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Tuesday, 30 November 2010
Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction
A recent post highlighted the disparity between Troy Southgate's claims to have moved to a position 'beyond Left and Right' and his role as a founder and Chairman of the New Right. A commenter posted a link to this article by Graham Macklin on the Slackbastard blog (originally from the journal Patterns of Prejudice), which provides a useful outline of the origins and development of Southgate's 'National Anarchist' politics - Strelnikov
Graham D. Macklin: Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction
Patterns of Prejudice
Vol.39, No.3, September 2005
Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a ‘national-anarchist’ groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ‘anarchist’ agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move ‘beyond left and right’, transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism. Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident ‘national-revolutionaries’ who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization.
In his monumental A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 Stanley Payne devotes only two pages to British fascism–‘a political oxymoron’–the volume of literature devoted to which is ‘inversely proportionate to its significance’.[2] Such disdain has all but smothered the study of post-war British fascism, which is characterized merely as an ‘epilogue’ to the ‘epochal significance’ of inter-war British fascism, which in itself is only of interest as a benign footnote to the history of fascism and Nazism. Walter Lacquer is similarly scornful in his refusal to study post-war British fascism, ‘because it has not been very significant or in anyway original’.[3] Although there is an element of truth in this proposition its reductive methodological focus on the traditional canons of ideological core and electoral performance overlooks the extent to which British fascism operates outside neatly quantifiable electoral, national and legal boundaries. This inevitably underestimates the wider impact of fascist politics.
In this respect Roger Griffin’s recent elaboration of the concept of the fascist ‘groupuscule’ provides a much-needed corrective to an analytically stunted approach that obscures as much as it reveals. This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism’s cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. While the synthesis of left and right in ‘third position’ groupuscules makes their classification suitably problematic, this article demonstrates that despite a protean capacity for change ‘national-revolutionary’ groupuscules retain, at least to the initiated, the recognizable mark of Cain. These origins are equally evident in the synthesis of ‘anarchism’ with Evolian fascism, which is espoused by NRF founder Troy Southgate whose rapidly evolving political odyssey from (comparatively) orthodox British fascism to the radical, anti-capitalist, ‘post-third-position’ ideology of ‘national-anarchism’ represents a highly personalized and idiosyncratic revolt against the modern world.
Origins
The origins of the NRF can be traced to the collapse of the National Front (NF) in 1979. From its formation in 1967 the NF grew rapidly in strength until by 1973 it had approximately 17,500 members, though approximately 64,000 people passed through its ranks during the course of the decade.[4] Following its comparative success in the May 1977 Greater London County Council elections — which masked an overall decline in its political fortunes — many commentators feared the NF was on the verge of a major political breakthrough.[5] Buoyed with hubris the NF fielded 303 candidates in the 1979 general election, more than any insurgent political party since the Labour Party in 1919.[6] However, a resurgent Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, which usurped its anti-immigration platform while taking an equally draconian line on law and order, trounced the NF, which polled a derisory 191,706 votes (1.4 per cent).[7]
It was Götterdämmerung. The resulting trauma accelerated the decline and fragmentation of the NF and led to the departure of its titular chairman, John Tyndall, who was blamed for its humiliation. Riven by internal dissent and struggling to cope with its failure, the NF entered a period of frenetic ideological radicalization. The catalyst for this development was the arrival in England of approximately forty fugitive Italian fascists belonging to Terza Positione and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, several of whom had been involved in the horrific bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980 that killed eighty people.[8] As well as supplying the NF with funds they also introduced its membership to the ideas of Julius Evola, the aristocratic Italian racial theorist who had assumed centre-stage after 1945 as the inspiration for generations of youthful Italian fascists.[9] The radicalization of these younger, educated, ambitious activists created a further rift within the NF, which culminated in the departure in 1983 of Martin Webster, the National Activities Organiser.[10]
