The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Dec 22, 2017 8:20 am

Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right

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by Harrison Fluss & Landon Frim

If we want to fight the new fascism, we must not only organise against it politically, but also understand its ideology. Far from being a morbid curiosity, this is essential for understanding twenty-first century fascism’s inner dynamics. Beyond racist tweets, memes, and Richard Spencer’s obnoxious media appearances, we need to lay bare the images, concepts, and ideas that form the core of alt- right thought. We must lay bare the alt-right imagination.

This imagination is an unstable and fractured thing, torn between two opposing ‘animal spirits’. These are Behemoth and Leviathan. Originating in the Bible, these beasts gained philosophical meaning in Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, and entered fascist thought through the writings of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.


Who are these monsters? Behemoth is a lumbering giant; it is usually mammalian, often an elephant or trampling bull, occasionally a Russian bear. Behemoth jealously defends its territory against incursions by the sea monster, the serpentine whale-fish called Leviathan. As Schmitt put it in 1942’s Land and Sea, ‘Behemoth exerts itself to rip apart the Leviathan with its horns or teeth, while the Leviathan, on the contrary, holds shut the mouth and nose of the land animal with its fins so that it cannot eat or breathe’. For Schmitt, this describes a naval blockade, and has its analogy in the conflicts between England and Russia in the nineteenth century, and England and Germany in the twentieth.

These beasts are a pair of opposites: Behemoth is autochthonous, representing the stable order of earth-bound peoples. Leviathan is thalassocratic, embodying the fluid dynamism of seafaring peoples. Behemoth signifies terrestrial empires, while Leviathan suggests commercial trade and exploration. The former stands for traditional, divinely sanctioned state authority, the latter for the spirit of pirate-capitalist enterprise (what Schmitt calls ‘corsair capitalism’).

Today, the ‘Traditionalist’ philosopher Aleksandr Dugin and the ‘neoreactionary’ philosopher Nick Land are the standard bearers of Behemoth and Leviathan, respectively. They are also the conduits by which these animal spirits have entered the twenty- first century alt-right imagination. It is for this reason that the alt- right mind is such a conflicted, contradictory thing. It is not that most reactionaries today engage much with Dugin and Land’s texts, let alone Carl Schmitt’s. But the seemingly opposed worldviews of Land and Dugin are the very ether within which alt-right thought is steeped. It is an ideology torn between technophilic Futurism and neo-Orthodox Traditionalism. Both positions reject Enlightenment modernity, but each of these fascist ‘postmodernisms’ represents its own distinct variety or brand. For Dugin, the break with modernity is accomplished through an ethno-religious apocalypse – a return to orthodoxy, and an activation of a mystical eschaton beyond time. Land imagines the break from liberal modernity will be accomplished through an accelerating techno-capitalism, superseding humanity itself. Despite these differences, both figures reject modernity as ending in the nightmare of cultural Marxism.



Putin’s Brain
In a 2017 interview with the Daily Beast, Aleksandr Dugin expressed his outrage at the ‘unforgivable’ tomahawk missile strikes on Syria by the United States. But while he bashed Trump for becoming a ‘mad neocon’, Dugin praised his then chief strategist Steve Bannon as Washington’s ‘last hope’. He even affirmed Bannon’s role as the main architect behind the administration’s America First, anti- globalist policy: ‘the denial of globalism, rejection of America’s hegemony, the return of religious and national interests, his criticism of liberals and respect for traditional values’.

At a 2014 Vatican conference (leaked by Buzzfeed), Bannon criticised the Putin administration as a kleptocracy. He nonetheless showed sincere appreciation for Putin’s ‘Traditionalism’ and opposition to Islamic terrorism. Bannon’s praise was not mitigated by his knowledge that Traditionalism, as a theory, is specifically derived from the ideas of Julius Evola that later ‘metastasised into Italian fascism’. Bannon also cited an unnamed Putin adviser who ‘harkens back’ to Evolean ideas. This advisor was Dugin himself.

Bannon’s political fortunes have waned: he used to function as ‘Trump’s brain’. Dugin, however, appears to be at the apogee of his influence. In 2014, Dugin lost his professorship at Moscow State University over genocidal comments made about Ukraine (‘Kill them, kill them, kill them. There should not be any more conversations. As a professor, I consider it so’). But after his academic ouster, Dugin and the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev launched the popular Russian news channel Tsargrad (Constantinople) TV. With its 20 million viewers, Tsargrad tries to be the Russian equivalent of FOX News, and is a mouthpiece for the Russian state and Orthodox Church. Dugin is a chief editor and commentator, while Malofeev serves as his benefactor.

Dugin’s influence on Kremlin policy has been a matter of debate. However, there is no question that he has intervened at key junctures as a diplomatic ‘fixer’. According to a Bloomberg report, in 2015 Dugin acted as a backchannel to ameliorate tensions between Turkey’s Erdoğan and Putin following the downing of a Russian plane over Turkish airspace. The main effect of this was to outmaneuver then-president Obama in Syria by solidifying Turkish support for the Russian-backed Assad regime. In Dugin’s mind, this was not only a matter of realpolitik, but the first step in a Russo- Islamic alliance against the liberal West. Today, Dugin and Putin’s geopolitics are essentially indistinguishable.

Dugin’s Traditionalism is a tendency of extreme right-wing ideology, first conceived by interwar thinkers René Guénon and his disciple Julius Evola. Traditionalists derive their name from the eponymous ‘Tradition’, which Marlène Laruelle defines as ‘a world that was steady in its religious, philosophical, and social principles and started disappearing with the advent of modernity in the sixteenth century’. In Revolt Against the Modern World of 1934, Evola specifically traces how the advent of Renaissance humanism threatened the Tradition’s social hierarchy. According to Guénon, all true religions participate in this now-extinct primordial Tradition, which is best preserved in those cultures relatively untouched by Western modernity (especially Islamic cultures).

Dugin’s enthusiasm for ‘The Tradition’ began early in life. Despite coming from a Soviet military family, he saw Traditionalism as a means of escape from the gradual collapse of the Soviet system. He was expelled from the Moscow Aviation Institute for possession of Traditionalist and occult literature. Dugin translated Evola’s 1933 Pagan Imperialism, which urges Italian fascism to embrace pagan elitism, into a samizdat. After the USSR’s collapse, Dugin briefly joined the ultranationalist Pamyat’ (Memory) organisation, an echo of the antisemitic Black Hundreds. By the early nineties, he drew closer to nationalist and Eurasianist circles, and founded the Arctogaia Association. He also associated with Gennady Ziuganov’s fascistic Russian Communist Party, which mixed Stalinist nostalgia with ultra-nationalism. Dugin found this eccentric ‘red-brown’ combination of Communism and fascism congenial, and later sought out Traditionalist circles in Western Europe, such as Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite.

Dugin then became a chief ideologue for the fascist National Bolshevik Party, but later left that organisation to become an adviser for Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party (incidentally another poorly named party given its far-right stance). This was his stepping stone to Putin’s inner circle. After writing The Foundations of Geopolitics (widely read by both generals and university students) Dugin made the transition from political crank to political player.



Dugin’s ‘Armed Doctrine’

Dugin claims that Eurasianism is the ‘armed doctrine of Traditionalism’. It is how Traditionalist ideas get cached out in the realm of international relations. While he is known for his geopolitical interventions, author James Heiser explains how Dugin conceives of international relations as mirroring a mystical- cosmic battle, a Manichean struggle between the forces of light and those of the antichrist. The primordial Tradition was the original wisdom of the Hyperboreans, the supposed denizens of a now submerged polar continent, sometimes called ‘Arctogaia’ or ‘Hyperborea’. This idea is very similar to that of the Ariosophist (i.e. Aryan supremacist) doctrines of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. The Tradition, per Dugin, entered our present world through the Hyperborean diaspora; they were the ‘white teachers’ of human civilisation. Miscegenation with the ‘more primitive and earth-bound dark-skinned peoples of the tropical south’ resulted in a dilution of their superior racial stock. Eventually, this led to the emergence of a non-Traditional society in the West – the Atlanticists. The interwar-inspired racism of this mythos is certainly palpable.

The geopolitical contest between Russia and the United States is understood through this meta-historical narrative of ‘sacred geography’. In Dugin’s cosmology, the present, observable world is not explainable through empirical causes. Instead, international relations are but an echo of a primordial spiritual warfare, between the virtuous Arctogaians of the North and the demonic Earth peoples of the South and West. The stakes of this contest are no less than the salvation of humanity, as opposed to mere resources or territory.

Dugin’s ‘sacred geography’ ruptures the dualism between the worldly and the transcendent. On the one hand, the ‘North’ in this Tradition refers to a submerged continent whose civilisation no longer exists. These ‘men of Arctogaia’, these ‘white teachers’, are not reducible to Northern Europeans or ‘Aryans’ as understood by nineteenth century ‘scientific’ racists. Indeed, Dugin goes to great pains to explain that every civilisation has benefited from ‘white teachers’ among them, and perplexingly, that ‘white’ doesn’t actually refer to skin pigmentation at all. Nevertheless, sacred geography entails that Arctogaia was, at some point, a physical location, and consequently, that the present-day world has some physical relation to that long-lost continent. We see Dugin constantly valorising the Polar North, and those parts of the Russian Federation closest to it (especially Siberia). It’s no coincidence that Dugin’s publisher in the English-speaking world is called Arktos Media, as the mythic concept of Arktos (North) is central to Dugin’s myth-making. Like Schmitt’s political symbol of the Behemoth, Arktos refers in Greek mythology to a great Bear, and sometimes a Centaur, who defeats the spear-throwing Lapiths people of Southern Europe.

Dugin is canny when it comes to professions of pluralism and equality amongst peoples. What appears at first blush to be a universalism is actually an ethnopluralism. Dugin affirms that each genuine culture has the right to persist in its uniqueness, and derides Enlightenment modernity as genocidal, disrespecting distinct cultures, particular histories and customs. Enlightenment obliterates all of these in favor of a global humanity. However, Dugin’s ethnopluralism is always expressed through a Traditionalism- inspired hierarchy. The coming Eurasian Empire will be integrated, first and foremost, by the ‘guardian angel spirit’ of the Russians, and all other Eurasian peoples will retain their cultural identity at the price of dissolving all claims to national sovereignty.

This ethnocentrism defines Dugin’s ‘Fourth Political Theory’, which supersedes the ‘failed’ theories of liberalism, communism, and fascism. It imagines a federated Eurasia where only communal, rather than human or individual, rights are respected. The biological corollary to this is that the Eurasian Empire will be one of permanently distinct ‘peoples’ who combine under Russian tutelage to oppose the West, but avoid a culture-diluting miscegenation at home. This Empire will not be democratic, since only a martial elite are fit for rule. Dugin invokes the need for a ‘party of death’, along the lines of Hezbollah, praising sharia law and the clericalisation of society (especially the subservience of women and internet censorship).

Dugin’s ethnopluralism starkly reveals its true colors when it comes to the Jews. In a manner reminiscent of Carl Schmitt, Dugin distinguishes between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ Jewry. As is made clear in the 2008 introduction to Leviathan, Schmitt thinks that the good Jews are the Israelis. For they have regained connection to their ancestral soil and so resolved to live as a geographically delimited people, as opposed to seeking either a nomadic life or assimilation. Dugin sees Eastern European Jews as the deracinated, historic enemies of Russian nationalism.

