Would it have been authoritarian to draw attn. to and slam, the "Green Anarchy" primitivists for printing Nick Griffin of the racist BNP in issue #19 of their rag, from which this screed was drawn, Chuck? http://thunderbay.indymedia.org/news/2005/03/19220_comment.php he Trojan Horse of National Anarchism by Nick Griffin for Green Anarchy Saturday March 26, 2005 at 12:47 PM
Originally printed as: National Anarchism: Trojan Horse for White Nationalism. There are real fascists in our midst...
Recently, a man who hung out in Eugene around green anarchists started promoting the idea of National Anarchism. A few years ago, he had written a well-known essay from a green anarchist perspective and he was a familiar face to many. His new belief system advocated that people of a different ethnic backgrounds should live in different villages, and he later wrote a letter t Green Anarchy in an attempt to propagate his view about supposedly "natural" hierarchies. [GA note: We were going ot print this letter but it's almost as long as the article, and we did not want to provide a forum for his ideas on "natural hierarchies" and "National Anarchism". If people are interested in the letter and who wrote it, you can contact us.]
Fortunately, his attempt to spread this racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic (so-called) "anarchism" were quickly unveiled. But what is National Anarchism? How did it arise, and what does it stand for, and why are these racist Right-wingers attempting to recruit anarchists?
Radical politics of all kinds took a new turn after the collapse of the Soviet Union and this accelerated after the demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle in 1999. Decentralized and networked political forms started becoming the predominant types of resistance. In the last few years, we have seen anarchism replace marxism as the dominant radical movement in the U.S., but changes have also occurred elsewhere. Parts of the white power movement started advocating "leaderless resistance" as early as the 1980s; the Islamic jihadists Al Qaeda are a state-less, transnational entity; and even marxist groups like Left Turn have rejected the tight "vanguard party" model in favour of a more networked-based structure.
But anarchism itself has also become a magnet for the racist radical right, and a tiny fringe group in the UK called the National Revolutionary Faction has re-christiened itself as National Anarchists. They are attempting to use anarchist symbolism and rhetoric to recruit both "White Nationalists" (WN, a catch-all term for the various kinds of white racists) as well as anarchists - especially green anarchists- to their strange belief system.
They advocate a decentralized economic and political system which features ethnically-pure villages which are defined by racial separatism, anti-semitism, and homophobia.
Most National Anarchists (NA) tend to be long-time participants in the Nazi or other racist movements (ie Klan, Christian Identity) who are looking for a new "hook" to use to break-out of the ghettoized White Nationalist scene. Many are former skinheads who retain their interests in the racist Oi!, metal and other bands, European football, and sci-fi. They also tend to be interested in occult or pagan religions, although the proprietor of the sole NA-affiliated website in the U.S. is a Christian. Sometimes they are interested in the ecology movement or animal rights, although this seems mostly to be lip service to attract anarchists to their ideas. Their real interests are clearly racism against non-white people and a hatred of Jews.
Unfortunately, their bait has seemed to hook a few from the anarchist scene, mostly mystical anarchists, individualists, and green anarchists- including the aforementioned Eugene hanger-on. There has always been a small Left-Right crossover point, especially where the politics involve a mixture of anti-capitalism, mysticism, environmentalism, and questions of technology. (Although skewed in its conclusions, Ecofascism:Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmairer offers a detailed historical account of this, and many of the racists have read this and taken it as a guide.)
In Germany, there is also a similar phenomena afoot. There is a wave of fascist groups that are attempting to cross-recruit by sporting Che t-shirts and Palestinian scarves, even marching in Black Blocs! Sometimes calling themselves Autonomous Nationalists, they - just like the National Anarchists - are attempting to pull people from anarchist and leftist movements into the white racist milieu.
NA guru Troy Southgate claims that NA is a "Third Way" between Capitalism and Communism and has nothing to do with "fascism". But he can only do this by falsifying history; for it is fascism that has always been called the Third ay. Southgate attempts to mobilize various philosophies in defense of his project, but he can only do it by distorting their messages. For example, in an essay on National Anarchist history, Southgate cites Gautama (the first Buddha) in support of his own work - but the Buddha was an opponent of the racist caste system. Southgate invokes Hakim Bey, a queer man who would be horrified at this usage of his ideas. Southgate also misattributes Ficthe's trinitarian concept to Hegel, whose dialectic is not triadic at all, but rather involves a more complicated process of double negotiations (the negation of the object and then the negation of the negation). Southgate's attempts at constructing a NA lineage are bullshit to anyone who has read their references.
But besides the details, Southgate's general claims are historical revisions and obfuscations which only serve to cover up NA's function as an attempt to recruit people to the same sour old racist right under a new label. He distances NA from "fascism" and the Autonomous Nationalists have even been known to call themselves "anti-fascists" by attempting to redefine Socialists like the PDS (a German left-wing party) as "fascists". Nonetheless, Southgate quite openly proclaims NA's intellectual forefathers to be the "left wing" of the original Nazi party. Under the leadership of Otto Strasser, these "left-wing fascists" advocated a racist, anti-Semitic, ecological, anti-capitalism before being thrown out of the part by Hitler in 1930, several years before his rise to power. A long discussion on the Stormfront site (a kind of bizzaro-world Infoshop.org for racists) will confirm that racist "White Nationalists" themselves look to NA to recur anarchists and others to their cause, much the same way that Marxist Leninists utilize the strategy of front groups. her is an exerpt form that page in a post by Pan Zagloba:
How can National Anarchism recruit people to our cause?
