the IWA provided, many young Asians had come to be critical of its activities. Its leaders were seen as part of the old guard of community spokesmen who had lost touch with the needs and problems of the youth. Indeed, the IWA had helped organize the anti-NF rally in Bradford city centre, the timidity of which young Asians had so despised. So, the following year the organization was renamed the Asian Youth Movement. Defining itself as Asian was not a way of cutting itself off from African Carribeans or whites but an attempt to create a conscious break with the sectarian forms of subcontinental politics that often still corrupted many first generation organizations. In its own way the AYM was to become to a new generation what the IWA had been to an old.

Soon Asian Youth Movements had sprung up all over Britain, in East London, Luton, Nottingham, Leicester, Manchester, Sheffield. Their slogans – ‘Come what may, we are here to stay’ and ‘Here to stay, here to fight’ – revealed a generation determined to be both seen and treated as British citizens. The youth movements challenged many traditional values too, particularly within Muslim communities, helping establish an alternative leadership that confronted traditionalists on issues such as the role of women and the dominance of the mosque. ‘Asian women are the most oppressed section of our community’ observed Liberation, the magazine of the Manchester AYM, perhaps the most progressive of all the AYMs. ‘Although we are living in an industrialised society, most of our people retain feudal values and customs. AYM will struggle against these reactionary aspects of our culture. AYM believes that the emancipation of women is a prerequisite for the liberation of society at large.’

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AYM activists were not necessarily atheists. But religion never shaped their politics. The AYMs were secular organisations. ‘I had grown up in a profoundly secular environment’, recalls Balraj Purewal. ‘As a Punjabi I did not think about Muslim or Sikh. At school the person next to me was never a Muslim or Hindu. It never occurred to me to think like that.’ Not only did AYM activists not distinguish themselves as Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, many did not even see themselves as specifically Asian, preferring to call themselves ‘black’. Indeed, the very first ‘Asian’ Youth Movement, which Purewal helped found, did not even call itself Asian. On 4 June 1976, Gurdip Singh Chaggar was stabbed to death by racists outside the Dominion Theatre in Southall, in west London. In the wake of the murder local youth formed themselves into the Southall Youth Movement, the aim of which was both to campaign against discrimination and to provide physical defence for the local area. What was developing here was a peculiarly British notion of blackness and the fermentation of a very British identity. In America, black meant ‘of African origin’. On the Indian subcontinent no one would have defined themselves by their colour. In Britain young blacks and Asians were attempting to forge a more inclusive identity rooted in politics rather than ethnicity or skin colour while at the same time trying to highlight the divisive character of racism.

The Asian Youth Movements drew inspiration from two very different models of political organization. The first was traditional class-based politics in Britain. Activists did not only draw upon the history of organisations such as the IWA. Many had cut their political teeth in far-left Trotskyist groups. Mehmood himself was a member of the International Socialists, the forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party. The other model on which the AYMs drew was the black power movement in America from which came the notion of ‘black self organisation’, the idea that blacks should organize independently of white groups. The clenched fist symbol of the AYM came straight from the Black Panthers.

These two guiding spirits were often in tension. ‘Most of us were workers and sons of workers’, Mehmood recalls. ‘For us race and class were inseparable’. Yet he, like many AYM members, was deeply suspicious of what he called the ‘white left’ and stressed ‘the need for our own organisation’. Indeed, the very ‘formation of the Asian Youth Movement in Bradford’, Anandi Ramamurthy, a historian of the AYM, suggests, ‘was also an expression of the failure of “white” left organizations in Britain to effectively address the issues that affected Asian communities.’ Despite the racist hostility they had faced from white trade unionists, the strikers at Imperial Typewriters rejected the idea of a separate black union. Their children, who formed the backbone of the Asian Youth Movements, rejected the idea that they should work within organizations they saw as racist. ‘We had to put our own house in order’, Mehmood observes, before it was possible to ‘unite as equals’ with the ‘white left’.

Such attitudes were understandable given the sense of isolation that many blacks and Asians felt. But such attitudes could also all too easily lead to what the writer Mala Dhondy has called ‘ghetto politics’. Today Dhondy is better known as Mala Sen, biographer of India’s Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi. In the 1960s and 70s, she was one of the leaders of Britain’s Black Panther Movement, which modeled itself closely on the American version and provided a political education for a whole generation of black British radicals. The writers Darcus Howe and Farrukh Dondhy (then Sen’s husband) and the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson were among her contemporaries in the Panthers.

