National-anarchism

This article is specifically about the idea of national-anarchism. See Anarchism and nationalism for general information about syntheses of nationalist and anarchist ideas.

National-Anarchist Movement flag

National-anarchism is an anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and anarchist ideology. National-anarchists advocate a post-capitalist stateless society in which homogeneous communities of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes, named "national autonomous zones", that are ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.

Although the term "national-anarchism" dates back as far as the 1920s, the contemporary national-anarchist movement has been put forward since the late 1990s by British political activist Troy Southgate, who positions it as being "beyond left and right".

National-anarchism has elicited skepticism and outright hostility from both left-wing and far-right critics. The former accuse national-anarchists of being nothing more than white nationalists who promote a form of 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.

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.

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. 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.

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. The NRF stressed this was a "highly militant strategy" and advised that some members may only fund the organization. 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, 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. 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. Thus, it 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". Southgate disbanded the NRF in 2003.

Shortly after, Southgate and other NRF associates became involved with Synthesis, the online journal of a forum called Cercle de la Rose Noire, which sought 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 (black metal and neofolk 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.

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. In the United States, only a few web sites have been established, but there has been a trend towards a steady increase. National-anarchism in the United States 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. There are adherents in England, Spain and Australia, among other nations. 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. Some protest groups seemed thankful for the strong police presence. Twenty members of an anarchist movement, all wearing black hoodies with their faces covered by bandanas, were escorted away by police after marching only 20m. The group, New Right Australia and New Zealand, became a focal point for the crowd, who turned on them, accusing them of being Nazis."</ref> Since then, national-anarchists have joined other marches in Australia and in the United States. 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.

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.

Ideology

The conservative revolutionary concept of the anarch, as articulated by German philosopher Ernst Jünger, is central to national-anarchism. National-anarchists stress that the "artificial nationalism" of the nation-State, which they oppose, must be distinguished from the "natural nationalism" of the people ("volk"), which they believe, in its more consistent expressions is a legitimate rejection of both foreign domination (imperialism) and internal domination (statism). 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. They propose a strategic and ideological alliance of ethnic and racial nationalists and separatists around the world (especially in the Global South), neo-Eurasianists in Russia, Islamists in Muslim-majority 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.

National-anarchism echoes most anarchist schools of thought 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. However, national-anarchists stress the restoration of the "Natural Order" and aim towards a decentralized social order where each new tribe builds and maintains a permanent autonomous zone for a self-sufficient commune.

Asserting the right to difference, national-anarchists publicly advocate a model of society in which communities that wish to practice racial, ethnic, religious and/or sexual separatism are able to peacefully coexist alongside mixed or integrated communities without requiring force. 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. Some leading national-anarchists, however, have stated in the past that they originally conceived the idea of establishing whites-only NAZs, which have seceded from the state's economy, — no-go areas for unwelcomed ethnic groups and state authorities — as an insurrectionary strategy to foment civil disorder and racial tensions as an essential prelude to racial civil war and the collapse of the capitalist system.

In terms of cultural and religious views, many national-anarchists are influenced by the radical traditionalism and spiritual racism of Julius Evola, who calls for a "revolt against the modern world". Although some national-anarchists adhere to a form of Identity Christianity, most reject Christianity because they believe it to be a Semitic religion that usurped the "Aryan" legacy of Mithraism as the historically dominant religion and moral system of the West. They therefore 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 separatism and cultural revitalization through the establishment of confederations of autonomous neo-völkisch communes as the ultimate barrier against globalized racial mixing and cultural homogenization.

For its part, the National Anarchist Movement founded by Southgate states on its website:

Race-based politics have nearly always been the domain of Right-wing organisations. But the fact that National-Anarchists are prepared to address this thorny issue should not cause people to wrongly dismiss us as yet another Right-wing organisation committed to promoting 'white supremacy', because National-Anarchism itself transcends both Left and Right. We are not supremacist, racist, statist or totalitarian. In addition, the German National-Socialists and Italian Fascists of the twentieth century allied themselves with large banking interests and betrayed the more 'socialistic' aspects of their original programmes. We are genuine Anarchists and proud of the fact.

American panarchist Keith Preston, a fellow traveller of the national-anarchist movement who promotes anarcho-pluralism, argues that 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, namely regionalism, localism, agrarianism and traditionalism.

See also

• Black anarchism
• Kinism
• Nativism
• Neotribalism
• Panarchy
• Primordialism

References

Books and journal articles

• Dahl, Göran (1999). Radical Conservatism and the Future of Politics. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN 978-0-7619-5414-9.
• Whine, Michael (January 1999). "Cyberspace: A New Medium for Communication, Command, and Control by Extremists". Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. 22 (3): 231–245. doi:10.1080/105761099265748. Archived from the original on 2006-10-22.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-3155-0.
• Griffin, Roger (March 2003). "From slime mould to rhizome: an introduction to the groupuscular right". Patterns of Prejudice. 37 (1): 27–63. doi:10.1080/0031322022000054321.
• Macklin, Graham D. (September 2005). "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction". Patterns of Prejudice. 39 (3): 301–326. doi:10.1080/00313220500198292.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Sykes, Alan (2005). The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (British History in Perspective). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-59923-5.
• Lyons, Matthew N. (Summer 2011). "Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism". New Politics. 7 (3). Retrieved 2019-07-27.

News articles

• Gulezian, Lisa; Hollyfied, Amy (2010-05-01). "Thousands across Bay Area protest AZ immigration law". KGO-TV. Archived from the original on 2010-05-04. Retrieved 2010-05-02.
• Mercer, Neil; Chesterton, Andrew (2007-09-09). "Scaremongering - Fears of violent demonstrations unfounded". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 14.
• Smiley, Lauren (2010-05-01). "Post-immigration march scuffle targets National Anarchists". San Francisco Weekly. Archived from the original on 2016-02-24. Retrieved 2010-05-02.

External links

• National Anarchist Movement