Webster’s departure paved the way for the ascendancy of the ‘leftwing’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ tendency within the NF inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite and the ‘anti-Nazi’ writings of Otto Strasser.[11] The absorption of these ideological imports led to the development of a more intellectually sophisticated, internationalist, ‘third position’ ideology showcased in the NF’s theoretical journal Rising. Modelling itself on the esoteric elitist pretensions of Evola and Corneliu Codreanu, the NF sought to transform itself into a ‘revolutionary’ cadre-based organization and to rid itself of ‘armchair nationalists, tin-pot dictators or refugees from old political parties’.[12] By January 1985 membership had declined to 1,000.[13] The NF’s ideological inspiration was Derek Holland’s The Political Soldier (1984), which envisaged an elite form of racial nationalism led by ‘a new type of man who will live the Nationalist life every day’ while preparing for a ‘holy war’ against the iniquitous British state.[14] Abandoning electoral politics, the NF extolled grassroots, community-based activism and aspired eventually to replace parliamentary politics with direct democracy or ‘popular rule’ adapted from Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book, which was eulogized alongside Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and Louis Farrakhan’s black separatist Nation of Islam. Not everyone accepted his ideological evolution, however. In 1989 the NF split into two separate groups: the Third Way led by Patrick Harrington, and the International Third Position (ITP) led by Derek Holland, Roberto Fiore and Nick Griffin, currently the British National Party (BNP) chairman.[15]
Troy Southgate
Born in Crystal Palace, South London in 1965, Troy Southgate’s political odyssey began in 1984 when he joined the NF as it was completing its rapid transformation into a ‘revolutionary organization’. Southgate claims he was attracted by its platform of ‘popular rule’ and Catholic distributism, rather than its ‘racial separatism’, which he accepted only later. Of immediate influence was Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and I Believed, the autobiography of Douglas Hyde, former editor of the Stalinist Daily Worker who became a minor cause célèbre in the 1950s when he renounced Communism and converted to Catholicism. Southgate followed suit in 1987, joining the ultra-conservative Lefebvrist sect, the Society of St Pius X. It was during this period that Southgate was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for serious assault during a streetfight. Following his release in 1989 he took over NF operations in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.[16] As the NF disintegrated into rival factions that year Southgate joined the ITP, believing it to be ‘the legitimate heir to the National Revolutionary Movement in Britain’, acting as its Kent organizer and editor of the Kent Crusader, Surrey Action, Eastern Legion and Catholic Action.[17]
Despite its radical origins the ITP quickly degenerated into an insignificant though fanatically ‘pro-life’ and homophobic Catholic sect, eulogizing the self-same ‘reactionary’ figures like General Franco and Mussolini it had previously denounced. Southgate became increasingly dissatisfied with the ITP leadership, particularly Holland and Fiore, whom he believed were far more interested in the possibilities of developing a rural fascist enclave in Northern France (and later in Spain), into which they had invested the group’s finances, than in sustaining the ITP as a cadre-based organization. Accusing them of gross financial impropriety, hypocrisy, racial miscegenation and of practising a ‘bourgeois’ form of reactionary ultra-Catholic fascism incompatible with the ‘revolutionary’ nationalism that, he claimed, they had betrayed, Southgate acrimoniously departed from the ITP in late 1992.[18]
Southgate immediately formed the English Nationalist Movement (ENM), which was intermittently active in Dover, Kent with small cadres in London and Bradford. It had ‘a small fluctuating hardcore’ of between 25 and 35 committed activists, though anti-fascist estimates put the figure as low as 4.[19] Signalling that the ENM represented the genuine embodiment of ‘national-revolutionary’ essentials Southgate established the knowingly titled Rising Press and reprinted influential articles from NF magazines like Rising, New Nation and Nationalism Today.[20] Vehemently opposed to the spiritual enslavement emanating from the twin materialistic poles of ‘Capitalist greed and Marxist servitude’ the ENM sought to define a usable ideological inheritance, untainted by its association with ‘classic’ fascism. Thus Hitler and Mussolini were denounced as ‘reactionary charlatans’ and enemies of ‘genuine’ revolutionary nationalism.[21] Corporate economics was also dismissed as the perpetuation of capitalism ‘behind a nationalist facade’.[22] The BNP was rejected as a mere ‘pressure valve’ for closet Tories and ‘small time drug dealers’.[23]
In contrast to the increasingly ‘reactionary’ ITP Southgate paid fulsome tribute to the pantheon of ‘forgotten’ dissident fascists that had motivated the original third position, including Strasser, Codreanu, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Léon Degrelle, not to mention the Welsh nationalism of Plaid Cymru. The resulting ‘patriotic socialism’ was assimilated with the writings of Victorian socialists like William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Robert Owen and William Cobbett to create a native Anglo-Saxon völkisch tradition that desired the reclamation of an English pastoral idyll supposedly swept away by the Industrial Revolution.[24]