Again, this is explicable through spiritual, not material reasoning. For Dugin, the Jews are metaphysically ‘indigestible’ because of their peculiar ethno-religious worldview. To use the Evolean term, the Jewish religion is one of ‘counter-tradition’ because of its linear, as opposed to cyclical, conception of time. Whereas mythic traditions affirm endless repetition of heroic struggle, Jews according to Evola and Dugin affirm linear progress, material advance, and accumulation. Besides, the Jewish rejection of Christ, on Dugin’s view, means the rejection of salvation through the Earth. This is an interesting theological contortion on Dugin’s part; it places Christianity within the Pagan earth-tradition through emphasising the bodiliness of the incarnate Jesus. Conversely, it places Judaism (along with the materialist West) as the hostile ‘other’ to this grand pagan inheritance.

Dugin claims that Russian Orthodoxy is closest to the Tradition, with its stubborn preservation of baroque ritual ‘where each gesture has a symbolic meaning’. This is not to mention the non-humanist emphasis on the End of Days which activates a ‘new beginning’. As such, even the criticism of Judaica ends with Russian- Orthodox chauvinism. Dugin’s mythic determinations are explicitly racial: He contrasts the spirit of ‘Judaica’, not only with Christianity, but also with the Aryan. This echoes Otto Weininger in denigrating the Jewish mentality as effeminate and weak, as opposed to the warrior ethos of the Aryan. Jews are slave moralists, ‘masochists’, while Aryans are aristocratic and ‘sadistic’. In this perverse mythos, the spirit of Judaica must be ‘vanquished’ by the Aryan.

Jewish materialism’s highest expression is what Dugin refers to as ‘Trotskyite neo-conservatism’ in the US. The neoconservative is the political vanguard of Atlanticism – a system of Western hegemony and consumerism that dominates the world through markets and technology, backed by force. The internet has become the ultimate ‘thalassocratic’ tool, promoting borderlessness and replacing reality with its own simulacrum. Dugin even went so far as to say that the internet should be banned. In a 2012 speech entitled ‘God is against [the] Internet’ he explains, ‘I think that Internet as such, as a phenomenon, is worth prohibiting because it gives nobody anything good’. In Dugin’s recent book on Heidegger, he complains that the internet takes the place of God as a ‘clown- killer from Mars’.



Land’s Atlanteanism

On his blog and on Twitter, Nick Land accepts Dugin as his ‘best enemy’, and also accepts Dugin’s appellation of ‘Atlanticist’. ‘We agree exactly about what the war is. We’re just on opposite sides of it’. But in modifying the term as ‘Atlantean’, Land also modifies its meaning. He accepts the basic division between terrestrial and sea power, and between statist traditionalism and modern capitalism. Land is even aware of the irony of affirming ‘sea-power’ given his terrestrial last name.However, he wants to cleanse Atlantean identity of any associations with liberal democracy and egalitarianism. On Xenosystems.net, Land’s blogsite, he enthusiastically predicts the end of NATO, the EU, and other institutions hostile to the emergence of a hegemonic Anglosphere.

Land rejects the populist, collectivist, and even pro-Trump elements of the North American alt-right as too ‘organicist’ and evocative of continental Europe (‘The alt-right has at its core an alien, Anglophobic ideology.’) He prefers the Tea Party’s brand of populism, which promotes right-libertarian ideas of free-markets, over what he calls collectivist ‘fascism’. But even Tea Party style populism does not quite capture Land’s aristocratic disdain for the unwashed and ‘unproductive’ masses.

Notwithstanding Land and Dugin’s differences, there is a shared rejection of liberalism, democracy, and Marxism, and a common affirmation of hierarchy, authoritarianism, and violence. This fascist ethos is also expressed in racist terms, with Dugin promoting a veiled antisemitism and Land issuing virulent Islamophobic screeds. Regardless of Land’s reservations about Richard Spencer’s alt-right politics, Land finds himself part of the ‘Outer-Right’, and was a guest on the premier alt-right channel Red Ice TV. As he told host Henrik Palmgren, his conception of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ derives from a strain of libertarianism hostile to democracy; a retooled ‘classical liberalism’ that embraces authoritarian government to ensure capitalist profits. Land’s heroes are Mencius Moldbug (aka Curtis Yarvin) and Peter Thiel, Bay Area tech-capitalists. Here, we transition from the piracy of Elizabethan times, that Schmitt describes in Land and Sea, to the pirates of Silicon Valley. The high seas have given way to cyberspace as the dynamic site of accumulation.


Continues at: http://salvage.zone/in-print/behemoth-a ... alt-right/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 23, 2017 9:15 am

Matthew Lyons’ Letter to the Editor

Posted on March 15, 2015 by sdonline

Dear Socialism and Democracy,

I was disturbed to read Efe Can Gürcan’s review essay “NATO’s ‘Globalized’ Atlanticism and the Eurasian Alternative” (Socialism and Democracy vol. 27, no. 2). Gürcan details the rise of (neo-)Eurasianism as an ideological challenge to NATO Atlanticism and US imperialism. But he systematically hides key Eurasianists’ neo-fascist and ultranationalist politics, making it impossible for readers to assess the movement in an informed manner.

Gürcan describes the contemporary Eurasianist movement’s founder, Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, as “an influential Russian thinker and scholar who served as an adviser to Vladimir Putin and numerous parliamentarians.”1 He doesn’t mention that Dugin is also the Russian far right’s leading intellectual and one of the most influential neo-fascist theoreticians in the world today. During the 1990s, Dugin spent several years as chief theoretician for Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, which promoted a blend of fascist and Soviet communist ideology. In 1997 Dugin extolled a “clean, ideal fascism” that stands for “a new hierarchy, a new aristocracy…based on natural, organic [and] clear principles — dignity, honor, courage, [and] heroism.” He argued that Mussolini and Hitler were forced to compromise these ideals by allying with conservatives and capitalists.2

Since the 1990s, Dugin has been one of the leading figures in the European New Right, an international project to rework fascist ideology within the framework of “ethno-pluralism.”3 The results are somewhat contradictory. Dugin disavows Nazi racism and any ethnic hierarchies, yet he has declared, “wherever there is a single drop of Aryan (Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, European) blood, there is a chance for racial awakening, for the rebirth of the primordial Aryan conscience.”4 He rejects vulgar antisemitism yet has warned that “the world of ‘Judaica’ is hostile to us,” and that “the Indo-European elite” needs to understand Jews “not ‘to forgive,’ but ‘to defeat’” them.5

Dugin’s Eurasianism draws on the geopolitical doctrine of Karl Haushofer, who gave Hitler the concept of Lebensraum, as well as other inter-war far right thinkers, such as traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola and conservative revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who coined the slogan “the Third Reich.” Dugin envisions a renewed Eurasian “empire” in which ethnic Russians will hold a privileged position based on their “messianic,” “world-historical mission.”6 He advocates the “Eurasian” values of authoritarianism, hierarchy, religion, communitarianism, and patriarchy, against the “absolute evil” of Atlanticist values including individualism, liberalism, parliamentary democracy, feminism, and homosexuality.7 He has promoted the arch-conservative Russian Orthodox Church as a dominant institution in Russian society, for example condemning the feminist and leftist band Pussy Riot, some of whose members are currently imprisoned for publicly protesting against the church’s power. At the same time, Dugin calls for a “global revolutionary alliance” of rightists and leftists against Atlanticist elites.8

Gürcan completely whitewashes Dugin’s Eurasianism, claiming that Dugin “uphold[s] at once the diversity of value-systems and the need for economic development, the emancipation of labor, and social justice.” His only caveat is that Dugin’s theory is limited by “such values as mysticism, traditionalism and esoterism.”9

Gürcan then turns his attention to Turkish Eurasianism, which compared with Dugin’s version exhibits “a stronger mobilizing capacity” because it “prioritizes rationalistic, secular and realistic values.”10 He rightly notes that Turkey’s main proponent of Eurasianism, the Workers’ Party (WP), is rooted in Maoism. But Gürcan (who has himself been published in the WP’s theoretical journal) doesn’t mention that the WP embraces ultra-nationalism and that many Turkish leftists regard it as left wing in name only. The WP program claims that “The Kurdish Question, in view of democratic rights and freedoms, has been basically solved.”11 (In reality, the Turkish state continues to persecute Kurds who assert their cultural identity, and has arrested over 10,000 Kurdish human rights activists, labor organizers, and political leaders just since 2011.12) The WP refers to the Armenian Genocide during World War I as a “falsification,” and party head Doğu Perinçek has claimed that the mass killings were fabricated by the British secret services.13

The Workers’ Party also has a history of collaborating with the far rightist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), for example in campaigns against the European Union and the proposed reunification of Cyprus. The WP advocates an alliance of Turkish leftists and rightists on the basis of anti-imperialism and Kemalism (secular Turkish nationalism closely associated with the army). WP leaders have met with Aleksandr Dugin in both Turkey and Russia, and Perinçek joined the supreme council of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement. In keeping with this alliance, the WP head regards Russia as “the critical country of the alignment in Eurasia,” and argues somewhat awkwardly that “Russia has taken up the same positions with the Oppressed World although she is an imperialist-capitalist state.”14

Eurasianism, including Gürcan’s “Eurasian movement from below,” means supporting the ruling classes of Eurasian countries — above all, Russia — in their inter-capitalist rivalry with the US ruling class. While some leftists rationalize this as a united front of democratic, anti-imperialist forces, a closer look shows that the movement is in fact spearheaded by ethnic chauvinists such as the Workers’ Party (Turkey) and neo-fascists such as Aleksandr Dugin. If Gürcan genuinely doesn’t know what these people stand for then he is not competent to write about them. Much more likely is that he knows perfectly well but chose not to tell us.

Matthew Lyons


http://sdonline.org/64/exchange-on-eurasianism/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 06, 2018 10:23 am

https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... orgetting/

The act of forgiving (and forgetting)

August 4, 2017 by Leila Al Shami

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Picture by Wissam Al Jazairy

Forgive (Verb):

Stop feeling angry or resentful towards (someone) for an offence, flaw, or mistake.
No longer feel angry about or wish to punish (an offence, flaw, or mistake).

[Oxford online dictionary]

For six years Assad has waged a campaign of extermination against a people who rose for freedom. His crimes have been so well documented, by both testimony and photographic evidence, that the international community is left in little doubt that this man, and his regime, have perpetrated atrocities on such a scale that they amount to crimes against humanity.

Yet today there are few voices within the international community that are calling for Assad’s departure. The focus is now on regime preservation, ‘stability’ and the ever-expanding ‘War on Terror’. It seems that the crimes of the tyrant can be forgiven, forgotten, erased from history. That he can keep the throne he destroyed a country for.

We shouldn’t be surprised that those in power protect the interests of the powerful. Or that there was never any real support for a popular movement that brought a state to its knees. Even those ‘Friends of Syria’, who spent millions on their five-star conferences as the country burned, were only ever motivated by their own interests and agendas. Welcome to the theatre of the absurd.

But forgiving, and forgetting, are luxuries not afforded to those who have lost everything. It’s much easier to be a ‘neutral observer’ from the outside. For millions of Syrians, the political is personal and the wounds of war will not be easily healed. Memories forged from pain are not so easily effaced.

You forget. The brutality of this regime did not begin in 2011. The totalitarian state was founded by Assad père. It was he who built the Kingdom of Silence and Terror where all dissent was ruthlessly crushed. Thousands of political opponents disappeared into the Syrian gulag. Many never got out. Those that did were often a shell of their former selves, ghosts amongst the living, broken by the torture, by the horror. And then there was Hama, the city razed to the ground in 1982 to quell an insurgency. Thousands – mainly civilians – lost their lives at the hands of Assad’s army. The viciousness of this repression kept Syrians silent, humiliated, until Mohamed Bouazizi – a Tunisian – ignited the hopes of a new generation.

