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Title: Rebranding Fascism Author: Spencer Sunshine Date: January 28, 2008 Language: en Topics: fascism, nationalism, third position, not anarchist Source: Retrieved on 9th June 2022 from https://politicalresearch.org/2008/01/28/rebranding-fascism-national-anarchists Notes: Published in The Public Eye, Winter 2008.
On September 8, 2007 in Sydney, Australia, the antiglobalization
movement mobilized once again against neoliberal economic policies, this
time to oppose the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit. Just
as during the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle,
Washington, in 1999, the streets were filled with an array of groups,
such as environmentalists, socialists, and human rights advocates. And
also just like in Seattle, there was a “Black Bloc”—a group of militant
activists, usually left-wing anarchists, who wore masks and dressed all
in black.
In Sydney, the Black Bloc assembled and hoisted banners proclaiming
“Globalization is Genocide.” But when fellow demonstrators looked
closely, they realized these Black Bloc marchers were
“National-Anarchists”—local fascists dressed as anarchists who were
infiltrating the demonstration. The police had to protect the
interlopers from being expelled by irate activists.
Since then, the National-Anarchists have joined other marches in
Australia and in the United States; in April 2008, they protested on
behalf of Tibet against the Chinese government during the Olympic torch
relay in both Canberra, Australia, and San Francisco. In September, U.S.
National-Anarchists protested the Folsom Street Fair, an annual gay
“leather” event held in San Francisco.
While these may seem like isolated incidents of quirky subterfuge, these
quasi-anarchists are an international export of a new version of fascism
that represent a significant shift in the trends and ideology of the
movement. National-Anarchists have adherents in Australia, Great
Britain, the United States, and throughout continental Europe, and in
turn are part of a larger trend of fascists who appropriate elements of
the radical Left. Like “Autonomous Nationalists” in Germany and the
genteel intellectual fascism of the European New Right, the
National-Anarchists appropriate leftist ideas and symbols, and use them
to obscure their core fascist values. The National-Anarchists, for
example, denounce the centralized state, capitalism, and globalization —
but in its place they seek to establish a system of ethnically pure
villages.
In 1990, Chip Berlet showed in Right Woos Left how the extreme Right in
the United States has made numerous overtures to the Left. “The fascist
Right has wooed the progressive Left primarily around opposition to such
issues as the use of U.S. troops in foreign military interventions,
support for Israel, the problems of CIA misconduct and covert action,
domestic government repression, privacy rights, and civil liberties.”[1]
More recently, the fascist Right has also tried to build alliances based
on concern for the environment, hardline antizionism, and opposition to
globalization.
Fascism has become increasingly international in the post World War II
period, particularly with the rise of the internet. One of the most
obvious results of this internationalization is the continual flow of
European ideas to the United States; for example, the Nazi skinhead
movement originated in Britain and quickly spread to the United States.
In trade, Americans have exported the Ku Klux Klan to Europe and
smuggled Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi literature into Germany.[2]
The National-Anarchist idea has spread around the world over the
internet. The United States hosts only a few web sites, but the trend so
far has been towards a steady increase. But it represents what many see
as the potential new face of fascism. By adopting selected symbols,
slogans and stances of the left-wing anarchist movement in particular,
this new form of postwar fascism (like the European New Right) hopes to
avoid the stigma of the older tradition, while injecting its core
fascist values into the newer movement of antiglobalization activists
and related decentralized political groups. Simultaneously,
National-Anarchists hope to draw members (such as reactionary
counter-culturalists and British National Party members) away from
traditional White Nationalist groups to their own blend of what they
claim is “neither left nor right.”[3]
Despite this claim, National-Anarchist ideology is centered directly on
what scholar Roger Griffin defines as the core of fascism: “palingenetic
populist ultranationalism.” “Palingenetic,” he says, is a “generic term
for the vision of a radically new beginning which follows a period of
destruction or perceived dissolution.” Palingenetic ultranationalism
therefore is “one whose mobilizing vision is that of the national
community rising phoenix like after a period of encroaching decadence
which all but destroyed it.”[4]
For the National-Anarchists, this “ultranationalism” is also their main
ideological innovation: a desire to create a stateless (and hence
“anarchist”) system of ethnically pure villages. Troy Southgate, their
leading ideologue, says “we just want to stress that National-Anarchism
is an essential racialist phenomenon. That’s what makes it
different.”[5]
Why should we pay attention to such new forms of fascism? There is no
immediate threat of fascism taking power in the established western
liberal democracies; the rise to power of Mussolini and Hitler in the
1920s and 1930s occurred in a different era and under different social
conditions than those that exist today. Nonetheless, much is at stake.
