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National-anarchism

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This article is specifically about the National-Anarchist movement. See Anarchism and nationalism for general information about fusions of nationalist and anarchist ideas.

National-Anarchism is a syncretic political current that developed in the 1990s out of an attempt by former Third Positionists to reconcile anarchism with nationalism and in some cases voluntary racial separatism.[1] It has intellectual roots in the writings of Julius Evola and the neo-Spenglerian Francis Parker Yockey,[2] and includes Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, Murray Bookchin, Richard Walther Darré, and Max Stirner among its influences.[2]

Used in this sense, the term was coined simultaneously by Troy Southgate (England), Peter Töpfer (Germany) and Hans Cany (France), and was used by the now defunct National Revolutionary Faction to describe its ideology.[3]

History

The purple star of contemporary National-Anarchism.[4]

The term national anarchist dates back as far as the 1920s, when Helmut Franke, a German writer involved with the Conservative Revolutionary movement, used it to describe his political outlook.[3] In the United Kingdom during the early 1980s, the Black Ram group promulgated ideas which it described as national anarchist and anarcho-nationalist.[5] However, the present usage derives from the French National-Anarchist Hans Cany, who first made use of this term in the early 1990s, along with the related terms national-libertarian and anarcho-identitarian.[3][6] Around the same time, Richard Hunt left the editorial board of Green Anarchist, due to a disagreement over political strategies, and formed his own journal, Alternative Green.[7] Due to Alternative Green's policy of publishing articles from across the political spectrum, the remaining Green Anarchist staff constantly accused Hunt of supporting fascism, while the left-wing writer/activist Stewart Home accused both Alternative Green and Green Anarchist of supporting ecofascism.[8]

In the mid-1990s, Troy Southgate, a Strasserite former member of the British National Front and International Third Position, began to move towards Hunt's green anarchism, and fused it with racial separatism (which Hunt did not support) to create a newer form of National-Anarchism.[9] In 1998 Southgate formed the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF), officiating as its national secretary.[10] For a period, he was also a member of Alternative Green's editorial board.[10] Later, Southgate disavowed the concept of the revolutionary cell-group and in 2003 the NRF disbanded, shortly after he and other NRF associates had become involved with a UK-based countercultural forum, the Cercle de la Rose Noire, of which Southgate is president.[10][11] Southgate is also an organiser for the New Right, a group which is inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite movement.[12]

One group that has accepted National-Anarchism as an ally is the American Revolutionary Vanguard, which proposes a cross-ideological alliance opposed to the present governments of the Western world.[13]

Views

National-Anarchists see the hierarchies inherent in government and capitalism as oppressive. They advocate collective action organized along the lines of national identity, and visualise a decentralised social order wherein like-minded individuals voluntarily establish and maintain distinct communities.[1] They may more accurately be referred to as Tribal Anarchists.[14] National-Anarchism has been denounced by left-wingers, who regard it as a far right ideology.[15]

National-Anarchism shares with most strains of anarchism a desire to reorganize human relationships, with an emphasis on replacing the hierarchical structures of government and capitalism with local, communal decision-making. Troy Southgate has stated:

We believe in political, social and economic decentralisation. In other words, we wish to see a positive downward trend whereby all bureaucratic concepts such as the UN, NATO, the EU, the World Bank and even nation-states like England and Germany are eradicated and consequently replaced by autonomous village-communities.[16]

National-Anarchists tend to advocate economic practices that can be described as distributism and mutualism, in which the emphasis is placed on a wide ownership of the means of production, in the form of small businesses and workers' cooperatives.[17] The revolutionary conservative concept of the Anarch is central to National-Anarchism.[10]

National-Anarchists reject liberalism as a primary cause of the social decline of nations and cultural identity.[18] National-Anarchists also reject fascism and Communism as statist and totalitarian,[2] and reject National Socialism as a failed dictatorship of a totalitarian government.[2][18] This rejection however is held by some in the broader Anarchist movement to be deceptive or dishonest.[15][19] Green Anarchist published an article accusing National-Anarchists of being state-backed fascist infiltrators with the goal of discrediting mainstream anarchism.[20] Antifa, a militant anti-fascist network, advocates violent physical confrontation with National-Anarchists, whom it considers to be part of the far right.[21]

Autonomy and separatism

National-Anarchists advocate a model of society in which communities that practice separatism along the lines of ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation are able to coexist alongside mixed or integrated communities without requiring force.[22] They suggest that "autonomous zones" would exist with their own rules for permanent residence in a community without the strict ethnic divisions and violence advocated by racist nationalism.[22] National-Anarchists consider genocide, murder, and social conformity to be unnecessary, tyrannical and an affront to "libertarian minded people".[22]

Some proponents of National-Anarchism support voluntary racial separatism, but not racial hatred or racial supremacy (such as white supremacy and black supremacy).[23] Some National-Anarchists, including Southgate, believe that miscegenation damages cultural diversity, on the grounds that the intermixing of cultures destroys one or all of the cultures involved.[16] They further maintain that racial separatism stops racial hatred from developing by allowing indigenous cultures and biodiversity to continue.[17] Southgate has stated that "Our concept of the word ‘national’ relates not to territory but to the racial identity which is a natural facet of all peoples",[16] and that "we are seeking our own space in which to live according to our own principles".[2] The United States National-Anarchist group Folk and Faith states: "Being firm believers in true bio-diversity, National-Anarchists are staunch racial separatists."[17] Anarchist critics argue that National-Anarchism's concept of racial separation is intrinsically linked to racial hatred.[15] For their part, National-Anarchists generally distance themselves from both mainstream anarchists[9] and white supremacists.[15]