When Bashar inherited the dictatorship from his father little changed except for the cosmetics of discourse. ‘Modernization’ and ‘development’ were the new buzzwords – but the regime kept people impoverished politically, economically and culturally. Bashar’s neo-liberal reforms benefited the crony capitalist class – who amassed their wealth through connections and corruption, pillaging and plundering a country they saw as their own personal fiefdom – holding the masses in perpetual contempt. Bashar had no wish to reform the fascist nature of the Syrian state. Imprisonment of regime critics, torture and enforced disappearance remained wide-spread. Syrians will not forget.

The revolution fostered such great hopes for change. And those hopes were crushed and shattered into a million pieces mirroring the fragments of a bleeding nation that descended into chaos and war. The regime’s barbarisms – and new barbarisms – were unleashed on a scale no one could have predicted and no one could contain. And in the international community’s acquiescence to the Syrian regime’s crimes, obscene levels of violence meted out by a state against rebelling citizens have become normalized. The ramifications will be felt not only by Syrians, but by all.

What does forgiveness look like for a mother who has pulled her child – piece by bloodied piece – from the ruins of her smoldering home? What does forgiveness look like for those who struggled to identify the tortured corpse of a loved one? For those who will now live a life of poverty and exile, severed from their homeland, their memories, and their dreams? Will forgetting come easily? Or will they be consumed by grief, rage and a desire for revenge?

Dreams are haunted by friends and heroes that are no longer here. What were their thoughts in their dying moments? Did they regret daring to dream that the impossible was possible? Did they cry out for their mothers as their bodies were racked by pain and cast aside? How did they feel as they were being brutalized – transformed from a human being – with all their hopes and fears – into just another statistic? Is it possible to forgive, to forget?

There is one thing that unites all Syrians, regardless of their political views: a feeling of immense pain and loss. And no doubt some element of forgiveness will be necessary to heal the wounds of a fractured nation. But it is hard to see how the country can move forward when the man and the regime responsible for this horror remain in place. The political leaders who presided over and directed this descent into barbarity must be held accountable for their crimes. As the slogan has it, ‘no justice, no peace’.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 13, 2018 11:57 am

STEVE BANNON’S “WASHED OUT” ANTISEMITISM

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Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland.


ANTISEMITIC NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND CODE WORDS
Breitbart’s content under Bannon includes a strong emphasis on stories which reflect various traditional antisemitic narratives, but where the actor is not named as “the Jews.” Instead it is sometimes another group which has traditionally been used either as a “code word” for Jews, while at other times it is a specific Jewish person who the narrative is used against. There are a range of these articles. As Political Research Associates contributor Matthew Lyons writes in his forthcoming book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire, this approach allows one to harness the emotional power of the antisemitic narrative, and appeals to conscious antisemites, while simultaneously giving a kind of plausible deniability against accusations of antisemitism.

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Endless Breitbart articles decry the “globalist elites” and “globalism,” and in one particularly pointed statement, Bannon decries the “establishment, globalist clique.” Numerous articles target liberal financier George Soros, who is described using traditional antisemitic imagery at least twice: one article calls him the “Puppet Master,” and a Breitbart Tweet says he is “Like an octopus.” “Cultural Marxism” is a frequent target; this narrative emerged as a form of coded antisemitism where the Frankfurt School philosophers, who were largely Jewish, were accused of being the cause of all the social ills that antisemites usually blame “the Jews” for. Terms like the “coastal elite,” “puppet masters,” “string pullers,” “banksters,” and the “octopus”—all of which have been used as antisemitic codewords—are frequently trotted out. So are institutions which antisemites frequently target as the mechanisms of Jewish control, including the Federal Reserve and Trilateral Commission.


More at: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2018/ ... isemitism/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 16, 2018 11:20 am

An Investigation Into Red-Brown Alliances: Third Positionism, Russia, Ukraine, Syria, And The Western Left

15th January 2018 written by ARoamingVagabond


Note for safety purposes: this post will contain links to far-right pages for documentation and sourcing purposes, and any link to such a page will be in bold and italic, such as this.

This post started as an investigation about the Left and Syria which I started after I read the Sol Process blog’s publicati0n of three posts concerning shady pro-Assad sources used in leftist circles (which can be read here: part I, part II, part III), and which later expanded into a more extensive investigation.

On Some Obscure Strains Of Fascism
I will first provide some historical context by exploring the history of some lesser known forms of fascism which, unlike the majority of Western fascists who supported the United States’ anti-Communism during the Cold War, instead actively supported and rallied around the Soviet Union.
German National Bolshevism

The very first National-Bolsheviks were Heinrich Laufenberg, a former member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who had been President of the Council of the Workers and Soldiers in Hamburg during the German Revolution, and Fritz Wolffheim, an ex-member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who was then living in Hamburg, and who were both leaders of the Hamburg branch of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the 1910s. In 1919 they submitted to Karl Radek their policy of having the working class ally with the bourgeoisie into a nationalist dictatorship of the proletariat which would fight a national liberation war (a position which would strangely be adopted by various Marxist-Leninist and Maoist groups in the late 20th century) against the Allies occupying Germany following WWI. Laufenberg’s and Wolffheim’s proposal was rejected by Radek and labelled as an absurdity by Vladimir Lenin himself, and they were soon expelled from the KPD. Laufenberg and Wolffheim later helped the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), but were soon expelled from it as well because of their National Bolshevism, their expulsion being Radek’s condition for admitting the KAPD to the Third Congress of the Comintern.

The French occupation of the Ruhr resulted in rising nationalism in Germany, especially among the working class, and threatened the Soviet Union’s cooperation with Germany laid down in the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 and the Soviet-German Military Pact, which allowed Germany to circumvent the limitations on it imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and under which far-right German paramilitaries of the Schwarze Reichswehr (which included Freikorps formations) were permitted to train in Soviet territory and provide training for the newly created Red Army, and for Germany to give credits to the Soviet Union while German firms were allowed to establish factories for the production of war equipment in Soviet territory. The Comintern subsequently pushed for cooperation between the Communists and the ultra-nationalists, and Radek gave a speech to the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Comintern praising Leo Schlageter, a far-right Freikorps member who together with his unit joined the NSDAP in 1921 and engaged in sabotage against the French forces occupying the Ruhr before being executed by them. This was a followed by a period of cooperation between the KPD and the Nazis against the Versailles Treaty during which KPD member Ruth Fischer infamously attacked “Jewish capital”, and the KPD’s newspaper reprinted articles by members of the German far-right while its rank and file members were fighting against fascists on the streets. This second National-Bolshevik wave died off during the period of growth Germany experienced from the mid- to late-1920s, though following the Comintern’s “social fascism” turn (itself partly a reaction to the SPD using Freikorps units to crush the Spartacist uprising, during which revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht were murdered) the KPD cooperated again with the NSDAP in an attempt to bring down the Social Democratic Party-led government of Prussia in 1931, again with support from the Comintern, which wished to end diplomatic talks between France and Germany, and participated in a strike together with the NSDAP in 1932, while again rank and file Communists instead engaged in street battles against Nazi brownshirts. This strategy, also based on the flawed accelerationist idea that the fascists’ policies would lead to a proletarian revolution and summed by then leader of the KPD Ernst Thälmann’s slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn!”, actively helped the rise of the Nazis, and the KPD refused to form a United Front with the SPD and preferred directing its attacks against the social demorats even after the Nazis seized power and unleashed their violence on the German Left.

The third period of National-Bolshevism came with Ernst Niekisch, a former member of the SPD who was expelled for his extreme nationalism after which he joined the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany, which he pushed towards a more nationalist direction and called for a “Prussian-Slavonic bloc” from Vlissingen to Vladivostok. Niekisch saw the Russian Revolution as a national form of class struggle,advocated for a nationalist form of Communism and joined the Consortium for the Study of Soviet Planned Economy (ARPLAN), which aimed to establish cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, which he saw as the only way of opposing the Treaty of Versailles. Niekisch was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Nazi regime in 1934 and was released after the Second World War, becoming an orthodox Marxist and moving to West Germany following the suppression of the 1953 workers uprising by the German Democratic Republic with Soviet support. Among those influenced by Niekisch was Otto Paetel, who formed the Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists, which opposed the Versailles Treaty, supported close cooperation with the Soviet Union and saw anti-capitalism as the means to free Germany from Western occupation. Unlike Niekisch, who was staunchly anti-Nazi, Paetel attempted to work with the Hitler Youth and many members of his organization also belonged to the “left wing” of the Nazi party of Gregor and Otto Strasser.

Gregor And Otto Strasser
Stresserism was a form of National-Socialism advocated by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, both German veterans of the First World War who later served in the Freikorps which destroyed the socialist Bavarian Soviet Republic. Gregor took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 which attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and replace it with a reactionary authoritarian state while Otto joined the Social Democratic Party and opposed the coup.

Both Gregor and Otto later joined Hitler’s Nazi party and Gregor helping Hitler organize and grow the Nazi party all across Germany. The Strasser brothers led a left-wing faction of the Nazi party which advocated for nationalizations and a mass action, worker-based and anti-capitalist while still extremely anti-Semitic and anti-Communist form of Nazism, with Otto interpreting Stalinism as a Russian form of National-Socialism and advocating for cooperation with the Soviet Union. Hitler’s faction of the party instead sought to ally with industrialists, and this as well as rivalry between Gregor Strasser and Hitler led to clashes between the two, and during the Night of the Long Knives which followed Hitler’s rise to power Gregor was killed and his faction of the Nazi party was purged, while Otto would form the Black Front after being expelled from the Nazi party in 1930 and later went in exile before later returning to West Germany after the Second World War, where he remained active among neo-fascists.

Francis Parker Yockey
As Anarchist researcher Kevin Coogan details in his book, Francis Parker Yockey was born in Chicago, Illinois in the United States, where he briefly flirted with Marxism in his youth before soon abandoning it for fascism. He came under the influence of Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer and Oswald Spengler, members of the German reactionary movement known as the Conservative Revolution (many of the ideologues of the Conservative Revolution supported an alliance with the Soviet Union), especially their ideas on culture elites, geopolitics and support for anti-colonial struggles.
Yockey would later associate with fascists during the Interwar period and during the Second World War including Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund, the National German-American Alliance, the Silver Shirts, the America First Movement, among others. During WWII, Yockey would enlist in the US army despite opposing the entry of the US in the war, disappearing for two months after pro-Nazi saboteurs with ties to his family were arrested by the FBI (the FBI suspected Yockey himself was on an espionage mission for Nazis in Mexico) before returning and being honorably discharged after a mental breakdown in 1943. Yockey soon applied for a post at the Office for Strategic Services but was refused a job there because of his Nazi sympathies.

The defeat of the Nazi regime did not weaken Yockey’s commitment to fascism and he instead became more active in pro-fascist activity, becoming dedicated solely to reviving fascism. However many of these groups were anti-Communist and therefore would refuse to work with Yockey, with George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party and his allies spurning Yockey and calling him a “neo-Strasserist” due to the idea of an alliance between the Left and the Right and working with anti-Zionist Communists being central to Yockey’s ideas.