This was coupled with Southgate’s desire for a ‘mono-racial England’, which he claimed was not ‘racist’. Borrowing his terminology from the Nouvelle Droite, Southgate claimed to seek only ‘ethno-pluralism’ (i.e. racial apartheid) to defend indigenous white culture from the ‘death’ of multiracial society. Defending ‘human diversity’ Southgate advocated ‘humane’ repatriation and the reordering of the globe according to racially segregated colour blocs. Within this framework Southgate advocated a radical policy of economic and political decentralization: England, Alba (Scotland), Cymru (Wales), Ulster, Mannin (Isle of Man) and Kernow (Cornwall). These regions were to be governed according to the economic principles of Catholic distributism and a wealth redistribution scheme modelled on the mediaeval guild system. The ensuing growth of private enterprise and common ownership of the means of production would end ‘class war’ and, ergo, the raison d’être for Marxism, and would also encourage an organic nationalist economy insulated from ‘foreign’ intervention.[25] Politically the regions would be governed by the concept of ‘popular rule’ extolled by Qaddafi. The resulting restoration of economic and political freedom would re-establish the link between ‘blood and soil’ enabling the people to overcome the ‘tidal wave of evil and liberal filth now sweeping over our entire continent’. ‘Natural law’ would be upheld and abortion, race mixing and homosexuality forbidden.[26]
This desire to create a decentralized völkisch identity has its roots in the ideological ferment gripping National Front News and Nationalism Today in the 1980s. Southgate’s continued ideological morphology was stimulated through contact with Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective formed in 1989 to discuss ‘European identities, autonomies and initiatives’ and which emerged from the NF’s cultural appendage IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic). IONA organized joint symposia with Michael Walker’s Scorpion magazine at which ‘former British Nationalists’ met to discuss finding a ‘rooted radicalism’ to challenge the nationalism of the NF that was ‘out-dated, discredited and overtaken by events’.[27] Despite such ideological innovation Southgate betrayed signs of remaining wedded to older biological fulminations espoused by Nazi racial scientist Hans “Rassen” Günther and American racist Lothrop Stoddard.[28] Even his assimilation of Noam Chomsky’s scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[29]
Anarch(y) in Britain: the National Revolutionary Faction
In 1998 Southgate disbanded the ENM and founded the National Revolutionary Faction, a new cadre-based groupuscule that embraced a far broader range of dissident fascist positions than the ENM, reflecting Southgate’s increasingly occult and esoteric trajectory following his break with Catholicism in 1997, which he blamed for the ‘complete stupefaction’ of the ITP.[30] Ironically, many of Southgate’s esoteric ideas were reconstructed from his own reading of the key texts of liberal ‘fascist studies’ rather than originating with any organic tradition.[31] Through the NRF Southgate pushed ‘third position’ thought on decentralism and regionalism to its ‘logical’ conclusion, rejecting the very cornerstone of fascist ideology itself: nationalism. While retaining the ‘palingenetic’ component of its ideology, the NRF nevertheless rejected the ‘artificial’ nation-state and the ‘reactionary’ nationalism emanating from it as the focus for rebirth. Drawing on Evola’s ‘spiritual racism’ Southgate rejected abstract geography, advocating instead a ‘tribal and organic’ Indo-European ‘ethnic heritage’, extending from Europe to Iran, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, which offered an impregnable racial defence against the ‘quagmire’ of globalization and the faltering security provided by national borders.[32] Added to this ‘spiritual racism’ was C. G. Jung’s concept of the ‘collective subconscious’, which provided the NRF with further evidence of the existence of a ‘primeval Aryan psyche’. In this respect Southgate admired Heinrich Himmler’s activity at Wewelsburg Castle as ‘one of the most significant developments in modern history’, which had contributed to a ‘deeper’ occult understanding of race, even though in the same breath Himmler could be derided as a ‘fascistic pig’ funded by ‘secret wall street financiers’ who had murdered many of his own ideological heroes.[33]
The most intriguing ideological innovation, however, was Southgate’s conversion to ‘anarchism’ and his subsequent formulation of a doctrine of ‘national-anarchism’. At first glance the ‘total insanity’ of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism.[34] When put into its wider context, however, ‘national-anarchism’ appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated.[35]
