National-anarchism

National-anarchist star

National-anarchism is a radical, anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist and anti-statist right-wing ideology and movement propounded since the late 1990s by British far-right figure Troy Southgate.^[1] First-wave national-anarchists advocate that different ethnic and racial groups should peacefully coexist by developing separately in their own confederations of autonomous tribal communes within a post-capitalist stateless society.^[1][2]

The term national-anarchism dates back as far as the 1920s.^[1] The few scholars who have studied national-anarchism conclude that it represents a further evolution in the thinking of the radical right rather than an entirely new dimension.^[3][4][5] National-anarchism has elicited skepticism and outright hostility from both left- and right-wing critics. The former accuse national-anarchists of being white nationalists who promote ethnic and racial separatism, while the latter argue they want the militant chic of calling themselves "anarchists" without the historical and philosophical baggage that accompanies such a claim.^[2][6][6]

History

The term national-anarchist dates back as far as the 1920s, when Helmut Franke, a German conservative revolutionary writer, used it to describe his political stance. However, it would be the writings of other members of the conservative revolutionary movement, such as Ernst Jünger, which would later provide the philosophical foundation of the contemporary national-anarchist movement.^[1]

In the mid-1990s, Troy Southgate, a former member of the British far-right National Front and founder of the International Third Position, began to move away from Strasserism and Catholic distributism towards post-left anarchism and the primitivist green anarchism articulated in Richard Hunt's 1997 book To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core.^[1] However, he fused his anarchist ideology with the radical traditionalism of Italian esotericist Julius Evola and the ethnopluralism and pan-European nationalism of French new right philosopher Alain de Benoist to create a newer form of national-anarchism.^[1]

In 1998, inspired by the concepts of the political soldier and leaderless resistance, Southgate formed the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) as a clandestine cell system of professional revolutionaries conspiring to overthrow the British state.^[1] The NRF stressed this was a "highly militant strategy" and advised that some members may only fund the organization.^[7] Southgate claims that the NRF took part in anti-vivisection protests in August 2000 alongside hunt saboteurs and the Animal Liberation Front by following a strategy of entryism,^[1][8] but its only known public action under the "national-anarchist" name was to hold an anarchist heretics fair in October 2000, in which a number of fringe groups participated. However, after a coalition of green anarchists and anti-fascists blocked three further events from being held in 2001, Southgate and the NRF abandoned this strategy and retreated to purely disseminating their ideas in Internet forums.^[1][3] The NRF had long been aware of the bridging power of the Internet, which provided it with a reach and influence hitherto not available to the groupuscular right.^[9] It thus became part of the Euro-American radical right, a virtual community of European and American right-wing extremists seeking to establish a new pan-national and ethnoreligious identity for all people they believe belong to the "Aryan race".^[4] Southgate disbanded the NRF in 2003.

Shortly after Southgate and other NRF associates became involved with Synthesis, the online journal of a forum called the Cercle de la Rose Noire, which seeks a fusion of anarchism, occultism and metapolitics with the contemporary concerns of the ecological and global justice movements. Thus, through the medium of musical subcultures (industrial metal, gothic metal and neo folk music scenes) and the creation of permanent autonomous zones for neo-völkisch communes, they hope to disseminate their subversive ideas throughout society in order to achieve cultural hegemony.^[1]

The national-anarchist idea has spread around the world over the Internet, assisted by groups such as the Thule-Seminar which set up web sites in the 1990s.^[10] In the United States, only a few web sites have been established but there has been a trend towards a steady increase.^[6] National-anarchism in the U.S. began as a relatively obscure movement, made up of probably fewer than 200 individuals, led by Andrew Yeoman of the Bay Area National Anarchists (BANA), based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a couple of other groups in Northern California and Idaho. Organizations based on national-anarchist ideology have gained a foothold in Russia and have been accused of sowing turmoil in the environmental movement in Germany.^[2] There are adherents in England, Spain and Australia, among other nations.^[2]

On 8 September 2007 in Sydney, Australia, the anti-globalization movement mobilized against neoliberal economic policies by opposing the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. During the street protests, national-anarchists infiltrated the left-anarchist black bloc but the police had to protect them from being expelled by irate activists.^[2][11] Since then, national-anarchists have joined other marches in Australia and in the U.S.; in April 2008, they protested on behalf of the Tibetan independence movement against the Chinese government during the Olympic torch relay in both Canberra, Australia, and San Francisco.^[6] National-anarchists in the U.S. are carefully studying the successes and failures of their more prominent international counterparts as they attempt to similarly win converts from the radical environmentalist and white nationalist movements in the U.S.^[2]

On May Day 2010, BANA participated in the Golden Gate Minutemen's march in front of San Francisco City Hall in support of Arizona's anti-illegal immigration senate bill. The march took place during International Workers' Day demonstrations as an attempt to counter mass protest against the bill, in San Francisco's Mission District. Local news media reported that Yeoman and four other national-anarchists were physically assaulted by about 10 protesters as they left the march.^[12]

Ideology

The conservative revolutionary concept of the anarch, as articulated by Jünger, is central to national-anarchism.^[1] National-anarchists see modernity, liberalism, materialism, consumerism, immigration, multiracialism, multiculturalism, and globalization as the primary causes of the social decline of nations and cultural identity.^[1] They stress a strategic and ideological alliance of racial separatists in the Western world, neo-Eurasianists in Russia, Islamists in Muslim-majority countries, autonomist and secessionist movements in the least developed countries, and anti-Zionists everywhere to resist the "New World Order"—globalization viewed as an instrument of Jewish-dominated international banking and American imperialism—that is inevitably leading to global economic collapse and ecological collapse.^[1][6]

