Now, as a German, my criticism regarding the original article and the reply is that the neither of them actually quantify what the so-called ‘Nazis’ in today’s modern German nationalists movements are.

It is rather easy, and lets be honest a desired effect by the system, to label a group or people with a word that is designed to evoke fear and hatred within the general political uneducated population. However, for people and groups that claim to be politically on the nationalistic side (what ever that means) and without hesitation use the same language and phrases as the totalitarian Antifa and the liberal democratic media, one has to wonder where they are coming from.

The words ‘Nazi’, Racist’, ect are just ….. words. Their intentions is, by the system, to label people and groups as undesirables, white trash, etc. and generally stop the ‘democratic’ community listening what ‘these undesirables’ have to say, kind of a ‘liberal democratic apartheid’.

I really don’t want to comment too much on both articles. I don’t believe that the suggestions and methods proposed by the article posted by the Nationalist Alternative are a solution to the problem that exists in the so called ‘nationalistic’ parties in Europe. Let’s be honest, most political nationalistic parties are only interested in political power and will bend whatever way it takes so they will get elected. Just look at the BNP in England, and what have they achieved since they are in the EU parliament?

You might knock the NPD as much as they want, but they are one of the longest surviving nationalistic parties in Europe. And if they have ‘Nazis’ in their midst, so who really cares? ‘Nazis’ are human beings too and part of our society; they have their believes, they work, pay taxes and drink tea. Some of them are even vegetarians and do not like German folk music.

As long as political groups and parties exclude people, because of whatever they are labeled to be, from the political processes of a society, the system nothing but a totalitarian entity – whatever they call themselves. As long as labels are more important in today’s political environment then discussing political and social issues without any prejudice, we are failed to go down the path that the system sets for us.

And if one thinks that today’s western liberal democracy is a fair and honest form of government, that is like claiming the catholic church a revolutionary anti-dogmatic society. But then some people are feeling rather warm and cozy in a dogmatic nightmare of self destruction……

Welf Herfurth

Finally, here is a report about the National Anarchist Asia Tour 2008. The report was written by one of the participants, and it is purposely written as an eye witness account, without too many political statements. The aim of the report is to give a personal account of the trip.

One of the aims that we tried to achieve with this tour was to show the participants how the native people live. Two of the guys who came with us had never been in Asia and one can say that it was a real eye opener for them. Not only did we see the most amazing cultural sights and landscapes, but we mixed with the people as much as we could: we ate their local food, travelled in their buses and experienced the life they lead.

And by the end of the trip it was very clear to us that the people in Lao, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia have the same needs and wants as we have here in Australia, namely the need for financial security, preservation of their culture against the never-ending tsunami of American influence and the preservation of their community’s identity and survival.

Across South East Asia

(I went on the trip in order to see for myself how an alien culture, but of a more natural society, contrasted with the technocratic-dogmatic thinking that is enforced on my beloved homeland. I discovered how complete the imprisonment of the great masses is. May every one of my countrymen and women’s minds break free!)

After much wrangling with my local post office, my passport arrived two weeks ahead of the plane trip. I flicked through it standing outside the post office. Its cover was dark blue, made of some stiff card with a fabric face; inside was a holographic photo of myself. Of interest, and different from my previous passport, was the addition of an imbedded chip in a page towards the back, presumably holding my personal file for the benefit of the authorities. I’d like to know what is on it.

I work in a factory at a trade. My last day at work was actually a send off; I would not be coming back. Therefore I was treated by all and sundry, and made to promise to send post cards. A few chaps from the factory floor decided to spring a good natured trap and in a meat pie they gave to me, had surreptitiously inserted into the filling a chopped up chilli! However, I had been training myself for the past months to eat chilli, and the addition on one chilli improved the taste of the pie. They stood surprised as I pulled another chilli from my lunchbox and ate it raw. Then the rough fellows slapped me on the back and hooted with applause. I had impressed them.

I did not want to have to pay rent for five weeks while away, so I packed everything I owned into my car. The student accommodation where I live is easy to get, and I planned to reapply when I returned. Therefore I needed to store my possessions while away. Previously, I had sorted out to store them at a friend’s garage, and now I drove over there. Not everything could fit in the car; therefore everything I did not want to keep, various odds and ends, books and the like, I simply distributed to the other tenants or discarded. I had an interesting ride, with my car full of things, receiving many an odd look from other motorists. At one point the car’s suspension, already overburdened, bottomed out over a speed bump with an awkward grind. I gripped the wheel tightly, thinking I was stranded. Fortunately the downhill momentum carried the car over.

After returning to my residence I collected the bond from my landlord. He was happy at the state of my room, and we parted friends. Then I drove my now empty car over to Welf’s. My other comrades greeted me at the door excitedly, everyone was in high sprirts. After a while Allan said to me: ‘Look here, I’m staving. Let’s go and get a kebab’. We quietly left and drove up and got a kebab. It was our last taste of a kebab for five weeks.

That night I could not sleep much. Going overseas excites because it is seeing things one has never seen before. My mind was continually playing over what I read about or seen in photographs many times before, and I tried to imagine what it would be like once we touched down. Would it be the same? Or would it be different? This guessing kept me up for a long time. Finally I dropped off in a restless slumber.
…..

We awoke at some time past four am. It was a clear cloudless sky: those mornings are the coldest. A cloudy morning acts as an insulating blanket. Rainy weather is even better. After a few cups of coffee we lumbered our packs into the car. Another comrade arrived. More greetings. Then we left for the station.

Here we did not intend to catch the train. The line to Sydney Airport is owned by a private company and the fare is prohibitive. It is cheaper and more reliable to catch a taxi. We selected one and got in, however at that moment its engine died. A poor start. The driver looked at us apologetically. I felt sorry for the fellow; he seemed a decent enough chap. He called for a friend over his radio to come and pick us up.

On the way to the airport we got stuck in the traffic coming through the M5 tunnel under the airport itself. This is a major bottleneck in Sydney’s traffic ring road system, especially in the mornings and afternoons during peak hours. The driver cursed and grumbled at the Government. All of us comrades laugh at the various corruptions in the NSW State Government, and incompetence with which it deals with the endless scandals when the media uncovers them. In a way I am glad that we have a corrupt government: it throws out the sham of liberal-democracy into sharp relief, something we can use in our own outreach.

The taxi pulled up at International at about seven am. We changed our money into Thai Bant, and read our last emails till touch down in Bangkok. After check in we passed into the huge shopping area that all passengers navigate. Then we went through the much vaunted airport security. This checkpoint was manned by an obese woman with three chins. She grunted at me once and I passed through the metal detector. We went straight to our plane and boarded within a few minutes.
…..

The plane trip was uneventful. It simply felt as we had got into a tube and then got out again eight hours later – but the scenery was different. Most people watched movies or slept. My first recollection of Bangkok was a great poster of the Thai Monarch, with the slogan, ‘Long Live the King’, facing the disembarking passengers at the airport. It was literally the first thing we saw of Thailand. Presumably this was to remind newcomers or returning Thais who was boss. Not that I minded: I’d rather a king as head of State anyday, over some lacklustre politician. Not that I stand for old Lizzy though.

The reception hall at Bangkok Airport is a huge modern steel and glass hanger-like structure. We passed through customs and security without incident. After we retrieved our packs from the baggage carrousel we went outside to get a taxi to the city and a hostel. Immediately outside a heavy, smoggy, windy heat descended on us. Our shirts began to stick to our backs. Past the glass doors a large pack of tour and accommodation guides gathered; now they gathered around us, offering various deals. We selected one and hopped into a car. It was a sort of homemade taxi. To the driver’s credit the ride was smooth.

The drive to Bangkok’s Chinatown is along massive freeways and overpasses that are not ten years old. Magnificent bronze statues of traditional Thai figures adorn the side. Out beyond that lies Bangkok: a metropolis that reaches as far as the eye can see, vast and glistening and spreading. Soaring office and residential towers glint silver and white in the slanting afternoon sun against a brown smog; their number is countless, and they stretch to the horizon in all directions. Between them as a floor lies the green foliage of neighbourhood trees, like a carpet between teeth. This is the home of the common people.

From a sweeping exit we descended into the neighbourhoods of Chinatown. Here tuk tuk’s – small motorcycles with a passenger cart attached – and sedans wrestled with numerous scooters and a considerable amount of bicycles, for possession of the road space. Thais drive on the left, but that is the only similarity to Sydney. The nature of driving and road rules, or lack of, was a topic of much discussion among my comrades, and a whole treatise could probably on that subject be written.

The important point for the traveller to remember is that here drivers and riders have an uncanny unspoken understanding with one another (undoubtedly born of close folkish community), and possess a hidden capacity to adjudicate right of way among themselves with ease, in a traffic without a legally set ‘right of way’ as in Western countries. The communicate subtlety to one another their intentions: a raised eyebrow, a slight nod, a minor movement of the finger; which, owing to their slightness of motion, the average tourist misses and mistakes for an almost telepathic communication (as mentioned before, this can only come about through an intense knowledge of common ‘modes of understanding’ held only within a folkish community).

What this amounts to on the roads is that rules are often flouted, because they don’t need them. For example, off the freeways, one can forget entirely the lane markings. We learnt over the trip to trust implicitly in our drivers and riders, and their ability to judge distance and speed in often chaotic situations, as well as communicate effectively to other drivers and riders. We became confident and our earlier apprehension was dispelled. After this, riding on a motor scooter through a crowded five way intersection became a peculiar joy.

But I digress. The hotel in Chinatown was unremarkable and Western-like. We ventured out after a shower into the streets. Bangkok’s streets are always remarkable – so much living is done on them! When outside one is continually engaged by the strange smells, sounds, and exotic sights that press in on foreign senses. Every inch is occupied, yet if you need room then space is made. Sellers flogging food clutter the footpaths and lanes; tuk tuks crowd the road; cycles navigate precariously close but safely the edges of whizzing traffics. There is an order here, but it is another order: a more natural order to the West; here each man follows what his own mind thinks best – instead of what he is told is best.

This is in contrast to the West, where advertising has changed way the average man thinks: instead of what comes instinctively, what would be common sense, what is inherently logical, Western man has unnatural rules, ‘responsibilities’, technocratic dogma, fashionableness, ‘correct political attitudes’, etc., etc., to consider when confronted by a problem and in framing his solution. Mostly he applies these stipulations subconsciously, but once in a while he wonders at their illogical. Here, this attitude of mindless conformity was thrown into sharp contrast with the more logical mode and independence of thinking of the native people. Why not set up a barbecue on the street? There is room, and money to be made, so why not? Another though occurred to me. As I became gradually conscious of the enormous effect advertising has over the great masses and their thinking, I realised the enormous problem that confronts anyone who seeks to establish the forces of national resistance against the whole international movement.

And finally let no one say that modern society needs these ‘rules’ to operate: Bangkok is a modern city of over twenty millions which operates with minimal violent crime or social disturbances – and its preserves its folkish community.
…..

The next morning we visited the famed Bangkok floating markets. The idea was to get into a motor canoe and visit numerous stalls by the side of the canal. The edged of the canals are concrete, the stalls themselves timber and reed roofs, the hawkers selling mass-produced, but locally made Thai souvenirs. It is purely a tourist market. That said, I had no problem with the outfit because the items obviously were of decent quality and made by local people.

We ended up buying little though. We left lunch and drove up to the bridge on River Kwai. One end of the bridge is a small town, with again lots of tourist wares. The planking on the bridge is rather slipshod, and many boards rattle when stepped on. We did witness a Buddhist monk being carried on the shoulders of others in a religious parade. Then we drove over to a famous cutting, the infamous ‘Hellfire Pass’, of the Japanese Thailand-Burma Railway built by forced labour during the last war. Here Allied soldiers, mainly British, Australian and New Zealanders, and Dutch, were used as forced labour by their Japanese to build the railway through the jungle, as well as numerous Chinese, Malay, and Tamil labourers. All suffered greatly under the Japanese.

It must have been a very difficult project to be labouring on. It was very remote from any major town and the lack of metal hand tools meant workers were often using sticks as makeshift digging tools. Workers were often required to work eighteen hour days in the humid climate, and this coupled with the lack of hygiene, poor health care, and small, poor quality rations, resulted in cases of cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion among the working parties. To increase production, extra strain was placed on the still healthy workers, with the Japanese using bamboo canes to beat slow workers. In the six weeks it took to cut the pass, guards beat to death sixty-eight in total, or about eleven men a week.

There is a bronze plaque dedicated to these poor souls at the beginning of the pass. Here we stood in silent contemplation of the pain that happened here years ago. Men our own age here had suffered horrible fates, maybe their ghosts lingered here still. It was a solemn moment.

On the 13th of April we spent the day browsing the bazaars and street markets of Bangkok. I brought a sturdy bracelet of Afghan make made of a silver alloy of low quality. The moist air affected the copper in the mix and slowly turned it a darken yellow in the weeks to come. I decided then to only buy four souvenirs, one from each country we visited.

That evening all agreed we were looking forwards to leaving Bangkok. The humidity was oppressive, and the air was polluted with smog. We previously had bought tickets on an overnight train to Vientiane, capital of Laos, a country to the north of Thailand.

Now we went to the grand central railway station of Bangkok from our hotel in a tuk tuk. We boarded at about 8PM, but the train left not at the 8.30PM timetable start, but instead at about 10PM – reason unknown. We shared out the bottles of beers we had brought with us and made merry. Then we were rocked us to sleep by the train, racing over the rails.

We arrived at the end of the line and crossed into Laos. Here the communist authorities and their bureaucracy became apparent: it took about an hour to cross the boarder. A tuk tuk took us into Vientiane. It was a small city and had everything in pleasing proportion. We checked into a hostel and went over to a well known venue, The Scandinavian Bakery, for lunch. Then we prepared for the Hash House Harrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers) run being held that afternoon.

It was held at a large house inside a compound on the edge of town. Like most of the runners, the host was an American from New York. We all got on fine. Then we ran the hash, through the streets, up into the poorer suburbs, out into the ramshackle slums, and along the main roads. It was great fun, and I remembered the thrill of pushing the body from my days competing in school middle distance running. Dogs yapped and barked at our heels and God knows what the locals thought of these red faced foreigners. After the run our generous host showered us with beer and conducted a hash circle, which is really a badly disguised drinking game for adults. Then, all for the grand price of US$5, we ate and drank to our hearts content at a nearby restaurant.

The next day was spent in sightseeing in Vientiane. We trawled the markets for deals on rare items back home, and for souvenirs. I bought a handsome silver dragon headed bracelet. That night we travelled north to Vanvieng in a minivan. Along the way an accident had just occurred, and a man was groaning on the ground, clutching a bloody head with his hands. He did not appear seriously injured though.

We arrived in Vanvieng past dusk. The streets had a Wild West feel. It was a free and easy atmosphere. There are a large amount of backpackers and European tourists in Vanvieng, and therefore drugs. One can order with food all sorts of concoctions.

The next day the others went tubing on a nearby river. I wandered the immense airstrip that runs through the town. Today its surface has deteriorated to a gravelly surface, and it serves a sort of large empty square. In the Vietnam War era this was the CIA’s base of operations for its ‘Air America’ service, an outfit transport aid and training to the anti-communist hill tribes. It was unlike how I’d imagined it. I had expected to see plane wrecks and mournful faces, but the people here seem to have already forgotten the war.

Vanvieng is a testament to the hedonism of today. Stoned backpackers stumble along the streets and periodically someone will fall over in a drug induced fit. This is common, and the person is simply carried to a padded bench to recover. It seemed to me like the end of the world, a denial of reality, of the future, a simple living for the moment feeling.

The day after the next we returned to Vientiane. The next morning, I left my companions and took a bus to across Laos heading for Danang in Vietnam. The bus travelled on through the night, and the music was never turned off for very long. I did not sleep for more than three hours all up.
…

In the pale blue dawn we stopped at a busy roadside café on the edge of a misty mountain. The coffee was Vietnamese style, condensed milk, hot dark liquid and ice. Stirring it up mixed the ingredients into a sweet and strong brew.

We went through the Vietnamese boarder at about 9AM. Because I was the only Westerner in the office I was delayed, and my passport was not approved until the last minute. However my bus passenger waited patiently, and even cheered me when I walked under the red and white boom gate.

Danang was a whistlestop. At about 2PM I quickly disembarked from the bus and found another going south almost immediately. We left Danang in record time, and this time I made certain beyond all doubt that the bus had air conditioning. Also the seats had clean fabric, not dirty lino covers. A pure luxury, in a contrast with the last twenty four hours. Not even the music would stop me from enjoying an adequate rest.

All that day and night we drove on, small fry on the roads dodging our rushing mass. In the morning we navigated through the outer suburbs of Saigon, which is still commonly called that name by locals. Once off the bus, I found a map. I correctly guessed the tourist precinct to be District 1. A local bus took me across town. Here I found in the agreed hostel a note detailing a change to another hostel around the corner. I fumbled around the long way, rejecting many offers of tuk tuks and restaurants. Finally I found it, well hidden in a back lane. The boys greeted me, and I explained my adventure on the busses.

I was in Saigon, the opulent faded jewel of France’s colonial empire. The influence could be seen in the art deco and French provincial architecture and street layout. Welf had the good luck to run into an old acquaintance from his previous trip, Johnny, an experienced local guide. Throughout our stay in Vietnam the friendliness of the local people surprised us, not least because being Australians our country had been fighting here less than thirty years ago. Perhaps the better treatment the Australians gave the Vietnamese back then, and their more professional training, accounted for some of this.
However I am inclined to venture that the natural spirit of the Vietnamese is friendly toward any stranger. A good example of this was Johnny, who insisted that we visit his home and eat there at least once. Similarly he was an honest and good natured guide we could not fault. After the day was over, and the obligation to guide these clumsy Westerners was done, still he would on his own free time insist on staying with us to help out and point out the better eating and drinking places. Undoubtable some of this was due to following shear good business acumen of not letting a customer out of site until safely in hostel, but it was hard to ascribe it entirely to this. There was a genuine and friendly side to his nature that was undeniable.

Johnny himself was a former South Vietnamese soldier in ARVN. After the war these men where barred from other professions’, and so today make up the large labouring and taxi driving class of Saigon and the South.

LONG TAN

The next morning we visited the memorial to the Australians at Long Tan, about an hour north west of Saigon. Again the heat was oppressive. The red soil was dusty in a horrid way, getting everywhere in the car. The memorial, which is a simple concrete cross painted white, stands in an unremarkable field of rubber trees. Here we stood for a moment of sombre silence. The birds twittered in the trees above.

Here on the 18th of August 1966 a ‘D’ Company 6RAR (Australian infantry) encountered forward elements of a VC regiment. The battle developed until the VC were continually assaulting and attempting to flank the Australians, however heavy artillery from a nearby base and ammunition resupply from helicopters allowed the Australians, who where widely dispersed in excellent defensive positions, to hold them off. Also heavy rain hampered assault attempts. This situation lasted for some hours until a counter attack by another company, ‘B’, staged in APC’s drove off the attackers.

Most of the Australian soldiers fighting in both companies were in their early twenties and conscripted. The parallels to my own age were again, like Hellfire Pass, uncanny, and gave me pause for reflection.

Two hundred metres or so to the right of the cross lay the battlefield itself, a cleared patch of red soil, furrowed for planting. It is said that this is the only memorial to foreign soldiers Vietnam has permitted to be erected on its soil. I wondered why this was. We also visited the unremarkable remnants of the Australian and New Zealander Base, now dismantled and grown over.

On the 24th we travelled to Mui Ne which is a beachside town north of Saigon by four hours. It is a simple and pretty place, clean sand and water against a warm blue sky. It did not rain once.

It is often said that when things are dangerous, or unpleasant, they make good reading and can fill many pages; but that happier days, of rest and sunshine can be soon told.

We spent the days lazing about the beach or floating in the warm ocean swells. In the evenings we would gather at our favourite restaurant and feast like kings for a pittance. And at dusk the cloudless red sky gave way to a full moon, which we toasted with our drinks in the gentle surf.

But we had adventures there too. One day we hired motor scooters and rode bravely through the foreign traffic, out along a coast road to a sea of immense dunes. Here we climb for hours among the hills of sand, sliding down the steep and shear faces, to come to rest in little valleys of dune grass and old drift wood – and then climb out again. Sand got into everything, my pockets and my under clothes included.

Among the dunes lay a round blue lake, ringed with green weed, and there stood a herd of miniature ponies, grazing in the shallows. The ponies had no owners in sight and seemed free beasts. They seemed unaware of our presence, and we left them to their food.

Later that day I lent my motor scooter to another backpacker. She fell into a corner, cutting her leg in places, and was taken to a local hospital. I was roused by Allan who raced back to the hostel. I was required to bring back the motorcycles of Welf and the injured backpacker. Allan took me to hospital and in turns we got back the other bikes, riding separately back and then together to the hospital. I must admit that the speed and confidence of Allan’s riding surprised me, but I counselled myself that he was an experienced rider of many years. On the return journey’s, when I was in control, I pushed my abilities to stay with Allan, and he commended me afterward. The sheer thrill of riding a bike at high speeds along chaotic road cannot be matched, and is almost delicious in its appeal. It feels like you have cheated death. The closure of this unfortunate incident was the complete recovery of the injured backpacker.

A sad parting of ways occurred then also, with Michael starting on the long journey home. During a special midnight toast in the South China Sea we declared eternal friendship.

Then after a few days, with heavy hearts, we turned and left the Mui Ne beach and returned to Saigon. Back into the smog and dirt and bustle of the city. The day after we caught a bus bound for Phonm Penh. We arrived late in the afternoon.

Cambodia struck me immediately as being a few degrees poorer than Vietnam. My first memory after crossing the boarder was the profusion of street sellers of crisp fried insects. I am told that these are a good source of protein. Eating them undoubtable was a practice that sprung up during Pol Pots time. The people here seem more reserved than Vietnam, more irrational, more genuine.

The next day I wandered along the foreshore of the Mekong, and here was a festival taking place in a very public manner. A small public temple was surrounded and crowded with reverent Buddhists, graced with flowers and incense. Across the road a large open air market spread. The living pulse of Asia is overwhelming, the sheer unconsciousness of how the people go about their very public lives amazes. There is not the least shred of self-consciousness here.

On the 29th of April I visited the huge Russian markets; perhaps it refers to the aid this country received from the USSR at one time. There I brought a small number of the red check traditional Khmer scarves. That night we lazed about the foreign correspondents club, famous for the patronage of journalists during Pol Pot time.

The next day Allen departed. We had the now customary last drinks. Then the net morning we boarded a bus to Sinnahokville, a beach town on the south coast of Cambodia. There was nothing extremely remarkable about this place in contrast to the beach at Mui Ne. In fact I found it dirtier and more crowded. There was not much to recommend it. However it could have been we stayed in a bad area or saw the wrong beach.

After a few days here we returned to Phenon Penh and to the same guest house. Then after a night we travelled north to Siem Riep. This is a town just south of the temples of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s best know landmark. Here Welf left to join up with his better half in an upmarket hotel. I choose a budget hostel instead. The rooms were $5 without aircon which suited me fine.

ANKOR WAT

I spent the next week travelling up to Angkor Wat and wandering around their massive bulk. This place is simply amazing and if a visitor does not visit it while in Asia then they are missing an extraordinary spectacle. These mightily temples, build between 800 and 1200 AC are the remnants of a once powerful Hindu empire in this now Buddhist land. The immense carved faces stare out at one impassively, confident and incumbent in their long gone power.

The temples take most of their themes directly from the mythology of the Hindu: the complex is laid out to represent holy Mount Meru in India; the temple is dedicated to Vishnu; and the orientation is to the West, from whence the Gods originated in Hindu myths.

Impressive stone scenes are depicted in bas relief and statues adore most other structures. Here one can see the great extent of Indian – and by default Aryan – influence, on South East Asian culture. This influence does not wash over the mountain chain that divides Vietnam from Laos and Cambodia, and this has acted as a dividing line between the Indianite and Sino influenced cultures of Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam respectively.

I left Siem Riep on the 9th of May. I took a bus to the boarder of Thailand along a highway that was in a poor state. I am told this is as an airline company is paying the government bribes to not repair the road. And thus the trip is slow and rough.

At the boarder transferred to a different bus. Thailand is a very modern efficient State, and the crossing was easy. The new bus was far more comfortable and we made good progress, arriving in Bangkok at 8.30PM.

I found the cheapest room I could (about $2) in a dormitory. Then I caught a taxi with two New Zealanders to the airport in the morning. It all went like clockwork. I meet Welf at the airport with his partner; they’d been staying on the idyllic south coast of Thailand for the better part of a week. Unfortunately it had rained a lot. However they had a happy time, including many massages and facials – Welf’s partner that is.

On the flight home I watched an old version of ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’. I was reminded that the world still holds much mystery, even now. Witnessing Asian culture shows one what is important in our own European culture.

In seeking to understand and respect other cultures, perhaps we can find some keys to building our own.

The article shall conclude with an example of some of the techniques we nationalists can use to foment Tibetan-style national awakenings in our own countries. Really, we nationalists should be ashamed of ourselves: the Tibetans face a greater danger, and face worse persecution, than we do; yet, we are afraid, and, more often than not, too afraid to come out from behind the keyboard.

1. Forced immigration

The Tibetan uprising is an anti-immigrant protest. As the mainstream media reports:

But an influx of Han Chinese to Tibet, and a growing sense among Tibetans that China is irreparably altering their way of life, produced a backlash when Communist Party leaders most needed stability there, analysts say. China has also encouraged huge numbers of Chinese migrants, whose presence has diluted the Tibetan majority… The state media has tightly controlled its coverage to focus on Tibetans burning Chinese businesses or attacking and killing Chinese merchants. No mention is made of Tibetan grievances or reports that 80 or more Tibetans have died… “That is one of the biggest sources of resentment,” Mr. Shakya said of the Chinese migration. He said Tibetans believed Chinese were given more opportunities for jobs, and Tibetan unemployment is high. Beijing surely noticed that the younger generation it hoped to entice was rampaging on the streets of Lhasa. [‘Simmering resentments led to Tibetan backlash’, The New York Times, March 18, 2008].