It speaks to these kids [anarchists] in a language they understand, which draws them closer to our side, and makes them more open to our ideas.
It plays upon their distrust of Marxism, Zionism, and ZOG [the "Zionist-Occupied Government].
It demonstrates to them something that they probably don't realize now - that many WN values are often the same as theirs. these include concern for the environment, distrust f globalization and the NWO, and a desire to preserve the rights of indigenous peoples (in our case, Europeans).
Websites and other media that support National Anarchism expose them to quotes from prominent Anarchist thinkers which actually support WN, such as Bakunin's and Bookchin's writings on nationalism.
It can show them that the mainstream Left's version of "diversity" doesn't leave room for Whites. This can be very instrumental, as a large portion of the Anarchist movement is made up of disaffected White youth.
Once they become more interested in National anarchism, they are more open to the influence of other nationalist and WN ideas, up to and including National Socialism.
How can we be sure this is the case?
Well, this is purely anecdotal, but: It worked on me and I have the feeling that I'm not the only one here on Stormfront who may have ben attracted to WN due t exposure to National Anarchist ideas. -----
NA itself has a complicated history. It's origins are in a '70s UK racists right-wing party called the National Front, who are probably best known to U.S. anarchists as the object of hatred in many '77 punk songs. The group adopted a "Third Positionist" stance in the '80s, attempting to meld elements of communist and fascist political systems. They embracedracial separatism (as opposed to White Supremacy, which often advocates racial genocide) and started to work with black and Asian racial nationalist groups to promote their common ends f ethnic separatism. In the early '90s, these politics werr later copied by Florida Klan leader ( and former SDS member) John Baumgardner, which led ot the specacle of joint Klan and Black nationalist demonstrations, held in conjunction with Chief Osiris Akkebala's Pan-African Internationalist movement (PAIN).
Origionally a two-tone Ska skin, Southgate 'crossed-over' into the white power Oi! scene and became a teenage National Front organizer. he laer navigated several splits in the party-turned-movement, first entering the international Third Position (who tried to recruit the far-right Roman Calthoics of the Society of St. Pious X), and then the English Nationalist Movemnet (ENM). in 1998 the National Revolutionary faction came out of the ENM, and then in turn morphed into the nationa Anarchist movement in 2003. NA is friedly with groups such as the National Bolsheviks in Russia, who mix their Stalinism with German fascism, and NA cites influences as diverse as occult philosopher Julius Evola, Libyan leader Colonel Qathafi, and former UK Green Anarchist editory Richard Hunt. Hunt quit the magazine to form the eco-fascist Alternative Green group, which Southgate says NRF was "heavily influenced by" and which helped prompt their transition to so-called "anarchism".
NAs also frequently cit anarchist founders Proudhon and Bakunin as influcences, suposedly for their advocacy of an economically decentralized society. Actually, they are more interested in their anti-semitism, an unfortunated attribute that both thinkers shared but which all anarchist since have repudiated. If this wasn't the case, why are NAs reluctant to mention other decentralists such as Alexander Berkman or Emma goldman? The answer is because of their clear opposition to nationalism, and their progressive politics and Jewish backgrounds. Jews were always a vital part of the European anarchist movement, and no amount of NA historical revisionism can change this.
Southgate sometimes makes feeble attempts to avoid answering if NA is anti-semetic, lest its true nature as a White Nationalist front group be reveald and potential recruits be put off. However, in a Stormfront discussion, the man who posts as "Faith & Folk" calls for a fellow-travelling National Bolsheviks to be "more folk centered and dare I say anti-Zionist and Judaic."
In a 2001 inverview (http://www.rosenire.org/interviews/southgate.php), after a rant about "International Zionism" and the banking industry, Southgate is aked point-blank if he is an anti-semite. He responds by reciting a bizarre story about Israeli Jews actually being not Jewish but being members of another ethnic group, while at no point repudiating anti-Semitism. In the asame interview, he says that he is noat a fascist "because the main tenets of this creed - bureaucracy, centralisation, the police state, the cult of personality, the mass movement etc. -are contrary to our objectives". Naturally, the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews represents no problem to Southgate. Only organizational issues separate him from the Hitler cultists.
In the end, since there is so little that is anarchist in National Anarchism, they will probably have limited success in recruiing anarchists. Anarchists seek the abolition of all hierarchies on the basis o four commmon humanity - not a separatism based on ethnic, religious, or sexual identity. In any event, most NAs seem obsessed with watching and deprecating the more orthodox racist factions, as if they were somehow not just as much a part of the white power circus. But if people appear in your scene sporting the National Anarchist symbol (a prple star with NA in the middle), or attempt to promote the setting up of separate ethnic villages, know that these people are not talking about a new kind of anarchism, but just a very old and obscure style of fascism. if you encounter these people, don't be fooled by the surface similiarities; treat them as if they were Klan members or Nazis. The only difference is this time, instead of pointy hats and baraces, ther racist dieas come dressed in a hoodie and patches.
Websites of interst:
National Anarchist sties in English http://www.national-anarchist.org (main NA site of Try Southgate) http://www.folkand faith.com http://www.rosenire.org
'Stormfront' discussion s about National Anarchism: http://www.stormfront.org/archive/t-103484 http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1297693&posted=1
Ecofascism - Lessons from the German Experience http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/ecofasc.html
Autonomous Nationalists: see the article "Nazis Go Pop" at http://www.raggacore.com/
Photos of racist "black bloc" htttp://http://www.germany.indymedia.org/2004/11/97143.shtml -- Michael Pugliese