Central to ‘national-anarchism’, however, is a far older paradigm drawn from conservative revolutionary thought, namely, the Anarch, a sovereign individual whose independence allows him to ‘turn in any direction’, a notion that reinforces Southgate’s belief that ‘the concept of humanity coming and going in the same direction is a 1960s dead-end’. Redolent of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Futurist poetry, Nietzsche’s rejection of dogmatism and even Max Stirner’s extreme egoism, the concept of the Anarch finds its fullest expression in Ernst Jünger’s novel Eumeswil. For Jünger the Anarch differed radically from the anarchist, whose acts of insurrection (‘beacons of the impotent’) only brought further state repression. For the Anarch all external poles of power, whatever their relative merits, are both arbitrary and transitory. Having undergone a fortifying process of inner migration the Anarch ‘adjusts accordingly’ to external authority as a ‘question of form’ rather than faith. Stoically abjuring from this ‘ultimate devotion’ the Anarch preserves his autonomy and ‘metaphysical integrity’. This was also paramount in Evolian thought, which also divined a ‘spiritual’ basis for genuine authority beyond naked self-glorification.[36]
By recognizing this inviolability, by gaining the mastery of himself, the Anarch personifies a spiritual, aristocratic elite. The recognition of multilayered realities sees the Anarch ‘endlessly moving nomadically with mercurial freedom through thought . . . free to explore and synthesize’.[37] In this way the Anarch appropriates authority rather than succumbs to it, thus securing his own salvation and, ergo, that of the nation. In essence, Jünger’s work provides an esoteric reworking of Southgate’s original understanding of the ‘political soldier’ as a ‘Godlike figure’ who ‘can only truly be master of his situation when he is truly master of himself’. Only this ‘new man’ can save society from the ‘corruption and decadence’ that has engulfed it.[38] The concept of the Anarch therefore provides sanction for the amorphous ideological shape-shifting and rampant eclecticism of ‘national-anarchism’, allowing Southgate to claim that he is not ‘fascist’ but that he has transcended the dichotomy of conventional politics to embrace higher political forms that are ‘beyond left and right’.
In order to ‘change society completely’ the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy, which coincidentally led Southgate to jettison the ‘socialist trappings’ of Strasserism and ‘reformist’ distributism as incompatible with his Evolian racial vision. Indeed, Southgate is vehemently opposed to immigration and miscegenation, which he believes have severely disrupted the ‘organic balance of nature’.[39] The depth of his contempt for those who contravene this ‘natural order’ can be surmised from his attack on glamour model ‘Jordan’, whose child was fathered by a black footballer. ‘She has been rewarded for her racial treason’, jeered Southgate, ‘her picaninny has been born blind. just [sic] like his father, it would appear. still [sic], he can always become a Stevie Wonder impersonator when he grows up.’[40]
As such sentiments reveal, NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism’s humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as ‘infected’ with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism.[41] In its place Southgate has propagated a ‘third position’ anarchism based not on ‘moral’ rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the ‘natural order’ from which every group with ‘insurrectionist potential’ could unite to destroy ‘One World’ tyranny with a ‘primal bloodlust’.[42] NRF propaganda revels in this discordant Conradian stereotype of anarchism, glorifying both Bakunin’s ‘propaganda of the deed’ and Sergei Nechayev’s ‘science of destruction’.[43]
Having styled itself as an urban guerrilla group, NRF propaganda pays particular attention to the avoidance of state repression and surveillance by extolling a cellular, cadre-based organization comprising ‘political soldiers’ with four degrees of membership: the cadre or ‘active unit’, the trainee or probationary cadre, the supporter, and the outer circle who do little more than receive NRF publications. These four degrees of membership are subordinate to the Revolutionary Command Council, betraying a linguistic nod towards the continued ideological attraction of Qaddafi’s Libya, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s Egypt and the Iraqi Ba’athist Party.[44]
Such political organization reveals the NRF to be closer in inspiration to the Leninist ‘revolutionary vanguard’ than anarchism, even though it eulogizes the Angry Brigade and recommends Towards a Citizens Militia, published by Stuart Christie, one of [the] anarchists who was indicted though subsequently acquitted during the ‘Stoke Newington 8’ trial.[45] Indeed the NRF appropriates its symbolism from Marxist terror cells like the Red Army Faction, and its publications regularly feature instructions on the manufacture of homemade explosives, rockets, grenades, short-range mortars and napalm. In preparation for the total systemic collapse of capitalist society NRF cells are urged to immerse themselves in survivalist literature, military field manuals and encouraged to join the Territorial Army so that, as the Irish Republican Army discovered in the 1950s, ‘you can actually be paid and trained by the State in order to deal with its consequences’.