These new permutations have the potential of playing havoc on social
movements, drawing activists out from the Left into the Right. For
example, when the Soviet Union collapsed, a number of non-Communist
left-wing groups suddenly emerged in Russia offering the promise of a
more egalitarian society sans dictatorship. However, the group that
became dominant was the National Bolsheviks, who are probably the most
successful contemporary Third Position fascist group (see glossary).
Catching the imagination of disaffected youth by taking up many
left-wing stances and engaging in direct action, they successfully
obliterated their rivals by absorbing their demographic base en masse.
The left-wing groups disappeared and the National Bolsheviks remain a
powerful political movement today with a huge grassroots and youth base.
As they grow older, they will remain influential in Russian politics for
decades.
Even when small, Jeffrey Bale suggests it is important to pay attention
to these fascist sects because they can serve as transmission belts for
unconventional political ideas, influence more mainstream groups, and
link up into transnational networks.[6]
Over the years, the antiglobalization movement has also created an
opening for these Left-Right alliances. The Dutch antiracist group De
Fabel van de illegaal pulled out of the antiglobalization movement in
1998 because of its links with far right forces. Pat Buchanan, the
paleoconservative politician who holds racist and antisemitic views,
spoke on a Teamsters Union platform during the demonstrations against
the IMF/ World Bank in Washington D.C. in April 2000.[7] Meanwhile,
racists like Louis Beam (who has worked with the Knights of the Ku Klux
Klan and Aryan Nations) and Matt Hale (of the World Church of the
Creator) praised the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade
Organization in 1999.[8]
At the same time, parts of the anti-imperialist Left (including some
anarchists) have built alliances with reactionary Islamist movements
such as Hamas and Hezbollah, called for open acceptance of antisemitism,
and embraced nationalist struggles.[9] This history prompts many
cosmopolitan anarchists to worry that the overtures of newstyle fascists
to radical Leftists could meet with some success.
The National-Anarchists have their origin in the National Front, a far
right British party with an impressive 1977 dark horse electoral success
based on their xenophobic anti-immigrant platform. After the election,
the group fractured into many internal factions before splintering into
different sects. Troy Southgate, the main English-language
National-Anarchist ideologue, is a veteran of this internecine maze. He
joined the National Front in 1984, and subsequently joined a splinter
group that eventually split again before becoming the National
Revolutionary Faction (NRF), a small cadre organization openly calling
for armed guerilla warfare.[10]
In the late 1990s however, the NRF started to morph into the
National-Anarchist movement; the two were referred to interchangeably
for a number of years, until the NRF disbanded in 2003.[11] Southgate’s
ideology does not seem to have changed substantially with the shift, and
he continues to circulate his NRF-era essays.
The NRF’s only known public action as “National-Anarchists” was to hold
an Anarchist Heretics Fair in October 2000, in which a number of
fringe-of the-fringe groups participated. However, when they attempted a
second fair, a variety of anarchists and anti-fascists blocked it from
being held. After the same thing happened in 2001, Southgate and the NRF
abandoned this strategy and retreated to purely internet-based
propaganda.[12]
The fair reflected Southgate’s adaptation of the Trotskyist practice of
entrism — the strategy of entering other political groups in order to
either take them over or break off with a part of their membership.[13]
Southgate argues, “The NRF uses cadre activists to infiltrate political
groups, institutions and services… It is part of our strategy to do this
work and, if we are to have any success in the future, it is work that
must be done on an increasing basis.”[14] He claims that the NRF
infiltrated the 1999 Stop the City demonstration and the 2000 May Day
protest, as well as activities of the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the
Animal Liberation Front.[15]
Beyond its tactical uses, entrism is a philosophy for the
National-Anarchists as they recruit members from the Left and in
particular anarchist groups. Instead of simply calling themselves
“racist communitarians,” they purposely adopt the label “anarchist” and
specifically appropriate anarchist imagery. Examples include the use of
a purple star (anarchists typically use either a black star, or a half
black star, with the other half designating their specific tendency,
i.e., red for unionists, green for environmentalists, etc.), or a red
and black star superimposed with a Celtic cross (the latter being a
typical symbol of White Nationalists). The allied New Right factions in
Australia and the UK also use the “chaos symbol” —an eight pointed star
—which they adapt from left-wing counter-cultural anarchists.
