The Worst Enemy of 'National Socialism'

I.

Most nationalists don't like the word 'neo-Nazi': they prefer the term 'National Socialist'. I myself refuse to refer to the post-war sympathisers and revivalists of Hitler as 'National Socialist' because that would imply that they are the one and same with the German National Socialists of the NSDAP. I believe that a continuity of sorts exists but not an identity. The term 'post-Nazi' manages to encapsulate the post-war Hitler revival movement best, but I regard it as a little specious. Better to stick with 'neo-Nazi'.

 It's true that this pejorative term is used by the enemy - just like its cousins 'racist', 'sexist', 'white supremacist' and the like - but by embracing the term we neuter it. Besides which, you can use it to get right down to brass tacks when discussing politics with someone. 'My political beliefs are neo-Nazi': such a statement cuts right to the essence of things and leaves very little by way of doubt in the mind of your interlocutor as to what your actual beliefs are. It saves time.

 In order to explain what neo-Nazism is, we need to define what the historical German National Socialism was. I'd sum it up in six points: 1) anti-Semitism and folkish German nationalism; 2) the doctrine of inequality between races, nations and men (the 'theory of personality' as Hitler calls it); 3) the leader principle, or Führerprinzip; 4) anti-communism; 5) the importance of improving the lot of the working class and recruiting from the working-class; 6) the importance of struggle - that the good things in life (or in politics at least) can only be won by struggle. One can find the best explication of these doctrines in Mein Kampf.

 And what is neo-Nazism? It's most commonly defined as an attempt to revive those doctrines. A.V. Schaerffenberg's Nazi Questions and Answers (2008) gives us the best introduction to neo-Nazism, Yockey's Imperium (1948) the most impressive intellectual foundation.

Neither of these authors really revise the doctrines of Hitler: by and large, they leave them unchanged. In the same way, Marxist-Leninism hasn't changed much in the past hundred years. The immutability of both these ideas - Leninism and Hitlerism - explains their survival into the 21st century. Neo-Nazism itself has been around in one shape or form for seventy years.

This long-livedness makes it superior, in my eyes, to other 'nationalist' and Far Right ideologies and tendencies. Recently an excellent article appeared in the Occidental Observer on the shortcomings of the Nouvelle Droit or European New Right - a school of thought which rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s and then went the way of all fads. I can imagine newer tendencies, such as the Alt Right, going the same way. Neo-Nazism outlived the European New Right and will outlive the Alt Right, simply because intellectual ideas need to be given political form, and this is what neo-Nazism does for the intellectuals - it gives them a party. This is what the original Nazism and fascism did as well. The European New Right made a hero out of Carl Schmitt, who, it will be remembered, joined the NSDAP (along with Martin Heidegger, another New Right hero) in 1933.

 The fascist parties gave intellectuals of the Right a home, the communist parties, the intellectuals of the Left. Communism and fascism resemble one another. Both make a fetish of the great individual, the man of genius, what Marx disparages as the 'cult of personality', and it's this side of the German National Socialist doctrine, I think, which tends to rub its critics up the wrong way. These men - ostensibly 'Far Right' and 'nationalist' and 'racialist' - don't believe in Hitler's genius because they hold to egalitarian theories. They subscribe to a form of Marxism. We know that Marxist theory teaches that all men are equal and that the masses - in particular, the working-classes - are the ones who make history. (In practice, the Marxist regimes of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, East Germany and the rest put their leaders on a pedestal and made a cult of them: the communist party line was that the revolutions in those respective countries were brought about by the individual initiative of those very great men...). The anti-Hitlerians take egalitarianism at face value. They don't follow the doctrine of racialism to its logical conclusion: that if you believe in the inequality of races, then you must believe in the inequality of nations - and men. And, from the inequality of men, we can deduce the Führerprinzip: responsibility for political decisions must be reserved for those superior men, the men who are (in Spengler's words) 'master-types' to whom the masses owe unquestioning obedience. In the words of the Italian Fascist slogan, 'Believe, obey, fight!'.

 In National Socialist propaganda, the Führer, the German Volk and the Wehrmacht form three pillars of the German national genius. The Hitler detractors take umbrage to this: how can one nation (Germany) set itself above another? Doesn't white nationalism preach that white nations such as Ireland, Portugal, Bulgaria, Finland, Serbia and Montenegro are all equal?