National-anarchism echoes most strains of anarchism by expressing a desire to reorganize human relationships, with an emphasis on replacing the hierarchical structures of the state and capitalism with local, community decision-making. National-anarchists, however, advocate collective action organized along the lines of a stateless ethnic national identity, and aim towards a decentralized social order where each new tribe builds and maintains a permanent autonomous zone for a self-sufficient commune, which is politically meritocratic, economically mutualistic, socially and culturally traditional, and ecologically sustainable.^[1]

Asserting the right to difference, national-anarchists publicly advocate a model of society in which communities that practice racial, ethnic, religious or sexual separatism are able to peacefully coexist alongside mixed or integrated communities without requiring force.^[13] They claim that "national autonomous zones" (NAZs) could exist with their own rules for permanent residence without the strict ethnic divisions and violence advocated by other forms of "blood and soil" ethnic nationalism.^[13] Some national-anarchists, however, see the establishment of whites-only NAZs which have seceded from the state's economy—no-go areas for unwelcomed racial groups and state authorities—as a strategy to foment civil and racial strife in order to provoke a race war and the collapse of the capitalist system.^[1][2]

Many national-anarchists are influenced by the perennial philosophy of Evola and the radical traditionalist school, which calls for a "revolt against the modern world".^[2] They therefore have a pessimistic vision of modern Western culture yet optimistically believe that the "decline of the West" will pave the way for its materialism to be expunged and replaced by the idealism of primordial tradition.^[1] Many national-anarchists reject Christianity because they believe it is a Semitic religion that usurped the Aryan legacy of Mithraic mysteries as the historically dominant religion and moral system of the West.^[1] They embrace a spiritual anarchism based on different forms of neopaganism, occultism and ethnic mysticism, especially Nordic racial paganism, which they view as genuine expressions of Western spirituality, culture and identity that can also serve as an antidote to the socially alienating effects of consumer culture. National-anarchists hold racial segregation and cultural revitalization through the establishment of confederations of autonomous tribal communes ("völk autonomy") as the ultimate barrier against globalized racial and cultural homogenization.^[1]

According to American panarchist Keith Preston, national-anarchism and classical American ideals of Jeffersonian democracy are reconcilable, despite the anti-Americanism of European national-anarchists and the patriotism of American paleoconservatives, because of their common values: regionalism, localism, agrarianism, and traditionalism.^[13]

Position on political spectrum

While the combination of post-left anarchist opposition to statism and capitalism, with right-wing support for ethnic and racial separatism, makes its classification on the left-right political spectrum problematic, the following scholars who have examined national-anarchism consider it to be on the radical right.^[1][3][5][6]

In 2003, Roger Griffin argued that national-anarchism is a segment of the groupuscular right which has evolved towards a "mazeway resynthesis" between "classic fascism, third positionism, neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization movement", whose main ideological innovation is a stateless palingenetic ultranationalism.^[3]

In 2005, Graham D. Macklin, in his essay Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction, building off of the writings of Griffin, argued that the conservative revolutionary concept of the anarch provides sanction for the ideological shapeshifting and unrestrained eclecticism of national-anarchism, allowing its adherents to assert they have transcended the dichotomy of conventional politics to embrace higher political forms that are "beyond left and right".^[1] Macklin further argued that despite a protean capacity for change, far-right groupuscules retain some principes which he calls core fascist values (namely palingenesis, ultranationalism, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist third positionism, and violent direct action). Macklin therefore concludes that national-anarchism is a synthesis of anarchism and fascism (or, more precisely, the radical traditionalism of Evola), which represents a "revolt against the modern world".^[1]

In 2005, Alan Sykes, in his book The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP, argued that national-anarchism represents a further evolution in the thinking of the radical right rather than an entirely new dimension, a response to the new situation of the late 20th century in which the apparent triumph of materialist capitalism on a global scale requires a greater assertion of the centrality of anti-materialist nationalism.^[5]

Criticism

National-anarchism has critics on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Both left- and right-wing critics look upon their third position politics with skepticism, if not outright hostility, in part because they find it incongruous of white nationalists, who compose the vast majority of national-anarchists, to be promoting Islamist, communist, and anarchist thinkers.^[6]

Left-wing critics assert that national-anarchism is a "Trojan horse for white nationalism" and represents what many anti-fascists see as the potential new face of fascism. They argue that it is a form of crypto-fascism which hopes to avoid the stigma of classic fascism by appropriating symbols, slogans, and stances of the left-wing anarchist movement, while engaging in entryism to inject some core fascist values into the anti-globalization and environmental movements. They further argue that national-anarchists hope to draw members away from traditional white nationalist groups to their own synthesis of ideas, which they claim are "neither left nor right". These critics warn that the danger national-anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that neo-fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing. Even if the results are modest, this can disrupt left-wing social movements and their focus on egalitarianism and social justice; and instead spread separatist ideas based on naturalistic fallacy, racism, antisemitism, heterosexism, and antifeminism amongst grassroots activists.^[6]

Some far-right critics argue that neo-Nazis joining the national-anarchist movement will lead to them losing credit for the successes of their "anti-Zionist" struggle if it is co-opted by left-wing anarchists. They further argue that national-anarchists want the militant chic of calling themselves "anarchists" without the historical and philosophical baggage that accompanies such a claim, such as the link with 19th-century Jewish anarchists.^[2]

See also

Notes

References

Books and journal articles

News articles