The fascist use of the “black bloc” political formation at
demonstrations is also an appropriation of anarchist and far left forms.
In recent years, German fascists calling themselves Autonomous
Nationalists have marched in large black blocs, waving black flags (a
symbol of traditional anarchism), and even appropriated the symbolism of
the German antifascist groupings.[16]
As far back as 1984, Pierre André Taguieff, an expert on the European
New Right, condemned the “tactic of ideological scrambling
systematically deployed by GRECE,” a rightwing think tank that embraced
some leftist critiques of advanced capitalism while promoting core
fascist ideas.[17] Here we see that ideological scrambling deployed on a
grassroots level.
It needs to be stressed that, despite the name, National-Anarchists have
not emerged from inside the anarchist movement, and, intellectually,
their origins are not based in its ideas. Anarchists typically see
themselves as part of a cosmopolitan and explicitly antinationalist
left-wing movement which seeks to dismantle both capitalism and the
centralized state. They seek instead to replace them with decentralized,
non-hierarchical, and self-regulating communities. Although similar to
Marxists, anarchists are just as adamant in their opposition to racism,
sexism, and homophobia as they are to capitalism. In the United States,
anarchists were key players in the formation of labor unions, were the
only political faction to support gay rights before World War I, were
leaders in the free speech movement, and were active in helping to
legalize birth control. The White Nationalists’ embrace of the anarchist
label and symbolism is more than little ironic, since anarchists have a
long history of physically disrupting White Nationalist events, for
instance by groups like Anti-Racist Action. Anarchist military units
were even formed to fight Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy.
The National-Anarchists claim they are not “fascist.” Still, Troy
Southgate looks to lesser known fascists such as Romanian Iron Guard
leader Corneliu Codreanu, and lesser light Nazis like Otto Strasser and
Walter Darré. Part of Southgate’s sleight of hand is to claim to be
‘against fascism’ by saying he is socialist (as did Nazis such as
Strasser) and by supporting political decentralization (as do
contemporary European fascists such as Alain de Benoist). Sometimes he
proclaims fascism to be equivalent to the capitalism he opposes, or
promoting a centralized state, which he also opposes.
Southgate is undoubtedly sincere in his aversion to the classical
fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, and has cited this as a reason for his
break from one of the National Front splinter groups. He sees the old
fascism as discredited, and an abandonment of the true values of
revolutionary nationalism. But his ultimate goal, shared with the
European New Right, is to create a new form of fascism, with the same
core values of a revitalized community that withstands the decadence of
cosmopolitan liberal capitalism. This cannot be done as long as his
views are linked in the popular mind to the older tradition.
One of the two main influences on National-Anarchists is a minor current
of fascism called Third Position. The origins of Third Position are in
National Bolshevism, which originally referred to Communists who sought
a national (rather than international) revolution. It soon came to refer
to Nazis who sought an alliance with the Soviet Union. The most
important of these was “left-wing Nazi ” Otto Strasser, a former
Socialist who advocated land redistribution and nationalization of
industry. After criticizing Hitler for allying with banking interests,
he was expelled from the party. His brother, Gregor Strasser, held
similar views but remained a Nazi until 1934, when other Nazis killed
him in the Night of the Long Knives.
A number of postwar fascists continued this train of thought, including
Francis Parker Yockey and Jean-François Thiriart.[18] They saw the
United States and liberal capitalism as the primary enemy, sought an
alliance with the Soviet Union, and promoted solidarity with Third World
revolutionary movements, including Communist revolutions in Asia and
Latin American, and Arab anti-Zionists (particularly those with whom
they shared antisemitic views). Thiriart’s followers in Italy formed a
sect of “Nazi-Maoists” based on these principles, and after a gruesome
August 1980 bombing in Bologna which killed 85 people, 40 Italian
fascists fled to England, including Robert Fiore.
Fiore was sheltered by National Front member Michael Walker, editor of
the Scorpion.[19] This paper subsequently spread Third Position and New
Right ideas into Britain’s National Front, and Troy Southgate openly
credits it as a major influence.[20] Third Position ideas also spread
through the National Front via the magazine Rising.[21] After a 1986
split, this new influence resulted in a reconfiguration of the party’s
politics. Prominent members visited Qadafi’s Libya, praised Iran’s
Ayatollah Khomeini and forged links with the Nation of Islam in the
United States.