Immigration here is being used as a weapon. The Chinese, in Tibet, have tried to change the ethnic composition of the Tibetan population by forcing as many immigrants – from China – upon them as possible. Another conspicuous example of the same technique is in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Israel, for decades, has been trying to change the ethnic composition of the Territories by settling as many Jewish-Israelis there (I use the word ‘Jewish-Israelis’ as opposed to ‘Israeli’, because there are one million Arab-Israelis in Israel, and they are not the ones being settled). Recently, the Israeli government announced that it would build 40,000 units (!) for ‘young Jewish couples’ in occupied East Jerusalem, all this while the “Peace Process” is meant to be going on.

(In fact, the State of Israel itself got started using this method – of deliberate ‘over-immigration’. Jewish-Europeans, mainly from Poland and Eastern Europe, settled in Palestine in the hundreds of thousands before, during and after the Second World War. By 1948, the Jewish-Europeans had waged a successful guerrilla war against the British, forcing them out, and had built up enough numbers (and gathered enough material support, i.e., arms from Josef Stalin) to form an army and wage a successful conventional war against Palestine’s Arab neighbours. The remaining parts of Palestine was partitioned between Jordan and Egypt, and 800,000 indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. The new State of Israel was formed, and received diplomatic recognition from both the USSR and USA within hours. The rest, as they say, is history).

Now, the strategy of forced immigration is extremely effective. Why? Because the presence of large numbers of immigrants becomes a fait accompli: it takes cruel, not to say inhuman, measures to get rid of those immigrants once they have arrived, and once they have lived there for a few generations. The Palestinians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, resented, naturally, the huge influx of Jewish-Europeans. But that resentment – which often exploded into riots and acts of violence against the immigrants (similar to what we are seeing in Tibet) – was met with cries of “racism” and “anti-Semitism”, even “Nazism”. It is notable, too, that the Jewish-European immigrants, and the Jewish Diaspora outside Palestine, exploited Palestinian acts of violence against the immigrants to the hilt, using the incidents in their propaganda war against the Palestinians, just as the Chinese government today is using footage of Tibetan violence (against Han Chinese immigrants) in its propaganda war.

Now, we in the West are in the same boat as the Tibetans and Palestinians. We have not reached the crisis point, but we are getting there. Britain has received hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, following the election of Tony Blair in 1997 (and this is on top of the immigrants from the Caribbean and the Sub-Continent, who arrived in huge waves in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s). America’s Hispanic population has reached 34 million, and threatens to eclipse the Afro-American population in size (10% of the Mexican population has departed for America). Australia has received tens of thousands of Indian and Chinese immigrants in recent years, under the “conservative” government of John Howard, and at this rate, Sydney will be an all-Chinese city in a few decades, Melbourne all-Indian. One could go on, citing the huge numbers of immigrants into Germany, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand and other Western countries.

Because these immigrants have put down roots, it will be a difficult – some pessimists say, impossible – job to remove them. This is not because of “assimilation”: from my own experience, the non-European immigrants to Australia have not “assimilated” (i.e., magically become Australian in all respects except the racial) even after living here for decades; likewise for the 3 million strong Turkish immigration population in Germany. No, repatriation is difficult because of the dislocation and suffering it inevitably entails. The Chinese government, and the Israeli government, know that. Woe betides the Palestinians if they ever became militarily strong enough to force the Jewish-European settlers in the Territories to leave. The Jewish-Israeli religious fundamentalist settlers in Gaza, for example, put on an Oscar-winning performance of grief and suffering (with some sympathetic media coverage) when they were forced to leave by their own government. And now the Chinese government is stirring up nationalistic fervour among its own people over violence committed against the Han Chinese in Tibet. One can imagine, then, the reaction from the Western mainstream media – which is relentlessly pro-immigrant – were a populist politician to be elected in the Netherlands or Britain and start deporting immigrants who had been there for decades. The media would, in its reporting, would give maximum coverage to the suffering and stress of the deported immigrant families (while overlooking, of course, the suffering and stress decades of immigration has caused to the indigenous Dutch and British populations).

The question is, from a demographic point of view, can the Chinese, and the Jewish-Israelis, win? Can they depopulate Tibet, or the Occupied Territories, through immigration? The answer is, I think, no, at least in the case of the Palestinians. There are 3.6 million Palestinians crammed into the Territories: even tens of thousands of new Jewish-Israeli settlers will not make much of a dent.

As for the West: pessimistic white nationalists seem to believe that the European population in the US, Britain, Sweden, Germany, France, are a dying race – that they are in the same position as some Amazonian Indian tribe, who suffer from poor health, low life-expectancy and a low ‘replacement rate’ (i.e., births replacing deaths). On the contrary, the Western populations are the healthiest and the most long-lived in the world. They will not disappear from the US, or Germany, any time soon. But – and here is the but – they will disappear, in large numbers, from the areas the immigrants are migrating to. The phenomena of ‘white flight’ are very real, and we are seeing it in action all over the West today. In effect, this is an ethnic-cleansing of the cities (which is where almost all immigrants go). Over time, the numerous numbers of indigenous British, French, and Germans will be pushed out of their capital cities, and replaced by immigrants. The population of the Western nations, overall, will increase, to unsustainable levels – unsustainable economically and environmentally.

The question is – why is this going on? What aggrieves people about the Tibetan, and the Palestinian, situation is the malign intent of the occupiers: China and the Jewish-Israelis are prepared to use force, and immigration, in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans and Palestinians respectively, on every level – culturally, economically, and, in the case of the Tibetans, even environmentally. So what of the governments in the West – do they possess that same intent? Yes, they do. But the strange thing is that the pro-immigration politicians – the Merkels, Browns, Bushes, Rudds – are of European descent, and yet, at the same time, do not seem to like their own people very much. At least, they do not want people of European descent to be in the majority. Why is that?

One of the answers is, simply, that it is a generational thing. The parents of the Bush-Brown-Rudd generation were racialist (without thinking about it too much) and opposed Third World immigration (and, in America, desegregation). That generation fought a long war against their parents – a political and cultural war – against race-based immigration policies, against Apartheid in South Africa, against segregation in the American Deep South. They won that war, or at least, they are in power (and their parents’ generation are not any more). And, in their minds, they are still fighting the same struggle today. They dislike their parent’s generation and its values so much that they are willing to see their countries disappear under a flood of non-European immigration.

Which, in fact, is a cause for hope: if the next generation of leaders is more nationalist than the Browns and Bushes, we will see a reduction of immigration and a rejection of the state-sanctioned ideology of multiculturalism. In the meantime, we must contend with the fact that our present leaders do not really care about the indigenous populations of Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, and the European populations of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada. ‘Anglo’ or ‘European’ culture is boring, too ‘white bread’: we need ‘diversity’, more and more immigrants, and anyone who voices their objections to immigration is a racist and deserves to go to jail. That is the world view of the ‘Generation of 1968’, which now rules the entire Western world – through the parliaments, the universities, the opinion columns of the newspapers, through television drama, through film.

2. The ethics of occupation

As anyone familiar with the left-wing scene in Australia knows, the communist groups here are Trotskyist: they have a fanatical devotion to the ideas of Trotsky, no matter how outdated Trotsky’s positions have become (after all, he died in 1941). Now, these same communists in Australia (and elsewhere in the West) oppose the Chinese occupation of Tibet on communist, left-wing and Trotskyist principles. But they are hypocritical to do so. After all, Russia, in the Leninist-Trotskyist period, incorporated the 14 or so other countries which made up the Soviet Union by force, and then went on to invade the Baltic States and Poland (where they were thrashed by the Germans and the Poles respectively).

Likewise, Chinese communism appears to be anti-imperialist, and, historically, has lent its support to ‘anti-imperialist’ struggles all over the world. The ideology of Chinese communism gives the appearance of being, in principle, opposed to the likes of the Tibetan occupation. But this is only a surface impression. Chinese communism has never opposed imperialism, racism, nationalism on principle: it has only opposed the imperialism, racism and nationalism directed against it – Chinese nationalism, racism and nationalism is fine. This is something that self-proclaimed Maoists in the West have never understood. (Likewise, Vietnamese and Cambodian communism was deeply nationalistic and racialist, while being fervently anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist – i.e., opposed to Western colonialism and Western imperialism).

In the West, there was another form of radical, left-wing socialism which was opposed to foreign imperialism and colonialism while being, at the same time, nationalistic, racialist: German National Socialism. It may surprise people to be reminded that Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ was an anti-occupation text (Now before all my friends from the ANTIFA jumping up and down and call me a NAZI because I dare to mention ‘Mein Kampf, please keep in mind that by just quoting the man doesn’t mean that I agree with the author of the book 100%. Hey, I quoted Mao and Che before and you didn’t call me a Commie as yet). The ire of the book is not directed, on the whole, against Jewish-Europeans, but against the French, who occupied, at the time of writing, the Saar, the Ruhr and the Rhineland. The French used the traditional techniques of occupying powers – suppression of language, culture and existing customs, and the encouragement of local separatist tendencies – as a means of continuing their war after the war against the Germans. Hitler, in ‘Mein Kampf’, champions the rights of an oppressed people – the Germans – against a much stronger occupier. But, like Mao and Lenin, he never took up anti-imperialism as a general principle, and of course, supported the dissolution of Poland, in the 19th century, into Germany and Russia (with all the accompanying suppression of Polish customs, language and culture).

That is how it is in politics: the right or wrong of the matter is relative, depending on one’s perspective. What matters is: do you, or do you not, support the occupation of your own country?

Now, Western Europe has been under Allied – American and British – occupation for sixty years. This is a fact. Even though the US military has wound down its military presence in Germany (because of the end of the Cold War, and requirements in Iraq), it still occupies Germany non-militarily. The same can be said of France, the Netherlands, Italy and the other countries which came under the Allied yoke.

How does America occupy these countries? For starters, the German constitution was written for Germany by the occupiers, and expressly forbids, as we know, any expression of German nationalism or independent foreign policy. And then there is the cultural occupation: the endless flood of anti-German books, films, news coverage, court cases (seeking redress for real or alleged German atrocities committed during WWII), plays, comic books, which seek to “educate” Germans as to how bad they are, and how the American (and Russian) occupiers “saved” them from themselves. Then there is the ritual obeisance paid to the Americans by all German politicians of all mainstream liberal-democratic parties.

The situation is much the same elsewhere in Western Europe – in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain. Indeed, each of these countries is “judged”, by the mainstream media, the intellectuals and the politicians, on the basis of its conduct during the war: Italy and Spain are “bad” because of Mussolini and Franco; France is highly suspect because of its support for Vichy (and besides which, it threw in the towel too easily after the German invasion of 1940); and so it goes, even though the war ended sixty years ago. This is all the product of an American occupation which influences the way Europeans see themselves: one could call it an occupation of the mind.

And it was all made possible by an American military occupation. Even in the case of the British, the arrival of millions of American troops to the United Kingdom in the Second World War, for preparation for the Normandy invasion, represented an occupation of sorts: their presence there dissuaded the British from cutting a deal with Germany at this point in the war. Francis Parker Yockey, in ‘The Enemy of Europe’ (in the chapter, ‘Three Aspects of the War’), writes that ‘England’s total war-effort was brought ever more under the direction of the Washington regime, and England, likewise its remaining overseas possessions, was occupied by American troops.

Thereby the Washington regime wanted to ensure that England would not attempt to bail out of the War…’.

The problem all this ancient history (and WWII is becoming ancient history) presents for nationalists is simple: once you, as a nationalist, start talking about immigration, and how something needs to be done about the non-European migrants in one’s country (e.g., they need to be repatriated), some liberal or communist will call you “Nazi” or “fascist”. This is despite the fact that, until the 1970s, neither Germany nor Italy suffered from an immigration problem: both countries were net exporters, not importers, of people, until the period of post-war economic prosperity. But the foes of nationalism are not given to logic and consistency, and so the burden of war “guilt”, in Germany, Italy and other Western European countries, weighs heavily, dissuading any nationalist policy of repatriation. This mentality even affects countries which fought against Germany in the war. In a recent news story in the British press, it was revealed that the British government sent mixed-race children (the products of couplings between Afro-American servicemen and indigenous British women) abroad, despite the misgivings that the plan was somewhat “Nazi”.

There is, for the Western nationalist, no way of getting around it. The American occupation of the European mind has very real consequences for nationalists.

The Tibetans (fortunately for them) are not burdened with years of Allied brainwashing (only years of Chinese brainwashing, which seems to have been comparatively less effective). And, to their credit, have made the political choice: they are acting. No doubt there are many Tibetans who do not want to make waves, and want to lead politically passive lives; but there are others who have had enough, and are taking a stand against a superior military and political power, for nationalism and against immigration. This is while we, in the West, who are facing a graver demographic and cultural problem in the long term, prefer to sit back and play with the X-Box.

3. The solution: get rid of fear

Many people in the West agree with the nationalists that immigration is a problem: and many people who are doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists, would speak out against it if they were not afraid. Who is it that scares them? In Australia, it is not multi-culti fanatics in the Labor and Liberal parties; or journalists like Gerard Henderson and Phillip Adams (who are on the mainstream Right and Left respectively, and who both adore immigration). No, it is the communists. Sooner or later in politics, one has to go out, in public, and meet people in one’s community, in order to drum up support. Nationalists need to do that: but they are afraid. Most of the nationalists I know spend half of their lives in fear – fear that a communist will, somewhere, take a photo of them and publish it on a website; or that a communist gang will beat them up; or that communists will disrupt a meeting, a march or a rally. In response to that fear, these nationalists tend to operate like a clandestine secret society – like the Freemasons. Meetings are held in secret, as are conferences with other nationalists from interstate. False names are used when meeting other people and (if things keep going down the Freemason-esque path) secret handshakes will be used as well.

The main problem with this approach is that nationalism is not a conspiratorial movement: it can only survive with the oxygen of publicity. Furthermore, nationalists need to build up their confidence in themselves and their ideas. Third, they need to go out and meet the people. So how can nationalists start doing all this?

Communist groups use posters, fliers and brochures to advertise events: usually rallies or, more often, meetings and educational nights at a function room at a local bar. At these meetings and educational nights, communists deliver speeches, or hold a film night, where they show a DVD of Lenin and Trotsky, or Chavez, or Castro, or the Colombian FARC rebels, or whoever. The communists are, in my experience, completely brazen: they will even include the names and mobile names of the organisers down the bottom of the poster. Communists do not live in fear like we nationalists do: despite their “rebellion” against “capitalism”, the capitalists (who, according to the Marxist analysis, control the entire Australian political system) do not care very much – at least, not enough to try and phone the bar owner to close down the event, or send some capitalist thugs around to beat the communists up.

What we nationalists need to do is follow the same strategy of booking function rooms and advertising them heavily. The difference is that we shall design posters, fliers, etc., and fill them with “Left” images and slogans (avoiding, of course, the hammer and sickle), supporting traditionally “Left” causes (the occupation of Iraq, Palestine, Tibet, for example) and, furthermore, we shall post our advertising in the ‘Red’ quarters of cities like Sydney and Melbourne – that is, the universities, and the bohemian/student parts of town which (in my experience) are targeted heavily by communists in their recruitment drives. All of this is intended to provoke the communists: and it would be a masterful provocation to hold a nationalist educational seminar/DVD night at a function room right in the heart of Red Sydney or Melbourne, so to speak.

What would the communist reaction be? Firstly, shock and disbelief. Secondly, panic: they would tell each other, ‘It’s a capitalist plot – these people aren’t real left-wingers/socialists, they’re Nazis, provocateurs working for the government… Make sure that no-one is fooled by their imposture. We don’t want young, naive student-types to be sucked in…’. Third, the inevitable reaction: ‘Fascist/racist/Nazi scum out. Smash fascism!’. Communists will turn up to the meeting, with the intention of taking as many pictures as possible, and to break it up, through heckling, and then force.

And this is what we have prepared for. Firstly, we shall have a reasonable number of tough, courageous, and physically intimidating nationalists acting as stewards standing by, ready to pounce at the first sign of a Red attack. Secondly, we shall bar all cameras at the door – and anyone caught taking pictures will be thrown out of the meeting and have their camera confiscated before they can flee. (There is always a risk that a communist may take pictures with a hidden camera, but that is a chance we will have to take).

Communists can be expected to exert maximum pressure on the owner of the function room to ‘not rent it to Neo-Nazis’. In response to that, we shall tell the owner: ‘That’s nonsense: we are a left-wing, socialist group, and these commies who are trying to close down our meeting are from a rival left-wing faction’. And, if the owner doesn’t believe that we are left-wing, we shall show him our Left-seeming posters and stickers. ‘Does this look Neo-Nazi to you?’.

Inevitably, the communists will win some of the time, and force us to relocate to a new venue. Possibly, we shall be in a situation where we shall never be able to use the same venue twice. Again, this is another chance we have to take.

The advantage of public meetings is just that: they are public, and interested members of the community are able to attend. Some independent-minded younger people may have heard rumours that the nationalist meetings are “fascist” and “Nazi”, and will come to see what all this “fascism” and “racism” is about, and be surprised to learn that we nationalists do have some good and reasonable ideas. Over time, we will be able to attract more of those kinds of people to nationalism. What is more, we will get into the habit of communicating our ideas to people outside the usual small clique of nationalists.

Some nationalists may reproach me here for ‘giving the game away’, for revealing too much of our plans. My response to that is, firstly, the communist has a complete contempt for our intelligence and abilities; he or she certainly won’t have bothered to read this article in full, much less take it seriously. Secondly, the worst thing the communists can do to us is ignore us – to let us hold our meetings and DVD presentations in their Red neighbourhoods.

Nationalism will wither and die without the oxygen of publicity. But a communist ignoring a so-called “fascist”, “racist” and “Nazi” presence in his midst? Impossible: such a thing has never occurred in the history of communism. Communists can always be trusted to use the same tactics, and react the same way, over and over. They are, in essence, machines, their brains computers programmed with the dogmas of Lenin, Trotsky, Marx and Engels.

The essential thing is that once the communists see that we are not discouraged by their attacks on our meetings, that we can stand up to them, physically if need be, and that we are not afraid – then they will give up. They will simply stop trying. Nationalism will be accepted as another fact of political life.

4. In conclusion

Now, I admit that this seems quite a leap – going from talking about the Tibetan struggle to communism. But the fact of the matter is that our situation in the West has not reached critical mass in the way that the Tibetan has: indigenous French, British, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and European Australians, Americans and Canadians are not rioting in the street, smashing immigrant shop windows, overturning cars, setting fires, attacking policemen. In order to oppose immigration and globalisation, we in the West need to organise politically. And, as soon as one does that, one comes up against the same problem again and again: organised Red bullying which prevents nationalists from exercising their political rights – communist groups which (to make no bones about it) use terror to achieve their objectives. It is not the liberal establishment – the politicians, academics, trade unions, church groups – which are opposing us, using threats, intimidation and force: it is the communists. (Perhaps, if our government was communist – like the one in China – we would be facing rows of policemen, beating our brains out with truncheons and shooting us).

What is holding us back is fear: a fear, which, to my mind, is unreasonable. Yes, there is a danger that we may get photographed, and have our names and addresses posted on the Internet. But that is not the worst that can happen. For one thing, the communists of today are not like those of the thirties: if they come to our meetings to heckle us, and try and break them up, they will not (like in Stalin’s day) be bringing coshes, razors, knuckle-dusters, vials of acid and even handguns. We do not risk injury to life and limb. Extreme politics, of any kind, has always carried grave danger to its exponents in the past. Nothing deterred the anarchist Emma Goldman from touring the world and making speeches in halls (to packed capacity), despite the tremendous repression she faced: one has to admire her courage in the face of adversity, an adversity greater than that faced by any Western nationalist c. 2008. So what if a photo of one of us appears on an Antifa website? So what if a newspaper, in some article buried in page 42, calls one of us a “Nazi”, a “racist” and a “fascist”? Compared to Emma Goldman, or any Brownshirt or Blackshirt from the 1920s and 1930s, we nationalists have it easy. And compared to the Tibetans, or Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC in the former Rhodesia, we have it easy.

No doubt, in some charter of human rights (guaranteed by international law), it says that indigenous populations have the right to resist colonisation and immigration. So the Tibetans are justified – legally – in doing what they do. So are we in the West: after all, we are being colonised: the massive flood of immigration in Europe, North America, Australia, is neo-colonialism.

The problem is that, living in a liberal democracy, we have come to expect that certain rights are a given. In truth, they are not: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and the right of national, ethnic self-determination for all peoples, are rights that have to be fought for, that have to be won by the fist. No-one recognises your rights unless you are prepared to fight for them.

White nationalists, on the white nationalist message boards, like to praise the white race for its courage, its daring. But the truth is that we Celts, Teutons, Latins, Norse, Anglo-Saxons have not displayed that supposed courage for a long time. Indeed, the very thought of speaking nationalist, and racialist, ideas in public frightens us.

In that regard, I want nationalists here in the West to look at the Tibetan example and feel shame. Here are a people (derided as ‘yellows’ by our supposedly brave, stalwart white nationalists) who are defending their heritage, their culture, their uniqueness, in the face of awesome repression. They are sticking up for themselves, whereas we are not.

Nationalists in the West need to find the courage in themselves to emulate the Tibetans in their courage, their determination, their sacrifice.

EXTINGUISH THE FLAME

As part of showing our solidarity with the Tibetan struggle, we call on all people to be part of the demonstrations against the torch relay in Canberra on the 24th of April. The National Anarchists will be attending in force. For further information, please contact the New Right in your state. For security reasons we can’t give out too much information, but we can tell you that we will have a lot of fun.

From a political view, does any of this matter? Do the antics of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan matter? Did Princess Diana matter? A person with an old-school, left-wing point of view would say, ‘No’. The fetishisation of celebrity women in our culture is a symptom of the fetishisation of capitalist consumer commodities. Once capitalism is abolished, the only women who will appear in advertisements, films and the like will be female communist role models – factory workers, rice paddy farmers, mothers bearing socialist babies and the like.

After the advent of the New Left, the analyses – of images of women in a capitalist society, as expressed through popular culture – became a little more sophisticated. The stern Soviet and Maoist bromides became somewhat old-fashioned, and the neo-Marxists argued that there was something deeper going on.

Here I will be taking an approach similar to that of the New Left – but will drawing upon Evola instead of Marcuse. Bill White, before his Nutzi phase, used to write some intelligent articles. One of them was on the subject of women in American popular culture, and used some Evolian concepts. (Unfortunately, it is no longer available on the Internet). Evola, I think, is a thinker who is the most suitable for this sort of thing. After all, many of his ‘spiritual types’, or ‘races’ (as he defines them) possess masculine and feminine characteristics. In essays like ‘Do we live in a gynaecocratic society?’ (1936), he said nearly all there is to be said on the subject. The present article will add little to the discussion – much of what Evola has written has yet to be surpassed – but the articles from the 1930s and 1940s are lacking in that they are out of date. They appear dated because Evola did not live in our age – the age of Angelina Jolie, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign bid.

1. Evola’s spiritual types

Evola’s work, as readers familiar with him know, defines a number of spiritual types, which are known to us through myths, religious texts, folklore and the like. Evola believes that these contain metaphysical truth – and that the task of the Traditionalist scholar is to interpret them. He regards descriptions of ancient events in the Bible, for instance, as history which is literally true – that is, accurate descriptions of the metaphysical states of affairs.

Evola often begins his narratives of ‘metaphysical history’, of the various ages of the metaphysical development (or, in his view, degeneration) of man, by positing a primordial ‘solar’, ‘Uranian’ spirituality, which is followed, in time, by the appearance of ‘Demetrian’, ‘Titanic’, and ‘Amazonian’ spiritualities (among others). It is the Amazonian spirituality which we shall first examine here.

The Amazonian spiritual type represents an interesting combination of both male and female spirituality. To Evola, Amazonian is both a reaction and a transmutation. ‘Demetrian’ spirituality is feminine, maternal, egalitarian, pacifist, collectivist – the closest there is to modern day pagan worship of ‘Mother Earth’ and the New Age cults. (Possibly, there is a link here to modern environmentalism as well). In contrast to this, there is the coarse ‘Titanic’ spirituality – cruel, masculine, militarist, phallic (in a purely physical way) and forever seeking after the higher, spiritual state as represented by the ‘Uranian’ and ‘solar’ spirituality. (There are several myths of giants and other demonic races who sought to attain the ‘solar’ spirituality by force – by storming Mount Olympus and so forth – and being punished by the Gods for their impudence). Amazonianism is a reaction against the coarseness of the Titanic spirituality, and is a defence of the virtues of Demetrianism. In Evola’s narrative of metaphysical history, the two rival spiritualities – the ultra-female Demetrian and the ultra-masculine Titanic – clashed, and produced a feminine spirituality which was not quite one or the other. Amazonianism is feminine, all right, but has taken on assertive, masculine and warrior characteristics. (Evola, of course, has nothing against militarism and the warrior: only the expressions of militarism without a higher, ‘solar’ spiritual aspect. The militarism of the Titanic spirituality is militarism devoid of any transcendent spirituality: it is the use of force only to attain purely material goals).

This Amazonianism is prevalent today. As Evola writes:

The woman often asserts her primacy in new ‘Amazonian’ forms. Thus we see the new masculinised sportswoman, the garconne, the woman who devotes herself to the unilateral development of her own body, betrays the mission which would be normal to her in a civilisation of virile type, becomes emancipated and independent and even bursts into the political field. And this is not all. (‘Do we live in a gynaecocratic society’ (1936), translation copyright © 2003 Thompkins and Cariou).