In the late 1970s Mala Dhondy helped organize Bengalis in East London into the Bengali Housing Action Group (BHAG), a militant squatting movement the aim of which was to end discrimination against Asians in housing allocation. Under pressure from the BHAG the Greater London Council proposed in 1977 that ‘we might continue to meet the wishes of the community by earmarking blocks of flats, or indeed whole estates if necessary, for their community.’ Jean Tathan, the Conservative chair of the GLC Housing Committee, told newspapers that ‘I am prepared to consider applications from all-white or all-West Indian groups’. The plan for colour-coded housing estates caused uproar and was eventually defeated. At that time Mala Dhondy claimed that ‘The GLC has gone beyond what we asked in a potentially dangerous way’. Later, however, she was to defend the idea of ghetto politics. ‘Some people said “You are creating a ghetto”’, Dhondhy argued. ‘We said, “Fine, we prefer the ghetto, at least you have each other to defend yourself”… So that’s what it was and we advanced it, and today you walk around Brick Lane and it’s totally Bengali.’

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For Asian communities under siege from racists, there was indeed safety in numbers. It was an age in which racism was vicious, visceral and often fatal, in which stabbings everyday facts of life, firebombings almost weekly events, and murders all too common. An age in which I remember organising street patrols in predominantly-Asain areas to afford protection from racist thugs. An age in which, thanks to discriminatory housing policies, most housing estates, especially good ones, were predominantly white. A 1982 report on housing allocation in East London reported that Bengalis made up just 0.3 of tenants on the best estates and concluded that ‘effectively the GLC has picked out certain old estates’ on which to house Bengalis while keeping newer housing stock ‘almost exclusively white’. In a follow-up report two years later it found little change and suggested that ‘Somewhere, somehow deliberate decisions must have been taken over which estates Bengalis were going to be “allowed” to live on.’

What Mala Dhondy called ‘ghetto politics’ was, however, more than simply a pragmatic response to such racism, more than simply a question of finding protection in numbers. It was also an attitude that came to celebrate the ghetto as an expression not of the segregation of immigrants through poverty or racism but of the cultural distinctiveness of a community. The notion of ‘self-organisation’ originated as a strategy through which to combat racism - ‘We have to get our own house before uniting as equals’. But over time it mutated into a celebration of cultural separation – ‘We are different because we are black and Asian’. The idea of temporary organizational separation for political reasons gave way to the notion of permanent cultural distinctiveness as a fact of life. In the 1980s these ideas moved out of the ghetto of radical anti-racist politics and into mainstream public policy.


[Taken from From Fatwa to Jihad, pp 47-54; the extract has been slightly edited. Some of the interviews were conducted specifically for the book, some were taken from other sources; full references are in From Fatwa to Jihad.]
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 4:51 pm

She's right about it being 'barely remembered', which again indicates how little it gelled with the traditional Left, even though it aped their values. Another echo of that J Sakei interview on race and class.

A good amount of these groups that tried to unite themselves under the banner of black and Asian (taken from the above) are now estranged at best, and in conflict at the worst. Again, the lack of women in the photographs is telling.

The one thing that does seem to 'unite' them (if only outwardly) is a contempt for the more recent wave of Eastern European immigrants. Ironically repeating almost word for word the attitudes that were directed at them. a couple of decades earlier. A factor that exacerbates this is that if you are a member of one of these groups, then such utterances are not seen in the same light as if they were to come from whites, this odd hangover is from what I previously described as invasive and patronising political correctness (which really went into into overdrive during the Blair years)
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:00 pm

A bit more Asian Youth Movement history:


"When they come to attack our people, we will stand our ground and fight!"

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The third article in the Fargate Speaker's series on Sheffield radical history.

Closer to the present day, the 1980s saw a different kind of struggle in Sheffield, as young Asians fought back against racist attacks, and faced severe police harassment while doing so. In June 1982, Ahmed Khan was arrested and charged with serious wounding for fighting back against racists, an event that led to the formation of the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement. The Sheffield AYM organised against police harassment and deportations, and to support people being prosecuted for self-defence. It was never simply a communalist group, with Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and white skinheads marching with the AYM banner on demonstrations, and it came into conflict with the existing leadership of the Asian community as much as with the white establishment, with one community leader complaining that "our children were growing up hating our culture. They were angry and withdrawn and we could not reach them." Leaders of mainstream groups like the Asian Welfare Association refused to speak at the AYM's events, leading to angry youths producing leaflets with slogans like "Fight for your rights, do away with tribal chiefs." The Sheffield AYM folded in 1987, but the Sheffield Defence Campaign continued to do similar work, organising a big demonstration against racism and fascism from Burngreave to Sharrow in 1989. In 1994, the police reacted to race riots in Darnall by arresting a disproportionate number of Asian youths, leading to the formation of a Darnall Defence Campaign, who organised a well-attended picket of Attercliffe police station. The names and faces may change, but the struggles - from wages and food prices to racism and police brutality - go on.


http://www.libcom.org/library/when-they ... ound-fight
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:24 pm

Lots and lots of snippets, seemingly getting smaller and more atomised.