Southgate claims to have abandoned Third Position fascism.[22] This is a
duplicitous claim. He has rejected a centralized state, and therefore
its ability to nationalize industry or create an “ethnostate.”
Nonetheless, National-Anarchists retain the two main philosophical
threads of Third Position. The first is the notion of a racist
socialism, as a third option between both capitalism and left-wing
socialism like Marxism or traditional anarchism.[23] The second is the
stress on a strategic and conceptual alliance of nationalists
(especially in the Third World) against the United States. Just as the
National Front praised the Nation of Islam and Qadafi, the
National-Anarchists praise Black and Asian racial separatist groups, and
support movements for national self-determination, such as the Tibetan
independence movement. Unlike many White Nationalists (such as the
British National Party), National-Anarchists are pro-Islamist —but only
“if they are prepared to confine their struggle to traditionally Islamic
areas of the world.”[24]
As Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons note, Third Position fascism influenced
U.S. groups such as the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the American Front
and the National Alliance; Christian Identity pastor Bob Miles also held
similar views.[25] Often overlooked by commentators is the American
Front’s affiliation with Southgate’s NRF, which he boasted of for
years.[26] Like the National Front, U.S. fascists Tom Metzger and Lyndon
LaRouche also forged ties with the Nation of Islam.[27] More recently,
the National Alliance has incorporated Third Position politics. They
attempted to cross-recruit left-wing activists by launching a fake
antiglobalization website, and, in August 2002, held a Palestine
Solidarity rally in Washington D.C.[28]
An early attempt to directly transplant National-Anarchist ideology to
the United States was made by political provocateur Bill White. Starting
his political odyssey as a left-wing anarchist, White briefly adopted a
National-Anarchist stance at the height of the antiglobalization
movement. He penned an infamous article for Pravda online in November
2001, which falsely claimed that National-Anarchists were part of
anarchist black blocs.[29] Later White linked up with the National
Alliance before embracing the undiluted Nazism of the National Socialist
Movement.
Currently there are two U.S. websites directly affiliated with the
National-Anarchists.[30] One is the work of a prolific Christian ex-Nazi
skinhead, while the Bay Area site has established a regional “network.”
It is this small group that claims to have taken part in demonstrations
for Tibetan independence and protests against the Folsom Street Fair.
Additionally, as an identity within the White Nationalist scene,
National-Anarchists continue to attract a number of followers in the
United States. For example, one of the early collaborators of the
Oregon-based magazine Green Anarchy affiliated with their
perspective.[31] U.S. National-Anarchists also frequently enter into
discussions on Stormfront, the main internet gathering place for White
Nationalists. There they defend their racial-separatist and antisemitic
credentials to traditional fascists, many of whom look upon Third
Position politics with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Apparently
hearing White Nationalists promoting Islamist, Communist, and anarchist
thinkers is as difficult for some of the Right to digest as it is for
the Left.
Besides Third Position fascism, the other major ideological influence on
the National-Anarchists is the European New Right, especially the
thinker Alain de Benoist. National-Anarchists have adopted his ideas
about race, political decentralization, and the “right to difference.”
Benoist founded the think-tank GRECE, and has spent his life creating an
intellectually respectable edifice for a core of fascist ideas. Like
Southgate, Benoist loudly proclaims that he is not a fascist, but
scholars such as Roger Griffin disagree. Griffin says that the New Right
“could by the end of the 1980s be credited with the not inconsiderable
achievement of having carried out a ‘makeover’ of classic fascist
discourse so successfully that, at least on the surface it was changed
beyond recognition.”[32]
Benoist extended the notion of an alliance of European nations with the
Third World against their main enemies: the United States, liberalism,
and capitalism. But against the fascists who desired a united Europe
under a super-state, Benoist instead calls for radical federalism and
the political decentralization of Europe. Roger Griffin describes this
vision as:
The pluralistic, multicultural society of liberal democracy was to give
way, not to a culturally, coordinated, charismatic, and, in the case of
Nazism, racially pure, national community coterminous with the
nation-state, but to an alliance of homogeneous ethnic-cultural
communities ethnies within the framework of a federalist European
“empire.”[33]
Benoist also incorporates many sophisticated left-wing critiques,
sometimes sounding like a Frankfurt School Marxist. Today he denounces
capitalism, imperialism, liberalism, the consumer society, Christianity,
universalism, and egalitarianism; he defends paganism, “organic
democracy,” and the Third World. He questions the role of unbridled
technology and supports environmentalism and a kind of feminism.[34] He
also rejects biological determinism and embraces a notion of race that
is cultural.[35] Southgate follows practically all of these positions,
which are not necessarily present in Third Position.