2. Amazons go pop

One can say that those tendencies identified by Evola in 1936 continued into the modern age. Indeed, to look at the popular culture of the last ten or so years, we can say that we are living in the age of Amazonianism. Women warriors abound: killer cyborgs, fighter pilots, deadly martial artists, female soldiers… One only has to think of Lara Croft, television shows like ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’, the remake of ‘Bionic Woman’, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Battlestar: Galactica’ (in which every single female character is an Amazon of some kind), ‘Dark Angel’, films such as ‘G.I. Jane’ (a 1997 film which was a portent of the future), ‘Kill Bill’, ‘Charlie’s Angels’… Even Guinevere, a more Demetrian figure, was reinterpreted as a bow-wielding Amazon-type in the 2004 film, ‘King Arthur’. (Of course, there are plenty of films and TV shows from the recent past with women warriors – there is ‘Barbarella’ (1968), the sixties British TV series ‘The Avengers’, the seventies version of ‘Bionic Woman’, Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien’ (1979) and its sequels, the Afro-American kung-fu heroines of the seventies Blaxploitation films, the Linda Hamilton character in ‘Terminator 2’ (1991). There are also the multitude of heroines in American comic books. But it is only recently – in the past ten or so years – that the Amazonian woman warrior has reached the forefront).

Now, I am not such a prude that I dislike all American popular culture. I have enjoyed at least a few of the above films and TV shows. But the striking thing is their unreal depiction of women. A reviewer of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ (2000) at the Vanguard News Network site acerbically noted that the film simply wasn’t real: no amount of martial arts training, and psychological ‘positive thinking’, could give women the physical strength to overpower a man in a fight – it simply doesn’t happen. They do not have the strength, or the aggression. He cited an anecdote of an incident he witnessed in a parking lot, where a man was berating a woman for her poor driving manners. The woman was twice the man’s size, but put up with the man’s tirade and nodded meekly before climbing back into her car. In a ‘Charlie’s Angel’-type universe, she would, of course, given him a roundhouse kick or thrown him over her shoulder in a judo manoeuvre.

We all know from real life that female aggression is the exception and not the rule. War is a man’s business, and it is men who do most of the fighting (and dying) on the battlefield. True, there were female communist soldiers in the Vietnam War, and in the Soviet Union’s so-called ‘Great Patriotic War’: but again, these are exceptions.

So why is it, then, are women, in today’s action-based films and TV shows, increasingly depicted as flying fighter jets, kickboxing, shooting, breaking necks, etc., like men? Why are there women who are portrayed as having inhuman physical strength – a strength which exceeds that of the male characters (e.g., the superwomen in ‘Buffy’, ‘Xena’, ‘Battlestar’, ‘Bionic Woman’)? They are often shown bending steel bars, terrorising hapless male characters, and engaging in protracted martial arts contests with other warrior/killer women – all the things that men, or at least the men in the absurd pop fantasy world, should be doing.

Popular culture is all about fantasy – a character like James Bond, who is a connoisseur of fine wine, food and clothes, a great lover, a successful gambler, an unbeatable action hero – appeals to male fantasies. Possibly, the new wave of women warriors appeals to female fantasies. That is, the women who like these films and TV shows have wanted to do these sorts of things, but now, under the aegis of feminism (which teaches that women can be equal to men in every way), they can see those fantasies put up there on the big (or small) screen.

Nationalist writers who have touched upon the subject usually blame it on a conspiracy – a conspiracy, by the writers, directors and producers of Hollywood, to turn women into men, to masculinise them. Usually these analyses are couched in white nationalist terms: the white race is dying, and needs more children; but, because of feminism and other modern ills, white women are not reproducing enough.

Western popular culture, which is tremendously influential, certainly encourages ‘feminist’ childlessness. One can think of a few of the female warrior characters mentioned above who do have children – e.g., the Uma Thurman character in ‘Kill Bill’ – but childlessness, and the absence of the comforts of the hearth and home, are the rule. The women characters lead a transient life of adventuring, and children, husbands, mortgages and homemaking only serve to get in the way. (A hit single from the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ soundtrack was, appropriately enough, titled ‘Independent Woman’).

Whether or not white women are staving off pregnancy, in order to imitate the feminist pop icons, is beside the point. Likewise, it is beside the point whether or not white women should be bearing as many children as possible (and Evola would be vehemently against that notion). The point is that we are seeing an eruption of Amazonianism. Why?

Many white nationalists would blame it on the ethnicity of the group which controls Hollywood and the American TV studios, record companies, etc. – this group, they charge, wants to ‘Destroy the white race’ through promoting feminist childlessness, and race-mixing. Evola’s interpretation, in contrast, is that the explanation is metaphysical: we are living in a dark age (what he calls the Dark Age) which is seeing the eruption of spiritualities which are the negation of the Uranian, solar spirituality that he favours most. In other words, pop-culture Amazonianism is merely a sign of the times, and there is no one ethnic group foisting it upon us. It is an explanation I myself tend to agree with.

I should note here that a recent trend in the celebrity news media is to dwell obsessively on celebrity pregnancies. The media is in a frenzy of speculation over whether or not Nicole Kidman, or whoever, is pregnant, and stars who are already pregnant receive maximum news coverage. Certainly, 2007 was, in the world of the trash media, the Year of the Pregnant Celebrity. Which has drawn protestations from some female journalists, who complain that the trash media seems to think that the pregnancies of these celebrities is more noteworthy than their artistic accomplishments. (I myself think that the artistic accomplishments of the majority of both male and female celebrities in the 2007 were not very noteworthy, myself – so maybe celebrity pregnancies make better copy than anything Kidman, Heath Ledger, Naomi Watts, Russell Crowe and the rest have done this year).

Related to this is the practice of celebrity adoption, particularly the adoption of children from the Third World. Madonna and Jolie have adopted children from Africa, and, in Madonna’s case at least, have removed the child from its birth parents. Africa, of course, is portrayed in the Western media as a continent wracked by war, poverty, famine, corruption, repressive government, and barbaric sex crimes. And, what is more, Westerners – who are, in the liberal democratic discourse, citizens of a globalised world – are obliged to take care of Africa’s problems, through aid and peacemaking efforts, but also through adopting orphans from Sudan or wherever, and giving them ‘a better life’ in the West. Certainly, to judge by their actions, the Madonnas and Jolies seem to think that way. (Likewise, immigration of Africans, on humanitarian grounds, is another form of aid. That is, African immigrants from war-torn, oppressive countries, have the ‘right’ to a life in the West, to share in its abundance and prosperity).

3. Aphroditism and consumerism

It is a fact that women are very big consumers of luxury consumer goods: that is, consumer goods that we could easily live without – expensive clothes, shoes, home furnishings and the like. Any man who has ever leafed through a woman’s magazine, or watched a TV program on woman’s beauty ‘needs’, would draw the conclusion that women’s inner thought processes revolve largely around hair and skin care, makeup, diets, the prevention of ageing, makeovers, ‘looking good’ by buying the right clothes and shoes (and wearing them the right way) and the like. In comparison, men seem to pay little attention to these things: advertising aimed at men, for instance, gives the message that men are creatures whose sole preoccupations are beer, sport, cars and DIY home repairs.

My own conclusion is that the advertisers, magazine editors and others are largely correct: the vast majority of men, and women, are interested in those subjects, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I say this because those advertisers, manufacturers of luxury consumer goods, etc., would hardly be able to make a living otherwise, and they do – the market for women’s rejuvenating skin creams, for instance, is huge. Partially, this is all a result of living in a technologically-advanced society where machines do much of the ordinary, hum-drum chores of the household for us. Traditionally, women in the past had to look after the house, and attend to the domestic chores. But they did not have the labour-saving, and time-saving, devices that we have now. Food had to be consumed quickly because there no refrigerators; washing had to be done by hand. Children had to be looked after, with direct supervision, and now the TV functions as a babysitter. Because of automatic dishwasher, the washing machine and all the other domestic labour-saving devices, women who stay at home become bored, and tend to go shopping to relieve that boredom. Which is natural: many shopping malls are pleasant places, and buying a new consumer item – especially a luxury – can generate its own short-lived ‘high’, just like a cigarette, a cup of coffee, or a win at a poker machine. As a result, the instinct which leads a mother to provide for her children, the hunter-gatherer instinct, is inverted, and turned towards consumerism. And, for adolescent girls, spending on luxury items becomes a competition, fuelled by peer-pressure. They feel compelled to keep up with the likes of Paris Hilton – but do not have the means to keep up, i.e., Hilton’s inexhaustible wealth.

In addition to shopping-mall consumerism, another pleasure is the celebrity gossip magazine, covering the dreary trivialities of the lives of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, and the rest, and the latest sordid escapades of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Princess Diana continues to generate news stories almost daily, even though she has been dead for ten years, and obviously, there is a market for every new scrap of information about her. (Incidentally, in my own experience, the majority of people interested in the British Royal Family are female).

The reason why such figures generate such fascination among women is vicarious identification: or rather, women want to be like Angelina Jolie and Princess Diana – they want that money, that luxurious lifestyle, the clothes, mansions, expensive holidays in luxury resorts, and affairs and marriages with handsome wealthy men. They also want to have their cake and eat it, too: that is, they want that lifestyle, and children – hence the media obsession with the pregnancies of wealthy female celebrities. All of this represents an escape from the routine, budget-restricted life: and the fact that the grass is always greener.

There is also an element of drama in the lives of these celebrity women, and danger: did Katie Holmes marry a Scientologist nutcase? Will Brad return to Jennifer Aniston and abandon Angelina? What does Kate Moss see in the out-of-control drug addict Pete Doherty? Will Victoria Beckham drop dead from an eating disorder? The media constantly focuses on scandal, infidelity, marriage troubles, anorexia and obesity, and general drama of all kinds – and where there is no drama and scandal, the media invents.

To a certain extent this is natural. Often, more politically-correct observers are surprised by the extent of two things: a) women’s tendency to place other women on a pedestal (e.g. Princess Diana, Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Grace of Monaco and other celebrities, who exist on a hierarchical plane far above the masses); and b) women’s appetite for luxurious consumer goods. One has to recall the socialist ‘queen’ of Argentina, Evita Peron, a beautiful woman who clothed herself in expensive furs, wore expensive jewellery, etc. A true socialist should never do such things, but Evita was wildly popular with her constituency – impoverished, lower-class women – who approved of Evita’s ostentatious displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Even though we live in a liberal democratic society, the masses still seem to feel the need for royalty, or at least, elevated figures of great wealth, beauty and refinement.

Vicarious identification, and wish-fulfilment, is at the heart of the fascination with the likes of Jolie and Princess Diana. But what of Lohan, Hilton and Spears? No woman would want to be like them, surely? I say this because these women are the unfortunates of the celebrity world: they are always in trouble, always having trouble with husbands and boyfriends, always going on self-destructive, booze- and drug-fuelled rampages (which often lead to arrest). And, not to put a fine word upon it, they are trash – they lack class.

For all her money, Britney Spears is trailer-trash, a lumpenproletarian who celebrated her wedding to the hip-hopping Kevin Federline with a wedding reception at KFCs. In addition, both Spears’ and Lohan’s careers are in decline: I know, from reading the entertainment pages, that Spears’ new album was outsold by a new release by the Eagles, and that Lohan is virtually broke from spending her wealth on drugs, dresses, extravagant holidays, houses, etc. No doubt many women envy the wealth of Hilton, Lohan, Spears (and that of a comparatively minor, but equally self-destructive celebrity, Amy Winehouse); but few would envy their lives. And then there is the question of sexual morality: conventional, conservative sexual morality – which still governs much of our lives – frowns on Hilton and her pornographic videos, etc., and certainly would not approve of a woman in real life who mimicked her behaviour, and that Lohan and Spears.

All of this is a kind of rebellion. But, instead of being a political rebellion, it is an individualist one. The energies that would be channelled into activism are now channelled into consumerism, escapism, and debauchery.

In my view, the cult of Lohan, Spears and Hilton is a symptom of what Evola calls ‘Aphroditism’. As Evola writes, in a rather sensationalistic passage:

Baumler wrote this, in the introduction to the already mentioned selected writings of Bachofen: “In the streets of Berlin, Paris or London, all you have to do is to observe for a moment a man or a woman to realise that the cult of Aphrodite is the one before which Zeus and Apollo had to beat a retreat…The present age bears, in fact, all the features of a gynaecocratic age. In a late and decadent civilisation, new temples of Isis and Astarte, of these Asian mother goddesses that were celebrated in orgies and licentiousness, in desperate sinking into sensual pleasure, arise. The fascinating female is the idol of our times, and, with painted lips, she walks through the European cities as she once did through Babylon. And as if she wanted to confirm Bachofen’s profound intuition, the lightly dressed modern ruler of man keeps in leash a dog, the ancient symbol of unlimited sexual promiscuity and infernal forces”… Woman and sensuality often become predominant motifs almost to a pathological and obsessive degree. In Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and particularly in America, the man who exhausts his life and time in business and the search for wealth, a wealth that, to a large extent, only serves to pay for feminine luxury, caprices, vices and refinements, has conceded to the woman the privilege and even the monopoly of dealing with ‘spiritual’ things. (‘Do we live in a gynaecocratic society’ (1936), translation copyright © 2003 Thompkins and Cariou).

This explains, to my mind, the cult of Lohan, Spears and Hilton – trashy women who lead opulent lifestyles, who have public affairs, make pornographic films and who, despite their lumpen-esque behaviour, still occupy a privileged place in our society. They are like the pagan priestesses of the Venusian cults of the ancient world. (It can be said, too, that the explosion of pornography (and nudes in advertisements at newspaper stands, billboards and the rest) in the modern age, especially Internet pornography, is another sign of the resurgence of the cult of Venus, so to speak).

Men are the biggest consumers of all this pornography. But this is precisely the point: they are bound, spiritually, to this cult of Aphrodite, as manifested through ubiquitous pornography, nudity in advertising, etc., which has been created by other men (usually in the United States). They wallow in decadence while their countries, politically and economically, go to ruin. The situation is not so different from that of Germany in the time of the Weimar Republic, when the young men of Germany indulged in ‘Aphrodisian’ sensuality instead of defending their country against communism, and working to fix their country’s myriad foreign policy and economic problems.

4. Women in politics

The reader may point out that here I have neglected to examine another form of Amazonianism: the rise of the woman Statesman. At the time of writing, Hilary Clinton is making a bid for the White House – and many liberal feminists are supporting her campaign, regardless of what her actual policies are, because they feel that ‘It’s time for a woman president’.

Margaret Thatcher and Indira Ghandi were two women who set precedents for women being Heads of State (and it is no coincidence that Thatcher’s propagandists compared her to the British warrior queen, Boudicea, a decidedly Amazonian figure who will soon have a Hollywood film, in the style of ‘King Arthur’ (2004), made about her). But more interesting is the role that women play in getting male politicians elected. As 50% of the electorate, they play a vital role, of course: but they also, as wives and partners, play a role in motivating men to run for office. One only has to look at the instrumental roles Cherie Blair and Hilary Clinton played in elevating their respective spouses. Some wives, like the former Australian prime minister John Howard’s wife, and George W. Bush’s wife, seem to play a minimal role; others, like Cherie Blair, Hilary Clinton and wives of despots such as Marcos and Suharto, are a driving force.

This is natural, to a certain extent. Wives and female partners often tend to encourage their spouses to achieve more, to do more with their lives, to obtain the respect that they rightfully deserve (‘How could you let x work colleague speak to you like that?’), to occupy the station in life that they truly deserve. There are many examples from literature and popular culture (Lady Macbeth being one of the most famous). To a certain extent, this is all healthy, and the consequences are not always as evil as in the cases of Blair, Clinton and Macbeth.

Part of the problem in nationalism is not merely the lack of female members, but the lack of female members who are driving forces in men’s lives. Instead of constructive political activism, many men use nationalism as an excuse for drunken get-togethers, where the conversation consists of complaints about the behaviour of certain ethnic minorities. Without motivation, without the desire for success and achievement in politics, and all the appropriate skills for success, professionally and in the community, nationalists will accomplish little. They will also fail to attract admiring, supportive spouses.

And this, I think, is one of the many reasons why women are not attracted to nationalism (at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries): they see little in the way of material and social benefit. A woman who is a former trade-union lawyer can achieve a great deal of success in the Australian Labor Party, by simply mouthing all the things that the unions want her to say; but a similar career path, leading to similar success, is not available in nationalism – either for a woman or her spouse.

Having said that, an increase in the number of women members will not cure all ills. One only has to look at the Australian communists, who attract plenty of young women, all right – but women who are, in my experience, bitter and twisted because they feel persecuted against and discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.

One of the other things that women find unattractive about nationalism is, I think, its emphasis on women’s role as the progenitors of the white race – specifically, their responsibility as progenitors – brood mares, so to speak. (Both fascism and communism, historically, tended to laud women as child-bearers, homemakers and housewives. Nowadays, of course, women see this as too limiting). While, of course, the majority of women will end up having children at some point in their lives, there are metaphysical types – or what Camille Paglia calls ‘sexual personae’ – besides The Mother. (Indeed, the image of woman in nationalist propaganda, especially white nationalist propaganda, is often evocative of Demetrian spirituality – the exception being, of course, that the Demetrian, lunar mother type in nationalist propaganda is racialist.

Demetrianism is egalitarian, rejects hierarchy, and treats all people and all races as being equal. Nationalism, of course, does not reject hierarchy, and makes distinctions between the races. Its propaganda emphasises that it supports the notion of white motherhood, not motherhood in general). Nationalists should, I think, try and give women more options – and not restrict the role of woman to The Mother. After all, we nationalists do not want to produce another generation of bored housewives like those of the fifties, sixties and seventies, who resorted to anti-depressant pills and other legal drugs to relieve their boredom.

The solution? We do not want go down the communist route – communist ideology draws on Amazonian imagery (e.g., women as soldiers, factory workers in overalls and the rest). At the same time, it should be pointed out that fascism, historically, while championing the role of woman as mother, also possessed a modernist, feminist tinge (often overlooked by hostile communist and liberal commentators), making icons out of Amazonian figures like Leni Reißenstahl and Hanna Reitsch. Fascism owed its successes in winning the support of millions of Europeans, and many European women, because, I think, it was flexible in its ‘party line’ when it came to women.

5. Masculinity in nationalist politics

I was discussing the contents of this article with a friend of mine who is a nationalist intellectual and who writes articles for nationalist publications. I mentioned that I would touch upon the subject of Amazonianism in popular culture. Inevitably, we started talking about a related issue: the subculture of male ‘nerds’ in the West who are vociferous consumers of American pop culture (especially with a science-fiction or fantasy theme): e.g., films, television shows, comic books, manga, anime, role-playing games, computer games and the rest.

These men, who are often physically out of shape and badly groomed, seem to live in a world of pop fantasy which is completely disconnected from reality. They seem to have little interest in politics or anything else that happens in the real world. They also have little interest in anything which is part of the tradition of ‘high’ Western culture (that is, novels, films, plays, operas, paintings, sculpture which is not mass-produced American or Japanese junk). If a film does not have a science fiction or fantasy theme, they will not watch it: trying to sell them on the virtues of classic filmmakers, such as Godard, De Sica, Jean Renoir, for instance, is a futile task.

In the West, the phenomenon of ‘nerdism’ is ever increasing. From a nationalist standpoint, nerdism is harmful: it is, in fact, a selfish form of consumerism, of liberal individualism, which is about as bad as Paris Hilton, indiscriminate credit-card driven consumerism – in fact, it is probably the male equivalent. Young, impressionable women waste huge amounts of disposable income on shoes to increase their physical allure; young men, ‘Warhammer’ figures, to retreat from traditional masculine imperatives like finding a mate. (A young man playing a ‘World of Warcraft’ game can be transformed into a hero – that is, a hero on the Internet. In this, they are not so different from the ‘keyboard commandoes’ of nationalism, who are heroes on the Internet, but politically ineffectual in real life).

Again, I am not being prudish here: games like ‘World of Warcraft’ and the like are fun. But these young men are concentrating on these mass-produced entertainments to the point of excluding everything else; and, if they do not concentrate on some of the other problems afflicting our civilisation – e.g., the demographic threat posed by immigration – they will, in the end, have no popular culture entertainments left to enjoy. (E.g., the actors in any upcoming fantasy epics will all be non-white; traditional European themes, based on medieval European, and Celtic and Teutonic folklore, will be replaced by Hindu or African ones).

So how do we attract such young men to nationalism? Well, the problem is just that: how to attract them. Why should they want to be nationalists?

The answer is, I think, by appealing to a sense of heroism. Nationalist ideology, at its best, rests on, among other things, confrontations and glorious struggles against our enemies (who are, more often than not, the communists). Nationalist man is very much a heroic, martial man: someone brave enough to march down the street, in a demonstration, and stand side by side with his comrades, waving a nationalist flag and enduring the jeers, screams and provocations of the assembled communist Left who seek to ‘smash fascism’ by smashing him, physically. Martyrs in the nationalist canon, like Daniel Wrestström, are glorified – just like Boromir in ‘Lord of the Rings’. (More than a few observers have pointed out the correlation between nationalist ideology and epic fantasy – in particular, their glorification of daring, heroic feats). Nationalism, too, has a place for the physically slight men who are not street fighters – men like Goebbels, John Tyndall and William Pierce – who function as agitators, writing politically provocative speeches and articles, an act which, in our present age of politically-correct anti-free speech laws, carries its own risks. One can say that it takes a certain type of man – a man with guts – to want to become a nationalist. And this, I believe, is how one can appeal to the nerds: by offering them, like the army recruiters of old, the prospect of a life of excitement and danger (while hoping, of course, that none of them meet the end of the unfortunate Daniel Wrestström).

6. The Traditionalist rebellion

Fascism, and much of post-war nationalism, has always promulgated the one metaphysical type: the ‘heroic’, ‘solar’ type of spirituality. In Evola’s writing, the heroic spiritual type as an attempt to regain the primordial Uranian and solar spirituality, lost after the successive waves of distortions and deviations of previous epochs. The heroic epics of Hercules, Gilgamesh and others describe spiritual journeys – not mere adventures – which are quests for that lost, solar spirituality. It is masculine – Evola uses the term virile to describe it – but not the coarse, phallic masculinity of the Titanic type.

Now, this brand of metaphysics is bound to appeal to men in the current age, which is very much a feminised age. I am not talking here of the proliferation of Amazonianism in pop culture, or Aphroditism, etc., but in the structure of our economy itself.

I once read a statistic (which I am unfortunately able to find again and reproduce here) that most of the hundreds of thousands of jobs created in Australia in the last ten or so years have gone to women. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case: in our everyday dealings with the banks, the electricity companies, government agencies like the educational institutions, the hospitals, social security, the Road Traffic Authority and the like, are staffed by young (20s, 30s) white-collar women, who are (again, statistically) more likely than not to be single. Our lives, in the West, have become bureaucratised, thanks to the proliferation of government red tape, rules and regulations for everything, and most of the bureaucrats one encounters in one’s daily dealings with the banks, government institutions and the like, are, more often than not, from this class of young white-collar women.

So men are bound to encounter ‘bureaucrats’ of this type, again and again – dealing with bureaucracy is inevitable in today’s world – and certainly, this must have a demasculinising effect on men over the long term, especially given that our conventional morality tells us that it is a man’s responsibility (and a man’s alone) to support his wife and his children. That, of course, has changed, with the rise of the single-parent household: but the perception that a man has these moral responsibilities still lingers, and certainly, I know many men still have them. And the question is whether having households without fathers – in Australia, we have 750,000 people on sole parent’s benefit, the majority of them being female sole parents – is, socially, good or not. I myself would say no.

So why are there so many women in employment? The answer is, economics – or at least, the economics of the post-1970s period. The inflation of the 1970s – following the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates – led to an economic deterioration which was so widespread, and so ruinous, that men were unable to support their wives and children on one wage, as they did in the 1950s and 1960s. So women were forced to go out and work.

The solution to the problem is, of course, economic. In economist’s jargon, we need to increase the capital-labour ratio in favour of labour: that is, capital, invested in the market, has to become plentiful in comparison to labour. A bidding war for workers, between rival capitalists, will begin, and wages will go up – which will enable men to support wives and children on one income again. (That is, of course, that single income will be enough to pay for high house prices (for houses located near the city centres) and the modern consumerist lifestyle. Some would say no, and that a two-income household is necessary to meet such demands).

But, of course, such a solution is nowhere insight, especially given that incompetents today are in charge of running the economies of the West, as evinced by declining share market values, inflation, high interest rates and all the other ugly economic phenomena.

In the meantime, until the economy is fixed once and for all (and I myself am convinced that, under the system of liberal democracy, the economy will never be fixed, i.e., it will never benefit the good of the wider population but only to big business and its shareholders). Instead of purely economic solutions, we need nationalism of the kind described above – one that resurrects the imperial, solar and ‘virile’ virtues, in defiance of the present depraved age of Aphroditism, Amazonianism and all the anti-Traditionalist spiritualities. Nationalism becomes an act of rebellion.

Subconsciously, I think, the masses are Traditionalist: the ‘solar’ virtues are what the men and women of the West want. So we nationalists must be prepared to give ‘heroism’, in Evola’s sense, to them.

Introduction

This is an article divided up, roughly, into two halves. The first concerns liberalism, or what liberalism has become. It details a transition in liberalism – from a cult of elections and parliaments, to a cult of doing your own thing (even if that involves sexual and other debauchery). The second half outlines what I consider to be the New Right antidote to the poison of modern liberalism, and explores some of the ideas of a liberal democratic anti-intellectual, Karl Löwenstein, who, in 1937, wrote a paper describing some of the political techniques used by the fascist political movements of the time. Some of those techniques are still being used by nationalists around the world (Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Britain, etc.), and, in my opinion, we in Australia can apply them equally as successfully here.