If you lived here you would care more about this sort of thing and start to possibly attempt some sort of useful synthesis.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:28 pm

Nick Griffin's sexual habits exposed on Question Time

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

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 5:31 pm

Yep. Sussed you AD.

You don't care about this stuff and are just conducting some sort of C&P contest. If you're really into analysing the British Far Right, then you can rediscover some context via me. ATM you are just making a mockery of the subject (from your lofty perch far away)
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:07 pm

Jakell, I have told you many times that I don't want to talk to you. Please stop acting as though I do.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby Sounder » Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:22 pm

You catch on quick jakell.

AD does not seem to have a curious bone in his body. All assertions, no questions.

AD's game has always been to target minor actors and use them to pump the dichotomy.

He could be quite useful as a case study if more folk would consider that tickling pretenses is an easy way to influence an audience.

away from central issues and actors.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby DrEvil » Mon Feb 10, 2014 7:49 pm

There's a daily prayer on my kitchen wall that goes like this:

"Oh Lord. Please help me to keep my big mouth shut until I know what I'm talking about."

I'm going to tattoo it on the inside of my eyelids.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:08 pm

Sounder » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:22 pm wrote:You catch on quick jakell.

AD does not seem to have a curious bone in his body. All assertions, no questions.

AD's game has always been to target minor actors and use them to pump the dichotomy.

He could be quite useful as a case study if more folk would consider that tickling pretenses is an easy way to influence an audience.

away from central issues and actors.


I don't know about the wider issues you describe here, but these may become apparent in time. If I seem to catch on quickly it is because he seems to be attempting amongst to hide amongst issues that folk usually find difficult to navigate, but I have some familiarity with, leading to a slightly cooler head.

I think he catches on quickly too, because he's switched to non-engagement, which may serve him for a while, but is a rather big climbdown from the previous role of 'fascist hunter'. embarrassing almost.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:10 pm

Nothing to see here, nothing at all...

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildhunt/2 ... ight.html/

Esoteric Publishers, Crowley, and the ‘New Right’


At the beginning of June, copies of a new anthology, “Crowley: Thoughts & Perspectives, Volume Two,” started arriving at the homes of individuals who ordered the book. Published by Black Front Press, the volume received generally positive feedback from commenters at the Aleister Crowley Society. On June 10th, well-respected esoteric publishers Scarlet Imprint released a statement regarding Black Front Press, and its head, Troy Southgate.

“We were approached recently to contribute to Troy Southgate’s Black Front Press whose last published work was a Crowley anthology. After a little research, we were disturbed to find their rather murky history hidden beneath the anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and permaculture ideals. Though we are very happy to promote the independent esoteric and occult authors and publishers whose work and dedication invigorate and stimulate our community, it is entirely another matter to contribute our energy to a project which would seem to be attempting to use a multiplicity of voices from the occult scene to promote the ideas of the so-called New-Right.“


It seems that Southgate is the leading figurehead for the “National Anarchist” movement, a political extension of the European “New Right” (not to be confused with neoconservativism). National Anarchists endorse a manifesto that defines Zionist Jews as “vampiric parasites intent on carving up the world’s resources in an attempt to create a single, global market,” rejects egalitarianism, and is pro-racial separatism.

“Race defines who we are, it provides us with an identity and exists for a damn good reason. Without maintaining this essential diversity, something you can find throughout nature, the world will become increasingly drab, standardised and monotonous and the only people left on the planet will inevitably form part of a coffee-coloured mush of uniform humanity. National-Anarchists wish to preserve the different races of the earth and believe that multi-racialism ends with the dissolution of all races. Racial separatism is the only way that the organic balance can be restored. We realise that it is impossible to separate people in the large cities and towns, many of whom have racially-mixed children or wish to live among foreign populations, and neither should we attempt to do so. Indeed, we believe that the nation-states of the West are likely to collapse in the next few decades and that our respective countries will begin to fragment along racial and cultural lines. So there is clearly no need to treat people inhumanely by herding them into camps or deporting them in the way that the Nazis and Soviets did in the last century; something which ended disastrously for those concerned. National-Anarchists must form new communities based on their own racial and cultural values. The maxim of the future will be respect for others and unity in diversity.”