National-Anarchists suggest that each collective would be free to practice the economic or political structure of its choosing, as long as it does not interfere with the rights of other communities to follow their own lifestyle choices. However, National-Anarchists generally believe that environmental protection and conservation are matters on which all people should coordinate.[7] Areas without significant human development and borderlands would be maintained collectively, and the existence of free zones allowing trade and sharing between communities would be established with the agreement of all parties involved.[24]

The Bay Area National Anarchist (BANA) network foresees the development of National Autonomous Zones (NAZ) and promotes them as a model, suggesting that along these lines National-Anarchists can achieve "autonomy amidst adversity", whilst observing that National-Anarchist theory "makes no specific demands...that [these communities] adhere to a particular political ideology" or organize in a particular way.[25] A NAZ may contain one or more of the following characteristics:

  • a homogeneous representation of spoken language, culture, religion, and ethnicity.
  • the organized delegation of tasks and economy.
  • a pre-defined relationship regulating behavior with outsiders of the NAZ.
  • a system of standard operating procedures for self-defense.
  • collective and informal decision making processes.[25]

A mature NAZ is considered to have one or more traits of the Vietnamese Military Fortress concept for national defense. [26]

See also

Footnotes and references

  1. ^ a b Southgate, Troy (January 2002). "Transcending the Beyond: From Third Position to National-Anarchism". Synthesis.
  2. ^ a b c d e Fyodorov, Miron (February 2006). "Interview with Troy Southgate for Kinovar, Russia". New Right.
  3. ^ a b c Unattr. "NA-Internationale, der internationale Nationalanarchismus und etwas zu seiner Geschichte". Nationalanarchismus.
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ Black Ram 1: 12, 18.
  6. ^ Cany, Hans (2004). "Zur Geschichte und heutigen Situation des National-Anarchismus in Frankreich". Nationalanarchismus.
  7. ^ a b An Interview with Richard Hunt
  8. ^ Stewart Home Society - Green Anarchist Documents
  9. ^ a b Sturgeon, Wayne John (2001). "Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Wayne John Sturgeon". Synthesis.
  10. ^ a b c d Macklin, Graham D. (September 2005). "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction". Patterns of Prejudice 39(3): 301-326. Cite error: The named reference "nur53" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  11. ^ S Y N T H E S I S - Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire
  12. ^ Macklin, Graham (n.d.). "An Interview with Troy Southgate". Synthesis.
  13. ^ American Revolutionary Vanguard
  14. ^ Yahoo! Groups
  15. ^ a b c d Griffin, Nick. "National Anarchism - Trojan Horse for White Nationalism". Green Anarchy.
  16. ^ a b c Southgate, Troy. "What is National-Anarchism?" (in question-and-answer format). Folk and Faith.
  17. ^ a b c FolkAndFaith.com Cite error: The named reference "f&f" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  18. ^ a b Herfurth, Welf (February 2008). "Doing the New Right thing by people" (interview with Australian National-Anarchist organiser). Mathaba.
  19. ^ Unattr. "Anarchists against Nationalism".
  20. ^ Manson, Peter (2000). "No case to answer" (including statement by Terry Liddle). Weekly Worker 363 (December 7).
  21. ^ Unattr. "The opposition". Antifa Britain.
  22. ^ a b c Preston, Keith (2003). "National-Anarchism and Classical American Ideals: Is A Reconciliation Possible?". Food For The European Mind.
  23. ^ National-Anarchist-Online : National-Anarchist-Online
  24. ^ Southgate, Troy (2007). Tradition and Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate. Aarhus: Integral Traditions.
  25. ^ a b Unattr. (May 2008). "National Autonomous Zones: Castles without walls". Bay Area National Anarchist.
  26. ^ Unattr. (May 2008). "Inside the Gates: the Vietnamese Military Fortress". Inside the Gates. This includes: "A new concept has been devised to meet this contingency - called the Military Fortress. While new and innovative, it does have roots in the "combat village" of the Vietnam war and the still earlier "fortified village" of the Viet Minh War. The Military Fortress concept presently involves some two dozen North Vietnamese districts that abut China... that are to be welded into one contiguous defensive structure. Each village of the district is to become a "combat village," linked in tactical planning terms to neighboring villages, the entire district thus becomes a single strategic entity, and all the districts together become a grand Military Fortress. Villagers are armed, and all have combat duties... Each villager spends a part of each day training and working on fortifications, for which he gets extra rations. The work includes digging the usual combat trench foxhole, trench, bunker, underground food and weapons storeroom, and the ever present "vanishing underground" installation, the hidden tunnel complex. These were within the village. Some distance out, usually two or three kilometers, is what is called the "distant fortification," a second string of interlocking trenches, ambush bunkers, manned by well-equipped paramilitary troops serving full time. Several villages (usually about five) are tied together by communication systems and fields of fire into "combat clusters" (about seven per district), and the whole becomes a strategic entity." It is interesting to note that the Military Fortress (in the Vietnam concept) has used against three different threats and has been refined against each one. In time, it wouldn't surprise me if many parts of the United States begin to resemble this. This method of operations would seem suitable as a NAZ objective to emulate."
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