2. What is liberalism really?

Nowadays, one can read, in the Western liberal democratic press, daily denunciations of General Musharaff of Pakistan and the Burmese Junta. The two dictatorships have attracted media attention recently because of their flagrant crackdowns on ‘liberal democratic’ political opponents (or at least, opponents who the Western media assumes are liberal democratic).

Now and then, other dictatorships and/or authoritarian regimes will occupy the spotlight. One recent case is Georgia, which is led by an American-backed liberal democrat, Mikhail Saakashvili, who came to power through an ‘Orange Revolution’-type coup (nicknamed the ‘Rose Revolution’) in 2003, but is now in danger of being overthrown, and now, as a result, has declared a state of emergency and is using state repression – including tear gas and rubber bullets – to subdue the populace.

A perennial target of the Western media is Vladimir Putin. Despite his massive support among the Russian people, and massive election results in his favor, the Western media still considers him to be ‘undemocratic’ and ‘illiberal’, and upholds his critics – small groups of ‘liberal democratic’ dissidents, who have no popular support, and no agenda beyond being anti-Putin – as being more ‘democratic’, and certainly more morally worthy.

So we have a collection of countries – Burma, Pakistan, Fiji, Russia and others – which are manifestly illiberal and democratic in the eyes of Western liberal democrats. But what is it, exactly, that makes our liberal democracies so good? Why are they preferable to these dictatorships and authoritarian regimes? The answer is, simply, that people in liberal democracies are ‘more free’ – in fact, they are ‘free to do their own thing’.

To explain. One of the objections the Western liberals have against Iran is that supposedly Iran (along with other conservative Islamic States) imposes a strict dress code upon women. Women are allowed to dress freely in the West, as well as engage in nude sunbathing and the like: part of that, in my view, is because of the Western cultural heritage (particularly in the northern European countries) which traditionally has given more freedom to women compared to, for instance, the Mediterranean cultures of North Africa and the Middle East. But according to the liberals, this freedom has nothing to do with the West and its cultural heritage, but is, or at least should be, universal. What is more, that freedom should be forced on to countries with a low regard for the freedom of women, and even on ones (like South Africa or Papua New Guinea) with a high incidence of rape. Israel is held up as a model to other Arab nations – ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ – because of, among other reasons, its high degree of personal freedom (which translates into a thriving gay and ecstasy culture). Such a level of freedom is ‘Western’. Consistent liberals, however, will acknowledge that liberal freedom cuts both ways: a recent article in the British Guardian newspaper denounces the fact that the secularist regime in Tunisia encourages harassment of women wearing the hijab and men wearing beards.

A country needs more than a high level of personal freedom to qualify as a ‘democracy’ in the eyes of the West, of course. For one thing, there must be a separation of powers: the executive, judiciary and legislature must be separate. And, as Carl Schmitt would say, there must be debate: all legislatures must go through the farcical process of debating the pros and cons of each piece of legislation before the members vote on it (even though the passage of each bill is determined, well in advance, along party lines). The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, allows plenty of debate, all right – mostly on the topic of how best to kill, starve or drive out the Palestinians, or who to bomb first (Iran or Lebanon or Syria?). Because of the daily debates in the Knesset, Israel qualifies as a ‘liberal democracy’.

On top of that, there are other requirements: elections, a multi-party system…

These days, however, there are many countries which do have elections, and an ostensible multi-party system, which are still condemned as ‘un-free’ and ‘un-democratic’: Russia, Belarus, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Venezuela. The Western liberals claim that the governments of these respective countries repress the political opposition, fail to hold elections which are completely, a 100% ‘free and fair’ (that is, meeting the Jimmy Carter electoral observer-standard), reduce the legislature to a rubber stamp, and censor journalists. The worst thing about these countries is that they do not see changes of government: an opposition party is rarely, if ever, voted in: so they are de facto single party States. So, then, these countries are situated in the hazy no-man’s land between complete dictatorship and complete liberal democracy. (And even pro-Western countries like Singapore and Malaysia fit into this category). Some are worse (or better) on the liberal democratic scorecard than others: Russia and Syria tolerate opposition political parties more than Syria and Iran – just barely. In many cases, e.g. Russia, Belarus and Iran, a real opposition exists. In other cases, e.g., Venezuela and Egypt, there is a political opposition which does win seats in parliament, but suffers from repression.

Again, though, we have to ask: what is all this freedom for? Surely elections, multi-party systems, frequent changes of government, the freedom of the press to snipe and criticise the government of the day, parliamentary debates, cannot be an end in themselves? Was Iraq invaded to give the Iraqis these dubious blessings? No: the answer is that the Iraqis were not free, as the Israelis are (or as Americans are) – not free to be gay, for instance, or drop ecstasy pills, or consume pornography, or to cross-dress. The Iraqis, and the Iranians, must reach the lofty status of Israel, which sent a transvestite singer to the Eurovision song contest – and won. Ahmedinejad attracted much Western condemnation for his insistence that ‘There are no gays in Iran’ (a mistranslation: he really said that there is no gay culture in Iran like there is in the West). The most strident criticisms against the Iranian political system is that it is run by Mullahs (democratically elected or not) who ‘repress the rights of women’ and repress gays.

This freedom occurs within a context, a structure, of course: in the West, and in Israel, the consumption of drugs like ecstasy is not legal, or de facto legal. It is merely widespread and socially acceptable – the outcome of a liberal society. (Whereas the consumption of heroin and ice, on the other hand, is not socially acceptable). It is fine to use drugs like ecstasy, marijuana and cocaine, or be a homosexual, or dress as a Goth or an Emo, or for a man to dress as a woman, so long as it does not harm others (to the extent that the consumption of ice and heroin does). If women are to be allowed to dress immodestly (immodestly in comparison to Iranian standards), this does not stem from traditional Western freedoms granted to women, and to tolerance of nudity, but to a woman’s universal right to freedom of self-expression.

Some countries are more socially conformist than others: Japan springs to mind. Ironically, America, up until the 1960s, used to be a very conformist country. One only has to look at the films from that time, the fashion magazines, newsreel footage, to see this. Francis Parker Yockey wrote on this topic in Imperium (in the chapter ‘America’, under the heading ‘World outlook’). The passage is lengthy, but is worth reproducing here in its entirety:

Every American has been made to dress alike, live alike, talk alike, behave alike, and think alike. The principle of uniformity regards personality as a danger and also as a burden. This great principle has been applied to every sphere of life. Advertising of a kind and on a scale unknown to Europe is part of the method of stamping out individualism. Everywhere is seen the same empty, smiling, face. The principle has above all been applied to the American woman, and in her dress, cosmetics, and behaviour, she has been deprived of all individuality. A literature, vast and inclusive, has grown up on mechanizing and uniformizing all the problems and situations of life. Books are sold by the million to tell the American “How to Make Friends.” Other books tell him how to write letters, how to behave in public, how to make love, how to play games, how to uniformize his inner life, how many children to have, how to dress, even how to think. The same principle has been extended to higher learning, and the viewpoint is nowhere disputed that every American boy and girl is entitled to a “college-education.”… A contest was recently held in America to find “Mr. Average Man.” General statistics were employed to find the centre of population, marital distribution of the population, family- numbers, rural and urban distribution, and so forth. Finally a man and wife with two children in a medium-sized town were chosen as the “Average Family.” They were then given a trip to New York, were interviewed by the press, feted, solicited to endorse commercial products, and held up for the admiration of all those who fell short in any way of the desirable quality of averageness. Their habits at home, their life- adjustments generally were the subject of investigation, and then of generalizing. Having found the average man from the top down, his ideas and feelings were then generalized as the imperative-average thoughts and feelings. In the American “universities” husbands and wives attend lecture courses on marriage adjustment. Individualism must not even be countenanced in anything so personal as marriage… The men change from felt hats to straw hats on one certain day of the year and on another certain day discard the straw hats. The civilian uniform is as rigorous— for each type of occasion— as the strictest military or liturgical garb. Departures from it are the subject of sneers, or interrogation [...]

All one can say is: how things have changed. America is now the land of the non-conformist, in every way in which Europe was supposed to be. In Europe in the twentieth century, the cultivation of one’s personality – i.e., emphasising one’s differences from the rest, one’s eccentricities – was always tolerated, if not encouraged. (The one exception? Nationalism: if you are a nationalist, and against multi-cultism, you are a Nazi, fascist, racist, bigot, etc., etc).

Non-conformism was part and parcel of the European aesthetic and intellectual tradition. America, though, had always resisted this – being the land of the conformist, the ‘square’, the ‘average man’. That was until the 1960s. I would hazard that the main cause was the shift in American popular culture. In the fields of music and film, the role of the individual genius, in revolt against society’s norms, came to the forefront. Even the films like Top Gun and Flashdance, which embody the ethos of the conservative 1980s – supposedly a return to traditional ‘American values’ – celebrate the heroic, non-conformist individual. There are still plenty of ‘average Joes’ depicted in American popular culture, but the protagonists of television shows like Desperate Housewives and House are eccentrics – the ‘average Americans’ are background characters.

The odd thing is that this attitude of individualism, eccentricity and non-conformity has filtered through to the American (and Western) population at large, and, in the end, has become a new kind of conformity. Everyone has to be different: the subsumption of oneself to a group, or a higher ideal, or to anything besides one’s own individual desires and preferences is an offence against the liberal spirit of the age. And it is this individualism which lies at the heart of modern liberal democracy. A country like Germany may be only barely liberal democratic – with its State control of the media, its repression of nationalists and Holocaust deniers, its thousands of political prisoners. In this, it is not so different from a country like Egypt or Tunisia. But where Germany is genuinely liberal democratic is its parliamentary debates, its multi-party system – and its tolerance of ethical hedonism and individualism. One cannot wear a ‘fascist’-style political uniform: that would be ‘Nazi’. But one can prance around, high on drugs, in a strange costume, at the Berlin ‘Love Parade’, a kind of annual Mardi Gras event where the attendants openly consume party drugs like ecstasy – while the police turn a blind eye. (In Singapore, or Belarus, it would be a different story).

3. Freedom and degradation

My own views on this are as follows. Freedom to take drugs in public, or for gays to marry one another, or to dress ‘differently’ (i.e., dress like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan) are low on my list of priorities. Freedom to take a revisionist view of German history, and the history of the Second World War, or to criticise immigration, are, on the other hand, very high. My view is that if that freedom is not possible, then other freedoms are not worth having at all. From my perspective, Russia is more free than the West. Russia, like the West, makes the Allied-Communist interpretation of the Second World War, part of its State ideology; but, unlike the West, it is indifferent to those who disagree with the government’s line on those subjects. Russia does not persecute people who take an alternative view of the history of WWII; and it could not care less if Russian nationalists oppose immigration. A German with a long history of nationalist activism, like myself, can walk the streets of Moscow a free man; but is in danger of arrest if he visits his own country.

Regarding the other freedoms – which my liberal democratic countrymen prize so highly – I am largely indifferent: the consumption of drugs, liquor, pornography, etc., have been part of civilisation ever since it existed; likewise, individualism, the right to act ‘crazy’ or different’, is part of European culture and history. (One only has to look at the Weimar Republic, with its cult of drugs and individualism. Because of the lack of individual identification with the community and the State, the Republic fell apart; out of the ashes arose the Third Reich).

But a recent incident has forced me to reconsider my views. Recently, I took a holiday in the United States, and, while in San Francisco, happened to be in a main street where a local, American version of the German ‘Love Parade’ was passing through. As in Germany, the revellers were high on drugs, prancing around to music, and wearing outlandish clothes. Being a good tourist, I started taking photos on my digital camera. I then saw, out of the corner of my eye, a grossly overweight, middle-aged bearded man, entirely naked except for a pair of sneakers. He had shaved all the hairs off his body (except for the hairs on his face), and, judging by his even tan, must have been a frequently-practicing nudist. I then became aware that he was masturbating – openly, in front of everyone. I must admit I was completely taken aback. Thinking that no-one back home would believe me, I took photos of the man. He looked up, saw me, and continued to masturbate – and even struck poses. Finally, he finished doing what he was doing. Another of the attendees – another overweight person, this time a woman, dressed in strange attire (somewhat reminiscent of a Viking costume) – came up and hugged him.

The man clearly must have been on drugs: ecstasy, fantasy, ice, goodness knows what. The essential thing is, it dawned on me that: this is the ‘freedom’ that George W. Bush speaks of; that he defends; that he insists on imposing on other countries through the unilateral use of military force. Liberalism has changed: from a doctrine of pluralism (manifested through a multi-party electoral system, parliamentary debates, a free press giving dissenting views) to a doctrine of complete individualism free of any restraints.

The liberal argument now is that individuals should be given the maximum amount of freedom, and be allowed to do what they like, so long as those people are not ‘hurting others’. With this principle in mind, the Netherlands allows the smoking of marijuana; it also allows gay men to organise sex parties. Unfortunately for the Dutch liberals, the principle was challenged recently, when it was revealed that gay men, infected with AIDS, would lure young men to these parties, drug them with a date rape drug (called, appropriately, ‘Easy Lay’) and inject them AIDS-infected blood. This caused a scandal.

But, presumably, the liberal position is: organising sex parties is OK; gays should be allowed to do what they like; they only cross the boundary between right and wrong when they hurt others – and injecting men with AIDS-infected blood is ‘hurting others’. The same principle applies to the revellers in the San Francisco Love Parade: the revellers high on drugs, masturbating publicly in the nude, were not ‘hurting others’. There may be laws on the books against indecent exposure, and the consumption of party drugs, but these are written by prudes, moralists, ‘wowsers’ (as the Australians like to call them). It’s OK for people to let their hair down once in a while and break those minor laws. Why not let people be free individuals and do their own thing? What is wrong with that?

4. Freedom and Tradition

The answer is long and complex. I will give it as follows.

Evola, in his work, gives an outline of the various kinds of spiritualities, as they have appeared in human civilisations: he identifies, following Nietzsche, a ‘Dionysian’ spirituality, which is a spirituality of shamanism – achieving altered states of consciousness through the use of drugs, alcohol and revelry. Evola has ambivalent views towards ‘Dionysianism’: on the one hand, he believes that it is an attempt to reach a mystical state of being which is truly ‘Traditionalist’; on the other hand, he thinks that is a mindless, debased spirituality, which breaks down all barriers, all hierarchies – between the sexes, between the classes, between all ethnic groups. What is more, ‘Dionysianism’ is a feminine spirituality – which explains the frequent association of the god Dionysos with female worshippers and revellers. Evola, of course, has nothing against femininity: merely the feminisation of men. Evola’s preference, as his readers know, is for the ‘Olympian’, ‘Solar’, ‘Apollinian’ spirituality, which is ‘virile’ (from the word viros, meaning male).

Now, all this is rather metaphysical: but Evola was a nationalist philosopher, or at least a philosopher of a kind of nationalism which many nationalists today are sympathetic with. Certainly they reject ‘Dionysianism’, or at least, the debased elements. And clearly, in my view, the phenomena of the Love Parade, and the behaviour I saw there, fits into the category of ‘Dionysianism’. As a New Rightist, then, I must reject it. Evola writes of the ‘lunar’ spirituality, which rejects hierarchy and authority, and regards all men as ‘one’ – no matter their race or social position. Certainly, the self-debasement of the Love Parade fits into that category too.

And it is a small leap from the ‘lunar’ spirituality of the Love Parade to the ideology of the Antifa. The Antifa objects to nationalism because that ideology draws distinction between races, and refuses to acknowledge the non-Western immigrant as being the equal, and deserving equal rights, as the indigenous Westerner. The Antifa accepts the immigrant, and the gay, as ‘brothers’. The stereotype of the ‘Lefty’ or ‘Crusty’ is someone who wears his hair in dreadlocks, Rastafarian-style, to show his affinity with the Negro, and smokes marijuana, which, as anyone who has tried it knows, is a notoriously egalitarian drug (which makes one accepting of all people and all things).

All rather complex and metaphysical, true: but Evola’s descriptions get right to the heart of things. He was an eloquent man; not surprisingly, he was a poet as well as a philosopher, and could be described as the ‘poet of fascism’. No-one managed to put the tenets of that ideology in clearer terms than he did.

5. New Rightism in action

All of this raises one question: what is that we from the New Right offer, precisely, which is in contrast to the individualism of the Love Parade and George W. Bush’s America? It is all very fine to talk of he nationalist’s affinity for ‘Olympian’ spirituality – one can be as ‘spiritual’ as one wants – but how does it manifest itself in our actions?

As part of the research for this article, I have been looking at a number of film clips of nationalist rallies on YouTube, from Hungary, Rumania, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Greece. Despite the national differences, a number of similarities emerged. (These similarities were even present in the film clips from different times: I watched one of National Front demonstration in the 1970s, and one in 2007).

One writer who identified those core elements is an American political scientist, Karl Löwenstein, who wrote a classic article, ‘Militant democracy and fundamental rights’, in the ‘American political science review’, volume 31/no. 3, 1937. The article is one of the most influential ever written: it consists mainly of recommendations for a series of ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’ laws (against wearing uniforms, ‘defaming ethnic groups’, etc.) which have been put into practice by Germany, France and a number of other Western countries which have sought to clamp down on resurgent ‘fascism’ and ‘Neo-Nazism’ in their midst. It ought to rank as the holy scripture of the Antifa movement: except that Löwenstein preaches the state repression of nationalism, not in the name of multi-cultism, but of liberal democracy. But I will not dwell on this side of the Löwenstein doctrine, important as it is, here. I will instead quote a number of things he has to say on the subject of ‘fascism’ (loosely defined). In my view, he could almost be speaking of nationalism today. He remarks on the surprisingly international character of fascism:

A closer transnational alignment or “bloc” of fascist nations, a “Union of Europe’s Regenerated Nations”, a fascist International of the multi-colored shirts, is clearly under way, transcending national borders and cutting deeply across historical diversities of traditionally disjoined nationalisms. The modern crusaders for saving Western civilization from Bolshevik “chaos” – a battle-cry which in all countries gone fascist has proved invaluable – for the time being sink their differences and operate jointly according to a common plan. Under this missionary urge, which is one of the most astounding contradictions of a political system based on the superiority complex of each individual nation, what exists of distinguishing marks in program, ideology, and nationally conditioned premises of Realpolitik shrinks to insignificance [...]

He writes, disparagingly, that:

Fascism is not a philosophy – not even a realistic constructive program – but the most effective political technique in modern history. The vagueness of the fascist offerings hardens into concrete invective only if manifest deficiencies of the democratic system are singled out for attack. Leadership, order, and discipline are set over against parliamentary corruption, chaos, and selfishness; which a cryptic corporativism is substituted for political representation. General discontent is focussed on palpable objectives (Jews, freemasons, bankers, chain stores)…. In brief, to arouse, to guide, and to use emotionalism in its crudest and its most refined forms is the essence of the fascist technique for which movement and emotion are not only linguistically identical [...]

So how precisely does the ‘fascist technique’ work? Löwenstein writes:

Concomitantly, the movement organizes itself in the form of a semi-military corps, the party militia or private army of the party. Under the pretence of self-protection, the original nucleus of the personal bodyguard of the leaders, and of the stewards for the maintenance of order in meetings, is developed into a large fighting body of high efficiency equipped with the fullest outfit of military paraphernalia, such as military hierarchy, uniforms and other symbols, and if possible arms. Again, this technique has strong emotional values and purposes. In the first place, mere demonstration of military force, even without actual violence, does not fail deeply to impress the peaceful and law-abiding bourgeois. Its manifestation, so alien to the normal expressions of party life, is, as such, a source of intimidation and of emotional strain for the citizens. On the other hand, while democratic parties are characterized by the looseness of their spiritual allegiance, the military organization of the fascist parties emphasizes the irrevocable nature of the political bond. It creates and maintains that sense of mystical comradeship of all for each and each for all, that exclusiveness of political obsession in comparison to which the usual party allegiance is only one among many pluralistic loyalties. When party allegiance finally transcends allegiance to the state, the dangerous atmosphere of double legality is created. The military routine, because it is directed against despised democracy, is ethically glorified as party of party symbolism which in turn is part of the emotional domination. Disobedience towards the constituted authorities naturally grows into violence, and violence becomes a new source of disciplined emotionalism. The conflicts with the state – unavoidable when this phase of active aggressiveness is reached – increase the common sentiment of persecution, martyrdom, heroism, and dangerous life so closely akin to legalized violence during war. In addition, the movement is, within its own confines, genuinely democratic. A successful roughneck forwith rises to distinction in its hierarchy [...]

The quasi-military structure and attributes of fascism are one of its distinguishing features:

The uniform has a mystical attraction also in avowedly non-militaristic countries. The effect of military display on the “soft” bourgeois is all the more last because he contrasts the firmness of purpose of accumulated force in fascism with the uncontrolled fluctuations of normal political life. In politics, the only criterion of success is success. Fascism has been irresistably successful in other countries; thus far, it has never met with a reverse. In any democratic country, be it traditionally ever so sober and balanced, the existence of a political movement organized as military force makes the average citizen uneasy and creates the feeling of restiveness which emotional politics needs [...]

He then goes on to list a few more of the ‘essential techniques’, and lists means of combating fascism through legislation:

All democratic states have enacted legislation against the formation of private para-military armies of political parties and against the wearing of political uniforms or parts thereof (badges, armlets) and the bearing of any other symbols (flags, banners, emblems, streamers and pennants) which serve to denote the political opinion of the person in public. These provisions – too light-heartedly and facetiously called “bills against indoctrinary haberdashery” – strike at the roots of the fascist technique of propaganda, namely, self-advertisement and intimidation of others. The military garb symbolizes and crystallizes the mystical comradeship of arms so essential to the emotional needs of fascism [...]

That ‘militarism’ is applied, by the fascist, as follows:

Political strife carried by the fascists to the extreme of organized hooliganism made the fundamental right of assembly more or less a sham. Creating disturbances in or wrecking meetings of opposing or constitutional parties not only proved a favorite test of the fighting spirit of militarized parties ((“meeting-hall-battles” – “Saalschlacht”), but also deterred peaceable citizens from attending meetings of their own selection. The task of the police to keep peace and order at meetings and public processions became increasingly difficult. The ordinary criminal codes being wholly insufficient to curb the deliberate tactics of extremist parties, more stringent legislation was introduced in Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, and proposed in Switzerland [...]

Löwenstein describes the method of the ‘provocative march’:

A different problem arose when it became obvious that fascist demonstrations, processions, and meetings were held in districts where they could be considered only as a deliberate provocation because of the hostility of the bulk of the people living in these quarters. If, in such cases, disturbances occurred, they were actually created by the opponents. Exploiting this situation was one of the favorite methods of rising fascist methods whereby they could stand on the constitutional right of free processions and assembly [...]

He details, interestingly, the use of the weapon of ‘political abuse’:

Overt acts of incitement to armed sedition can easily be squashed, but the vast armory of fascist technique includes the more subtle weapons of vilifying, defaming, slandering, and last but not least, ridiculing, the democratic state itself, its political institutions and leading personalities. For a long time, in the Action Française, the finesse of noted authors like Daudet and Maurras developed political invective into both an art and a science. Democratic fundamentalism acquiesced, because freedom of public opinion evidently included also freedom of political abuse, and even malignant criticism was sheltered. Redress had to be sought by the person affected through the ordinary procedure of libel, thereby affording a welcome opportunity for advertising the political intentions of the offender [...]

In an unintentionally amusing passage, he takes note of the distinctly fascist method of using martyrs to exalt one’s cause – and dubious martyrs at that:

More patently subversive is fascism’s habit of publicly exalting political criminals and offenders against the existing laws – a practice which serves the twofold purpose of building up the revolutionary symbolism of martyrs and heroes and of defying, with impunity, the existing order. It is still remembered that Herr Hitler, in August, 1933, when the rowdies of his party murdered, under particularly revolting circumstances, a political adversary in Potempa and were sentenced to death by the court, proclaimed his “spiritual unity” with them. Only Czechoslovakia and Finland have provided against this practice of morally aiding and abetting the political criminal [...]

6. Fascism as technique?

At first, when I read Löwenstein’s article, I was somewhat offended by it – in particular, by his characterisation of fascism as being mere ‘technique’, not a real ideology. After all, fascism attracted many intellectuals who gave fascism a well thought-out philosophy, an intellectual basis. And certainly, the post-war ‘neo-fascist’ writers – Yockey, Thiriart, Evola – gave fascism a real intellectual grounding. But, the more I thought about it, the more I saw that Löwenstein’s contention was true. After all, it has to be admitted that nationalism – which Löwenstein would classify, rightly or wrongly, as ‘fascist’ (and certainly his followers in the Bundesrepublik do) – is vague. What the liberal democratic media calls ‘policy detail’ has never been our strong suit. We are not used to contesting in elections, like the mainstream liberal democratic parties, and, when we do, we do not produce budgeted, carefully-crafted plans to improve children’s health care, combat global warming, fix petrol-price gouging, etc., like the Labor and Liberal parties are doing at this Australian federal election. Part of this is sheer lack of experience and money – whereas the mainstream liberal democratic parties have plenty of both, and are very good at organising the logistics of elections.

New Rightism, more than anything else, is an ‘action’ movement, not a ‘talking’ movement, and the heart of our policy, if not worldview, lies in our day to day living: living in community, working in the community, transforming it through our actions.

Nationalism, of course, does tend to elevate people who have fallen in battle – either through actual military conflict, or in the context of a political struggle – into martyrs. Of the film clips I saw, one was a commemoration of a Swedish nationalist martyr – Daniel Wretström, a 17 year old Swedish nationalist killed by immigrants; the other, a wreath-laying ceremony in Hungary commemorating the country’s servicemen who had fallen in WWII.