In 1946 Yockey obtained a position in the US War Department as attorney for the Nuremberg Trials, undoubtedly to help some of the Nazi war criminals being tried. In Germany Yockey would spend his time forming ties with German fascists operating underground against the Allies and agitating against the US occupation of Germany and against what he perceived to be the “biased procedures” of the trials, causing him to be fired from his position the next year.

Following this he fled to a small village in Ireland where he wrote his heavily Spengler-influenced book Imperium with the aim of reviving fascism. In Imperium he rejects the biological racism of the Nazis and opts for a cultural racism instead, though he still defended the Nazis by denying the Holocaust in his book (while privately acknowlegding the existence of the Holocaust and praising the Nazis’ atrocities) which he dedicated to Hitler, being one of the very first Holocaust deniers ever, and considered the rise of the Nazi regime as an “European revolution”. Yockey being an avowed anti-Semite, the crux of the ideology laid out by his book was that Europe was being eroded by liberalism, which he saw as a “Jewish plot to undermine European culture”, and was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union ,and that therefore Europe had to eschewing nationalism and nation-states and instead unite into a fascist superstate which would “rejuvenate European culture” and be capable of opposing the two superpowers of the Cold War.

Shortly after writing Imperium, Yockey lived in London, UK, where he worked for a short time for the European contact section of fascist Oswald Mosley‘s Union Movement, allowing him to form ties with an underground fascist network throughout Europe, including Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a former SS official and the leader of the neo-Nazi Bruderschaft organization. Following Yockey’s falling out with Mosley, he formed with the support of baroness Alice von Pflugl and help of former Mosleyites the European Liberation Front, whose aim was to “liberate” Europe from the US and the USSR.

Yockey’s perception of the United States was itself negative in that he considered it to be little more than a bastardized colony of Europe which had devolved from the influence of non-European minorities and had “come under Jewish control”, and he therefore considered the impact of American capitalism as more destructive than Soviet repression for European culture and thus considered Soviet control as preferable to American domination of Europe. Hence he urged fascists to not collaborate with American anti-Communism during the Cold War and unlike most fascists who collaborated with US intelligence during the Cold War, Yockey’s European Liberation Front instead remained neutral and had a pan-European approach of geopolitics, with Yockey praising Soviet policy in Germany and seeking to secretly organize neo-Nazis in West Germany who would then collaborate with the Soviet military against American occupation. His aim was of course to form the European fascist superstate whose designs he laid out in Imperium.

Having lost his political ties in the United Kingdom, Yockey instead entered West Germany clandestinely, with army documents stating Yockey was “promoting a National Bolshevist movement” and contacting ex-Wehrmacht and ex-Nazi officers, among whom the Socialist Reich Party, a Strasserist party whose founder the ex-Wehrmacht member Otto Ernst Remer praised Imperium. Remer attacked Konrad Adenauer as an American puppet, denied the Holocaust and dismissed the Nazi regime’s atrocities as “Allied propaganda”, and agitated against the Allied occupation of West Germany while never criticizing East Germany and the Soviet Union, instead saying that he would “show the Russians all the way to the Rhine” should a conflict erupt between the US and the USSR, with Remer’s SRP receiving funding from the Soviets in the early 50s, something the Communist Party of Germany with which the SRP temporarily worked against Adenauer did not receive.

Yockey then traveled around Europe, distributing copies of his book to prominent neo-fascists, including French fascist Maurice Bardèche (himself one of the very first post-war Holocaust deniers like Yockey) and Julius Evola.

In Europe, Yockey participated in a conference by the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), Europe’s first neo-fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini Italian Social Republic, which was also attempting to form fascist networks. The conference amounted to little due to the aims of the various fascist groups involved present being at odds with each other and with internal strife within the MSI itself over whether to adopt an “Atlanticist” strategy and align with NATO and the West or a pan-European “Third Position” strategy opposed to both the Americans and the Soviets, with the anti-Communist MSI eventually allying with NATO and the US who were more concerned with opposing the Italian Communist Party instead of punishing fascists in these early days of the Cold War. Yockey’s advocacy of allying with the Soviet Union did not find very receptive audiences among these fascists, with many pan-European fascists including Julius Evola, who had erstwhile praised Yockey’s book, being skeptical his ideas.

Returning to the USA, Yockey worked with infamous anti-Communist US senator Joseph McCarthy and with H. Keith Thompson, an American fascist who was the American representative of the Socialist Reich Party and worked for the defence of Otto Ernst Remer. Thompson defended Hitler and the Nazi regime and would remain in connection with Yockey until his death. In 1950 he would give a speech at a conference by far-right preacher Gerald L. K. Smith’s Christian Nationalist Party where he would call the Nuremberg Trials a “sham” and claim the supposed existence of “global Jewish conspiracy”.

In the early 1940s Stalin initially adopted a pro-Zionist foreign policy (despite Lenin himself having condemned Zionism as a reactionary bourgeois movement) with the hope that Israel would be a socialist bulwark against British hegemony and supported the UN plan for the Partition of Palestine (and by extension endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine) and the subsequent creation of the colonial Israeli state, the Soviet Union being the second state to recognize Israel after the United States. But after Israel emerged as a Western ally, the Soviet bloc did a foreign policy volte face and threw its support behind Arab nationalist movements. However, far from being merely anti-Zionist and in opposition to Israel only, Soviet policy in Stalin’s later days became outright anti-Semitic and the Eastern bloc faced a wave of anti-Semitic purges in the 1950s which included the Night of the Murdered Poets and the Doctors’ Plot. It is in this context that Yockey, visiting Europe again, found himself attending the 1952 show trials in Prague during which eleven Jewish members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party including its secretary general Rudolf Slánský were executed on charges of being Zionists, Trotskyists, Western imperialists and Titoists (Slánský was, on the contrary, staunchly anti-Zionist). Yockey considered this to be the end of American hegemony in Europe and thought it “foretold a Russian break with Jewry”, which he saw as “a favorable development in the fight to liberate Europe”. For Yockey, the wave of anti-Semitic purges was a “declaration of war by Russia on the American-Jewish leadership” and he therefore cooperated with Soviet bloc intelligence and became a paid courier of the Czech secret services who themselves worked for the KGB, and he started advocating for a tactical alliance between fascists and the USSR to end the American occupation of Europe.

Back to New York, Yockey’s report on the Soviet bloc anti-Semitic purges led James Madole of the National Renaissance Party, an American Nazi party, to endorse the campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionists” (which here is a coded anti-Semitic term referring to Jews rather than to the actual colonialist ideology of Zionism). Madole declared Communism as a mask for Russian nationalism following the triumph of Stalin over Trotsky, whom they saw as the leader of the “Jewish internationalist faction”, thus in his eyes transforming what fascists consider to be “Jewish Bolshevism” into National Bolshevism. The National Resistance Party itself started praising the Soviet Union and had portraits of Hitler and Stalin on its wall, attracting both Communists and Nazis, and certain American fascists started praising the Soviet Union as result.

Dissatisfied with the anti-Communism of the majority of the US far-right who was not very receptive to his National Bolshevik ideology and was at odds with his sympathy for the Stalinist USSR and for Third Worldist movements, Yockey traveled around the world, clandestinely going to East Germany and possibly to the USSR, writing propaganda for the Egyptian Information Industry and meeting Egyptian president Abel Gamal Nasser, under whom thousands of Nazi war criminals (including Yockey’s collaborator Otto Ernst Remer) fleeing Europe found refuge in Egypt.

Yockey spent some weeks in Cuba shortly after the Cuban revolution where dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, seeking to form new ties again though his attempts failed, before being arrested by the FBI in 1960 and imprisoned. In jail, Yockey is recorded to have lamented the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and praised Hitler as a hero. Yockey eventually committing suicide in jail by swallowing cyanide, allegedly to protect his contacts.

Before his suicide, Yockey was visited in jail by Willis Carto, who would then become one of the main advocates of Yockey’s ideology in North America, although Carto rejected Yockey’s own rejection of biological racism and his anti-American and pro-Soviet position. Carto’s organization, the Liberty Lobby, distributed Yockey’s writings through its newspaper Spotlight, and its publisher Noontide Press republished Imperium.

Therefore Yockey’s core ideology could be seen as consisting of: a cultural rather than biological racism, rejection of nationalism in favor of a European superstate, and support for pro-Soviet and Third Worldist forces against American hegemony and liberal democracy, which he considered to be a “Jewish plot”.

Yockey’s ideology has been very influential among post-war neo-fascists and his book is distributed among Nazis and white supremacists, with former leader of the neo-Nazi British National Party John Tyndall praising Imperium, and is influential among far-right neo-pagans and occultists.

The European New Right
Yockey would become the ideological predecessor of the Third Position and the European New Right, among whose prominent members are Jean-Francois Thiriart, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. A main feature of the European New Right is its criticism of American imperialism and of the “economism” of liberalism and its attempt to form alliances or infiltrate far-left opponents of Western imperialism and globalization.

Jean-Francois Thiriart
Jean-Francois Thiriart was briefly a leftist in high school before joining the National Legion and the Association of the Friends of the German Reich, two far-right organizations, later serving in the Waffen-SS for which he would be imprisoned after WWII. After his imprisonment he would retire from political life until the 1960s when he re-entered politics due to his belief that Europe was losing its status as a cultural center, especially after the independence of the Congo and the Algerian Revolution during which he organized in favor of Belgian settlers who wanted Belgium to reconquer the Congo as well as support for the French Secret Army Organization seeking to maintain Algeria as a French colony through a brutal and bloody campaign of massacring Algerians.

Thiriart saw the Belgian and French loss of the Congo and Algeria as pan-European affairs rather than in purely nationalist terms and he founded the organization Jeune Europe with the aim of creating a united Europe which would have its own nuclear arsenal and would be independent of the USA and the USSR whom he considered were dominating Europe and had turned it into a battlefield, thus echoing Yockey in his pre-1952 days, though Thiriart himself had never apparently known or read Yockey. Like Yockey, Thiriart also despised parliamentary democracy and instead advocated for an anti-egalitarian totalitarian state.

Thiriart would also try denying being a fascist and distancing himself from his Nazi past, instead calling the Left-Right division as outdated (in typical fascist rhetoric) and advancing a philosophy called Communitarianism which claimed to transcend the division between the Left and the Right though Jeune Europe had open ties with Nazis and used openly fascist imagery. Thiriart from then on advocated for a union of Europe and the Soviet Union, which he considered to be more Russian than Communist as from the early 50s, into a “massive white power bloc from Brest to Vladivostok”. Here he was echoing Yockey again.

Following the Sino-Soviet Split, Thiriart started advocating for supporting China against the Soviets in an attempt to make the latter lose its grip on Europe to pave the way for a rapprochement between Europe and Russia, as well as supporting revolutionaries in Latin America and the Black Power movement in the Unites States to end American hegemony on Western Europe. He would further restructure Jeune Europe along the line of a Leninist vanguard party, drop the open Nazi imagery of his organization and repudiate his earlier positions on Algeria and the Congo.

From then on, Thiriart moved towards a “National-Communist” perspective which was significantly influenced by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s adoption of an ultra-nationalist National Communism as state ideology, no doubt the result of Romania’s inclusion of former Iron Guard fascists within its intelligence apparatus, and Romania’s break with the Soviet Union and shift towards the People’s Republic of China. In 1966, Thiriart himself met Ceaușescu who contributed an article to Thiriart’s publication and would then help Thiriart met Zhou Enlai, from whom Thiriart attempted in vain to obtain Chinese support for Jeune Europe.