And on the subject of Hitler's alleged genius, his critics accuse him with making many questionable decisions (the implication being that had they been in charge, they would have done better). They don't believe in his greatness, and what's more, don't believe that any man - much less a politician - can be great.

 Oddly enough, it's the Left which understands the theories of 'personality' (viz., the cult of individual genius) and Führerprinzip - and national greatness too. While the anti-Hitlerians may decry neo-Nazi celebrations of Hitler's birthday as cultish, the Left has no problems with celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday and making it an American national holiday. Likewise, after the 1917 October revolution, the Left made a fetish of Russia and Russian nationalism (and Russian imperialism), recognising Russia as a superior nation. One may wonder, how many Anglophone left-wing intellectuals after 1917 strove to learn Russian? Or, after 1949, Chinese? As for democracy, the communist parties which made up the Comintern (and later the Trotskyite Internationals) were never that big on it. Even today, the communist parties run their organisations like disciplined military units and their members show more self-restraint, more subordination to authority, than our present nationalist mob. But one could say that the Marxist-Leninism of Stalin, Mao, Trotsky represents a dishonest fascism, a mealy-mouthed, hypocritical fascism which is unable to say, plainly and frankly, what it is.

One may object to German National Socialism on the grounds that it was for Germans only - that National Socialism doesn't carry across to white nations other than Germany. But we need to look at this in context. After WWI, Europe was ruled by four Great Powers, each with their sovereign independence, each with a number of smaller countries (and colonies) within their sphere of influence: Germany, Britain, France and Italy. By 1939, France and Britain had lost their sovereignty and had fallen, along with Poland, under the sway of America; by the middle of 1944, Germany, the sole power on the Continent, was engaged in a ferocious struggle with the US for control of Europe. It was in this period that Italy ceased to be a sovereign political unit. The project of Italian Fascism - along with the fascisms of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. - became subordinated to the German. In connection with this, it must be recalled that Hitler's racialism was not directed at the Negroes or the Muslims or Chinese or Indians but against the Jews. By 1944 the Italian racial doctrine became explicitly Hitlerian; Fascist Italy, along with France and other European countries, had consented to the round-up and deportation of Jews. Politically and intellectually, all fascism and Far Rightism by 1944 had become Germanised and 'Nazi'; paraphrasing Sir William Harcourt, Europe's Right had said, in effect, 'We're all Nazis now'. This is why I characterise neofascism (the remnants of fascism which survived the war) as neo-Nazi.

 Despite the 'Germanness' of the National Socialist doctrine, and despite the fact that it was implemented eighty years ago, many of its ideas could still be carried across to other white countries (and solve a good many social and political problems thereby). In Australia, a nationalist government could introduce labour laws modelled on National Socialist Germany's; young men and women could be conscripted into an Australian version of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls (both of which were patterned on communist youth formations).

 But it goes without saying that, in these times, an insurmountable wall prevents us from introducing anything like Hitlerism here (or, for that matter, any Western country). Communist and fascist youth organisations originated in countries which were ethnically homogenous. In many Melbourne and Sydney schools, the non-whites - who are the children of non-white immigrants - can often outnumber the Aussies, and a mixed-race nationalist and fascist youth organisation, composed of Aussies and non-whites, would be a contradiction in terms. (For that matter, it's difficult to imagine Chinese or Russian communist youth organisations with members who are African). Much of historical fascism can't be transposed to the modern era. In today's multi-culti, bastardised, mixed-race Western societies, the old slogan, 'Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer' - 'One people, one kingdom, one leader' - doesn't hold true and can't hold true. George Lincoln Rockwell, who died in 1967, and Francis Parker Yockey, who died in 1960, would have been shocked and appalled by today's Melbourne, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Athens...

II.

One can't turn the clock back, and all the ideologies on the Far Right today face the same uphill battle. We can't return to the same ethnically homogenous societies of the 1960s and even the 1970s and 1980s - at least, not without a terrible fight.

Now, I think that neo-Nazism - with its doctrine of the importance of struggle - is uniquely suited to that task; but a great many of its critics on the Far Right don't agree. Despite the fact that everywhere on the Far Right it dominates - and even the detractors of German National Socialism, such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, pay lip service to it and make their bread and butter from it - it doesn't rank high in the opinion of many. Like that other venerable racialist movement, the Ku Klux Klan, it has fallen into disrepute. Duke admitted, in his autobiography My Awakening (1998), that by the end of the 1970s, the mass infiltration of provocateurs (and degenerates) into the Klan had turned it into a violent and criminal organisation, hardly a vehicle for the white man's racial struggle; Duke had no choice but to leave. Neo-Nazism finds itself in a similar quandary. It's now tainted by an association with skinheadism, which is as unlike the historical German National Socialism as could be (see here).