The ultimate historical fascist martyr figure is, of course, Horst Wessel. There is a scene in ‘Triumph of the Will’ where assembled National Socialist personages sing the Horst Wessel Lied, accompanied by the inevitable salutes and giant banners: the camera focuses on Göring for a few moments, and one can see the beginnings of a tear forming in the hard man’s eye. Without a doubt, nationalists – whether today in Greece or Hungary or Russia, or in yesterday in France or Germany – rely heavily on emotion. These emotions are: indignation, against our liberal democratic and communist enemies; a feeling of the rightness of the cause; self-sacrifice; self-abnegation (which comes from service to a higher goal)… All of this is transmitted through formalities and ceremonies: the Swedish nationalists, for instance, put on a candle-lit vigil and procession for the young Wretström. (Swedish nationalists have set up a site, outlining the rules for the annual march, and meeting points, at: http://www.salemfonden.info/index_eng.php ). Whereas, in a liberal democracy, the Berlin Love Parade has replaced the torchlight processions of the SS: individuality takes the place of community as an object of veneration in the Bundesrepublik.

Even liberal democrats have to admit that, compared to the political street theatre of nationalism, their brand of conventional politics is mundane. There is nothing in mainstream conservatism, social democracy, environmentalism, liberalism, etc., to compare with it. There is a real pleasure in being part of a crowd of demonstrators, marching past communists who are swearing, spitting, jeering, singing communist anthems, who are being held by mounted police (as in one of the old National Front film clips). It is a peculiar pleasure, to be sure, and not for everyone. But once one has a taste of it, one becomes addicted. I am often chastised by liberal democratic friends, and I have plenty of them, for being part of the so-called ‘Neo-Nazi’ nationalist scene: I retort to them, ‘What am I meant to do? Join the Liberal Party, attend boozy functions, sit among fat, middle-aged men in suits, and listen to speakers like Tony Abbott and Peter Costello drone on about the unions?’ The mainstream liberal democratic parties do not give anyone much of a scope for real political activism. What they are about is power to political parties but not the people they claim to represent. New Rightism, on the other hand, is activist-based: and it has the potential to encompass nearly all spheres of life.

One other advantage of nationalism is that it is virtually indestructible. The National Front imploded after reaching a peak in the late 1970s: but it is still in action, albeit with reduced numbers, and this time demonstrating against Islamic immigration and gay marriage. Certain of the problems afflicting Britain have changed, but others remain the same. The prime example of nationalist indestructibility, though, is Germany and Eastern Europe. The Allies and the Soviets embarked on a campaign of unprecedented genocide against Germany and its Allies – with the intention of eliminating ‘fascism’. But nationalism has grown back. Part of the reason for nationalism’s success is that, being a technique, it is easy to apply in all manner of times and places.

So why do some nationalist movements in some countries grow and others do not? I am biased on this. My belief is that, if the British nationalists, for instance, invested as much time and effort in constant, round the clock demonstrations – and taking the ‘war’ to the enemy, the communists and Antifa – as they do in trying to win council seats, they would achieve better results (and certainly earn themselves more media notoriety that way). The Internet has proven to be a boon to nationalism, but it has also made nationalists stay at homes – preventing them from going out, mixing with other nationalists on group activities (like hiking trips), meetings, conferences and the like, and engaging in demonstrations and rallies.

The demonstration is really at the heart of nationalist ‘technique’. Demonstrations are a public show of power: they are political street theatre. What matters in a demonstration is force, strength. Large numbers are required – and flags on poles to make the nationalist crowd look bigger than it really is. Loudhailers, loudspeakers mounted on cars, whistles, drums (the National Front in the 1970s made effective use of drums), ect, are all important for drowning out the hateful cries of the enemy (with their inevitable boring chant of ‘Nazis out!’). It becomes a pitched battle between the nationalist and the communist counter-demonstrators: and the biggest and loudest crowd wins.

I myself recognise the supreme importance of this: and the importance of getting as many nationalists and New Rightists as possible to attend a demonstration, and take the blows directed at them by the communist enemy. But nationalists, it has to be said, spend too much time on doctrinal disputes. On the National-Anarchist and New Right mailing lists, for example, there was a recent debate on whether or not ‘New Right’ and ‘National-Anarchism’ were appropriate names for our ideas. Should we not look for alternative names? Alternatives were suggested: e.g., ’New Left” (the affiliate of the New Right in Portugal actually calls itself ‘New Left’), ‘New Reason’ instead of ‘New Right’. One of the objections to the use of the term ‘New Right’ was that it may be confused with the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal movement of the same name from the 1980s (as if the average man can remember back that far). As for ‘National-Anarchism’, are not nationalism and anarchism mutually exclusive concepts?

All of this is somewhat missing the point. The early fascist activists cobbled together an ideology which was ‘Left’ as well as being ‘nationalist’: no doubt it confused a good many people. A typical response would have been: ‘I can’t tell if you people are Left or Right: your ideology is an incoherent mish-mash’. (Some commentators characterised German National Socialism, when it first appeared, as ‘conservative Marxism’). I am sure that Mussolini’s movement started off without a name: and that finally, at some point, someone felt that they had to give their rather loose collection of ideas a proper name, and someone came up with ‘fascism’. But what is in a name? And why do political ideas have to be consistently ‘Left’ or ‘Right’? Political theories, in my view, are not mathematical proofs, where every step proceeds logically from the other. The essential thing is to go out and do. The trouble is that the liberal democratic system wants the Left and Right to fight one another; it is happy with the Left-Right divide; it likes the simplicity of the concepts; it does not want people to think; rather, it wants them to be conditioned, to categorise themselves as green or socialist or conservative. That way, a person only sees himself in terms of that category: the ideology does the thinking for him. Which is why Greens feel that they have to fight nationalists, despite their similarities: Bob Brown and the Green Party have ordained that nationalism is evil, racist, and has nothing to do with environmentalism; so the individual ends up not thinking for himself, and instead obeys his party leaders and the dictates of the mainstream political consensus.

7. What to do

Sometimes, when I look at the hostility nationalism generates – from the ‘militant democratic’ governments of Germany and France, in particular – I wonder why it is these governments are so afraid. Look at the footage of any nationalist march, and all you will see – in the last analysis – is a large group of men and women carrying flags and banners, walking along a road. But, from the way the liberal democrats and communists behave, such activities are heinous, and must be stopped by any means necessary. Nationalism will lead to a second Holocaust, etc., etc. (even when the marchers are British or Russian). My pragmatic response, though, is: so what? A bunch of people are marching down the street, waving flags with old Teutonic and Celtic symbols on them – what harm does it do? I wonder what would happen if the German government banned the prohibition of uniforms or Holocaust literature. Would mass riots and discord ensue? Would the Bundesrepublik cease to exist overnight? Simply because ‘fascism’ in the 1920s and 1930s became a Europe-wide movement, embracing millions of men and women, is no reason to believe that it will happen again. The pettiness and stupidity of the ‘militant’ liberal democrats expresses itself in actions like the withholding of two years worth of mail to Ernst Zündel, for example.

Having said that: laws come, and laws go (Holocaust denial in Spain has just recently been legalised again) and there is no body of legislation in existence anywhere which has succeeded in shutting down nationalism completely. The Russian nationalists wear masks and uniforms at their rallies, and use the Roman salute; they also engage in paramilitary training, and even own their own Kalashnikovs. The Italians, on the other hand, labour under the same restrictions as the Germans: but that does not stop them from putting on large demonstrations. It is all a matter of working around the Löwenstein-style laws.

The main strength of our movement is our organisation – our ability to mobilise large numbers of people for mass action. This, of course, occurs only under optimal circumstances – we waste a good deal of time debating doctrinal differences among ourselves, instead of going and doing what we do best. No doubt the demonstrators in Sweden, Hungary, Russia and other countries have, as individuals, a number of doctrinal differences with one another: but the main thing is that they were sufficiently united, and organised, to take to the streets in defiance of communism and militant anti-racism. Ideally, I would like political activists from all over Europe to converge on London – in particular, the financial district (the City of London) – for an annual pan-European anti-capitalist march. And if police and the media, and the communist enemy, descend en masse upon the march, all well and good. That will garner the attention that we need. Because of the location, we would be sure to get worldwide English media coverage, which is considerable.

The main thing which is holding us back is wrong thinking – and lack of courage, or at least, an unwillingness to offend bourgeois proprieties. One German poster, at a mailing list I frequent, wrote recently:

The so-called “free nationalists” are only free from responsible behaviours. They mimic American dress codes and copy antifa strategies which basically makes them appear as dangerous, violence-prone hooded hoodlums. If you disguise your face you not only have something to hide – you also won’t garner any sympathies from the populace…

That is a common fallacy among some nationalists. The fact of the matter is that the German populace have been trained to hate all forms of German nationalism; the same goes, to a milder extent, for the rest of the world. They are conditioned, Pavlov-style, to react with disgust. Non-German nationalism in the West is fast going the same way – that is, our liberal democratic masters in the media, the church, the parliament, the trade union leadership, the university, are training the Western masses to find it nearly as equally as abhorrent. The notion, then, that this hatred (and that is what it is) can be done away with by aping bourgeois manners, is wrong.

Related to this is the fact that many people – especially young people – like outlaws and rebels. You can appeal to more people by trying not to appeal to anyone at all, by being yourself and by making your own values in contrast to the norms of the society you live. In popular culture, this fact has been known at least since the 1950s: James Dean, Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, were marketed, deliberately, as moody, dangerous rebels – and all three of them made fortunes as a result. Many rock bands nowadays are still being marketed as being rebellious as the Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols. Although rock and roll rebellion has now become something of a tired old cliché, the youngsters never seem to get tired of it, as we see with the continuing popularity of likes of the EMO cult. Almost everyone understands this, except for the nationalists who are desperately trying to look respectable and liberal-democratic. Instead of acting independently and doing what has to be done ,they are more concerned about what the apolitical consumer orientated Zombies thinks about, and trying to appease them.

Other nationalists have described their reluctance to refer to the Antifa enemy as precisely that: the Antifa. Why? Because if the Antifa are anti-fascist, it implies that their enemies – us – are ‘fascist’. And we can’t have that. I am surprised that Australians, of all people – a people who wrested this country from the Aborigines, and built a country and a State literally from the dirt, facing great personal hardship and struggle – are afraid of a mere word.

To conclude: what we in the New Right offer is an alternative. Löwenstein is quite right when he says that ‘fascism’ is a method, of confrontation – and investing the political struggle with an honour, dignity and nobility (although he would not use those words). At the risk of sounding ‘irrationalist’ or ‘anti-intellectual’, we New Rightists have to make use of the method (and I am stressing the word method) and get to work – the time for talking is over. We have to show the world our anti-liberal alternative – our alternative to the tyranny of individualism in a liberal democratic society.

This article has been written with a view to outlining an overall strategy for nationalist groups to follow – a course of action. In the weeks since the APEC demo, it has become clear to more than a few observers that our communist and militant anti-racist (Antifa) opponents are incapable of debating with us intellectually, and indeed are incapable of intellectual expression. A long, intellectual article posted at the New Right blog will have, in the comments section, abuse and threats of violence from our communist opponents – and never a discussion of the ideas and personages involved (e.g., Babeuf, Stalinist economics, Lorenz von Stein, de Benoist…). And, again and again, we at New Right (as do many other nationalists in Australia, whether they be German or not) get tagged with the ‘Neo-Nazi’ label – this is despite the fact that we here, at this site, have made our opinions clear on German National Socialism and the phenomenon known as Neo-Nazism (or Nutzism, as we disparagingly call it).

Having said that, the reaction from our communist opponents is, I think, beneficial. It can only benefit our cause, as I shall explain below, and part of our strategy ought to be to continue to provoke similar reactions in the future.

1. What is a Neo-Nazi?

Neo-Nazism is an attempt to revive German National Socialism in the modern era. As we know, German National Socialism was a form of fascism. There are a number of definitions of what fascism actually is, or was. Fascism can be defined as a radical form of socialism for the petit bourgeoisie (Hayek’s definition, and the definition of many other free-market conservatives who locate German National Socialism on the Left of the political spectrum, not the Right); or as an attempt to introduce a Traditional order in the modern world (which is how Evola understood it)… What distinguishes German National Socialism from other forms of fascism (Quisling’s, Mosley’s, Mussolini’s) is its adherence to the Führer principle. Simply put, National Socialism needed a Führer figure to hold it all together, and was nothing without him. As the German historian and liberal anti-Nazi Martin Broszat writes:

National Socialism was not primarily an ideological and programmatic, but a charismatic movement, whose ideology was incorporated in the Führer, Hitler, and which would have lost all its power to integrate without him. Hitler was never merely the spokesman for an idea that would have had an equivalent importance and existence without him. On the contrary, the abstract, utopian and vague National Socialist ideology only achieved what reality and certainty it had through the medium of Hitler. Thus there could be no effective opposition against Hitler in the name of the National Socialist ideology. Where this was none the less attempted, as for example by Otto Strasser and his mainly intellectual following, the features of the National Socialist ideology, which were composed of emotions, resentments and dreams, were exchanged for an ideology directed towards concrete material action (which was consistent in that respect and naturally permitted no omnipotent Führer) and failed to appreciate the charismatic foundation of the National Socialist movement. It had been far more typical of the general attitude of Party functionaries from the various ancillary organisations of the NSDAP
before and after 1933 that however much they thrashed out bitter quarrels amongst themselves they did not as a rule turn against Hitler, but tried to win him over to their respective interpretations of the National Socialist ideology and programme. That is they basically recognised him as the interpreter of the correct ‘idea’ and did not question his supreme authority to rule on ideological matters too. (Martin Broszat, ‘The Hitler State: the foundation and development of the internal structure of the Third Reich’, 1969, p.29).

So, in order for there to be a Neo-Nazism movement, there has to be a neo-Führer, who takes Hitler’s place symbolically as the integrating, charismatic head of the revived Nazi movement. The communist and militant anti-racist opponents of Western nationalism understand this instinctively: which is why, whenever they are on the look out for a ‘Nazi’ revival, are always hunting for the ‘new Führer’, whether he be Dr James Saleam, the ‘Reverend’ Patrick Sullivan, David Palmer, Jack van Tongeren.

On the other hand, it could be argued that there can be a ‘Führer’-less form of ‘Neo-Nazism’. The NPD is accused, by the German and international media, of being ‘Neo-Nazi’ all the time, even though it has no charismatic ‘Führer’ figure. In all fairness, the NPD does have a few things in common with the old German National Socialist and fascist movements. For starters, both are mass-movements, which emphasise extra-parliamentary organisation; both form women’s and children’s groups, and other groups which embrace people from all walks of life, all professions, with the intention of being more than political parties; both are on the Left, politically speaking, in many of their social and economic policies; both are radical and uncompromising; both have suffered persecution at the hands of liberal democratic States; both tend to make a mystique of street action and confrontations with communist opponents; both of course, are German and nationalist. One could, on that basis, apply the description ‘Neo-Nazi’ to the NPD. But, again, there is no Führer, and my argument (and Broszat’s) can be no German National Socialism, old or new, without a Führer-figure.

One of the problems of identifying the likes of the NPD with ‘Neo-Nazism’ is that so many other ideological groupings have appropriated parts of the National Socialist doctrine. Do we castigate the Greens, for instance, for being environmentalist, when one of the first environmentalist politicians was Adolf Hitler? A few scholars acknowledge the influence Hitler’s National Socialism had on Swedish social democracy – the welfare-statist brand of socialism which, in turn, influenced the British Labour Party (in the 1960s) and the Australian Labor Party (in the 1970s). In fact, one of the definitions of German National Socialism could be: welfare-statist social democracy plus dictatorship.

Incidentally, one can see how the Führer-as-integrator principle works for other political ideologies. Chavezism, for instance, is inconceivable with Chavez: in that respect, Chavezism is more ‘Neo-Nazi’ than the ideology of the NPD.

Oddly enough, the communists adhere more to the Führerprinzip, or ‘leader principle’, more than we nationalists do. Communism, even today, is nothing but a gallery of ‘great leaders’: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Il-Sung, Tito, lesser lights like Salvador Allende… Their word is law: none of the members of the communist parties are allowed to question the rulings, on any conceivable subject, by these men. Communism is the most authoritarian movement in the history of the world; it is also the most bound up with personality cults, ‘Great Leaders’ (or ‘Dear Leaders’). Hitler and Mussolini, of course, imitated this (and many other parts) of communist doctrine, and German National Socialism could be described as being little more than German Stalinism.

The advantage of the communist application of the Führer principle is that it discourages questioning, thinking and debate. Were the followers of communism allowed, for once, to question where socialism is going, what they, through their activism, are doing to achieve it, what a communist Australia would actually look like, communism would collapse. Or rather, belief in communism would collapse. Socialists would ask, for instance, how it is that mass immigration of Africans, Muslims and Indians helps the Australian working-classes – when these immigrants (especially the more disadvantaged ones, like the Sudanese) would compete with Australians for welfare benefits. And what on earth do gay rights have to do with socialism? Surely capitalism cannot be to blame for discrimination against gays? And why support socialism in Cuba when Cuba uses fierce state repression against gays? There are no answers to these questions: which is why the communist Führer principle is needed. It keeps communists from thinking.

2. What is wrong with Neo-Nazism?

To me, ‘Neo-Nazism’, particularly in its Nutzi, uniform fetishist form is a bizarre, antiquated and ultimately self-defeating ideology. Enough of it has been said here elsewhere at the New Right site. (See the article, ‘Freaks in the movement’, archived at http://newrightausnz.blogspot.com/2006/07/freaks-in-movement-this-is-statement.html ).

But, obviously, what I and many other nationalists dislike about ‘Neo-Nazism’ is not what our opponents on the mainstream Left dislike about it. To them, the objection to ‘Neo-Nazism’ is simple. During the Second World War (itself started by Germany, when it invaded Poland in 1939), Germany gassed eight million people, using weapons of mass destruction, and threw the corpses into giant ovens. Some were turned into soap; others into lampshades. The horrible, shrivelled corpses at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen are testimony to the evil of the ideology of German National Socialism, which committed the most terrible crimes of the twentieth century.

Now, according to the communists and the Antifa, the ‘Neo-Nazis’ want to bring back that order, and start gassing, not only Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies, but anyone who is not a white European or of European descent. Alan Moore’s classic 1988 graphic novel, V for vendetta, offers a good summary of the communist and Antifa view of Western nationalism – and the consequences of a ‘fascist’ return to power. The graphic novel depicts a dystopian Britain in the late 1990s, where 1930s-style fascists have taken over the world and have killed a good many Jews, homosexuals, Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants in death camps, and like Dr Mengele, carried out sadistic medical experiments on the inmates. The mainstream Left sincerely believes that propaganda like V for vendetta depicts nationalist goals accurately: they believe that we nationalists are all working together towards the same goal – of eliminating, through death camps, the ‘racially impure’ (whatever that means) members of Western society.

The Antifa demonise their opponents, making them out to be satanic. Militant anti-racism plays on nothing but fear: it is pure emotion. And it is purely negative, as well: ask them what their political policies are on inflation and interest rates, for instance, or conscription or abortion or the death penalty, are – and they have no answer. Because of the lack of foundations, the lack of arguments, they can only appeal to fear. They are more a belief-system than a political ideology, and with their appeals to fear and irrationalism, plus the almost religious attribution of satanic qualities to their opponents, they resemble a cult, like the Raelians or the Scientologists.

In the Antifa and mainstream ideology, the New Right and the National-Anarchists are part of the same ‘Neo-Nazi’ conspiracy. A few individuals of the mainstream Left have expressed their trepidation that naïve youths (who have been insufficiently indoctrinated, i.e., not converted to Marxist-Leninism) may go over to the National-Anarchist side, not understanding that the National-Anarchists are ‘Neo-Nazi’ fakes. In the communist scenario, the naïve youths, after becoming members of a National-Anarchist group, will eventually led down the path to ‘Neo-Nazism’. Possibly, the new National-Anarchist recruit will be brought to a secret cavern by the other members, where he will find framed portraits of the Führer and George Lincoln Rockwell, and swastika flags, on the walls. The secret ‘Führer’ of the movement shall doff his anarchist garb to reveal a homemade brownshirt uniform. He will then unveil a fantastic plan to take over Australia and build death camps, run by blonde, Nordic women in ‘Ilse the She-Wolf of the SS’ uniforms, and fiendish doctor-sadists like Mengele.

Regardless of whether or not one believes in a National Socialist gassing of eight million people, the interesting thing is that the communists have a long backlog of atrocities of their own to atone for – and they do not apologise for them. While many nationalists push a revisionist line, the communists do not. Confront a communist with the nine million Russians killed by Lenin and Trotsky – during the Red Terror, and the mass famine deliberately triggered by the Bolsheviks to pacify the Russian population – and he will shrug and regurgitate the old Leninist cliché that ‘One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs’. Then there is Mao, whose Great Leap Forward killed 18 to 34 million people (depending on whose figures you believe); Pol Pot; and lesser-known figures like the Ethiopian communist Mengistu Haile Mariam. Even Castro, who is fondly regarded by Australian communist groups, killed thousands after his takeover of Cuba.

My point is that, given communism’s track record, people ought to hold communism’s past atrocities against Australian communist groups like Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative and others. How do we know that these groups do not have a secret plan to collectivise Australian agriculture, and starve millions of Australians to death? Will Australian soldiers be rounded up, Khmer-Rouge style, bound with nylon ropes and have their necks broken with blows from pick handles? (Or perhaps they will be given the softer, North Vietnamese communist version: internment in a ‘re-education’ camp until they get their thinking straightened out?). And what of the capitalist class? Will the Packer family be liquidated on the spot, or will they be forced to work with their hands (for the first time in their lives) in the fields of our newly-collectivised farms, while communist overseers, wearing black pyjamas and carrying Kalashnikovs, jeer at them and curse them? (‘No rice for you today, Mr Packer! Work harder!’).

3. The reality

I am, of course, being facetious here. The Australian communists do not have the demonic drive of a Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Pol Pot, Mengistu: they do not have what it takes to bring about a revolution.

Even more important is the fact that no communist revolution has come about by the revolt of the working classes against the capitalists. All the communists in history have won power as a result of war. Lenin won power only after Russia’s catastrophic defeat, at the hands of Germany, in WWI; the Bolsheviks emerged from the ashes of the Russian Civil War as the most powerful and unified force, and took advantage of the subsequent chaos to impose a dictatorship. Likewise, every subsequent revolutionary owes their successes, not to mobilising the working classes, but from defeating their opponents on the battlefield. (One exception is Mengistu: but Mengistu came to power through a military coup, and was able to used soldiers to liquidate any bourgeois-liberal, monarchist or rival communist opponents).

The truth is that the old-school communist revolutionaries had a unique genius, lacking in today’s Western communist parties, for exploiting the political opportunities that arose as a result of chaos. That chaos is not present today, and it is unlikely that today’s communists would know how to harness it to their advantage.

And so today’s Australian communists, who are schooled in the theory, but not practice, of communism, naively believe that power will be theirs for the taking, once the inevitable downfall of capitalism gets going. Marxist theory proves, scientifically, that the capitalist mode of production will go the way of feudalism – into the dustbin of history. All the communists have to do is agitate at the universities and TAFEs (by selling the Green Left Weekly and trying to encourage students to attend pro-Chavez rallies), march at trade union anti-Work Choices rallies, and run in elections. Then revolution will come about. Australia will turn into Cuba, except it will be a Cuba where people of all sexual orientations will be free to do their thing…

In truth, the only communists to hold true to historical communist practice are a few isolated groups around the world who have taken up the path of armed struggle. The Maoists in Nepal, who adhere to a Pol-Potist ideology and are engaged in an off-again, on-again war against the Nepalese State, are classic, old school communists. Given the disarray of the Nepalese politics, it is not inconceivable that the Maoist revolution could succeed, and a handful of revolutionaries could end up imposing their will on a reluctant, and hostile Nepalese population. Naturally, however, such conditions are not likely to replicate themselves in Australia.

4. What to do

Unfortunately, much confusion exists among nationalists as to who our enemies are. Nationalists tend to speak of ‘the Left’, and lump together all the disparate factions of the Left into a single group: ‘lefties’, ‘crusties’ and the like. But the fact of the matter is that the communists, and the anarchists, for instance, are unaware that we nationalists exist – at present. The only faction of the Left who are aware of us, and consider us to be a serious threat, are the Antifa, the militant anti-racists – who strive selflessly to avert a second Holocaust by posting photographs, names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc., of nationalist activists on the Internet.

It should be mentioned that it is doubtful that the Antifa are really ‘Left’ at all. Although they adopt a Trotskyist rhetoric (‘smashing fascism’ is a Trotskyist phrase), they do not seem to support communism or anarchism – nor even the watered-down social democracy of the Labor Party. No, they believe in racial harmony and the brotherhood of man – and the use of violence to enforce it. They believe in the same pan-racialist, multi-racialist ideology as the Labor Party, or the Democrats, or the Greens – but, in their case, they make that ideology political. Schmitt defines the ‘political’ as any conflict that is raised to the level of war between two or more parties: and certainly, the Antifa are political by Schmitt’s definition. But they are not Left, and, in Australia, they are not do not possess the numbers, the discipline and the organisation of the European Antifa. (According to postings on Stormfront, European nationalist activists are disappointed by the calibre of the Australian Antifa. Indeed, the Antifa in the Netherlands, for instance, is so powerful that it controls neighbourhoods, and hides illegal immigrants who are being sought by the police there). Here, their warfare is psychological. They could not summon up the numbers needed to ‘smash fascists’ at an APEC or anti-Work Choices rally; the communists, however, can.

The point is, though, the communists are not aware of us. They do not acknowledge we exist, and to them, we are an irrelevancy. After all, history is inevitably progressing towards communism: does not the hostility of the Australian electorate towards Work Choices show this? We nationalists do not fit into the grand scheme of things. To the communists, nationalists are ‘Nazis’, and ‘Nazism’ was a tool of the German capitalist classes, who sought to lure the German working-classes away from communism. The capitalist class of Australia, however, is not, at the moment using ‘Nazism’ and ‘Fascism’ to trick the Australian working-classes; it is using the Australian Labor Party. Fortunately for communism, the Australian proletariat will eventually wake up to the Labor Party. The upshot is that communists and other like-minded progressives need not pay any heed, for the time being, to the ‘Neo-Nazis’ of New Right and other nationalist groups.