Because of these views, the European New Right is very different from
the U.S. New Right, whose Christianity and free market views are
anathema to the Europeans. The Europeans are closer to the
paleoconservative tradition in the United States, and connect with The
Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles.
Benoist’s main intellectual formulation is the “right to difference,”
which upholds the cultural homogeneity and separateness of distinct
ethnic-cultural groups. In this sense, he extends the anti-imperialist
Left’s idea of “national self-determination” to micro-national European
groupings (sometimes called “the Europe of a Hundred Flags”). The “right
to difference” has influenced the anti-immigrant policies of Jean-Marie
Le Pen’s National Front in France, and a number of GRECE members joined
this party, even though Benoist himself rejects Le Pen.[36]
Benoist has also influenced U.S. White separatism. Usually based around
the demand for a separate White nation in parts of Idaho, Montana,
Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, this became a popular idea in White
Nationalist circles starting in the early 1980s.[37] This decentralized
regional perspective was matched by decentralized organizational schemas
which emerged at the same time. Louis Beam advocated “leaderless
resistance,” and the “lone wolf” strategy for far-right terrorism,[38]
while Christian Identity Pastor Bob Miles started referring himself as a
“klanarchist.”
Inverting language, Benoist claims that he is an antiracist. Racism, he
argues, is a function of universalistic ideologies like liberalism and
Marxism, which purportedly wipe out regional and ethnic identities. He
says “Racism is nothing but the denial of difference.”[39] But Taguieff,
a keen observer of the European Right, identifies a “phobia of mixing”
at the core of this form of racism. It is part of the “softer, new, and
euphemistic forms of racism praising difference (heterophilia) and
substituting ‘culture’ for ‘race.’”[40]
The influence of these New Right ideas on the National-Anarchists is
explicit. In Australia, the National-Anarchist group is for all
practical reasons coextensive with “New Right Australia/New Zealand” and
at one point they claimed that “New Right is the theory,
National-Anarchism the practice.”[41] In Britain, Troy Southgate has
been involved in New Right meetings since 2005.[42] But while Benoist
claims that he does not hate immigrants, repudiates antisemitism, and
endorses feminism, the National-Anarchists show what New Right ideas
look like in practice: crude racial separatism, open antisemitism,
homophobia, and antifeminism. The “right to difference” becomes separate
ethnic villages.
The New Right also has had a limited influence on elements of the Left
intelligentsia. In the United States, the influential journal Telos
(known for disseminating Western Marxist texts into English) moved
rightward in the 1990s as its editor showed sympathy for Europe’s New
Right and published Benoist’s works.[43] It continues to publish
Benoist, and explores the thought of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.
Many Leftists now consider the once venerable journal anathema.[44]
Although Benoist advocates decentralized federalist political
structures, the Australian National-Anarchists make clear that he does
not go so far as to advocate anarchism itself.[45] Instead the claim to
“anarchism” apparently stems from Richard Hunt’s notion of “villages.”
Originally an editor at the British magazineGreen Anarchist, which
advocated an intensely anti-industrial environmental ethic, Hunt was
expelled from the editorial collective for his right-wing views before
founding Green Alternative, which is seen as an “ecofascist”
publication.
Hunt adopted an apocalyptic, Mad Max-esque vision of a post-industrial
society. Southgate comments that “to say that we have been hugely
influenced by Richard Hunt’s ideas is an understatement,” and Southgate
took over the editorial helm of Hunt’s magazine when he fell ill.[46]
Hunt’s critique also reverberated with the environmental strain of
classical fascism, such as the views of Hitler’s agriculture minister
Walter Darré. Southgate openly gushes over Darré’s “Blood and Soil”
ideology in one article[47] while white-washing him in another,
referring to him merely as a “nationalist ecologist.”[48] Many other
contemporary fascist groups, especially WAR in the United States, also
embrace environmentalism.