Thiriart worked with Argentine politician Juan Perón, who saw his own views of Latin American unity and integration as tied to Thiriart’s ones on European unity and who saw Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as heroes just like Thiriart did (for which obviously neither Castro nor Che themselves should be blamed), during the latter’s exile in Madrid where he also courted many members of the European far-right (Norberto Ceresole, who was for a time a close advisor of Hugo Chavez, was an associate of Perón. This red-brown tendency of Ceresole was also reflected by his association with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and with Roger Garaudy, a Holocaust denying Communist).

Thiriart would adopt a policy of forming ties with the Left from now on, praising Ho Chi Minh’s struggle against America which he saw as an inspiration, and visited many Arab states trying to obtain support for a potential armed organization who would fight “American occupation” in Europe, and speaking at a Ba’ath party conference and meeting with Saddam Hussein, who was then only a colonel in the army. However receptive the Ba’ath party was to Thiriart’s proposal, it scrapped this project following the Soviet Union’s refusal to support it. He also attempted to form ties with Palestinian resistance organizations during this period. Thiriart retired again from public life after his failure to obtain significant support, though his few public appearances would keep on being vehicles for his anti-Americanism.

[Note: During Thiriart’s retirement, one of his followers, Renato Curcio, would go on to found the Red Brigades radical leftist organization which was active in the 70s and 80s in Italy. Another disciple of Thiriart, Claudio Mutti, would form the Italian-Libyan Friendship Organization after Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya and later took part in organizing a “Nazi-Maoism” movement with the help of pro-China student groups, forming the Lotta Di Popolo organization, and would later meet Aleksandr Dugin in the 90s before arranging for Thiriart to visit Russia. Some Italian militants influenced by Thiriart would even adopt Hitler, Mao, Gaddafi and Juan Perón as heroes, and had slogans supporting a “fascist dictatorship of the proletariat” and praised both Hitler and Mao together.]

The collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged him to start working with the National-European Communitarian Party (PCN) a small party made up of former Maoists and neo-fascists, and run by Luc Michel, who identified himself as a National-Communist and acted as Thiriart’s secretary. In 1992, Thiriart would lead a PCN delegation of National-Communists to Russia to meet fascists who were now able to operate openly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thiriart met Yegor Ligachyov, who was receptive to Thiriart’s idea of a union between Europe and Russia against America.

Ligachyov suggested it should be in the form of a revived Soviet Union, which Thiriart accepted, paralleling Yockey’s post-1952 National-Bolshevik positions.

Thiriart died from a heart failure in late 1992, his followers setting up a second European Liberation Front to continue Thiriart’s project. The European Liberation Front kept contacts with the Russian coalition the National Salvation Front and supported the National Salvation Front during the 1993 crisis opposing it to Boris Yeltsin in Russia.

Alain de Benoist
Among the neo-fascists to come out of Thiriart’s ideological orbit is Alain de Benoist, who has exerted a substantial influence on the New Right. In his teenage years, De Benoist joined Thiriart’s Jeune Europe out of sympathy for the French occupation of Algeria in the late 50s and would later be a member of the editorial board of Europe-Action, a successor organization of Jeune Europe after the latter was banned by the French government.

During this period De Benoist was a standard mainstream neo-fascist opposed to Communism, defending apartheid and supporting the American imperialist war in Vietnam. Dissatisfied with the then state of the far-right and its inability to challenge the Gaullist French state, De Benoist would instead opt for giving up on the biological racism and conspiracy theories of the far-right and instead favor a more intellectual approach and founded the think tank GRECE (which is the acronym for Groupement pour Recherches et Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne, the French translation of Research and Study Group for the European Civilization). Inspired by the theories of Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony (for which the by-then long deceased Gramsci should not be blamed), De Benoist would advocate for fighting an ideological war to influence mass culture as foundation for political change, a theory called “metapolitics”. GRECE consequently published material rehabilitating fascists such as ideologues of the Conservative Revolution and supporters of National-Bolshevism such as Ernst Niekisch.

De Benoist’s ideological evolution was also marked by a shift towards hostility to Christianity, which in his view had “colonized” Indo-Europeans by force, and support for a revival of pre-Christian European polytheism, which echoed Julius Evola. Accompanying this shift was an increasing anti-Americanism of De Benoist, who hated the “American way of life” and “it’s inane TV serials, chronic mobility, ubiquitous fast food, admiration of the almighty dollar and its quiescent, depoliticized populace”. He opposed free-market capitalism, appropriating left-wing critiques of liberalism by decrying it as an ideology reducing every aspect of human life to purely economic value, thus producing a totalizing consumer society which was inescapably totalitarian.

Paralleling Yockey and Thiriart before him, De Benoist came to consider American imperialism and liberal democracy as more dangerous than Soviet Communism, writing “Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn” in 1982 (which would be repeated by Richard Spencer, a prominent figure of the American fascist “Alt-Right” movement in 2017), supporting Third World struggles while condemning NATO and voting for the Communist Party in the French elections of 1984.

Against accusations from other neo-fascists of having defected to the New Left, De Benoist would just like Thiriart before him claim he was out of the Left-Right spectrum and instead supported “a plural world grounded in the diversity of cultures” against a “one-dimensional world”. This concept, called “ethnopluralism”, meant that De Benoist had gone from a white supremacist to a supporter of separate ethnic and cultural identities and regionalism against what he was as a “homogenizing global market”, putting him at odds with the vision of a pan-European superstate of Thiriart.

This concept of “ethnopluralism” would find its way among wider far-right circles, with Jean-Marie Le Pen re-using it in his xenophobic declarations and neo-fascists adopting it to ‘soften’ their racist rhetoric.

The end of the Cold War signified the end of the Left-Right divide for De Benoist and following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he would visit Russia in 1992, months before Thiriart’s own delegation, where he would meet many figures of the opposition to Boris Yeltsin and proclaim that politics consisted of anti-system forces against the “establishmentarian center”, effectively advocating for a Left-Right coalition against liberal democracy.

Third Positionist Fascism
Among the movements close to the European New Right is Third Positionism, a strand of fascism which stands in opposition to both capitalism and communism and has its origins in “classical” fascism and in the Strasser brothers.

Following the Movimento Sociali Italiano’s adoption of an electoral course during the 50s and 60s, a number of neo-fascist offshoots of the MSI who preferred extra-parliamentary methods and sought to replace parliamentary democracy with a fascist dictatorship.

Terza Posizione
Among these were the Evola-influenced Ordine Nuovo and the Avanguarda Nazionale which would be dissolved by the Italian state in 1973 because they were attempting to revive fascism, which was illegal in Italy post-war constitution. Following their dissolution, many of their ex-members along with members of Mutti’s Lotta di Popolo would come together to form Terza Posizione, whose ideology was based on Julius Evola’s work one of the “pioneers” of post-war Third Positionist fascism. Following the 1980 Bologna massacre in which a suitcase blew up in a train station in Bologna, Italy, killing 85 people and wounding 200 others, the group would come under investigation as prime suspect behind the attacks and two of its prominent members, Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello, fled to the United Kingdom.

The International Third Position
In the UK, Fiore met Nick Griffin and Derek Holland, former members of the far-right National Front who had formed a Third Positionist faction within the NF called the Political Soldier wing, which opposed to the NF’s own electoral politics. In 1986, dissensions within the NF led Griffin and Holland to break away from the NF and form their own organization named the Official National Front (ONF). Unlike the National Front, the ONF supported ethnic regionalism in the UK and praised Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Gaddafi and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

Following a further split in the Official National Front, Griffin, Holland and Fiore would become the founding members of the International Third Position (ITP) while Patrick Harrington later founded the National Liberal Party, the party and later think tank Third Way, and Solidarity-The Union for British Workers.

The ITP would itself undergo multiple splits, with Griffin leaving in 1990 and later joining the British National Party (BNP), and later succeeding John Tyndall at the party’s head. Another member, Troy Southgate, left in 1992 to later form in 1998 the “National-Anarchist” National Revolutionary Faction, hich again true to Third Positionist habits appropriates left-wing imagery and aesthetics for a reactionary, fascist ideology. “National-Anarchism” cannot be considered a legitimate form of Anarchism since only did it not develop out of any existing Anarchist thought, but Anarchists themselves have been at the forefront of opposition to fascism for many decades.

The Tricolour Flame, Forza Nuova and CasPound
The Movimento Sociale Italiano would rebrand as a supposedly more moderate conservative party (though it maintains its fascist imagery and does not repudiate the party’s ties to Mussolini’s regime), leading its hardliner fascist faction to form Tricolour Flame, a Third Positionist fascist party.

A pro-Fiore and pro-Morsello faction within Tricolour Flame would grow while they were in “exile” in the UK and later split from Tricolour Flame and become an ultra-Catholic fascist party of its own named Forza Nuova, and when Fiore and Morsello returned to Italy, they were made the leaders of Forza Nuova. Once allied to the Ukrainian far-right Svoboda party, Forza Nuova later shifted to a pro-Russian and pro-Donbass position after the Euromaidan, with one member even going to, ironically, fight against “Kiev fascists”.

An ally of Forza Nuova is CasaPound, named after fascist and anti-Semite Ezra Pound, which also grew out of Tricolour Flame whose members call themselves the “Fascists of the Third Millennium”. CasaPound is virulently xenophobic and anti-immigration, and has been behind many attacks against leftists and refugees in Italy while also adopting the New Right concepts of “ethnopluralism” and of metapolitics, and appropriating leftist methods such as squatting and occupying buildings, criticizing globalization and austerity, supporting workers and running social centers. Among CasaPound’s affiliates is Solidarites-Identites (Sol.ID), an “ethnopluralist” NGO which is active in Syria, Burma, Kosovo, Palestine and South Africa.

Red-Browns in Russia

Russian National Bolshevism
The origins of Russian National Bolshevism differ from interwar German National Bolshevism and have their roots in the Russian Civil War which followed the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent counter-revolutionary power grab by the Bolshevik Party, when Lenin made concessions to Russian nationalists to stabilize the newly formed Soviet Union and many Tsarist White movement members and defectors from the proto-fascist Black Hundreds switched sides and joined the Bolsheviks. Among former White movement supporters who joined the Bolsheviks was Nikolai Ustrialov, who saw the Bolshevik Revolution as the way to reestablish Russia as a great power, called for the end of the Russian Civil War and for Russian nationalists to collaborate with the Bolsheviks, which Ustrialov and Russian emigres in Prague published in Smena Vekh while adopting the “National Bolshevik” name after Ustrialov read Niekisch. The Soviet government subsequently subsidized Smena Vekh, which became influential in the USSR and though Ustrialov himself initially praised Stalin before being executed during his purges, a number of Smenavekhites became influential ideologues in the Soviet establishment. Following Stalin’s victory in the power struggle which followed Lenin’s death, the mixture of nationalism and Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union developed into some kind of National Bolshevism as result of the USSR’s adoption of the “Socialism in One Country” policy in 1925 (which was also partly motivated by the need to maintain the Treaty of Rapallo) after the failure of the Spartacist uprising.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Another period of Red-Brown collaboration followed the crisis resulting the failure of the Western powers’ appeasement policy towards Hitler when he violated the Munich agreement (from which the Soviet Union had been excluded) by annexing Czechoslovakia, leading Stalin to openly negotiate a potential alliance against Hitler with Britain and France, while also secretly negotiating with Germany. To the shock of Western powers and Communists around the world, in August of that year the German-Soviet Credit Agreement and the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact were signed, followed by about five hundred German Communists who had previously sought exile in the Soviet Union being deported by Stalin back to Germany. These treaties were accompanied by secret protocols dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence, and the next month the Nazis and the Soviets invaded Poland, with the Soviet and Nazi troops holding joint parades at Brest-Litovsk and Lvov.