Were they to notice us, however, their reaction would be along the lines of: the ‘Neo-Nazis’ of New Right, National-Anarchism and other nationalist groups are in the pay of the Australian capitalist class and possibly the federal government itself. These ‘Neo-Nazis’ are trying to lure the Australian working-classes away from their salvation, communism. Really, all capitalism is ‘fascist, racist, imperialist’ – ‘Neo-Nazism’ is capitalism with the mask torn off. The solution? ‘Smash fascism’, use violence, use any means necessary…

The communists can be expected to say many things along these lines, and no doubt they will end up alienating potential members (e.g., left-leaning university students) with their hyperbole and bellicose rhetoric in attacking us; they will also, inadvertently, generate more publicity for us than we could manage to achieve ourselves. It is also possible that, by doing so, they will succeed in making us more attractive to the politically uneducated (that is, not indoctrinated with Trotskyism) university student.

I will, at this point, digress, and bring up the subject of Hugo Chavez, and in particular, one of the techniques he uses to get attention for his ideas. Recently, Chavez announced that he plans to bring his ‘Bolivarist revolution’ to Venezuelan high schools, and alter the content of high school text books along ‘Bolivarist’ lines, filling them up with the crapulous mumbo-jumbo of communist and other progressive ideologues (including the Colombian guerrilla groups). The reaction to Chavez’ announcement was entirely typical. Liberal democrats, in Venezuela and the United States, reacted with outrage, and demanded that Chavez adhere to the norms of free speech and liberal democracy. Chavez’ supporters (and he has many) reacted with enthusiasm.

Nowhere did anyone declare that Chavez’ policy was well-intentioned, but needed to be examined more closely, etc., etc., in the way that the Labor Party, for instance, reacts to any of John Howard’s policy announcements. No: Chavez polarises people, he splits them down the middle. You either love him or hate him. But this is precisely what Chavez wants. He wants the liberal democrats, the Bushophiles inside and outside Venezuela, to hate him; and he has, over many years, become awfully good at it. He instinctively knows what to do in order to get his opponents frothing at the mouth, hurling invective and hyperbole, making themselves look foolish, and piquing the interest of the otherwise apathetic masses. And he has done this, not once, but many times; he is, to a certain extent, a one-trick pony, pulling off the same stunt again and again. His opponents have such little regard for him that they do not see how they are being manipulated by the master. The solution to Chavezism? Incorporate him into the system, and treat him with respect: hold press conferences with him and George Bush, where the latter defers to him as respectfully as he would to Ehmud Olmert or Ariel Sharon.

One can see the parallels with Australian nationalism: all the communists at APEC had to do, for instance, was to invite the National-Anarchists up on stage and ask them to speak; the audience would have listened respectfully, and applauded – just as they did with the indigenous Australian woman at the start, and the North American conscientious objector – and National-Anarchism would have been neutered.

This will never happen. The communists can be expected to react with hostility and hyperbole, every time; and the same reaction can be provoked every time. In that sense, they are as predictable as machines.. The communist policy is always the same: no platform for fascists! No free speech for Nazi scum!

So how do we provoke them? How do we get their attention? Well, we only need to repeat APEC a thousand times over – APEC with more and more permutations. But it is essential to keep up the ‘Left’ talk, the ‘Left’ symbolism, the ‘Left’ imagery, the ‘Left’ sloganeering’, and the ‘Left’ methods of mass organisation, mass activism, extra-parliamentarism, and anarchistic, non-hierarchical, decentralised organisation. Such an approach will ensure that the communists will work themselves up into a state of hysteria: we are using their symbols, their ideas, to lure the naïve young away from progressive, multiracial, tolerant communism and towards ‘Neo-Nazism’ and capitalism. They will be unable to help themselves, and unable to see that the best means of ‘smashing’ us would be to give us equal rights and equal time at their rallies, and possibly in their publications as well.

The Australian communist groups appear to recruit using what I call ‘chaff-cutter’ methods. They attract literally hundreds of young Australians, mainly students. But many of the prospective new members are naïve about the communism of a Socialist Alliance or Socialist Alternative: they believe that these organisations are liberal, like the mainstream political parties – that they encourage free thought and free debate. But the prospective member learns, very quickly, that Lenin and Trotsky had, in advance, worked out the answer to every political problem in existence – and that he had better recognise this or ship out. Subtle, and then not so subtle, peer pressure is used to bring a recalcitrant into line. Eventually, the prospective member gets fed up and ceases his association. He is a liberal and an individualist – both traits fostered by our liberal democratic society – and, at the same time, like many idealistic young people, wants to do something good and progressive. But the inflexibility which lies at the heart of any Marxist-Leninist party, and which is communism’s greatest strength (and greatest weakness) repels him.

The scenario is not all bad, however, for the communist group: a small minority of the prospective recruits will stay on and the communist group is left with a small hard-core. Communism is, above all, a ruthless ideology, which often turns on its own (there is no need to cite the many examples from history). But their recruiting and indoctrination policies – more reminiscent of a cult than anything else – get results. The wheat is separated from the chaff.

Here, though, we nationalists can step in – and pick up the chaff. And, it has to be said, we are not going to expand as a movement by recruiting the same old faces from Stormfront Down Under – the same old white nationalists and Australian bush patriots who have been hanging around the nationalist scene for years and years. No, we are only going to expand by recruiting people who have a fresh perspective which comes from being on the outside of the existing nationalistic scene.

In this connection, it is advisable that nationalists go out and attend as many political meetings as possible: lectures on Lenin, Trotsky, Chavez, etc., delivered by Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, Resistance. But not only political meetings of the left; nationalists should attend also meetings of the mainstream parties like, here in Australia, the Liberal party, the Greens, ect.
The best course of action is to go there, as normal, intelligent people, and ask questions about their beliefs, and try and engage them in the debate they are so averse to. This is a New Right Australia strategy.

5. Mistakes made

Recently, a nationalist friend of mine – a man with a long and distinguished career in Australian nationalist activism – showed me a nationalist publication which he had helped edit and publish. It was a handsome production. But, while looking through it, I found a caricature of an African immigrant – a giant African immigrant, stalking the streets of some Australian city, with a knife in his hand, and, needless to say, up to no good. I chided my friend for inserting such a crude caricature with overtones of old-fashioned racism: it could have come straight off Tom Metzger’s website. My friend joked, half-heartedly, that at least the cartoonist didn’t draw blood dripping from the African’s mouth. I rested my case.

On the back of the publication there was a reproduction of a beautiful painting, done two hundred years ago, of the inauguration of Australia’s first Governor-General. Looking at the picture, I found myself confused as to who the intended target audience of the magazine was: monarchists? Old Australian types who voted for Menzies in 1949? Often this Australian nationalism is an emotional nationalism, with no intellectual foundations, no ideology. Ask them to define what is ‘Australian’, and they will have no answer.

Even if one is not a republican, one will find such imagery incongruous. Granted, governor-generals are part of Australia’s past: but the emphasis is on the word past. Any young person (and the only people who could revel in such patriotic Australian imagery must be very old indeed – at death’s door if they voted for Menzies, anyhow) would find such a nationalist publication off-putting – as dull as a school trip to a museum of Australian history.

As for the cartoon of the African – and there were similar crude caricatures throughout the magazine – there are other, more tasteful ways to address the question of immigration. Link immigration to globalism, for one; or point out how immigration drains Australia’s resources (e.g., water resources) and is bad for the environment… No need to use pictures of blonde, nordic women cuddling blonde, nordic babies, either.

Oddly enough, I agreed with around 90% of the publication’s content: the difference between their approach, and New Right’s, was one of emphasis, and of imagery. Thinking it over, I saw that the whole problem could be summed up in the form of a parable.

Suppose that Henry Lawson, or Jack Lang, or some other Australian ‘bush’ socialist could be transported in time to 2007. We nationalists would explain to him that the old Australian Labor Party, which championed white working man’s racialist socialism, has ceased to exist; in its place is a party of namby-pamby multi-cultism. The union movement, too, is no longer interested in fighting immigration: all it wants is the abolition of Work Choices and federal and state Labor government. Indeed, the union movement has lost the political power it once had – only 17% of the Australian workforce is unionised. The way forward for socialism – for a system where labour dominates capital, and not the other way around – is to restructure the entire political and economic system. That means changing liberal democracy. But that goal, in turn, can only be achieved by building up a mass movement on the streets, which will bring about radical change through mass pressure. To build a mass movement, we need to bypass the unions and the political parties, and start taking our message – of racialism and socialism – directly to the masses. What’s more, we need to talk the language of today – not the language of 100 years ago.

Unfortunately, our way is, for the moment, blocked – by communists, who, like parasites, attach themselves to every progressive cause, whether it be anti-globalisation or the trade union struggle for better wages and conditions. They are unpopular, in the minority, and they adhere to a theory which has been falsified by history. But they are convinced that their cause is the only moral one, and every political ideology contradictory to their own (including ours) is evil and immoral, and should be destroyed, by violence if necessary. Their bark is worse than their bite, but they are still numerous enough, and hostile enough, to prevent nationalists from reaching the masses and becoming a true, mass political force. And so one of the prime necessities of our movement is to unblock the communist blockage…

And that is what I would tell Henry Lawson.

In relation to this, it should be asked: why, if the communists have been going at it for so long, are they so unsuccessful? The communists enjoy all kinds of advantages that we nationalists do not: the media coverage they receive is generally favourable (e.g., see the media coverage of the APEC demonstrators); they can display their names and faces without impunity (at least, they will not be treated as harshly as a so-called ‘Neo-Nazi’ nationalist); they have numbers, nice newspapers, propaganda fliers, badges, flags, banners… And they can attend any demonstration for any cause whatsoever – anti-globalisation, anti-WorkChoices, anti-war – without being set upon by the other demonstrators. And, furthermore, most of Australia seems to support their positions on, for instance, the war in Iraq, or WorkChoices (or perhaps it is the case that the communists attach themselves to popular causes). And yet, they have made little to no headway in all the years they have been here: the communist revolution is further away than ever, and they cannot get one MP elected to state or federal parliament…

The answer, or the beginning of an answer, came to me when I was leafing through old issues of the Australasian Spartacist newspaper from the 1970s. This is a long-running Trotskyist-communist newspaper, which began in 1973 and which is still running today. More or less, it makes a cult, a fetishistic cult (like the Nutzi-cult of Hitler), out of Trotsky and Lenin: every political event – from the war in Iraq, to a trade union dispute in Sydney, to a scuffle between two rival communist groups holding stalls at a university – is interpreted from the perspective of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism. The frightening thing is that there is no difference between the writing style, and ideas, of the 1970s issues written thirty years ago, and the issues written today. Which raises the possibility that the same person has been writing all the articles for that newspaper all along – and getting nowhere. This obsessiveness, and the refusal to countenance anything other than orthodox Leninist and Trotskyist view of socialism and politics, makes me speculate that the authors of Australasian Spartacist, and other communist publications (like the Green Left Weekly) are literally insane.

And this is why the communists have been failing in Australia for so many decades: they cannot ditch Lenin and Trotsky. It is not that Australians do not want radical socialism; it is that they cannot understand what two dead Russians – who died a long time ago – have to do with a political struggle in Australia today. (The same could be asked of many nationalists today: why is Hitler, for instance, so important?).

6. Conclusion: The strategy of tension

Something else that leapt out of those old issues of Australasian Spartacist was an account of the famous ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in Britain in 1977, which was an epic confrontation between the British National Front and hundreds of communist protestors in South-East London. The clash was violent, leading to hospitalisations, and the police use of tear gas, riot shields, etc., against the protestors. Reading the venomous account of events from the communist perspective, I was reminded of the (far smaller, by comparison) Battle of APEC. Economic, and to a great extent, social, circumstances in Britain in 1977 differed from those of Australia in 2007: but otherwise, nothing has changed. The National Front in the 1970s was a mass-movement with a popular base, and left-leaning; it won a certain amount of support from the British working-classes, effectively challenging the communists and socialists in what the latter two regarded as their own domain. The communist response was to ‘crush fascism’. Hence, the ensuing confrontation at Lewisham.

Perhaps (depending on whose account you believe) some members or supporters of the National Front, who were still bourgeois in outlook, and still held to liberal democratic ideas, found the idea of a political confrontation with communists off-putting; that is, they did not want to suffer verbal abuse from communists, and have bricks thrown at them, and be assaulted. Which is a natural enough reaction. But they did not realise, and many nationalists in Australia today do not realise, the political value of these confrontations. Suppose that 500 or a 1000 nationalists from all around Australia joined up to march through Sydney or Melbourne. The police would be out in force, as would the media; and so would the communists. The spectacle would ensure more media coverage for nationalism than we could generate by ourselves (through pamphleteering, etc., or through websites); and, at the same time, events would radicalise our membership and draw them closer to one another. And the communists would do all of this for us for free. If we are to look at it in economic terms, the return from a demonstration pays even more than the investment in pamphlets and websites.

And all of this can be done tomorrow. Some liberal media commentators will argue that events like the Battle of Lewisham came about because of the high inflation and high unemployment in Britain in the seventies; which is untrue. All one needs is a large body of nationalists who are prepared to go out and demonstrate: then the communists will show up, and behave like they have behaved for the past ninety years. Like monkeys in a zoo cage, they will jump up and down, shriek and spit. And the average Australian will wonder what all the fuss is about, and some of them may even become interested in nationalism as a result.

The essential thing is this: all demonstrations have to be well-organised, for a worthy cause, and above all, disciplined!

We at New Right do not endorse violence. One can, however, use the metaphor of war: that is, any confrontation with communists is a battle in a political war. A good many nationalists in Australia and elsewhere are in political fairy-land; they think they can form a nice little bourgeois liberal democratic party, and be treated with the same respect, and enjoy the same rights, as all the other liberal democratic parties. But, once their parties get up and going, they due for a shock. The communists will use non-liberal democratic means to deny them their rights. And, possibly, a more effective Antifa will spring up and oppose them with the same means.

Christian Blocher’s Swiss People’s Party (SVP) recently held a rally which was set upon by the Black Bloc of Left-wing Chaotics (an Antifa Black Bloc), who caused an enormous amount of property damage and disruption. The group was arrested, and the rally went ahead. Christian Blocher’s party posted a triumphant account of events at http://www.svp-udc.ch/internet-tv.html . But Australian nationalists cannot expect to get off as lightly. Which is why we must take the war (again speaking metaphorically) to the enemy.

And, while I am not a militarist, I must state my belief that this kind of confrontation is good: it cleanses, it purifies, it bonds the ‘soldiers’ – who are made up of disparate social groups who may have otherwise never have come into contact with one another – together. And, psychologically, to go on the attack is much better than going on the defence: which is the posture many nationalists take now, confining their ‘activism’ to the Internet and not trying to get their ideas out to the Australian community. Which is why we at New Right Australia/New Zealand endorse a strategy of tension. And we endorse direct political confrontation, with the goal of smashing political dogmas, and forming a real social alternative.

On top of that, Marx’s theory – that the capitalist states are inevitably heading towards Marxist socialism, that the capitalist historical epoch is on the way out and that we stand on the threshold of a new communist era – has been disproved by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the slide of communist states like China and Vietnam towards a free-market capitalism (or at least, social democracy). According to Marx’s historical prediction, the collapse of Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism should not have happened, and the decline of communism in Vietnam and China, should not be happening. I know, from my own experience, that the tentacles of globalisation have reached even into Vietnam and Laos – one can see Coca-Cola billboards everywhere. Western foreign investment in Indochina may be ‘good for the economy’ (whatever that phrase means) but, at the same time, its appearance is a depressing reflection of a replacement of a unique Indochinese culture and way of life with a faceless (and raceless) Western, global ‘Starbucks’ one.

So what went wrong? Here, in this essay, I will be explaining that communism, even before Marx, was flawed from the outset on the basis of its principles. I will also argue that socialism is something distinct from communism, and that socialism, and a socialist revolution (not a communist one) in the West is still possible. I will here be quoting extensively from a classic work by a German socialist historian, The history of the social movement in France, 1789-1850, by Lorenz von Stein, originally published in 1850. Stein was a Hegelian and a proto-Marxist of sorts, and a big influence on Marx. I will be using him as a touchstone because his understanding of communism and socialism predates Marx, and is in much the same language as Marx’s, while at the same containing none of Marx’s errors. For that reason, he gives a valuable insight into capitalist society, the class relations which exist under capitalism, and the socialist alternative which exists to it.

2. Babeufism

What is communism? The reader will say: ‘Obviously, what’s contained in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest’. Not quite: communism, as a concept, precedes Marx. The first communist theorists and activists appeared in France around the time of the French revolution. The first communist, in modern times at least, was a man called François-Noël Babeuf, who was executed by the French government in 1797. It is in connection with Babeuf’s movement that the word communism first appears.

So what is it? Firstly, it is the belief that all men are equal – egalitarianism. Secondly, the belief is that the main source of those inequalities is the possession of capital, which economists define as wealth being available for the production of goods and services. Ownership of this wealth, or rather, wealth tied up in means of producing goods and services (means such as land, or factories, or shops, for example) is property. Some – a minority – possess property, others do not. Bill Gates, James Packer, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch and other capitalists possess large amounts of property; others possess only a little (the small businessman, or farmer); while most people possess none at all. The social gulf between the property owners and the non-possessing class is vast: so, in order to bring about true equality, we need to abolish property. The land will be owned (and Babeuf’s ideas were intended mainly for agrarian societies) by the people who work on it – all the people.

This is the first stipulation for a communist order. The second is: the equal distribution of goods. Suppose that someone works for x collective farm, and earns an enormous amount of money through his labours? (Or, if it is a barter economy, an enormous amount of goods?). Or, suppose that he does not consume as much as his fellow workers, and thereby accumulates a large amount of money. After that individual has paid his taxes, and paid for his living expenses, he may still have an enormous amount of savings – after-tax income, capital, wealth. That would make him richer than other people in his commune; and it would no longer be an equal society. Therefore, his wealth has to be distributed, equally, to all other members of the commune; he should only be allowed to keep enough to feed himself, and meet his other expenses, and no more.

Likewise, suppose that a farm, in our communist model, experiences a very large demand for its products in comparison to the other communal farms. That farm would require more labourers than the others; perhaps the labourers on that farm would gain higher status compared to other labourers on other farms. Therefore, in order to enforce equality, labourers have to be discouraged from working on that farm; or consumption of that farm’s products has to be discouraged; or both.

The reader will now see the main problem of communism. In order to ensure that everyone gets the same amount of goods for differing amounts of work, a higher authority will have to intervene to enforce equality; likewise, a higher authority will need to intervene in order to allocate resources, like labour, to each farm, to ensure that some farms or individuals do not become ‘more equal’ than others. So, in order to enforce extreme equality, we wind up with extreme inequality. And this is the fallacy of communism, which has made itself felt in every communist society, without exception. Early critics of Babeuf and communism saw this straight away – even before the revolution in Russia in 1917.

The early communist program was quite explicit about the levels of control needed to maintain it. In the communist doctrine, individual economic interactions are be strictly regulated and directed:

Three basic rules for any communistic society are necessary to give public authority the monopoly of the distribution of goods: all private exchange among members of the communistic community has to be abolished;… all products have to be delivered to a public warehouse in order to separate the individual from his labor; and each individual’s share of the goods produced must be obtained exclusively from these warehouses by public authorisation. These are the necessary prerequisites of a communistic economic order. The fourth rule, the compulsion to work in order to increase the amount of goods to be distributed, is a consequence of the demand for affluence. It may be emphasised or omitted, depending on what type of communism is desired, one of wealth or one of poverty… [Lorenz von Stein, History of the social movement in France, 1789-1850, p.167].

All the elements of a Leninist or Stalinist economic system were in place (as I shall explain later) in Babeuf’s ideas. Indeed, Babeuf seems to anticipate Pol Pot, who made everyone in communist Cambodia dress the same, took children from their parents and raised them in communal creches, executed any Cambodian who showed signs of any higher learning, and developed an agrarian militia. Stein writes:

Although the citizens shall be well off, they shall live and dress simply and uniformly. Why have different colours of clothes or different furniture? Why have a well tailored dress for one and a shabby one for another? ‘It is essential for the happiness of all individuals that the citizen never experiences the slightest degree of even apparent superiority’. Here communism is already lost in the particulars of clothing regulations…

Even with this complete process of levelling all differences there was one serious danger for absolute equality, namely, the difference in mental ability which manifests itself in the arts and sciences. Here also radical measures were proposed… Lest the unalterable nature of things would reassert the dreaded inequality in the children, education, of course was under no condition to be left in private hands. Only the state was to have the right to educate the children. ‘The more domestic education there was the greater would paternal power become’. All children will be placed in a huge institution, and here, without regard to intellectual qualifications, all will receive a simple and absolutely equal education… The whole press was to be kept within the narrow limits of republican principles: any violation was to be severely punished… The economy of early communism was concerned with war and agriculture. Babeuf’s doctrine is one of Spartan virtues… [Stein, op. cit., pp. 165-167, p. 169].

It is no wonder, then, that Proudhon wrote: ‘Communism is oppression and slavery’ (in What is property?).

Oddly enough, however, many anarchists today are Babeufists, that is to say, communist, by the definition above. The anarchist wants the abolition of property, and power to be given to ‘the workers’ – or at least, to the employees of private enterprise (including private enterprise on the land). The State, which exists only to uphold the unequal power relations of capitalism, will be abolished, and a mass of decentralised communes, libertarian, sovereign and without property, will take its place. But the question is: how far will each of these anarchistic communes go to enforce equality? One of the enterprises in the anarchist-run towns and villages may be more profitable than another enterprise; one worker may earn more, or consume less, than the others and so accumulate more wealth. The really successful, worker-controlled enterprise may turn into a new Microsoft or General Motors; the really successful worker, a new Warren Buffet. At some point, then, the community will have to intervene and enforce equality. The same goes for achievements in the arts and sciences and the rest – with the really successful scientist or artist earning more prizes and honours, and more money, than the others…

And all of this has nothing to do with The State. That is, the negative side-effects of communism can occur without a State, even though, in anarchist mythology, the bad, ‘Statist’ communists Lenin and Trotsky perverted the cause of true communism and socialism when they crushed the Soviets, which were, in anarchist hagiography, proto-anarchist communes worthy of emulation. Even without the State, the communist idea entails that people must be crushed to fit the communist ideal of equality, thus bringing about an order which is even more repressive and coercive than capitalism.

3. Marxist communism

The traits of Babeuf’s communism carry over into Marx’s, as we can see. But, in Marxist theory, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and all the other communist countries were not truly communist. As anyone who is acquainted with Marx’s theories knows, history, in the Marxist view, progresses in historical phases. At the time of Marx’s writing, mankind was standing on the threshold of the end of the capitalist phase; the next phase was to be followed by a period of ‘socialism’, which would then be followed by a period of perfect communism, where all men would be equal, everything would be owned by everyone, etc.

Certainly, the Soviet Union and other communist countries were not perfectly communist in that sense; but they were more communist, and more Babeufist, than anything else. Take Stalinism as an example. Some concessions, under Stalinism, were made to individual acquisitiveness – in other words, the individual’s desire to accumulate large amounts of money for himself and not to share it with others. As the Australian economist Ian Ward writes:

In Stalinism, material rewards were designed to induce individuals to act in accordance with goals and targets determined by higher authority. Among the distinct characteristics of the reward system was: a heavy reliance on piece rather than time rates [in other words, payments per good produced, rather than payments by hour worked]; extremely wide differentials which reflected not only one’s status but the industry or sector in which one worked; the payment of bonuses for overfulfilment of one’s target; the payment of high rewards, together with special privileges, such as restricted shops, to members of the party; and an emphasis on the individual member rather than the group as a whole in determining the rewards. By contrast, a more collective form of material incentive was practised in the group form. Failure to perform was often associated with a negative form of incentive. [Ian Ward, The Soviet struggle for socialism, VCTA Publishing, 1992, p. 25].

Having said that, equality, and collective ownership, reigned in Stalin’s Russia. For instance: all State-owned enterprises were forbidden to sell goods to one another (a tire factory could only exchange tires with a machine parts factory, for instance). The enterprises used profit as an accounting measure – that is, the enterprises did make profits – but all of these were redistributed back to the State. The collective farms were not owned by the State, but run by the workers on them, who were in turn monitored and directed by State officials. The farms, after producing their agricultural goods for the State, were allowed to keep the leftovers, which were then distributed among their workers (but there was often little left to distribute).

In a previous quotation from Lorenz von Stein, it was mentioned that, under Babeufist communism, four conditions had to be met for a communist society to exist: 1), all private exchange has to be abolished; 2) all products have to be delivered to a communal warehouse; 3) all goods in these warehouses can only be obtained through public authorisation; 4) all are compelled to work in order to produce a greater amount of goods, which are then to be distributed to everybody. Every communist State – whether it be Stalin’s, or Mao’s, or Pol Pot’s, or Castro’s – works according to these principles. For instance, take 4): the mobilisation of the masses to produce more for the community was one of the distinguishing traits of Stalinism:

[Under Stalinism] a whole range of symbols of social approval and disapproval, as well as mobilisation and emulation techniques, were employed. For example, individuals and groups were made model workers or awarded badges, and banners as external symbols of good performance. In addition, all citizens were mobilised either directly through the bringing together of large numbers of people to achieve some specific target or indirectly through massive advertising in the form of slogans on buildings, pictures of successes in public parks or through a media campaign.; ‘Catch up with the West’ and ‘Forward to Communism’ were commonly-used slogans. More specifically, emulation campaigns were used to encourage workers to learn by the example of others and work harder. [Ian Ward, op. cit., p. 25.]