Scarlet Imprint noted that they held a “profound” disgust for the views expressed in the National Anarchist manifesto, and stated that “what is clear in magickal history is that racial mixing has been incredibly beneficial.” The well-regarded San Francisco esoteric book-seller Fields Books thanked Scarlet Imprint for their stance, and promises “a longer and more nuanced response to all of our customers soon” on the matter. In response, some Crowley fans instantly went on the defensive, wondering if there was going to be a “blacklist” of contributors, bemoaning the “war of ideologies” that will be raised on the issue. This is exactly the kind of response that National Anarchists like Southgate hope for, since a veneer of an apolitical “pox on both your houses” attitude is what gives these New Right/third positionist groups their oxygen.

“The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing. They have abandoned many traditional fascist practices—including the use of overt neo-Nazi references, and recruiting from the violent skinhead culture. In its place they offer a more toned down, sophisticated approach… Their cultural references are the neo-folk and gothic music scene, which puts on an air of sophistication, as opposed to the crude skinhead subculture. National Anarchists abandon any obvious references to the Hitler or Mussolini’s fascist regimes, often claiming not to be “fascist” at all.

Like the European New Right, the National-Anarchists adapt a sophisticated left-wing critique of problems with contemporary society, and draw their symbols and cultural orientation from the Left; then they offer racial separatism as the answer to these problems. They are attempting to use this new form to avoid the stigma of the old discredited fascism, and if they are successful like the National Bolsheviks have been in Russia, they will breathe new life into their movement. Even if the results are modest, this can disrupt left-wing social movements and their focus on social justice and egalitarianism; and instead spread elitist ideas based on racism, homophobia, antisemitism and antifeminism amongst grassroots activists.”


Before Southgate and his apologists muddy the water on the debate that will no doubt gear up, lets be clear that his views are extremist, but always with the added caveat of “we’ll leave them alone if they leave us alone.”

“The most important thing for us is the Natural Order. It is natural for men and women to procreate. Anything which threatens the harmony of Nature must be opposed. Feminism is dangerous and unnatural not because it threatens to leave men with a pile of dirty washing-up and a few smelly nappies (as some of its adherents claim), but because it ignores the complimentary relationship between the sexes and encourages women to rebel against their inherent feminine instincts. Anyone interested in the opposing view should read The Female Woman by Arianna Stassinopoulos (Davis-Poynter, 1973) or Chapter 20 of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World(Inner Traditions, 1995). Homosexuality is contrary to the Natural Order because sodomy is quite undeniably an unnatural act. Groups such as Outrage are not campaigning for love between males – which has always existed in a brotherly or fatherly form – but have created a vast cult which has led to a rise in cottaging, male-rape and child sex attacks. Nature is about life and health, not death and AIDS. One of the most eye-opening pamphlets produced on this issue is Alexander Baron’s truly excellent Guide to Gay Sex: A Primer For Young People (Infotext Manuscripts, 1994). But we are not trying to stop homosexuals engaging in this kind of activity like the Christian moralists or bigoted denizens of censorship are doing, on the contrary, as long as this behaviour does not affect the forthcoming National-Anarchist communities then we have no interest in what people get up to elsewhere. I just hope these people respect our own right to live in the way we choose. As far as abortion is concerned, this process violates the sanctity of life and once again the killing of an unborn child is flying in the face of Nature and one could do far worse than read Abortion: Yes Or No? by John L. Grady (Tan Books, 1979).”


Amazingly, the “we’ll let you live in peace apart from us come the revolution” defense seems to often work. Allowing views that would get them painted as neo-fascists to get lost in a constructed apolitical fog. However, any direct contact with self-proclaimed National Anarchists makes plain what they are, and apologists end up having to twist themselves into pretzels in order to insulate figures like Southgate from the odious effects of their pseudo-intellectual rhetoric.

I don’t think there should be a “blacklist” for those duped into thinking Black Front Press was truly apolitical in orientation, but once enlightened, it will become increasingly hard to erect a firewall between Southgate’s publishing arm and the views he and his followers espouse. Just because this book on Crowley avoided becoming a pamphlet for neo-fascist views doesn’t mean the publishing house that produced it should be given a free pass. Ultimately, there’s an expectation that intelligent people will consider who is funding and distributing a project. If your work is helping to bolster the image of a company that endorses the philosophy of the National Anarchists, if your work helps these groups further insinuate themselves within Pagan and esoteric communities, then the fig leaf of apoliticism must be challenged.
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