[Note: When Jean-Francois came out of retirement in the 80s, he praised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and declared that it made the Soviet Union the geopolitical heir of Nazi Germany.]

When Britain and France declared war on Germany in reaction the invasion of Poland, the Comintern instead suspended all anti-fascist activity and forced Communist parties to condemn the war as imperialist and oppose war credits, causing the collapse of the anti-fascist Popular Fronts. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed another economic agreement in 1940 whereby the USSR sold raw material to the Nazis, who would provide the USSR with war equipment, helping Germany circumvent the sanctions imposed by Britain, and unresolved talks about the possibility of the USSR joining the Axis ensued. The agreement ended only when Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, prompting the USSR to enter the war on the side of the Allies, during which Stalin used nationalist rhetoric about fighting the “Great Patriotic War” to mobilize the Red Army.

This nationalist policy was continued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the ensuing Cold War, where it made use of both Russian nationalism and Marxism-Leninism for mobilization, and the nationalist factions of the Soviet ruling elite tolerated and supported National Bolshevism, especially through the Communist Youth League and the Red Army.

Post-Soviet Fascism
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, numerous fascist and ultra-nationalist movements emerged, culminating with the formation of the National Salvation Front, the alliance opposed to Yeltsin composed of far-right Russian ultranationalists and communists, especially Gennady Zyuganov, who had previously taken part in discussions with Alain de Benoist and Jean-Francois Thiriart during their visit to Russia in 1991 and later founded the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which despite its name is an ultranationalist and reactionary organization which opposes “cosmopolitanism” and called for banning Jewish organizations in Russia together with fascist party Rodina in 2005. Following Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve the Russian parliament in 1993, the National Salvation Front attempted to form a shadow government and wrestle power from him during the following crisis, resulting in a showdown opposing Yeltsin to a red-brown alliance including the National Salvation Front and Aleksandr Barkashov (the founder of the neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity) in front of the Russian White House. The co-chairman of the National Salvation Front was Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was also the editor in chief of Dyen, the mouthpiece of the National Salvation Front and which published the vilest anti-Semitism such as excerpts of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and expressed support for Western neo-Nazis. Among the Red-Brown neo-fascist groups also involved in the National Salvation Front was also the National Bolshevik Front of Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, who was published in and helped edit Dyen .

Aleksandr Dugin
Aleksandr Dugin was born in the Soviet Union in 1962 and joined the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979 before being expelled from it because of his associations with the esotericist Golovin Circle, for which he translated Julius Evola’s works. Following the Demokratizasiya under Mikhail Gorbachev, Dugin joined Pamyat, an anti-Semitic organization which blames a “Zionist Masonic plot” for the Russian Revolution and for all of Russia’s ills. Dugin became a member of Pamyat’s Central Council in 1988 before being expelled it in 1989 for attempting to introduce new ideas to the organization, after which he traveled to Western Europe where he met Alain de Benoist and Jean-Francois Thiriart, who strongly influenced his anti-Americanism and his support for Russian traditionalism.

Dugin then returned to Russia and founded Arktogaia, which published material expressing support for a conservative social revolution in Russia which would lead to the creation of a traditionalist, authoritarian and spiritual society. Around this time Dugin proposed to Limonov (who was also regularly published on Matt Taibbi’s and Mark Ames’ The eXile in the later part of that decade) to form the National Bolshevik Front, which was materialized in 1993, as part of the process of uniting the various anti-liberal tendencies in Russia which culminated in the National Salvation Front, and Dyen itself was associated with Arktogaia.

In 1997, Dugin wrote The Foundations of Geopolitics as a lecturer at the Academy of the General Staff with the help of Leonid Ivashov, a Russian colonel and former Soviet military officer who was the head of the International Department of the Russian Ministry of Defense from 1996 to 2001. Dugin however left the National Bolshevik Party in 1998 after being dissatisfied with it and sought to increase his contacts, writing the program of the KPRF, and becoming advisor to Gennady Seleznev, the Speaker of the Russian State Duma, while also praising figures of the NSDAP and Nazi Germany and calling for a “fascist fascism”.

Around this time, Dugin combined his National Bolshevism to the Eurasianist ideology of white émigrés who saw Russia as a non-European entity which had been saved from modernization by the Bolshevik Revolution and aimed to turn the Soviet Union into a an Orthodox Christian state. In 2001, he formed the Eurasia Movement and the Eurasia Party and in 2005 he formed the Eurasian Youth Union while claiming to be an anti-fascist (though he still remains in effect a fascist) around that time, and has since then chosen a metapolitical strategy to realize his fascist goal. While Dugin’s influence in Russia is exaggerated, such as when he is called “Putin’s Rasputin”, he nevertheless is influential within sections of the Russian establishment (the head of United Russia’s ideological directorate and deputy culture minister in charge of the film industry, Ivan Demidov, is an Eurasianist close to Dugin) and military and used to be the head of the Department of Sociology of Internal Relations at the Moscow State University until thousands petitioned for him to be fired after he made calls to mass murder Ukrainians in 2014. Dugin has been hosted [archive] and promoted [archive] by Russian state television RT, formerly known as Russia Today, which now tries to downplay Dugin’s influence and distance itself from him. However Duginists like Mark Sleboda, Manuel Ochsenreiter and Tiberio Graziani are regularly hosted as experts on Russian state-owned international media, especially Sputnik International (formerly RIA Novosti and The Voice of Russia), the radio broadcaster owned by the Russian state.

The European New Right and Third Positionists became more influential following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which meant the loss of the Communist bogeyman against which the majority of Western fascists had agitated throughout the Cold War, and the neoliberal counterrevolution started under Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s accompanied by globalization meant that the new bogeyman for fascists was “globalism“, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory whereby a tiny secret elite was working to undermine national sovereignty to form a “One World Government” and uses immigration for these ends. A common fixation of these conspiracy theories is philanthropist billionaire George Soros, who is regularly blamed for being behind every sort of social movement. In Europe, the far-right rebranded itself by co-opting leftist causes such as LGBT rights and secularism and anti-establishment politics abandoned by the old left-wing parties which caved in to “Third Way” politics and using them for their own reactionary cause, and went from opposing Communism and supporting the United States to opposing the United States and what their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories call the “Zionist lobby” and instead rallying around the Russian state, especially after the rise to power of Vladimir Putin and his brand of authoritarian right-wing politics.


Continues at: https://ravingsofaradicalvagabond.noblo ... alliances/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:36 am

Iranian Protests against Austerity


Imperialist Rivalry

On the international scale, the US was very quick to openly support the protests while the EU remained somewhat neutral. The regional rivals like Saudi Arabia and Israel welcomed it with a great pleasure, while the Turkish government sided with the Iranian government. Russia and China predictably stood on the regime’s side. Of course, as far as the protest itself is concerned, the support, or lack of it, of the various imperialist powers, amounts to the same thing. They are all there just to sabotage it in one way or the other.

Foreign meddling has substantially increased since Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi and Israel in May 2017. It has become vitally important for both Saudi and Israel to contain Iran's imperialist advance in the region. Supporting the protesters has provided a golden importunity for them, to put pressure on Iran. Hence they hypocritically cry out against abuses of "Human Rights" in Iran! To the same degree, Russia, China, and Turkey who support the regime for their own benefit, and gain from Iran's new enhanced role in the region, equally hypocritically call for respect for Iran’s "sovereign" right which should not be interfered with.

However, in the US, Saudi and Israel camp, the motley crew of Trump, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Netanyahu are more likely repeat the Bush scenario by strengthening the Iranian regime rather than harming it. US policy under George W. Bush’s administration got rid of Iran's arch enemies, Saddam and the Taliban, and thus paved the way for Iran's imperialist advance in the region. It suits all these imperialist regimes to posture and bluster since it allows them all to play the nationalist card back home. Trump’s untimely tweets have been seized on by regime to demonstrate its “moderation” as well as play the nationalist card against US imperialism once again to maintain support for the regime.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:10 pm

Don’t ignore the left! Connections between Europe’s radical left and Russia


The third typical argument concerns “anti-fascism”. Just as Putin’s regime simultaneously warns of the rise of the far right and supports (and is supported by) far-right parties in Europe, the radical left’s anti-fascism is often selective and one-sided. Radical left actors usually share Putin’s concerns over the “fascist junta in Kyiv” (bit more difficult to argue for since the country has a Jewish Prime Minister). Also, they criticise the EU for being ignorant on the subject. At the same time, they are blind to see fascists, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites on the side of the pro-Russian “rebels” — while examples, such as the anti-Semitic leader of the Donetsk Republic, are numerous.

Then you have victimisation: the left often portrays the Russian and Syrian regimes and eastern Ukrainian rebels as victims of western aggression, ignoring Putin’s and Assad’s violence.

Far left parties support Russia's Ukrainian intervention because they accept and legitimise the Russian narrative of a western-backed Nazi coup on the Maidan — putting Russia on the side of the “oppressed”. In Syria, they portray Assad’s Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party as fighting a “counter-revolution” against “western imperialist intervention” and/or Islamists controlled and financed by the west.

Cooperation beyond ideology
The massive international network and the Russian state’s increasing propaganda effort to bring these forces on a joint Putinist-Assadist platform also plays a crucial role. The Party of the European Left has a friendly relationship with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. This party, the second most popular party after United Russia, is a pet opposition party that follows the Kremlin line on every crucial issue. While the Rodina (Motherland) party of Russian deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin seem to be the key actor in reaching out to far right parties in Europe, the Communist party plays a similar role as far as the radical left is concerned.

Given the growing importance of young politicians within the party and its growing popularity, it can become an even more important player in Russia, that can happily celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution next year with increasing influence and money to spend.

The Kremlin is not secretive about its strategy of reaching out to Europe’s radical left

Furthermore, communist and socialist parties with historic links to the Soviet Union can be found almost everywhere in the world. Russian influence via communist parties reaches well beyond Ukraine and other former member states of the USSR and deep into the Middle East through the Arab socialist-communist parties in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. In Syria, some leftists portray Assad’s Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party as a comrade group fighting a “counter-revolution”.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, is not secretive about its strategy of reaching out to Europe’s radical left. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, for example, published a piece recently in English in Russia in Global Affairs (the “Russian Foreign Affairs magazine”), whichj explicitly targets left-wing intellectuals and politicians in the west with quotations from George Orwell, and statements to the effect that western European welfare states just copied the Soviet Union's success.

In order to address the far left’s relationship with the Kremlin, investigative journalists, policy leaders, and intelligence services must acknowledge that these old “comrade networks”, established during Soviet times by the KGB, are still alive. Furthermore, left-wing parties such as Syriza and Die Linke have strong ties to Russia as well, which is partially built on the personal networks and infrastructure from the Soviet era as well. Nikos Kotzias, the Greek foreign minister for example, was an important member of the Communist movements in Greece, with extensive relations to the Soviet Union.