[46] The NRF found even greater inspiration in the native terrorist tradition of the American far right and its concept of ‘leaderless resistance’, which is portrayed as an ‘anarchist’ alternative to the traditional mass-based organization that is rejected as ‘self-delusion’.[47] Having abandoned the constitutional’ approach of the British National Party the NRF is free to wage its ‘war of liberation’ against the British state and ‘international Zionism’ and in doing so evokes the inspiration of liberation leaders like Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who are listed as ‘exemplars for the struggle’.[48] This synthesis leads the NRF to promote a form of ‘black’ anarchism. These ideas owe a far greater debt, however, to fascism’s own tradition of terrorism and the ‘active nihilism’ of Julius Evola who in his later life preached that the outright destruction of the state was imperative. Southgate’s concept of ‘Real Anarchy’ is therefore little more than a repackaging of the esoteric principles of conservative revolutionary and Evolian thought.[49]
Richard Hunt and Alternative Green
Southgate’s espousal of Evolian Traditionalism underwent further ideological morphology through his contact with the anarcho-primitivist ideas of Richard Hunt, the founding editor of Green Anarchist who had been forced to resign over his support for the Gulf War. Southgate was exposed to Hunt’s ideas through the pages of Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective that eventually merged with his new publication Alternative Green.[50] Hunt’s ideas found their fullest expression in his book To End Poverty (1997), which argues that poverty in the ‘periphery’ is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the core’. This ‘progress’ represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and ‘biologically unhealthy’ population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards ‘total social breakdown’. Hunt’s panacea is to return to ‘the original affluent society’ of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a ‘peck order’ of ‘respect and influence’, bound by ‘kinship’, that would reestablish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism.[51]
Impressed by Hunt’s ‘grubby sort of utopia’ Southgate recognized that it could only be implemented following the ‘complete collapse’ of capitalism. Southgate believed that this eventuality was nearer to hand than was generally imagined, counselling that ‘national-revolutionaries’ needed to create ‘alternative revolutionary structures’ and ‘independent enclaves’ away from Britain’s ‘Asian infested cities’ in order to hasten capitalism’s demise. Thus the NRF advocated a localized ‘counter-economy’ based on smallholdings and allotments whose produce and required skills could be bartered through local exchange trading systems (LETS) suffused with a racist imperative to break the ‘dominating stranglehold’ of Asian shop owners. This racist anti-capitalism had as its end the desire to foment civil and racial strife through ‘no-go’ areas for ethnic minorities and state power as an essential prelude to racial civil war and the collapse of the capitalist system.[52]
Key to this is the maintenance of a network of like-minded and ideologically committed individuals, families and groups who have ‘turned their backs upon the corrosive influence of urbanism and decay’ and might feasibly form racially segregated rural communities and build something ‘tangible’.[53] Emulating the example of the Wandervogel, the British Woodcraft folk and the ‘legionary spirit’ of Corneliu Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Southgate formed the Greenshirts and a uniformed Iron Youth to re-establish the ‘eternal’ principles of blood and soil through cross-country hikes and camping.[54] Here can be found Southgate’s attempt to create the archetypal Fascist Man who, in Codreanu’s words, ‘does not bend, who is inflexible’.[55] These activities represent an integral part of the NRF’s long-term strategy to construct a broad range of viable political, social, cultural and economic alternatives to those of ‘the Establishment’ through which the children of its activists can emerge as ‘the true vanguard of our people’s future’.[56] To insulate them from the degenerate Americanized values of their peer group and a national curriculum based on ‘reading, writing and buggery’, Southgate schools his children from home.[57]
This racist communitarianism is given an ‘anarchist’ gloss through Southgate’s reinterpretation (and limitation) of the ideas of free and instinctive association implicit in Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as an expression of ‘folkish’ identity. Proclaiming that it is ‘anarchist’ to insist on ‘our own space’, Southgate excludes from these communities the ‘unnatural’ presence of ethnic minorities, homosexuals and feminists, not to mention those who support abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, vivisection and genetically modified foods. They would be free to form their own communities.[58] Influenced by Hunt’s anarcho-primitivism Southgate’s view of ‘Traditional Anarchy’ is suffused with Evola’s advocacy of ‘self-rule by an elite’ and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by ‘genetics’ that, despite its alleged ‘anarchism’, looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial ‘kingship’.[59] Southgate’s vision also absorbs the ideas of anarchist thinkers like John Zerzan, not to mention the Luddite terrorism of Ted Kaczynski, in order to theorize a ‘more natural lifestyle’, superficially free of the taint of ‘fascism’, adding a novel green/anarchist spin to Evola’s Traditionalism in the process.[60]
