Written with the direction and assistance of Welf Herfurth.
1. Introduction
In past articles, we have discussed mass movements and how important mass mobilisation is for building a political base and eventually achieving political power. This really is the question of all politics: how to get a sufficient majority on one’s side in order to carry out one’s political agenda. All politicians, no matter their affiliation or ideology, have to struggle with this. Nationalists are no different. Nationalism, I think, is even more mass-based than conventional liberal-democratic ideologies. It relies on mass force, mass mobilisation, and is democratic (by Carl Schmitt’s definition of democracy). Through people power, and the dictatorship of the democratic mass, nationalists can overturn existing laws and bring about radical constitutional change.
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I often discuss nationalist politics with non-nationalist friends. Usually, it transpires that they are in agreement with me on certain issues which we nationalists are concerned with. But, while they do end up agreeing with me, they often note that nationalism seems to lack a centre; that it does not seem to be a coherent ideology moving towards a fixed goal. While I am reluctant to admit it in front of them, I am forced to concede that they are right. The reason is, I think, as follows. Nationalists are often categorised as ‘extreme’; but, while I agree that nationalist must be, in the end, extreme, there is a difference between the extremist ideology of today’s nationalism and the extremist ideologies of the recent past – fascism and communism, for a start. The latter ideologies moved towards a goal, and subordinated all their activities towards that goal. In the case of fascism, the brownshirts and blackshirts aimed at little more than bringing their Führer or their Duce to power, through a combination of legal and extra-parliamentary means; for the communists, to bring achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, again through the same combination. Both had clear-cut political goals. But the nationalists of today are moving towards – what, exactly?
As most readers know, the Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zündel was sentenced to five years jail by a German court – after being kidnapped, from America to Canada, held for two years without charge in a Canadian prison (under anti-terrorist legislation) and then deported to Germany, where he was charged with multiple counts of Holocaust denial. It is unknown, at this point, if the court will take into account time served. Predictably, the German media were hostile to Zündel and his defence team, but worried if the severity of the sentence – and the fact that freedom of speech on the Holocaust is illegal in Germany and around 30 states in Europe – would turn the ‘Neo-Nazi’ Zündel into a martyr.
I. Are we fascist or Nazis?
The great Austrian political thinker and champion of free-market liberalism, F.A. von Hayek, made a famous distinction in his work between ‘values’ and ‘merits’, summed up in his famous slogan ‘There is no value to society’. (Margaret Thatcher was attempting to convey the same idea when she made her famous assertion that ‘There is no such thing as society’). Hayek argued that, when we assess the worth of a man’s labours – in providing us with symphonies, or paintings, or glass etchings, or plumbing, or shoes, or whatever – the marketplace provides us with the only accurate assessment of their value. The market, which is made up of individual buyers and sellers, assesses the value of, say, a pair of shoes at $90. If buyers disagree with the price charged by the shoe seller, the latter must drop his price, and sell at a discount, if he wants to move his product off the shelves. If he refuses to budge on prices, or if he is underestimated the demand for his product (mistakenly believing that there is a large demand for his shoes, when there wasn’t) he goes out of business.