More at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia ... eft-and-ru
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 9:27 am

Dr. Tim “Asad” Anderson: the abuse of academia to spread out propaganda

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Part I


My name is Andrea Glioti, I’m the journalist who intervened at Dr. Tim Anderson’s talk at Sydney UNI “Why I went to Syria” on March 6 (2014), an event promoting a blatant apology of the Syrian regime under the pretext of “counter-information”. A professor of political economy, Tim Anderson (https://www.facebook.com/timand2037?fref=ts) has been part of a delegation led by the Wikileaks Party and the Asadist activist group “Hands Off Syria”, which paid its homage to the Syrian regime during a visit of solidarity in December 2013. This is a response to some of the absurdities I heard about the Syrian conflict and, apart from the single case of Anderson, it addresses several points continuously raised by the so-called “anti-imperialist left”. It would be actually fair to rename this ideological stubbornness on Syria as a Stalinist-Soviet approach, if we were between the 1950s the 1960s, Anderson and his likes would be probably denying the Hungarian and Czech revolts ever took place. If we were in the Spanish Civil War, they would probably defend the Soviet decision to crush the anarchists. As long as a government sits in the anti-American camp (no matter the hypocrisy of Syrian foreign policies in this regard), it doesn’t really matter if it tortures leftists in its own prisons. Dr Anderson and his likes claim to hold the truth on what’s going on in Syria, this truth could be sum up in a Western-backed plot denying any sort of agency to the Syrians who took the streets in 2011. In their eyes, they’re only puppets, they would have never risen up after more 40 years of authoritarianism , they needed the Zionist-Salafi-American trust to give them a green light.

I’m an Arabic speaking Middle Eastern politics graduate, who has been covering Syria from inside the country for 10 months between 2011 and 2013 and I spent the rest of the time between Turkey and Lebanon, mainly in the border regions, where most of the Syrian refugees are located. I’ve worked with a wide range of media including “corporate” and “leftist” magazines (The New Internationalist, the German TAZ, the Swiss-German WOZ fall in the second category), being a freelancer, therefore I don’t even fit into the category of mainstream corporate media. Having said this, the sources Dr Anderson relied upon during his presentation could hardly be considered “independent” sources of information, despite his efforts to present them as such: Russia Today, in the words of Putin, reflects the views of the Kremlin, just like the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reflects the views of the pro-Syrian (regime) 8 March coalition. Among the sources quoted there was also Mother Agnès de la Croix, a Palestinian-Lebanese nun closely related to the Asad regime (http://pulsemedia.org/2012/08/21/dead-j ... es-mariam/) and the French far-right (http://vicinoriente.wordpress.com/2012/ ... -di-assad/). Anderson’s talk was covered by the Iranian Press TV: if the station’s anti-US biases were combined with a minimum degree of professionalism, then my intervention wouldn’t have been censored, after I raised several critical points Anderson intentionally ignored.


Read more: https://mabisir.wordpress.com/2014/05/2 ... ropaganda/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 4:52 pm

Defiling the Graves of Lesvos

By Brian Slocock

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Graves of unidentified refugees on the Greek island of Lesvos.

The fund established to continue the work of slain MP Jo Cox has come under attack from assorted far right forces (and unfortunately someone once associated with the British left) for including in its list of beneficiaries the White Helmets—the volunteer civil defence service that act as first responders to bombing attacks on Syrian opposition communities, digging dead and injured victims out of the rubble.

The White Helmets have been subjected to a vicious slander campaign by a network of Syrian regime supporters, centred around Australian university lecturer Tim Anderson.

These people have long supported Assad’s bloody campaign of repression against anyone who dares to challenge his power, but their attack on the White Helmets carries this to a new level: not only do they cheer on the mass slaughter in Syria, they also seek to deny Assad’s victims the elementary right to rescue their loved ones and to bury their dead. This is akin to the ‘double tap’ attack favoured by both Assad and the Israeli air force: first you bomb a community and then you drop a second bomb to hit those who come out in response to the attack. But in this case the first attack comes in the form of the rhetorical onslaught by Anderson and his supporters, who seek to prevent the very existence of any form of civil defence in Syrian opposition communities—and then the real bombs drop.

This is a regression to medieval standards of warfare—as far as I know not even Lord Haw Haw objected when the British authorities appointed air raid wardens in the Second World War.

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Most of those contributing to this campaign have come from various sections of the far right: Nick Griffin of the BNP, British and US groups associated with the ‘libertarian right,’ climate change deniers, and opponents of the great ‘globalist’ conspiracy to take over the world—which they describe as linked to Jews, to Freemasons, and of course to green lizards from outer space. One vociferous supporter of Anderson can be found on the internet engaged with white supremacists branding Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist.’


More at: http://www.syriauk.org/2016/06/defiling ... esvos.html
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 5:40 pm

Fox News' Tucker Carlson is the new premier voice of Bannonism

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While rightwing Republicans are generally anti-immigration, Carlson has found ways to go further on issues of race than shock jocks like Sean Hannity or Mark Levin. Last July, he devoted a long segment to drumming up fear and loathing for Roma in Pennsylvania, a fairly exotic prejudice to promote in the context of the American right.

Certainly, it’s unrelated to any US policy debates. Some observers have suggested that in such moments, Carlson is actually pitching to a broader sense of “European” (ie white) cultural and ethnic identity. In other words, Carlson is promoting values associated with the alt-right.

At the same time, he may be mainstreaming their message. He stood up not only for Confederate statues, but for flyers put up at a high school reading “it’s okay to be white”, a phrase which was propagated as an alt-right slogan. He has also taken time to defend the alt-right social network, Gab.

And he reserves his most scathing attacks for the far right’s sworn enemies – not only leftist academics, but hate-monitoring groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Prominent alt-right figures have returned the favor. In a celebratory tweet last year, Richard Spencer affirmed that one “can’t cuck the Tuck”. On the Daily Stormer, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin approvingly called the combative Carlson “a machine of ultimate destruction”.

How much of this does Carlson, formerly a more conventional conservative, really mean?

Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies conservative media, thinks that a lot of what Carlson does is driven by sheer contrarianism, and a desire to produce lively television.

He points to his journeyman history on a series of cable networks – including MSNBC and CNN, where he was infamously lectured by Jon Stewart – and the evolution of the Daily Caller, which Carlson co-founded, suggesting that he has learned that viewers love fireworks.

“His show is less about what he thinks, and more about ‘owning the liberals’,” he says, though he adds that Carlson seems to have few limits on what he is willing to say in coming up with his particular brand of political bloodsport.

Carlson’s contrarianism is most visible in his signature technique: confrontational interviews in his “Tucker Takes On” segment. His tone is important in making them shareable – his lighthearted sneering sets him apart from the hectoring anger that so many other conservative media figures rely on.

What’s notable about Carlson’s viral interviews are his targets. Some of them would be irresistible to any rightwing pundit, like the Chicago Democratic alderman whom Carlson called a “loathsome little demagogue” on Wednesday night. (One wonders why so many local politicians and campus advocates agree to enter into in a no-win situation).

But Carlson also had a notorious on-air brawl with Max Boot, a neoconservative who advocated for and later defended the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. He has repeatedly excoriated “Russia hawks” in the foreign policy establishment, and those who argued for Middle Eastern adventurism in the previous decade. This lines up perfectly with the isolationism of many in the alt right.

On the other hand, Carlson has even given a warm reception to a select group on the left. Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald and Alternet’s Max Blumenthal have each been given a respectful hearing by Carlson, who has chosen to emphasize their common ground – skepticism about US overseas adventurism, the “Russiagate” narrative and Clintonian liberalism.

Whether he is cynical or sincere, Carlson continues to blur the lines between the far right and the mainstream, and is prepared to employ any weapon that comes to hand in taking on establishment conservatives and liberals alike. There’s no sign that he is looking to change what has been a successful formula.


More at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... -bannonism
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 8:15 pm

Dr Tim Anderson has some funny friends
Posted on July 13, 2017 by @ndy

While it’s true that politics makes for odd bedfellows, it’s an unedifying spectacle to witness an ostensible leftist address a gathering of the extreme-right, in this instance University of Sydney academic Tim Anderson addressing the Leura Forum in November last year. In front of a banner reading ‘One People. One Destiny. One Flag.’, the brief vid below (the full vid is avail online elsewhere) begins with a very subtle dis of The Gay Mafia and a prayer for God Emperor Trump by the MC (dentist Dr Jim Sternhell), followed by a few words from Tim, interspersed with complaints about Jews from an audience member, Ross May.

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Apart from anything else, the presence of geriatric neo-Nazi Ross ‘The Skull’ May in the front row of Tim’s audience brings to mind another academic from Sydney, Peter McGregor (1947–2008). An anarchist and a political activist in addition to being an academic, McGregor participated in numerous campaigns, groups and projects during his too-short life. This included participating in the campaign to free one Tim Anderson from jail after he was framed for the Hilton bombing (1978).

Peter’s activities, especially in the name of anti-racism, naturally antagonised fascists and the far right. Hence: ‘The Australian Nazi Party, ideologically aligned with apartheid, organised a brutal and cowardly assault on McGregor in 1971 which I witnessed. Its propagator, one Ross Lesley May (aka “The Skull”), subsequently served time; but the police more often than not acquiesced in Nazi violence and that of fellow racists and the more fanatical rugby fans, who were often inseparable.’

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Note that the speaker who followed Tim, Dr Jim Saleam, was also a member of the Australian Nazi Party at this time, while the speaker who preceded him, Keith Windschuttle, has also had some interesting things to say about genocide, and history.


More at: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=41566
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:41 pm

On Lesser and Greater Evils (guest post by Rebecca Hill)


Myopic focus on the Democratic Party
Most of us on the left are familiar with one narrative of the bad consequences of strategic alliances with the lesser evil. The story of the failure of the Democratic Party to represent the aims of the left is one that most of us could recite in our sleep. Instructed by years of experience, many on the left perceive the Democratic Party to be much like Charles Schulz's Lucy, offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown's running kick. That is, at one point on the way to political maturity, many of us may have been excited about the left argument for backing a particular Democratic Party candidate, only to find ourselves flat on our backs when those people pursued terrible policy agendas once elected. Long term consequences of such alliances for the left have been devastating, funneling emerging social movements into campaigns to elect politicians who betray left agendas. Even worse, despite arguing that a left movement will push these candidates to go further left, the broader left orbit of progressives generally refuse to seriously challenge Democratic Party politicians out of fear that any protest against Democrats will aid the Republican Party.

As I see it today, those leftists who argue that the Trump-Russia investigation as simply a Democratic Party strategy to avoid taking responsibility for their loss of the election to Trump is flawed by a myopic emphasis on these past experiences. Keeping the story of the 2016 primaries at the center of the field of vision, they don't see the significant disruptions in US centers of power forged by the simultaneous growth in domestic white-supremacist populism and the international effort by Russia to create a Eurasian power-bloc against NATO. The implication of the argument is that the political center is currently more dangerous than the far right. The assumption is that the far right is small and the center-right predictable.

However, the radical conservative movements that led to the Trump presidency have opened up a fault line within the Republican Party that casual observers on the left rarely care to parse. Even as we on the left warn our progressive friends not to overstate differences among right wing factions to the extent that they shout "Welcome to the Resistance!" to each mainstream GOP activist who breaks momentarily with Trump, we should understand where and how such breaks occur, and what they may mean in the long term for US politics. Just as overstating petty ideological or rhetorical differences can obscure a larger policy consensus, it is also important not to lump everyone on the right together. We chide those on the right who fail to understand differences between socialism and liberalism, and find it ludicrous when liberals refer to critics of the Democratic Party as the "alt-left." Similarly, we should understand the differences between the Never-Trump Republicans, the alt-right, "alt-light" and others within the Trumpist movement today.