Both Marxist communism, and Babeuvist communism, are the one and same thing in practice: communism. And that communism can be reproduced at the decentralised level of the anarcho-communist: we can have a mini-Maoism, or mini-Juchism (Juche being the official North Korean ideology), which is what anarchist-communism and its offshoots are. The anarcho-communists may deny it, but, by necessity, they will be led down the same path, and be forced to abandon anarchism in favour of communism.

From my comments here, it may seem that I believe that communism is entirely a bad thing. But it is not, at least, from the nationalist perspective. After all, recall Stein’s phrase: ‘The economy of early communism was concerned with war and agriculture. Babeuf’s doctrine is one of Spartan virtues’. Such a description reminds me, at least, of certain elements of the German National Socialist, or Italian Fascist ideology, or Evola’s Traditionalism. And I must confess that I as a nationalist look at a country like North Korea, or Cuba, with some degree of envy: there, the respective populaces are disciplined, and led, by a political leadership which is anti-US and which, despite all its faults, acts in the national interest as represented by the State – above all classes, all special interests, which exist in our own liberal democratic societies. There are no business lobbies there calling for policies which are harmful to the general well-being as there are here, for instance, and no trade unions doing the same. There is no degenerate phenomena along the lines of ‘Chavism’ in Britain, and one can be sure that social pathologies are dealt with firmly by the law. At the same time, no-one doubts that Cuba and North Korea are dead and repressive countries, and that their standard of living is far below that of the Western States. The challenge for any theorist of Western nationalism is to isolate the good from the bad.

4. Socialism

So, what is socialism? Stein defines it this way:

All those systems, and all those ideas, which aim at establishing labor’s control over capital… and making labor the guiding principle of society, may be called socialist. Socialism is the second blueprint for a social system based on the social idea of equality. Socialism in all its variations is infinitely superior to communism. Its basis is labor, and thereby, individuality, this fountainhead of all true wealth and of all diversification. Socialism does not desire to realise the abstract of equality of men, any more than it desires to eliminate a person’s individuality… Socialism does not desire, as communism does, to abolish differentiations among individuals and therewith society and the order of the whole; it aims to build society on the principle of labor independent of property. [Stein, op. cit., p. 85.]

Stein, elsewhere, goes on to outline what he means by social reform, and how it can be achieved:

The major concern of a social movement is not the problem of poverty. The social problem which social reform tries to solve is the result of the laws which determine the relationship between capital and labor and thus also govern society, the constitution and the development of each individual personality… We have shown that the contradiction in the situation of the proletarian consists in his dependence on the property-owner because he owns only labor and no capital… As long as the inherent nature of capital and labor remains unchanged… differentiation and dependence are inevitable. It would be a complete misinterpretation of the nature of social life to consider the abolition of differentiation as the aim of social reform… The abolition of this differentiation is not at all the aim of the proletariat… The proletariat wants to acquire capital. Here is the core of the problem. [Stein, op. cit., p. 92.]

So the solution is, says Stein:

Personal independence in this [acquisitive] society rests on the ability of even the meanest worker to acquire capital. This provides an opportunity for everybody to break through the traditional pattern of social classes and of the ensuing dependence…. As long as this opportunity exists in the form of a rule also extending to the worker, no contradiction is apparent, and the social order is stable, no matter how great are the dependence and the differences between the two classes. The essence of the social question and of social reform in our present society is therefore clearly indicated. The problem is whether it is at all possible, in this acquisitive society, to provide labor with the necessary opportunities and corresponding institutions for the acquisition of property commensurate with the accomplishments and standards of labor. The social reform movement consists of the work, the activities, the suggestions, the attempts, the laws, and the institutions which aim to create these opportunities for the working class. [Ibid.]

5. Socialism and its applications to Nationalism

I think, after the exposition above, that the reader can understand what socialism is and how social democracy, and the social democratic parties (like the German SPD, the British Labour Party, and the Australian Labor Party) are socialist or at least contain socialist elements and aim at social reform. But there is one important change which has occurred since the socialist doctrine was first propounded in the early 18th century. That is what I call the ‘blue-collarisation’ of socialism. ‘The workers’ in socialist doctrine are, theoretically, anyone without property, i.e., anyone who has to work for a living as opposed to living off rents and dividends. A call centre worker in a phone company like Telstra is a worker, perhaps even a proletarian; the investor who lives off Telstra dividends, or capital gains on sold Telstra shares, is a capitalist. (And, in theory, the CEO whose job it is to manage Telstra on behalf of the shareholders is a very rich worker). But somewhere along the line of the history of socialism, the worker or the proletarian became ‘working-class’ as we know it today: i.e., a blue-collar. The CEO, or even the white-collar worker, are not ‘workers’.

The difference, I think, between white collars and blue collars is as follows. In economist’s jargon, the blue-collar menial labourer possesses a great deal of ‘physical capital’. That is capital – the wealth available for the production of goods and services – is the blue-collar’s muscle power, which is used to produce goods and services in the sectors of industry he works in. Whereas the white-collar worker relies on ‘intellectual capital’, i.e., skills which stem less from muscle-power and more from some skill which comes from higher education and training.

It has been stated here at the New Right blog, and indeed, in many other places, that German National Socialism, Italian Fascism and their variants in other countries (Mosley’s Fascism, for instance), were socialist, all right – but socialism for the workers with more ‘intellectual’ than ‘physical’ capital (students and academics fit into that category). Which is not to say that blue-collar workers did not support fascism – they did – but that the white-collars were overepresented and were its primary support base.

As well as that, small business – the petit bourgeoisie – formed another pillar of the fascist support base. The petit bourgeoisie work for a living; but they own a little more capital than the average salaryman or salarywoman, but much less than a big capitalist.

So the NSDAP was a party of the German worker, all right, but of the worker who had more intellectual than physical capital, or who had possession of comparatively small amounts of capital. (On top of that, the NSDAP appealed to small farmers, in particular, the peasantry). There is plenty of evidence for this in the literature. Martin Broszat, for instance, recounts that the NSDAP appealed to youth, and to the German mittelstand (middle classes):

The share of young voters who found the NSDAP most appealing was particularly high. What attracted them was the Nazi image as a party of youth. There was also the pressure of youth unemployment with its demoralising impact. In this way young people became politicised at an early age and in turn began markedly to shape the public style of the NSDAP and the SA…. It was in particular young people of traditional liberal-bourgeois or conservative family background who dissociated themselves from their parents’ political and joined the NSDAP.

The main social basis of the Nazi mass movement was therefore the broad spectrum of the Protestant middle class in town and country. As early as 1930, the sociologist Theodor Geiger explained the political landslide of the September elections in terms of a ‘panic among the Mittelstand’. He argued that fear of proletarianisation was an even stronger motive among large parts of the old and the new Mittelstand than their actual degree of material deprivation. Although objectively, these groups were becoming proletarianised, their anti-proletarian and anti-socialist consciousness which had been moulded by their education and social background held them back from voting for the left-wing parties. Instead they began to search for a third way between socialism and capitalism, and it was the Nazis who promised it with their emotionally very effective propaganda extolling the Volksgemeinschaft. Only a few people in the socialist movement recognised at the time that the massive successes of the NSDAP among peasant and the impoverished lower middle classes were partly a consequence of a dogmatic Marxism; for all this type of Marxism was able to offer the panic-stricken ‘petty bourgeoisie’ and peasants was a ‘proletarian class consciousness’ against which they had developed a psychological block. [Martin Broszat, Hitler and the collapse of Weimar Germany, 1984, pp. 86-87.]

The above quotation should be made compulsory for every nationalist in the West – not to mention every Marxist. The fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, whether they be in the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Rumania, Italy, gathered their mass support simply because they paid attention to the social classes which were in need of help but had been neglected by Marxism. Nationalists can likewise fill the gap in the West today – especially now, considering that Marxism and communism are spent forces. If we are to advocate socialism, it will be much more appealing than communism, for, as Stein says, socialism, unlike communism, does not aim at a society where no-one earns more, and has more, than anyone else and where everyone is perfectly equal.

6. Objections

The first objection anyone could make is that, at present, in Australia, at least, we are experiencing great economic success, and that, in good economic conditions, the propertyless classes are much less prepared to abandon the ‘acquisitive society’ and capitalist order. While economic conditions in the West in the 1930s were uniformly terrible, they are not so today. One only has to look at Australian unemployment, for instance, which was 4.3 % in the June quarter – the lowest in over thirty years.

It has been stated here before that the unemployment figures, in Australia, and elsewhere in the West, are kept artificially low using statistical trickery. The opinion columnist Ross Gittins estimates that, once the underemployed and ‘discouraged jobseekers’ are factored in, the current Australian unemployment rate stands at 9 or 10 percent – hardly the best in Australian economic history. (Ross Gittins, ‘Credit where it’s due on unemployment’, Sydney Morning Herald, February 14 2007). Elsewhere in the West – France and Germany, for example – unemployment is much worse: the official unemployment rates, which underestimate the true extent of unemployment, are much higher than Australia’s.

Secondly, there are pockets of deprivation in Australia, even among the workers who possess ‘intellectual’ capital – for instance, the students. The article ‘Extent of student poverty highlighted’ (August 8 2007, at http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22208668-29277,00.html ) makes the claim that many Australian undergraduate and postgraduate students are struggling on less than $A10,000 a year, and are studying with a very high level of personal debt.

As well as that, inflation, as manifested in the rising prices of commodities like oil, is very high at the time of writing; and central banks in the Eurozone, America, the United Kingdom and Australia have hiked interest rates to high levels – in Australia interest rates are the highest in ten years. The results have not been catastrophic, but have caused some economic hardship, especially to the heavily indebted petit bourgeoisie. It is, then, a time for the electorate to turn leftward, not rightward.

The other objection is, ‘What’s to stop, then, Australian voters, for example, from going over to the mainstream, social-democratic Labor Party? Why should they go over to your brand of socialism?’.

Again, I will point to precedents in 20th century history. In Weimar Germany, for instance, the socialist vote was split three ways – between the NSDAP, the German Communist Party, and the social democratic SPD. The NSDAP, in terms of bringing about social reform for its constituency, proved to be a much better party than the SPD, which had been running Germany federally, and at the state level, for years. Likewise, social democratic parties regularly come into office on the Continent and accomplish little. I do not think, either, that the Australian Labor Party will accomplish much in alleviating unemployment after it wins the federal elections this year (if it does win) – although it is conceivable that interest rates and inflation may come down over time.

7. Conclusion

One of the reasons why communists do so well in recruiting students is that hardly any other political group (and that includes nationalists) pays attention to student needs. A recent communist poster around Australian university campuses, for instance, reads ‘Abolish student poverty/Abolish HECs [student] debt/No more fee increases’. In the view of the average student, these policies are good policies. The student, on the basis of that, will be more inclined to support the group whether it be communist or not. For the most part, other mainstream parties hardly seem to give a damn.

As Stein would say, all political parties have a class basis. A political idea only makes the transition from theory to practice when it appeals to the needs of a certain economic and social class. And that is the difference between a socialist group and a nationalist one (or at least, nationalism as it exists in Australia). A racist slogan like ‘Pakis go home’ is not the expression of a social movement; it is an expression of animus, of resentment. But, on the other hand, propaganda which explains why Subcontinental immigration is bad because, among other reasons, it affects the economic well-being of a certain economic class – it is social theory.

Fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, had a huge mass base in Europe. After the war, neofascism did not. This cannot be explained wholly by persecution at the hands of Allied-imposed State sanctions against neofascism. The reason why neofascism failed to make headway was that economic conditions were too good in Europe in 1960 or even in 1970. Secondly, the theorists of neofascism (men like Yockey and Evola) failed to ground their politics in a class base, unlike the canny fascist demagogues Hitler and Mussolini. They could not find a socioeconomic group to align themselves to, or at least, had no wish to align themselves to any such group.

Admittedly, economic conditions today in the West are not at the catastrophic level of the 1930s. It is far better, materially, to be one of the propertyless-classes – even one of the lumpenproletariat – in the West than it is in, for instance, Africa or India (which is why so many Africans and Indians are emigrating here). But we should not allow white guilt over our privileges stand in the way of socialism. In the 1930s, Germany, Italy and Japan portrayed themselves as ‘proletarian nations’ – that is, countries which, even though they had a very high level of industrialisation and wealth, were in an inferior position compared to France, Britain and the United States, and were deserving of better treatment in the sphere of international affairs. Nationalists in the West need to adopt the same mentality. We may be members of wealthy nations, and members of the white race, the most privileged in the world; but, at the same time, we deserve social reform, and the system which can deliver it, socialism. And that means reclaiming the word socialism from the Left.

This is an article which explores questions of tactics and propaganda, building on previous articles such as On Kameradschaft and The power of the people. Most of its suggestions – regarding demos, leaflets, posters, etc. – are not easily put into practice straight away. Simply put, at the present stage we do not have the numbers, in Australia, at least, to carry out large demonstrations, and we do not possess all the requisite materials and equipment for making posters, and the rest, on the scale that the Left in this country does (and what is more, of the same quality). Having said that, I think it is important that we nationalists, at this early stage, start considering these things. This article, like previous ones in this vein, will be drawing upon the example of certain German nationalist movements – the Freie Kameradschaften, the Freie Nationalisten, and the Autonome Nationalisten – as well as the NPD itself.

It should be noted that throughout the essay, I will be using the terms ‘left’, ‘right’ in their conventional sense. Which is not to say that I do not recognise their limitations. (For instance, most nationalists are characterised by mainstream analysts as ‘Far Right’, which is I think is woefully inaccurate). What is more, I consider a good many political issues (especially ones relevant to nationalism) to be ‘beyond left and right’.

Unlike many, I tend to characterise the German nationalism of the NPD and the Freie Nationalisten groups as ‘left-wing’ and ‘socialist’. I also think that, to a great extent, the nationalist movement is left-wing and socialist. What I am advocating here is that we place those ‘socialist’, anti-globalist and anti-capitalist elements to the forefront of our doctrine, and that we repackage certain parts of our image (as it is conveyed in our visual propaganda (posters, symbols, leaflets, banners, etc.) and our slogans to get that across. By doing that, we will appeal to a wider cross-section of the political thinking conscious community which is left-leaning, anti-globalist and anti-capitalist. We will then manage to compete, successfully, with the mainstream Left (the anarchists, communists, social democrats and liberals, plus the trade unionists and environmentalists). The mainstream Left was able to claim a monopoly on political issues like anti-globalisation and the environment. That is, anyone who was concerned with these things was naturally on the (mainstream) Left. Nationalism has to work to break that monopoly.

As well as that, the Left seems to have a monopoly on the young – it is easier to attract a young person into the folds of the Left than it is into the nationalist ‘Far Right’. The reason for that is that the Left are politically active, forming groups and holding demonstrations; but they also portray themselves, in their propaganda, as rebels and underdogs – something which is appealing to the young. But the ‘underdog’ and ‘rebel’ status can easily be appropriated for nationalism, and for the most part, it is a question of adopting the Left’s symbolism and imagery (which I will discuss later).

2. What is Left and what is socialist?

On one level, socialism is about redistributing wealth. Under the market system, some people are rich, and others are poor, most are in between. The socialist view is that certain distributions of wealth are unjust – that is, certain groups deserve more than they are allocated by the market system – and so the government, and collective action, has to step in and redistribute it. Hugo Chavez is a typical socialist. His followers, the slum dwellers of Caracas and other parts of Venezuela, deserve more, in Chavez’ view, than they have received under previous neo-liberal governments. His intention, then, is to redistribute wealth. He does this by, among other things, nationalising American-owned oil refineries: the profits are to no longer go to Yanqui, gringo shareholders, but to ‘the people’ – Venezuelans, or at least, the neediest, who happen to be Chavez’ followers. Nationalisation and welfarism are the two main tools of ‘government’ socialism.

Other socialisms, however, need not be as extreme, polarising and confrontational as Chavez’. Indeed, socialism can exist within a mainstream liberal democratic context. Mainstream social democrat or liberal-socialist parties can and do use the tools of nationalisation and welfarism (more the latter than the former) to redistribute wealth. Even the conservative-leaning National Party in Australia is an agrarian socialist party, redistributing taxpayer’s money to ‘rural and regional Australia’. (One of the great ironies of Australian politics is that the Nationals are in a coalition with the free-market conservative Liberal Party). Indigenous groups in Australia, and Afro-American groups in America, likewise seek a share of taxpayer’s money – in the name of ‘social justice’, redressing inequality and compensating for past injustices (e.g., slavery, or the theft, by white settlers, of indigenous land).

There are, of course, the Marxist socialisms. Socialism in Marx’s time, and for many decades afterwards, had its roots in the working classes, who were exploited by capitalism. Like Dickens, Marx viewed Victorian capitalism as gloomy, degrading, soul-destroying; Marx was outraged over practices like child labour, for instance. The solution proffered by the communists, and other advocates of working-class socialism, was nationalisation, welfare and legislation against exploitative practices.

Over time, ‘working-class socialism’ filtered through to mainstream liberal socialist parties, like the German SPD and the British Labour Party, but not necessarily through Marx (Britain, for instance, has a strong, non-Marxist Fabian socialist tradition).

After the war, ‘national’ communisms sprang up in the Third World; but, for Cuban, Vietnamese and Chinese communism, the peasantry, and not the blue-collar proletariat of the cities, were the agents of revolutionary change. Marx’s theory, by this point, had been twisted beyond recognition, but the Third World communists still insisted on categorising themselves as Marxist.

What of nationalism – Western nationalism? It has been argued elsewhere on this site that the German National Socialist and Italian Fascist movements and their imitators were socialist and left-wing in their orientation. Their membership included many disgruntled ex-communists and sympathisers or members from the mainstream liberal democratic socialist parties. Likewise, the NPD’s ideology has a socialist tone. Its party program implies that the existing neo-liberal order is unfair to the indigenous Germans, and that wealth should be redistributed – not to Kurdish or Turkish immigrants, but to indigenous German families, particularly in the depressed areas of the East.

But there are additional reasons to characterise nationalism as socialist. For one thing, nationalists are naturally against globalisation, specifically the globalisation of people. In the neo-liberal and capitalist order, all human beings are interchangeable labour units, without any defining ethnic, racial or cultural characteristics. Or, if they have those characteristics, they hardly matter. So, if a few hundred thousand immigrants arrive from a Third World country to France, Germany, Australia or America, it will make no difference to the economy. Indeed, immigrants are ‘good for’ the economy, because, among other things, immigrants are quite generously prepared to work hard enough to pay for not only their social security pensions but the rest of the population’s as well. For these reasons, according to business, we should ignore any effect immigration, and the corresponding changes in demographics, has on the existing culture. Big business is globalist, and supports immigration in order to obtain cheap labour. But ironically, the Left supports this side of globalisation, and welcomes immigration as well (albeit for different reasons).

Sectors of the community other than business are prepared to welcome immigration for quite selfish and stupid reasons. Recently, the CFMEU (the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Engineering Union, one of Australia’s largest) has undertaken a campaign to have immigrant workers naturalised – in the hope that they will vote against the incumbent anti-union Liberal Party. Such a mentality betrays a selfish, short-term outlook – an outlook which is more associated, in leftist polemics, with capitalism than anything else. That view is ‘Only my economic interests matter, no-one else’s’. We nationalists reject that, considering that to be destructive to the community and the common good.

Then there are the economists, who are always cobbling together good sound ‘economic’ reasons for immigration. They claim that the ageing population in the West will place a strain on our social security systems, so we will need immigrants to pay for tax money for those pensions, but to replenish our numbers. As well as that, economists think that the addition of consumers (most economists today think in terms of demand-side economics, which places the consumer at the center) will likewise be ‘good for the economy’.

But all these are rationalisations. There are plenty of other good economic reasons for rejecting immigration: for one, Australia does not have an unlimited supply of natural resources (like water); some studies show immigration to be bad for the environment; and so on.

The main reason why nationalists reject immigration is that we place a high value on the homogenous, and harmonious, community. And it is this concern with community and solidarity which we share with the mainstream Left. In ‘An infantile disorder? Crisis and decline of the New Left’ (1977), Nigel Young writes (of the New Left in America):

The ‘myth’ of community was a central one for the [New Left] movement; Georges Sorel had once used the notion of myth to depict something that was not necessarily untrue or impossible, but an image of the future which guided effective action in the present; a truth becoming rather than existing. Such was the idea of community in the growth of the NL and the counter-culture, reflecting the influence of anarchist and utopian socialist ideas, and filtered through writers like Fromm and Goodman; but it also reflected a general popular and sociological concern with a ‘loss of community’; in the words of the Port Huron Statement itself, the task was ‘bringing people out of isolation and into community’. That was a function of politics. For Mills, ‘mass society’ described an atomized, amorphous social situation in which individuation had replaced true individualism: conformity replaced autonomy, leaving only the alienation of ‘pseudo-gemeinschaft’, a phoney community of status-striving, the success ethic and the rat-race. This society elevated individualism as an ideal, but undermined its social basis. Both the cult of organizational belongingness and the quite contradictory myth of competitive individualism are cultivated to disguise the real nature of the corporate conveyor belt. (p. 57).

These are some of the key tenets of Leftism and Socialism: the isolating, alienating effects of capitalism and liberal individualism; and the need to increase community bonds, a sense of fellow-feeling and shared destiny, and have members of the community work, at least in part, for the good of the whole instead of their own selfish benefit. That can be accomplished through a number of ways: Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Castro, Gamel Nasser, Huey Long, Juan Peron, each have their different answers to the question. And these are only the ‘government’ socialisms: there are the ‘libertarian’ socialisms as well – the anarchists and the counter-culture dropouts who formed their own communes.

It is reasonable to say that many of the ideologists of early socialism and anarchism would certainly be “racist” by today’s standards. Marx and Engels intended communism for industrial societies in the First World like England and Germany. Had they, and other socialists of Germany in the 19th century, been told that future communists would support mass immigration into the West with a view to making Germans a minority, they would have been appalled, not to mention astounded.

3. The New Left and its relevance to nationalism

In view of this, it is worth recounting the history of the New Left, which has lessons for nationalists. The New Left was a mass, left-wing radical movement in the West which began in the 1950s but gained prominence in the 1960s, and died sometime in the 1970s. The New Left championed women’s rights, desegregation, environmentalism, gay rights, mass non-white immigration, nuclear disarmament, and campaigned for an end to the war in Vietnam. It looked to communists like Che, Mao, Ho Chi Minh as heroes, but represented a break from the ‘old’ Left (Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castroism). Unlike the ‘old’ Left, it had its membership base, not in the working-class trade union movement, or in Leninist ‘revolutionary vanguards’ (small groups of communist activists, often working undercover and infiltrating mainstream political groups), but in students and youth (mostly white and middle class). Culturally, its roots were deep within the sixties Hippie counter-culture of the time.

The movement burned out for a number of reasons: its use of violence, culminating, among the more radical groups (like the Weathermen and the Red Army Faction), in a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare against the State; infiltration by the ‘old’ Left groups who steered the movement in a more pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing direction; psychological strains imposed by drugs, communal living, sexual promiscuity and other elements of drop-out counter-culture life; organisational problems; and changing political and economic circumstances.

Perhaps most important of all, they failed to win over the support of the working classes and other significant groups in the community. Partially this was because of the natural conservatism and apathy in sections of the Western working classes of that time, and the generation gap between the old, working-class, trade union types and the young radicals. But it was also due to the fact that, as the seventies progressed, the behaviour of the New Left alienated people who could have been the New Left’s natural supporters.

While nationalists may find large parts of their program noxious, there is much we can learn from it. On a close examination, it becomes clear that New Leftism has much in common with National Anarchism and the Freie Nationalisten/Freie Kameradschaften/ Autonome Nationalisten movements. The New Left doctrine emphasised spontaneous ‘organisation without disorganisation’; activism over theory; activism directed towards the concerns of today rather than tomorrow; extra-parliamentarism; a non-hierarchical, amorphous structure (meaning that there were no strict membership rules and no leadership which imposes orders and rules from the top down); the creation of parallel society and ‘counter-institutions’ (i.e. community activist groups which to a certain extent usurp the functions of the State – ‘We visualise and then build structures to counter those which we oppose’, in the words of Tom Hayden). All in all, it preferred to be a ‘movement’ over a ‘party’. The New Left groups were decentralised and difficult for an outside agency (like the government) to infiltrate and control.

All of this had its basis on anarchist theory. As Young writes:

The NL’s version of pluralism sought the representation of all social groups regardless of their power or literacy or degree of organisation… Mills’s ‘publics’, Goodman’s and Fromm’s ‘community’, Lynd’s and Hayden’s ‘participatory democracy’, all point towards a recreation of a genuine and ‘socialist’ pluralism. Such concepts also provide a base for a more utopian and anarchistic sociology; populist, eclectic and experimental, ‘from the bottom-upwards’ – in tune with decentralised movement projects, and making possible, in contrast, a sociology of the structures of unfreedom, of war, the State, and revolutionary limitation and possibility.

Thus these libertarian radicals of the 1960s largely accepted an end to doctrinaire solutions and closed utopias, endorsing the sort of pluralism and flexibility that had been characteristic of much anarchist thought. The projection of a single historical sequence, the single blueprint for a new society, the unified and reductionist theory of man or history, [all the elements of Marxist theory], was replaced by an insistence on the need for different groups, a range of solutions. (Young, pp. 22-23).

Part of this came about with a disillusionment with party politics, and elections. Left-wing activists had placed great faith in mainstream liberal or social democratic politicians, only to be burned each time. (The nationalist in Australia who reads of this cannot help but be reminded of the Pauline Hanson-One Nation experience). As well as that, the Old Left tactic of infiltrating mainstream center-left parties and institutions, and gradually turning them towards a communist party line, was not working; neither were the communist parties which competed in elections (an option available to them after the McCarthyite anti-communist phase of American political life had ceased).