This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of ‘folk autonomy’ rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization. He was quick to appreciate that the anti-globalization movement was ‘sectarian’ in its political leanings. Alternative Green and its ‘overriding aversion to the Capitalist system’ was therefore an ‘ideal platform for formulating practical strategy’ to oppose capitalism.[61] Alternative Green was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a ‘sincere’ alliance of ‘anti-system’ protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe, though admittedly ‘there wasn’t much input from the far left’.[62] To push this agenda the Beyond Left and Right website was founded, although efforts to convene further events during 2001 proved unsuccessful when Anti-Fascist Action and members of Green Anarchist (and their arch-detractor Stewart Home) mobilized to ‘smash convergence’.[63] Southgate’s aborted attempt to transcend the left/right dichotomy and open a dialogue with the (now-reviled) ‘anarcho-dogmatists’ failed utterly.
Members of the anarchist trade union, the International Workers of the World, founded an anti-nationalist-anarchist e-group to refute the assertions being made by ‘national-anarchists’. Black Flag, the backbone of British anarchism, provided its Internet audience with a vast archive of online texts refuting Southgate’s assertion that racism and nationalism were ‘anarchist’. Individual members of Anti-Fascist Action have also been particularly active in challenging NRF activity in online newsgroups. The furore led to Hunt’s further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate’s frequent contributions to Alternative Green, his views have not permeated further within the far right.[64] Denounced as a ‘fascist’ Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green.[65] Having become ill Hunt finally relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green to Southgate; it was, however, suspended after only one issue and replaced with a new publication, untainted by the furore, entitled Terra Firma.[66]
The brief existence of the ‘Beyond Left and Right’ project hinted at its nebulous potential. Two veteran socialists, Gary Holden and Terry Liddle, both prominent in the Greenwich branch of the London Green Party, its Green Socialist Network and the South London Republican Forum, attended the 2000 Anarchist Heretics Fair. As news of their attendance emerged members of the UK_Left_Network e-group (unsuccessfully) lobbied the London Socialist Alliance and the Republican Communist Network (RCN), with which they were involved, to institute an enquiry. Liddle offered a somewhat unconvincing defence of his actions in both Republican Communist and Weekly Worker, organ of the minuscule Communist Party of Great Britain, which was closely aligned with the RCN, that stated that he had ‘no case to answer’. Calls for an enquiry were dismissed as a ‘witch hunt’ motivated by the ‘paranoid’ fantasy of Green Anarchist, thus sidestepping the actual content of the accusations. A parallel Green Party enquiry ended with Liddle’s resignation, however.[67]
As these events unfolded it became apparent that the NRF was practising a form of virtual entryism through the eco-anarchy e-group, an arm of the Canadian-based anarcho-green forum, in order to enquire into, among other things, the viability of forging a green/black bloc. Its moderator Joseph Catron had previously posted a number of messages to ‘national-revolutionary’ e-groups announcing his opposition to the ‘multicultural and imperialist nightmare’, and it has been suggested that the eco-anarchy e-group was a ‘honey trap’ designed to lure genuine and unsuspecting greens and anarchists into its orbit.[68] This thesis was given some credence by the fact that Dave Parks, the Anti-Fascist Action activist who exposed these machinations, was barred from the list rather than those he exposed.[69]
Mindful of the contemporary success of the red/brown coalition in Russia, NRF cadres sought to create ‘a working synthesis’ between anti-capitalists of both the left and right.[70] Indeed, with the collapse of ‘really existing’ Communism in 1989, the NRF abandoned ‘third position’ fascism as ‘irrelevant’. Having immersed himself in the writings of both Hunt and anarchist theorist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), Southgate reconceptualized the coming struggle in terms of a Manichaean division between ‘those for Capitalism and those against Capitalism, Centralists versus Decentralists’.[71] In this respect ‘national-anarchism’ was ‘transcending the very notion of beyond’ by taking synthesis to its ‘logical’ extreme and uniting all anti-systemic opposition against a single enemy: global liberal capitalism deemed to operate as a front for the ‘shadowy financiers’ of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and therefore ‘International Zionism’.