Paleocons and libertarians versus the mainstream
George Hawley, who as a conservative is keenly aware of differences between mainstream conservatives and the far right, argues in his two books on the subject (Right Critics of American Conservatism and Making Sense of the Alt-Right) that the “Never-Trump Republicans” of today are heirs to a long effort at gate-keeping within the GOP. Hawley argues that neoconservatives have long been the dominant voice in mainstream conservative opinion. He defines the neocons broadly as hawkish in contrast with the isolationist conservatives of the 1930s, and sees them as more accepting of egalitarianism than the pre-World War II conservative movement. While Hawley understates the importance of racism in the party's mainstream as well as overstating the extent to which the GOP has marginalized the extremists in the party rather than themselves moving further right, his discussion of how neoconservatives have sought to exile paleoconservatives and libertarians from the conservative mainstream is informative. (For an account of how the effort to keep the far right within the GOP voting base has pushed conspiratorial ideology into the party rather than out of it, see Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy and Dionne, et al., One Nation After Trump.)

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Anti-Federal Reserve slogan draws Occupy
activists toward rightist conspiracy theories


Hawley describes David Frum's attack on anti-war Republicans in the National Review in 2003 over intervention in Iraq as a key moment in the neocons' current position. At that time, some activists and thinkers on the left advocated strategic alliances with these exiled paleoconservative and libertarians because of their opposition to US intervention, regardless of disagreements on many other issues. The most obvious example of this lesser-evil alliance appeared at CounterPunch, which still regularly publishes pieces by both paleocons and libertarians. Beyond CounterPunch, other left media outlets promoted the website Antiwar.com, run by the Pat Buchanan and Murray Rothbard supporter Justin Raimondo. Thus, despite seeming to have become entirely marginal relative to the rest of the GOP, paleoconservative arguments remained at the center of American popular discussion through the anti-War and the anti-Patriot Act Movements. Ron Paul's two presidential campaigns contributed to this growing libertarian-left fusion. In addition to opposing US intervention and domestic surveillance, Paul's campaigns promoted anti-Federal Reserve conspiracy discourse in the wake of the financial crisis, providing a mainstream space for white nationalist organizing, as these groups pushed the narrative of the 2008 collapse from “Wall Street banksters” toward conspiracy theories about “Jewish bankers” and “global elites.” In the Bush era, the mingling of right and left activists in movement spaces became obvious in the growth in the popularity of the "9/11 truth movement," conspiracy theorist huckster Alex Jones, bizarre anti-Federal Reserve documentaries, as well as in smaller ways, as in the emphasis on buying local and the increase of leftists involved in anti-vaccine and anti-GMO activism.

The decline in status of neoconservatives as a result of the debacle of the Iraq war and the associated domestic surveillance program was a crucial element in the growth of the Tea Party movement that gave us first, Sarah Palin, and then Donald Trump. Trump marked himself as different from neoconservative Republicans during the primaries because of his claim to have been against the war in 2003. In the general election, rather than shifting to the center as predicted, he relied on Steve Bannon’s populist attack on Hillary Clinton’s ties to Goldman Sachs, and today, continues to appeal to conspiracy theories about the "deep state" to dismiss stories of Russian hacking of the Clinton Campaign/DNC. (Journalist Joshua Green has made a point both online and in print of how important Bannon’s Clinton Cash was to the characterization of Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary.”) The Democrats' attempts to appeal to what they perceive as widespread patriotic support for the "intelligence community" against Trump only plays into the fusion of libertarianism, paleoconservatism and some strands of the left.

Activists who later helped to found Three Way Fight warned of the dangers of any temporary alliances with economic nationalists during the “Battle of Seattle” in the 1999 Anti-Globalization movement in My Enemy's Enemy and Confronting Fascism. Today, the danger of fusing left and right populism appears much stronger because of the added international dimension as well as the new media environment.

Now, those who ignored this worry and allied with paleocons and libertarians describe the Never-Trumpers to be acting entirely in bad faith. In doing so, they ignore what Hawley explains has been a long-term transformation in the boundaries of acceptable conservative discourse, as neocons rejected overt racism and exiled the conspiratorial right from respectability. In this way, the neoconservatives can be understood as serving a similar centrist function in silencing and coopting right wing opponents just as the neoliberals of the Democratic Party have marginalized the left. In the meantime, courting those remnants to the right of the neocons has not led to any left victories, and from the perspective of larger dynamics, has added the voice of the left to the far right's argument that the Democratic center is in fact the greater, rather than the lesser evil. Slavoj Zizek took this logic furthest when he argued that Sanders supporters should seek to organize Bannon supporters for a joint fight against global capitalism...



Leftists minimizing the far right threat
What appears currently to be the most dangerous formation on the left is the long-term result of what was initially described as a temporary strategic, issue-specific alliance between the anti-war left with libertarians and paleoconservatives, who have in the last several years been actively courted by the Russian state, as conservative journalist James Kirchik has chronicled. The recent investigations by CounterPunch of the personas “Alice Donovan” and “Sophie Mangal,” whose attack pieces on the Syrian opposition and praise for Basher Al-Assad were published by both left- and right-leaning media outlets, indicates the extent to which the left is vulnerable to the same courtship when it fits their existing biases. CounterPunch had the decency to admit that they had been played by a foreign intelligence service. Those on the left who continue to dismiss all mention of Russian intelligence efforts in the US, whether they target left media or elections as "McCarthyism," fail to understand the ideological connections of international right-wing populist movements. It is not a “made up” story that alt-right activists chanted “Russia is our Friend” in a recent Charlottesviille march, or that Eurasianist ideologue Aleksander Dugin is often featured on Richard Spencer's website, or that Pat Buchanan has claimed Putin for the paleoconservative cause.

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Assange offers job to ex-Google engineer who claims
gender gap in IT reflects innate biological differences


If the far right loves Putin for his authoritarianism, "traditionalism" and nationalism, some on the left continue to follow Russian media because they like the criticism of US intervention and buy uncritically the description of all the regime's opponents as fascists or the product of CIA manipulation. In a few notable cases, leftists have spoken about the Russian government offers of material support to struggling left organizations, as Micah White did in the Guardian. The most extreme exemplar of left-right fusion connected to the influence of Russia in US left politics is the current public support for Vladimir Putin by former Workers World Party activist Caleb Maupin, who has praised Putin on Sputnik as similar to both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the more widely known figure supported by left-right alliance is Julian Assange, whose supporters on the left continue to overlook his overt statements of racism and sexism on social media because of their alliance with his position relative to the US security state.

While the Democratic Party is certainly largely responsible for the current situation, this exclusive focus on the wrongdoing of the DNC by some on the left minimizes the meaningful threat of the populist and white-nationalist right within the conservative movement, including longer term GOP projects of racial gerrymandering and voter suppression. This particular part of the left is much too sanguine about the hegemony of the multicultural neoliberal order. The contradictory nature of this position is apparent in the treatment of near-wins by Corbyn or Sanders as harbingers of neoliberalism's near death, in combination with the surprise with which this faction has greeted Brexit, Trump's election, and each sickening right-wing turn, such as the seating of large numbers of right-wing parties in European parliaments. No matter how often they come, right-wing populist victories are treated as "aberrations" and "flukes" that will be corrected and controlled by the centrist power bloc. Meanwhile, we are to believe, the real danger to the left comes from the writing of Black progressive Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The mistaken theory has been that the centrist power bloc would never compromise with the Trump-Bannon side of the right wing, largely based on an understanding of the US deep state as inherently neoliberal, and by a mapping of European party dynamics from the 1930s onto the US in the 2010s. Despite the continuing evidence that their predictions have been entirely mistaken, these left opinion makers continue to deny that Trumpism represents a serious break in hegemonic influence of the political center, even as they anticipate its imminent overthrow by the Sanders/DSA current. However, elements of the security establishment in the US are themselves divided and partisan, and it is not at all clear that these forces are universally neoliberal. Indeed, it is common for some anti-interventionist media to feature ex-intelligence operatives or intellectuals whose opposition to US intervention was or is currently based in paleoconservatism.

It's also worth noting that the behavior of US political parties is different from those in 1930s Europe precisely because of the all-or-nothing stakes of the US election system. As a result, we have in the US neoconservative Republicans who may be horrified by Trumpean rhetoric, and yet continue to make compromises for the sake of the party's long-term survival, which they believe is seriously threatened by the demographic changes in the US. Among the dynamics that these critics of anti-Trumpist resistance fail to understand is the entryist strategy of the white nationalist right into youth groups through College Republican and libertarian organizations, a strategy that may have long-term impact on both the current structure of universities, and the center of political gravity within the GOP itself. The left understands that the parties are themselves powerful institutions with massive material assets. Keeping control of the electoral apparatus and retaining political bases in their support has become a desperate struggle that will lead to all manner of moral compromise and self-justification by neoconservatives with Trumpism, as we have already seen with the recent tax bill. Even Steve Bannon’s recent fall from grace was about personal disloyalty to Trump and failure to deliver electoral results, rather than a moral repudiation of his putrid ideology.


Read more at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2018/ ... -post.html
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Jerky » Tue Jan 23, 2018 4:05 am

An excellent link, AD, with lots of interesting food for thought.

Not that I agree with everything she says - particularly her final, I think doomed strategy of a "left alliance" against both center and right... I mean, duh?!

But, regardless, I think it's an essay worthy of being read closely and taken heed of, IMO.

Thank you for bringing this to my/our attention!

J
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jan 23, 2018 8:07 am

Not sure I completely follow, Jerky. How do you see the strategic situation?
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 27, 2018 9:40 pm

How the far right has perfected the art of deniable racism


Image
Marine Le Pen with her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2014.

This is not a problem confined to Ukip or Britain. Within hours of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment into the German Bundestag last year, one of its leading members had left the parliamentary group and stormed out of its victory news conference. Frauke Petry, who considers herself a “moderate”, had previously failed to have a senior official expelled for denying Adolf Hitler was “absolutely evil” and branding Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame”.

In France, the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, expelled her own father from the party after he repeated his view that gas chambers were a mere “detail of history” and called on France to unite with Russia to save the “white world”. Almost every day the US president says something egregious about one minority or another only to have the Trump whisperers in the Republican party and Fox News explain why, whatever else it was, it definitely wasn’t racist.

There is method to this madness. Petry said that the AfD, under hardliners, lacked a credible plan to govern; Marine Le Pen called her father’s comments political suicide. In other words, they wanted to win. And while racism and xenophobia were central to their meaning, they needed them to be coded in their message. To achieve this they must relegate racism from an issue of power and discrimination to a matter of politeness and decorum.

Meanwhile, hate crimes against Muslims and refugees are on the rise in Germany; and against African Americans, Jews and Muslims in the US. Hate crimes in the UK leapt 29% last year.

These parties often look ridiculous. Bolton is Ukip’s sixth leader in 15 months (two of those have been Farage). Trump is a buffoon. This week an AfD executive member in the state of Brandenburg converted to Islam. The party’s website states: “Islam does not belong in Germany.”

The trouble is they are also incredibly effective. They won the Brexit referendum; Trump is in the Oval Office; the Front National made the presidential runoffs again; the AfD became the third largest party in Germany.

“We are what we pretend to be,” said the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” For too long we have pretended we are tolerant societies in which racism is not a system of oppression but the marginal obsession of the uncouth. In reality we have simply become more sophisticated about our prejudices. We have plenty of racism, but apparently very few racists.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... us-bigotry
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