More than that, however, was a desire, on the part of the many impetuous young activists who made up the New Left, to do something now. In an ideal left-wing world, a communist party would come to power through the ballot box and start expropriating the capitalist class and redistributing wealth. But clearly that was not possible in Europe and America in the 1960s, at least in the short term. Which raised the question: given that the Left lacked the political power to do what it wanted, how could it go about building a socialist community today? How could one bring about an order where one can feel a sense of solidarity, kinship and community, and work for the well-being of the whole (instead of the individual)? How could one escape the confines of the liberal capitalist order straight away?

The simple truth was that the institutions of communism were designed to benefit the people – not the other way around. Forced collectivisations, expropriation without compensation, rationing, price controls, currency controls, hierarchical state management of state-owned enterprises, the abolition of profit, interest, competition – all the techniques of communism – were intended to increase man’s well-being. Obviously, this was not apparent from the way the communist regimes of China, Russia, Cuba and Vietnam worked: to the anti-Marxist New Leftist, these regimes were ‘anti-people’. Communism had lost sight of the truths of socialism, and persisted in treating people like objects – a carry-over from capitalism. Under a business-friendly liberal democratic regime, business manipulates the government in order to serve business; while under communism, the government manipulates the people in order to serve the government.

So New Leftism sought to create socialism on the ground. ‘The underground society grows out of the ground now, and it begins – independent of the still ruling authorities – to live its life and to rule itself’ (Young, p.93).

All of this is relevant to nationalism for a number of reasons. Populists and nationalists tend to wait for the big electoral breakthrough, for the messiah who, at the head of a party, will take control of the government, in a Leninist-style, Bolshevik revolution (or Hitler-style, National Socialist revolution) and do all the things that they have wanted: expel immigrants; cut ties to Israel; begin expropriating the assets (particularly media and entertainment assets) of capitalists who are antipathetic to nationalism. But all these policies are intended to bring about a sense of unification and solidarity among peoples of European descent in the West. They aim to replace the old, deracinated, neo-liberal consumer order with one which could be described as ‘socialist’, or at least communitarian. Given that we cannot achieve this, at present, through the ballot box, how can we work towards it now?

Part of the answer, I feel, lies in the formation of small, decentralised groups of ‘autonomous nationalists’, as detailed in ‘The power of the people’. Capitalist, consumerist society is isolating and alienating (even without large numbers of non-white immigrants); we can break that down, in the nationalist community, by encouraging nationalists to associate with one another, in a ‘disorganised’ manner, without coercion. That is the first step. One of the benefits of that approach is that it makes the individual nationalist realise that he is not alone – and that he can draw strength, in an individualist, anti-racial world, from being in a group.

This has relevance, too, for non-white groups. Recently, the conservative Australian government has unveiled a raft of policies designed to assist isolated, squalid indigenous communities, which, like indigenous communities in North America, suffer from alcoholism, drug abuse, poverty, low life expectancy. In these communities, which are tantamount to reservations, social pathologies, like child abuse, and spousal abuse, are rampant. Over the past few decades, a large industry of welfare and social workers has sprung up to tend to the needs of the indigenous, but can not have said to have helped them much at all. So the government is looking for other solutions, and is, with its latest policies, for the most part winning the applause of conservatives in the press, and the qualified support of the opposition Labor Party.

But in the ‘debate’ on how to ‘save’ the indigenous people of Australia from themselves, no-one has looked at the possible solution of mutual aid. That is, the indigenous people in these communities could form activist groups and concentrate on improving their lives, without control and direction from the government and the indigenous welfare agencies. They could do simple things like clean up graffiti, carry out renovations of run-down government-owned properties, and prevent the supply of liquor.

The conservatives like to preach the value of ‘self-help’; their belief is that indigenous people should lift themselves up by the bootstraps and leave their fellows behind. But a far better approach, in my view, is mutual aid – people co-operating in groups to benefit their community. And what can work for the indigenous people can work for the whites.

4. The revolutionary agency

In Marxist theory of the ‘imminent’ communist revolution and the downfall of capitalism, the working-class plays the central part – or rather, the working-class organised into a mass communist party. After receiving a proper political education in the truths of Marxism and dialectical materialism, the proletarian will see the truth of ‘scientific socialism’, develop class consciousness, and feel a radical antipathy towards capitalism. The revolution comes about through a violent overthrow of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, liberal democracy; or it comes about when the masses come to see the good sense of communist practice and then simply vote the pro-capitalist political parties out.

This side of Marxism presented a problem for the New Left. For one, the working classes in the West in the 1960s were not revolutionary, but, through the massive trade union movement (e.g., the AFL-CIO) were very much part of the liberal democratic order. As well as that, the trade unionists were racist, nationalist and very much opposed to desegregation, civil rights for Negroes. They were antipathetic to the pro-Hanoi, anti-colonialist foreign orientation of the New Left as well.

It was this lack of revolutionary potential in the working classes that led the theorists of the New Left to scout around for a new ‘revolutionary agency’. Accordingly, the New Left made a fetish of Negroes struggling for civil rights, or the ‘peasants’ of Indochina waging an anti-colonialist war against the Americans and their puppets; some New Leftists even made a cult of the lumpenproletarian, following a strand in early anarchist thought.

These social or racial groups were said to have the dynamic potential which would bring about the revolution against capitalism. But, in the end, the New Leftists had to face up to the obvious: most of their membership were (mostly) white middle-class students. Speaking of C. Wright Mills, one of the leading New Left intellectuals, Young writes:

Mills… having written off the disorganised poor, the co-opted blacks and working-class leadership, the accommodated unions and the middle class dominated by consumerism and bureaucratism, continued his search for the ‘insurgent impulse’ where it could be found… [It] led usually back to the radical young and the activist students. By the early 1960s, they had already taken a leading part in European peace movements; students also played a continuing role in internal change (such as the overthrow of Menderes in Turkey, and Synghman Rhee in Korea) and after 1960, their role in Japan and Latin America became a constant echo of actions taken in North America and Europe. (Young, p. 110).

At once, the critic can see that a movement which has its base located in students and youth would experience severe problems. They could not be said to exist as a unified group, a class, or have much in the way of political clout. As Young writes:

How could seven million students, mostly white, mostly middle class, ever be a class in themselves? Student culture, despite the enormous impact of the New Left as a movement, was by no means solidary. External ties, training differentiation, seniority, size of student community, living situations, and finally sex and race, were all factors that could cut across the solidarity of students. As in the development of all classes, occupational and interest differentiation will be the most stubborn obstacle to the development of communal identity. Engineers versus humanities students, those whose first priority is exam-taking against those whose objective is the humanisation of the university environment, is paralleled by the opposition between craft and industrial unionism, between different racial groups, between the individual striver and the collective solidarist, which has characterised the history of classes in modern societies…

Perhaps the most telling opposition to the use of the class label for the student community came from those who stressed the evanescent quality of the status. Even if a majority of twenty million high-school leavers in the USA went through university, it remained an interim time for most of them; rarely lasting more than four years, the stakes in it are not that high. (Young, p.111).

Despite such dire prognostications, the student movement was spectacularly successful – gaining numbers, in America, at least, that American nationalists can at present only dream about:

By 1968, student support in America may have stood at around a million sympathisers, of whom probably 150,000 were actively linked to the movement or its organisations (e.g. by membership), over half of these were linked to SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], locally or nationally. Certainly, by 1968 and 1969, SDS itself was undeniably numerically larger than ever, and with 60,000-100,000 members of local chapters, by far the largest organisation on the Left…

A movement which had begun with a few thousands on a few major campuses (the large and prestigious, usually state, universities) had, after the Columbia rebellion, spread to literally every campus in America down to the smallest junior college; and even in black colleges in the South, where a new wave of militancy was apparent in1968, comparable movements existed. (Young, p.188).

5. We need students and youth

I will now advance a thesis that most nationalists will find controversial: in order for a nationalist revolution to succeed, we must target the students. It is an axiom of modern political life that no revolution has ever succeeded without the support of the students – whether it be in Weimar Germany or Batista’s Cuba. It is almost certain that, once the universities go, the rest of a country’s institutions go. Which is why reactionaries, like the Pinochet Junta in Chile, made it a point to target the universities first: in order to get rid of communism, and nip any revolution in the bud, they had to invade the universities and purge them of left-wing students, who, in Allende’s Chile, were quite numerous.

In contemporary times, the communist groups in Australia manage to recruit among the students with great success. At the least, the memberships of the two main groups – Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative – respectively run into the hundreds. After the communist student members graduate, they go on take jobs in the public service (of course) and plough money back into their parties. The same phenomenon occurred in the New Left: the post-graduates employed in the capitalist system would even form groups with names like ‘Radicals in the Professions’.

Nationalists, I know, will object to targeting students because a good many nationalists, or potential supporters of nationalism in the community, are not middle-class and not university-educated. For one, they may be afraid of the better education of students, or at least, afraid of the unknown quantity that these people represent.

To this I respond that we do not want to reject people who do not fit in the student or ex-student category: merely that we want to pitch our propaganda, our approach, to the levels of the student. Hollywood marketers today aim their blockbuster films at audiences with a mental age of 13 (which is one of the reasons why so many Hollywood films are awful). People who are older than 13, or are smarter than a 13 year old, will still go and see a piece of rubbish like Shrek 4 or whatever; but the target audience is someone with the intelligence of the 13 year old. Likewise, we nationalists should be trying to appeal with someone with the tastes and intelligence of the modern college student. Certainly, we do not want to attract people only from the student class: we want to (unlike the New Left) attract the parents of these students – the white middle-classes (see a previous essay at New Right Australia, The radicalisation of the middle classes). But we need a base which is already, to an extent, radicalised; has a lot of time on its hands for activism (and most people in the professions are simply too busy); and is aware of, and concerned with, the problems of the world. Students and youth fit the bill perfectly.

We should not underestimate the radical potential of the student body. It surprised and upset quite a few Marxist theorists when (especially during the uprising in France in May 1968) it was shown that it was the middle-class student who was the radical socialist, and not the proletarian. But the (non-Marxist), New Left anarchist Murray Bookchin understood. Speaking of the ‘non-revolutionary’ characteristics of the working class, he wrote:

The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his “workerness”… His “workerness” is the disease he is suffering from, the social affliction telescoped to individual dimensions… The worker begins to become a revolutionary when he undoes his “workerness”, when he comes to detest his class status here and now, when he begins to disgorge exactly those features which the Marxists most prize in him: his work ethic, his characterology derived from industrial discipline, his respect for hierarchy, his obedience to leaders, his consumerism, his vestiges of puritanism. In this sense, the worker becomes a revolutionary to the degree that he sheds his class status and achieves an un-class consciousness. He degenerates – and he degenerates magnificently. What he is shedding are precisely those class shackles that bind him to all systems of domination. He abandons those class interests that enslave him to consumerism, suburbia and a bookkeeping conception of life… (Bookchin, ‘Listen, Marxist!’ in “All we are saying…” : the philosophy of the New Left, ed. Arthur Lothstein, p.105).

What happens is a process of hippie-fication or bohemianisation:

The most promising development in the factories today is the emergence of young workers who smoke pot, f*ck-off on their jobs, drift into and out of factories, grow long or longish hair, demand more leisure time than more pay, steal, harass all authority figures, go on wildcats, and turn on their fellow workers. Even more promising is the emergence of this human type in trade schools and high schools, the reservoir of the industrial working class to come. To the degree that workers, vocational students, and high school students link their life-styles to various aspects of the anarchic youth culture, to that degree will the proletariat be transformed from a force for the conservation of the established order into a force for revolution. (Bookchin, p.105).

The fact of the matter is that the blue-collar working classes are a conservative bunch, and working-class culture is, at its worse, coarse and brutal. A hundred years ago, working-class people in Britain attended night classes to receive an education in arts, culture, the humanities, or read popularisations of science and philosophy in order to ‘better’ themselves. In other words, they were striving to achieve (what they perceived to be) the refinement and sophistication of the middle-classes, who had the leisure and the income to cultivate themselves. Now, however, in Britain, the working-class ethic reins supreme, in the media, popular culture, but, apparently, in the social life of Britons itself: even people of ‘good’, respectable middle-class backgrounds affect coarse, crude mannerisms and working-class accents in order to fit in and appear ‘working class’. (The reason is that the middle classes, over the past few decades, have been demonised in British popular culture: television, film. Whereas the working-classes are portrayed as having warmth, humanity, and integrity. Needless to say, the average British scriptwriters tend to be members of the politically correct master race in terms of their political sympathies).

So a certain amount of education and cultivation, no matter how small, is essential to make someone less self-centered, more cognisant of the problems of the world – aware of what globalisation is, for example, or what Zionism is, or the fact that there are wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now (and the reasons why there are these wars). This is necessary for an individual to reach his or her revolutionary potential. And this is the point that Bookchin is trying to make. (The same process of education occurs in nationalism. The average nationalist, in my view, often possesses more knowledge of political theory and history, and the history of the European peoples, than the average person – certainly more than the average blue-collar). Even the proletarian who goes on to become an active socialist in a social democratic party must, to a certain extent, educate himself, refine himself and overcome his ‘workerness’.

In the student class, fortunately, we have ready-made radicals: people who are more than ready to ‘smash the system’.

I am not suggesting that nationalists campaign on campus on student issues – e.g., more funding for better student services and the like (although if activists want to do that, they should go ahead). What I am suggesting is that we nationalists do not put, in our propaganda, anything which will make the average student run a mile. It should be a general rule of thumb that, if a piece of propaganda scares students, white, middle-class, and left-leaning youth, and fails to appeal to them, then it won’t appeal to anyone.

As a concrete example, take Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance website, with its online racist computer games (where one has to shoot as many illegal Mexican immigrants before they cross the border, and so on). I am not being puritanical and politically-correct about such games – I personally find them amusing, as do quite a few other nationalists. But the average non-nationalist student, for instance, finds them shocking and horrifying, and will have his worst impressions of nationalism confirmed by them. For that reason, most of what is on Metzger’s site should be rejected, and certainly we can find things more important and relevant to the nationalist cause than silly online racist computer games, or racist cartoons.

5. Symbols and slogans

The other thing we have to do is become more and more left-wing in our appearance. To achieve this, we merely have to change the form, not the content. The German nationalist groups, especially the Freie Nationalisten, in my opinion show us the way. They use Che, Hugo Chavez, Castro; quote left-wing notables like Friedrich Engels and Ernst Thälmann (the former German communist party leader); wear the standard anarchist ‘uniform’ (sunglasses, black baseball cap, black hoodie, and even black scarves wrapped around their faces) at demonstrations; and they demonstrate against globalisation (at G-20 meetings, for instance) or against Zionism (some even wear Arab headscarves to show their solidarity with the Palestinians). In their posters, slogans, badges, banners, and their look, they replicate the feel of the Left, particularly the anti-globalisation ‘black bloc’ Left.

The approach has a number of advantages. Firstly, their look (and politics is as much about the visual as it is about theory) fits in with the ‘student’ Left’, the bohemian ‘youth’, and so has that edge of hipness about it. Secondly, the posters, fliers, badges, etc., are radical and socialist enough, but innocuous enough to be displayed anywhere – at a campus, on a street corner, even in an office (I know this from experience): when people see them, their first reaction, after digesting the message, is to consider it to be standard left-wing propaganda – not “Nazi” or “racist” at all. Third, the Antifa at demonstrations against nationalism wear the anarchist ‘uniform’ as well – dressing like them acts as camouflage confuses not only them but the police. Fourth, using “left”-type visual propaganda annoys the (conventional Marxist and anarchist) Left intensely, which is its own reward. (One anti-nationalist writer on the Internet even accuses the Freie Nationalisten of trying to appropriate the power of the Left as if all the badges, slogans, clothing, etc., of the Left were the sources of shamanic, mystical power. The Freie Nationalisten often use a two-flag symbol which has the reverse colours of the German Antifa; the militant Anti-Antifa uses for its symbol a parody of the Antifa ‘Good night white pride’ symbol and logo – ‘Good night Left side’). The fifth advantage is that it breaks down conventional Left-Right thinking among non-nationalists, who previously thought that boycotting McDonald’s and Starbucks was a ‘Left’ concern.

The most important thing is image. One only has to compare an anti-Semitic cartoon image produced by the likes of Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (which has specialised in cartoons of that kind for a while) with a “left”-looking anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian poster. The nationalist who is anti-Zionist could either come up with a poster depicting a Jew as a rat, or pointing how many Jews are involved in the American pornography industry, or how many media assets are owned by Jews, etc.; or he could use a photo of a Palestinian boy throwing stones at an Israeli tank, and place, across the top, a slogan like ‘Defy Israel!’. The latter is not “Nazi”, not “racially offensive” and can be plastered on walls of buildings in the city centre, or on campus, without attracting media attention.

And what of all the symbols associated with nationalism: Celtic crosses, ’1488′ symbols, swastikas, variants on the NSDAP flag, SS symbols, Thor hammers, and Nordic-looking runes? These stick out like a sore thumb, and brand one as “Nazi” or “white supremacist” straight away. Far better to subvert an existing left-wing symbol: for instance, a common Frei Nationalist badge has the Antifa ‘two flags’ symbol with the slogan ‘Nationale Sozialisten – Bundesweite Aktion’ logo or the slogan ‘Frei, Sozial and National’ against a plain black “anarchist” backdrop. A black t-shirt will have, in German, the slogan ‘No war for Israel! Against Zionism!’ with the ‘two flags’ symbol. A banner will read, ‘Against globalisation and capitalism’ – a slogan not out of keeping with German National Socialism or Italian Fascism, but one which is contemporary Left as well.

Anarchist symbols often show men in masks and beanies, or men (or boys) using slingshots, or men about to throw molotov cocktails. The symbols have a message; they signify a number of things – defiance; radicalism; a war, waged by the little people, using the weapons of the weak. They are anti-authoritarian, and have the benefit of evoking the underdog, which is a big psychological advantage in propaganda. They are also radical and edgy enough to attract the youth, students and those who want to look different from the crowd (and who, paradoxically, want to fit in with their student or bohemian peer group). As well as that, anarchist visual propaganda uses images of masked people – which symbolises that anarchism is anonymous, that anyone can be an anarchist.

In contrast, the Metzger cartoons, for instance, represent ugliness and hate (which, again, is not to say that they cannot be amusing). And the white pride/Neo-Nazi symbols have disadvantages which are obvious.

Having said that: it is a matter of externals. If a nationalist wants to wear white pride, etc., tattoos on his body, or festoon swastikas and other symbols around his home, he should feel free to do so. But, at rallies, and in designing propaganda posters, websites and the like, it is more advantageous to adopt the Left look (especially the clothing, which preserves one identity – sunglasses, hoods and caps do obscure one’s features remarkably in photos).

Ironically, much of modern nationalism uses imagery and symbols which are at least seventy to eighty years out of date. The original fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s stood on the cutting edge when they first appeared – politically, intellectually, culturally. They were avant-garde (which was one of the reasons why they appealed to so many of Europe’s intellectuals, and artists). But today’s nationalist movements look back to the past – using old National Socialist symbols, posters, flags, and even uniforms (if one is a Nutzi). (Italian and British Fascist imagery is recycled too, to a certain extent). Australian nationalists use Eureka Stockade flags, and make a cult of old Australian national icons, like Ned Kelly and Henry Lawson – who were antiquated even before the onset of the fascist and Bolshevist era. Nationalists, it seems, cannot help living in the past.

Readers of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ will recall Hitler’s impressions of the first time he experienced Marxist visual propaganda in a German city – great red banners, parades, rallies, and the like – and the feelings of awe it gave him. He quickly realised that he had to appropriate the visual style of the Left, because that was a big part of the Left’s appeal. For the same reasons, Mussolini’s Fascists copied the Left’s style. Supposing that these two men were alive today, and sought to imitate the Left – how would they go about it? Certainly, leftism has changed since the 1920s. The face of today’s leftism is not the hammer and sickle, and the proletarian working-man in overalls and a cap, but the black outfits of the anarchist radicals at the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle (the ‘Battle of Seattle’) or the demonstrations against the G-20 summit Rostock, Germany in 2007. The icons of left-wing iconography are not Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin, but Hugo Chavez, Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican Chiapas movement, and Che, whose appeal continues to endure. The Left has moved on; it has even moved on from the days of the New Left in the sixties (whose icons were Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Che and the Black Panthers).

But it is not merely a matter of a nationalist “Far Right” appropriating the outer trappings of leftism. One of the slogans of the student uprising in May, 1968 was, ‘The consumer society must perish a violent death. The society of alienation must disappear from history. We are inventing a new and original world’. That is what we nationalists are trying to achieve: an overcoming of the alienation the members of the white race, the peoples of the West, feel towards one another, brought about by the neo-liberalist ideology, which substitutes the satisfactions of consumerism for racial and national belonging.

Having said that, there are quite a few genuinely right-wing people in the nationalist movement. The American nationalist movement has plenty of small-government; classical liberal types who would ordinarily vote Republican; likewise, many of the Far Right populist parties in Europe are that – Far Right, ultraconservative and reactionary.

This, in my view, has to be discarded. We nationalists have to change – by becoming more youthful and forward-looking. The British National Party campaigns heavily in parts of Britain which are disadvantaged; they pitch their appeal at white Britons who feel, not unjustly, that non-white immigrants get better government services than they do, simply because of the reverse racism of a succession of PC governments which values immigrants more than indigenous Britons. One of the BNP’s slogans is, ‘We’re the Labour Party your granddad used to vote for’. I sympathise with that sentiment; had I been a Briton in 1960, or even in 1970, I would have voted Labour. But I would much prefer it if the BNP changed their slogan to, ‘We’re the radicals who rioted at Seattle in 1999′.

6. Objections

If I have persuaded 50 or more nationalists to follow the Freie Nationalist lead, and put together a demonstration at an anti-globalisation (or anti-Iraq war, or anti-Israel) march, and dress as “anarchists”, and carry “left-seeming” banners, and cover up any Nordic rune tattoos – then I have accomplished my purpose here.

But there are potential pitfalls, which I will now point out. Part of the downfall of the New Left was its embrace of violence. It preached the doctrine of ‘direct action’, which at first translated into civil disobedience, peaceful protest and draft-dodging and then became a rationale for rioting, the ‘occupation’ of university classrooms, ‘trashing’ of rooms and the like, before winding up in guerrilla violence – bombings, kidnappings, hijackings, assassinations. Likewise, the anti-globalisation movement has a reputation for mindless violence. The violence at the 1999 WTO conference, and the publicity given to it, was unprecedented. In my experience, many people who observed it on the television felt, at the time, that the anti-globalisation demonstrators did have a genuine grievance (which justified to a certain extent the violence and destruction of property). But, by the time of the 2006 G-20 summit in Melbourne last year – which included assaults on police and police vehicles by protestors – the general public, in my view, had become somewhat impatient with the violent anti-globalisation crowd, characterising it as nihilistic violence and destruction of property for its own sake. The average violent anti-globalisation protestor is perceived to be a ‘demo tourist’, a ‘groupie’ who follows these events around the world for the purpose of disrupting them: it is seen to be a lifestyle as well as a political choice.

The trouble is that the mainstream media, politicians, academics, as well as the Antifa, attempt to associate nationalism with extreme violence, especially against immigrants. (To read the German newspapers, one could be forgiven for thinking that nationalists are responsible for all the crime in Germany). We have a long way to go to reversing that image problem. So any of our demonstrations must be peaceful – despite any provocations by any Antifa or police.

Inevitably, some nationalists will object that students, youth, etc., are too narrow a sub-section of the population, that they are a minority; and that the views of the radical Left (especially the anti-globalisation Left) are likewise the views of a minority – the communists, anarchists and the like do not have large numbers on their side.

To respond to the last objection first. As noted before, the communist groups in Australia are not nearly as big as the mainstream political parties. But, compared to the nationalist groups, they are enormous. We nationalists have trouble filling a room with 10 people – and yet we make declarations about taking the country over, expelling all the migrants, etc. The outdated Trotskyists, who go the party-political route and bomb out at every election, and who conduct boring weekly lectures on Marx’s Kapital, have more numbers and a more solid following than we do. They succeed in gaining this following because they target students, and their propaganda (their posters, badges, their newspaper (the Green Left Weekly)) is better than anything we can do at the present time – it is hip, trendy, progressive, in touch with today’s political culture.

Secondly, in a liberal democracy, it is minorities, not majorities, that acquire a real following and accumulate the real power. Here I will quote John T. Flynn, an American conservative and author of ‘As we go marching’ (1944), on the appeal of Mussolini:

I must be careful not to infer that Mussolini did what a majority of the Italian people wanted. He had made one important discovery — a principle that most successful politicians in a parliamentary state understand and that is perceived by few of their intellectual critics. It is that parliamentary societies are not governed by majorities but by combinations of minorities. “Majorities are inert,” Mussolini said to his faithful Boswella, Signora Sarfatti, “but minorities are dynamic.” He had perceived that society is composed of groups profoundly concerned about their several group interests. They are all minorities. Each minority is far more interested in its special minority objective than in those vague, general subjects that concern the state as a whole. It comes about, therefore, that two seemingly hostile minorities can be induced to unite upon a third proposal of a general nature provided they are each rewarded with a promise of fulfilment of their own special desires.

I can point out plenty of examples from modern politics where this rule applies. For instance, there is the National Party, Australia’s agrarian socialist party, which represents a minority economic class which is fast becoming irrelevant, and which, at the same time, has state and federal representation in every state and territory. And then there is the New Left itself – which, in America, recruited enormous numbers among a student class which was, at the time, only 15% of the American population.

I will end by saying that, by veering leftward, at least in terms of our appearance at demonstrations, and in our propaganda, we are staying true to the roots of nationalism. I think it is no exaggeration to say that, were Hitler, Mosley, Mussolini and Degrelle alive today, they would be Freie Nationalisten, or something very much like them.