The National-Anarchists are quite open about their antifeminism and
desire to exile queer people into separate spaces, but tend to hide
their deeply antisemitic worldview. Troy Southgate says of feminism,
“Feminism is dangerous and unnatural… because it ignores the
complimentary relationship between the sexes and encourages women to
rebel against their inherent feminine instincts.”[49]
The stance on homophobia is more interesting. Southgate said:
Homosexuality is contrary to the Natural Order because sodomy is quite
undeniably an unnatural act. Groups such as Outrage are not campaigning
for love between males — which has always existed in a brotherly or
fatherly form — but have created a vast cult which has led to a rise in
cottaging, male-rape and child sex attacks… But we are not trying to
stop homosexuals engaging in this kind of activity like the Christian
moralists or bigoted denizens of censorship are doing, on the contrary,
as long as this behaviour does not affect the forthcoming
National-Anarchist communities then we have no interest in what people
get up to elsewhere.[50]
What this means in his schema is that queer people will be given their
own separate “villages.” The recent National-Anarchist demonstrations in
San Francisco were against two majority-queer events, the Folsom Street
Fair and the related fair Up Your Alley. Their orchestrator, “Andy,”
declares that he is a “racist” who hates queer people.
Andy also denies the charge of antisemitism against National-Anarchists,
claiming that they merely engage in a “continuous criticism of Israel
and its supporters,”[51] as do the majority of Leftists and anarchists.
Once again, this is a typical disingenuous attempt by
National-Anarchists to duck criticism. Antisemitism is an important
element of the political world views of Southgate and Herfurth.
Southgate actively promotes the work of Holocaust deniers, including the
Institute for Historical Review, and holds party line antisemitic
beliefs about the role of the international Jewish conspiracy. As a
dodge, he sometimes uses the euphemism “Zionist”; for instance, he says
“Zionists are well known for their cosmopolitan perspective upon life,
not least because those who rally to this nefarious cause have no
organic roots of their own.”[52] In another interview he says that,
“there is no question that the world is being ruthlessly directed (but
perhaps not completely controlled) by International Zionism. This has
been achieved through the rise of the usurious banking system.”[53] And
he describes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forgery which is the
world’s most popular antisemitic text) as a book which “although still
unproven, accords with the main events in modern world history.”[54]
Meanwhile, his Australian counterpart Welf Herfurth is even more
explicit in his neo-Nazi antisemitic views. In one speech, he describes
the Holocaust as an “extrapolation” that “has been an enormously
profitable one for the Jews, and one which has brought post-war Germany
and Europe to its knees,” before referring to Israel as “the most
powerful state in the Western world.” Herfurth concludes that “by
liberating Germany from the bondage to Israel and restructuring a new
Germany on the basis of a new ‘volksgemeinschaft,’ the German
nationalists will liberate Europe, and the West as well.”[55]
Recently new groups of National-Anarchists, recruited through
Southgate’s internet activism, have made the leap from contemplating
their idiosyncratic ideas on the internet into making them the basis of
really-existing politics, by joining demonstrations in Australia and San
Francisco. Web pages and blogs continue to pop up in different countries
and languages.
The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal
political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way
that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a
new footing. They have abandoned many traditional fascist
practices—including the use of overt neo-Nazi references, and recruiting
from the violent skinhead culture. In its place they offer a more toned
down, sophisticated approach. Their cultural references are the neo-folk
and gothic music scene, which puts on an air of sophistication, as
opposed to the crude skinhead subculture. National-Anarchists abandon
any obvious references to Hitler or Mussolini’s fascist regimes, often
claiming not to be “fascist” at all.
Like the European New Right, the National-Anarchists adapt a
sophisticated left-wing critique of problems with contemporary society,
and draw their symbols and cultural orientation from the Left; then they
offer racial separatism as the answer to these problems. They are
attempting to use this new form to avoid the stigma of the old
discredited fascism, and if they are successful like the National
Bolsheviks have been in Russia, they will breathe new life into their
movement. Even if the results are modest, this can disrupt left-wing
social movements and their focus on social justice and egalitarianism;
and instead spread elitist ideas based on racism, homophobia,
antisemitism and antifeminism amongst grassroots activists.
Fascism: Fascism is an especially virulent form of far-right populism.