by Searcher08 » Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:17 am
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:25 am
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 12:08 pm
Netanyahu calls for 'massive immigration' of European Jews to Israel
After two shootings in Copenhagen, PM says cabinet to discuss $46 million plan to encourage Jewish immigration from Ukraine, France and Belgium; Bennett: European Jews should know Israel is their home.
by slimmouse » Sun Feb 15, 2015 12:27 pm
seemslikeadream wrote:I didn't either...but I'm sure the message is us/them
by seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 12:34 pm
by American Dream » Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:20 pm
On the old saw, “Islam isn’t a race.”
Sunday, February 8, 2015 — Adam Kotsko
It’s the ultimate get out of jail free card: when a critic of Islam is accused of racism, they point out that “Islam is not a race.” I agree on a certain level. Islam is a faith that embraces believers on every continent, in hundreds of ethnic groups. While Arabic has a special privilege as a language, there is explicitly no racial requirement for accepting and practicing Islam.
That’s why it’s so strange that critics of Islam constantly treat Islam as though it’s a race. They claim to be nervous about the religion, but then it turns out that the largely secularized and only episodically observant “Muslim” population in France is a big problem for cultural homogeneity, for instance. And even when an intellectual from a Muslim background renounces Islam, they become famous precisely as an ex-Muslim. Within this rhetorical framework, Islam looks suspiciously like a race in the sense that it is a social grouping one is regarded as belonging to from birth and from which one can never “opt out,” at least not fully.
What’s worth remembering here is that even the traditional racial categories “aren’t a race” in the sense of corresponding to an identifiable biological reality. Every race is a social construct. Even black Africans (the quintessential “race” of Western racism) were not “a race” before Westerners incorporated them into a racial hierarchy and began oppressing them on that basis. We usually think of racism as prejudice against a race that somehow preexists the prejudice, but the historical reality is the reverse. Racism creates the racial group as a race in order to legitimate differential treatment.
Hence I propose that we are today witnessing the construction of Islam precisely as a race in Western discourse. Obviously the racialization of the Islamic Other has always been a part of the Western arsenal — though it’s interesting to note that the regions where Islam has been traditionally dominant (North Africa, Middle East, Indian subcontinent) have always fit awkwardly into the traditional scheme of races — but today it is proceeding with a thoroughness and level of explicitness that is largely unprecedented.
Hence the only response to the “Islam isn’t a race” dodge is, “Perhaps it wasn’t before, but you are making it into a race.”
by Project Willow » Sun Feb 15, 2015 11:59 pm
American Dream » 10 Feb 2015 13:09 wrote:I'm not so sure jakell would welcome such people as his next door neighbors...
American Dream » Sat Feb 14, 2015 10:48 pm wrote:You know, if I were to venture a guess, it would be that you're much more ok, than not ok with Israel Shamir, and his line...
Searcher08 wrote:American Dream » Sat Feb 14, 2015 4:00 pm wrote:2. You do and have over the years endorsed many, many ideas which 99.9% of the people I know in the English-speaking world would consider far right and/or racist. I object to that on principle and because I still believe in muckraking, in conspiracy expose's as a (potentially) effective means of promoting positive social change. I see your posting pattern as fairly negative, in this light.
Post a Link Or Shut The F*** Up.
by American Dream » Mon Feb 16, 2015 9:50 am
by Elvis » Mon Feb 16, 2015 10:25 am
American Dream wrote: I would appreciate a bit more help from you in getting to the roots of the problems so that we can really move on in a different and better way.
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