Fascism glorifies national, racial, or cultural unity and collective
rebirth while seeking to purge imagined enemies, and attacks both
left-wing movements and liberal pluralism. Fascism first crystallized in
Europe in response to the Bolshevik Revolution and the devastation of
World War I, and then spread to other parts of the world. Postwar
fascists have reinterpreted fascist ideology and strategy in various
ways to fit new circumstances.
Third Position: Third Position politics are a minor branch of fascist
thought. It rejects both liberal capitalism and Marxism for a kind of
racially based socialism. Its main precursors are the National
Bolsheviks, who were a fusion of nationalism and communism, and the
Strasser brothers, key figures in the “left-wing” of the Nazi party.
Third Positionists tend to support national liberation movements in the
Third World, seek alliances with other ethnic separatists, and have
recently supported environmentalism
[1] Chip Berlet, Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchian, and Other
Neo-fascist Overtures to Progressives and Why They Must Be Rejected
(Cambridge, MA: Political Research Associates, 1994).
[2] Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo, eds. Nation and Race: The Developing
Euro-American Racist Subculture (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1998).
[3] For recruitment of counter-culturalists, see Nick Griffin,
“National-Anarchism: Trojan Horse for White Nationalism,” Green Anarchy
19, (Spring 2005). On spreading National-Anarchist ideas to BNP members,
see Troy Southgate’s comments.
[4] Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism(New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1991), p. 38.
[5] Email from Tory Southgate to National-Anarchist listserve, message
[6] Jeffrey Bales, “ ‘National revolutionary’ groupuscules and the
resurgence of ‘left-wing’ fascism: the case of France’s Nouvelle
Résistance,” Patterns of Prejudice, v36 #3 (2002), pp. 25–26.
[7] Anti-Fascist Forum, ed., My Enemy’s Enemy (Montreal: Kersplebedeb,
2003), p. 31.
[8] Don Hammerquist, J. Sakai, et al., Confronting Fascism (Montreal:
Kersplebedeb, et al, 2002), pp. 35–38.
[9] On the alliance between certain sectors of the antiglobalization
movement and Islamist factions, see Andrew Higgins, “Anti-Americans on
the March,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2006, p. A1. For an example
of contemporary left-wing calls to openly tolerate antisemitism, see
Rami El-Amine, “Islam and the Left,” Upping the Anti #5, October 2007.
[10] Troy Southgate, “Transcending the Beyond: From Third Position to
National-Anarchism,” Pravda, January 17, 2002.
[11] Graham Macklin, “Co-opting the Counterculture: Troy Southgate and
the National Revolutionary Faction,”Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 3
(2005), p. 325.
[12] Macklin, p. 325.
[13] Troy Southgate, “The Case for National-Anarchist Entryism.”
[14] “Neo-Nazis Join Animal Rights Groups,” Sunday Telegraph, June 19,
2001.
[15] Macklin, p. 318.
[16] See URL.
[17] Cited in Roger-Pol Droit, “The Confusion of Ideas,” Telos 98–99,
(Winter 1993-Spring 1994), p. 138. GRECE stands for the “Groupement de
recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne” – the “Research
and Study Group for European Civilization.”
[18] Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens(Boston: Little, Brown & Co,
1997), pp. 168–83; Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day (Brooklyn:
Autonomedia, 1999), pp. 191–92. For Yockey’s influence on Southgate, see
Macklin, p. 320.
[19] Lee, p. 450 n40. See also Southgate, “Transcending the Beyond.”
[20] Troy Southgate, Interview, “Interview with Troy Southgate,
Conducted by Graham Macklin.”
[21] Macklin, pp. 303–4; Martin A. Lee and Kevin Coogan, “Killers on the
Right,” Mother Jones 12, no. 4, (May 1987), p. 45.
[22] Macklin, pp. 317–18.
[23] Troy Southgate, “Was ‘Fascism’ Outside of Germany and Italy
Anything More Than An Imitation?”; “Revolution versus Reaction:
Social-Nationalism & the Strasser Brothers.”
[24] Troy Southgate, “Enemy Within? Hizb-ut Tahrir, Al- Muhajiroun, &
the Growing Threat of Asian Colonisation.”
[25] Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New
York & London: Guilford Press, 2000), pp. 269–70; see also Betty Dobratz
and Stephanie Shanks-Meile, “White Power, White Pride!” The White
Separatist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1997), pp. 262–67. On Miles, see Lee, pp. 340–41.
[26] Southgate says, “We also have an excellent relationship with
National-Bolsheviks like the American Front (AF), who, despite the fact
that they do not share our anarchistic tendencies, are basically working
for very similar objectives.” “Synthesis Editor Troy Southgate,
Interviewed by Dan Ghetu.”
[27] Berlet and Lyons, p. 267.
[28] The website for the “Anti-Globalism Action Network.” See also
Center for New Community, “Neo-Nazi Infiltration of Anti-Globalization
Protests,” Center for New Community, June 22, 2002; Anti- Defamation
League, “Purported ‘Anti-Globalization’ Web Site Fronts for Neo-Nazi
Group,” July 12, 2002. For the Washington, D.C. rally, see
Anti-Defamation League, “Neo-Nazis Rally in Nation’s Capital,”; Susan
Lantz, “Fascists Countered In D.C., ”Baltimore IMC, August 28, 2002;
“Washington, DC: National Alliance Rally a Huge Bust,” Infoshop News,
August 24, 2002.
[29] Bill White, “Anti-Globalist Resistance Beyond Left And Right: An
Emerging Trend That Is Defining A New Paradigm In Revolutionary
Struggle,” Pravda Online, November 2, 2001.
[30] folkandfaith.com is based in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
bayareanationalanarchists.com/blog is based in California’s Bay Area. As
unlikely as this location may seem, the NRF-affiliated fascist skinhead
gang the American Front originated there as well. attackthesystem.com is
another site sympathetic to National-Anarchists.
[31] See Griffin; The U.S.-based Green Anarchy is not to be confused
with the UK-based Green Anarchist, despite shared ideology. Green
Anarchy has explicitly denounced National-Anarchism.
[32] Roger Griffin, “Plus ça change! The Fascist Pedigree of the
Nouvelle Droite,” draft, August, 1998; p. 5.
[33] “Plus ça change!” p. 4.
[34] Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “The French New Right in
the Year 2000,” Telos, no. 115, (Spring 1999), pp. 117–144.
[35] Many fascist intellectuals have held this view, including early
Nazi leader Otto Strasser, Italian occult philosopher Julius Evola, U.S.
Third Position theorist Francis Parker Yockey, and German Nazi legal
theorist Carl Schmitt. For a discussion of “spiritual” versus
“biological” race, see Coogan, 313 n38, p. 481. See also Lee, pp. 96.
[36] “Three Interviews with Alain de Benoist,” Telos, nos. 98- 99,
(Winter 1993-Spring 1994), pp. 173–207.
[37] Dobratz and Shanks-Meile, p. 99.
[38] See Jeffrey Kaplan, “Leaderless Resistance,” Terrorism and
Political Violence 9 no. 3, (Autumn 1997), pp. 80–95; see also Dobratz
and Shanks-Meile, pp. 171–74, pp. 267–68. For the influence on Troy
Southgate, see Macklin, p. 312. Beam’s essay is also reproduced on the
Australian National-Anarchist site.
[39] “Three Interviews with Alain de Benoist,” p. 180.
[40] Pierre-André Taguieff, “The New Right’s Vision of European
Identity,” Telos, nos. 98–99, Winter 1993- Spring 1994; p. 123.
[41] New Right Australia New Zealand Committee, “Statement of New Right
on National-Anarchism and Australian Nationalism.”
[42] For the intellectual influence of the New Right on Southgate, see
Macklin, p. 306.
[43] Telos nos. 98–99, Winter 1993 – Spring 1994.
[44] Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2007).
[45] See New Right Australia New Zealand Committee.
[46] “Synthesis Editor Troy Southgate, Interviewed by Wayne John
Sturgeon,”; see also Macklin, pp. 312–13.
[47] Southgate, “Blood and Soil.”
[48] Troy Southgate, “The Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic.” On the
link between German Nazis and ecology, see Janet Biehl and Peter
Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons From the German Experience (San
Francisco: AK Press, 1995).
[49] Southgate, Sturgeon interview.
[50] Southgate, Sturgeon interview.
[51] “A smear salad: Nick Griffin, Green Anarchy, and a concoction of
fallacies,” Bay Area National-Anarchists, October 7, 2007.
[52] Troy Southgate, “Manifesto of the European Liberation Front, 1999.”
[53] Southgate, Sturgeon interview.
[54] Troy Southgate, “Oswald Mosley: The Rise & Fall of English Fascism
Between 1918–45.”
[55] “Welf Herfurth On Kameradschaft.”