 One has to ask if the powers that be deliberately engineered this situation. Did they use their power and influence in mass media and popular culture to help create the skinhead subculture and push it towards neo-Nazism, and to eventually make the skinhead subculture the public face of neo-Nazism? I've heard speculation along those lines from a few people on the nationalist scene; one of them is Esben Kristensen, the leader of the National Socialist Movement of Denmark (DNSB). As Kristensen notes, the shaven heads, bomber jackets, braces and Doc Marten boots look 'stupid'. It could be that the enemy has waged psychological warfare against its political opponents by manipulating the more impressionable and naive of them to adopt a 'stupid' look. In addition, the enemy has succeeded in encouraging an ethos of immoral and degenerate behaviour - violence, alcoholism, wife-beating - of making that behaviour acceptable, if not laudable, within the confines of that group.

 If we trace the history of skinheadism, it can be seen that skinheadism turned neo-Nazi after the formation of several skinhead rock bands under the aegis of the British National Front after 1978 - precisely at the point when the National Front had become the third-largest political party in Britain and a threat to the British establishment.

One should ask: who, exactly, introduced skinheadism into the British nationalist scene at that time? Who encouraged it to grow, flourish? And doesn't it to stand to reason that the British 'Deep State' would have taken some form of action in 1978 to disrupt, divert or destroy the National Front - and British Nationalism - by utilising provocateurs and degrading the morale of British nationalists through infiltration and subversion...

III.

It's quite true that skinheads belong to the working class - as do the chavs and bogans - and the working classes, as pointed out earlier, form the bulwark of any National Socialism, whether it be of the historical German National Socialist or the neo-Nazi variety. But, in order to defend myself, I will quote scripture here. This is a famous passage from Mein Kampf:

[The worker] cannot be raised from his present standing and incorporated in the.. folk-community by means of goody-goody meetings where people talk about the brotherhood of the people; but rather by a systematic improvement in the social and cultural life of the worker until the yawning abyss between him and the other classes can be filled in. A movement which has this for its aim must try to recruit its followers mainly from the ranks of the working class. It must include members of the intellectual classes only in so far as such members have rightly understood and accepted without reserve the ideal towards which the movement is striving. This process of transformation and reunion cannot be completed within ten or twenty years. It will take several generations, as the history of such movements has shown.

The most difficult obstacle to the reunion of our contemporary worker in the national folk-community does not consist so much in the fact that he fights for the interests of his fellow-workers but rather in the international ideas [i.e., communism] with which he is imbued and which are of their nature at variance with the ideas of nationhood and fatherland. This hostile attitude to nation and fatherland has been inculcated by the leaders of the working class. If they were inspired by the principle of devotion to the nation in all that concerns its political and social welfare, the trades unions would make those millions of workers most valuable members of the national community, without thereby affecting their own constant struggle for their economic demands...

The reservoir from which the young movement has to draw its members will first of all be the working masses. Those masses must be delivered from the clutches of the international mania. Their social distress must be eliminated. They must be raised above their present cultural level, which is deplorable, and transformed into a resolute and valuable factor in the folk-community, inspired by national ideas and national sentiment.

A few sentences stand out here: the worker must be raised from his present standing 'by a systematic improvement in the social and cultural life of the worker until the yawning abyss between him and the other classes can be filled in...'; the masses 'must be raised above their present cultural level, which is deplorable, and transformed into a resolute and valuable factor in the folk-community, inspired by national ideas and national sentiment'. Hitler places the emphasis on lifting the working classes up, improving their culture and their conditions, ennobling them. The skinhead movement can't be said to be Hitlerian in this regard; neither can chavvish nationalist and Far Right movements such as the English Defence League and Britain First.

 My point is that the system - the 'Deep State' - understands this, and understands it better than most nationalists; it could be that it has concocted the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, or at least helped it grow, as a means of sabotaging neo-Nazism and Far Right nationalism in general.

To many on the Far Right, this sort of thinking seems conspiratorial, and what's more, galling - it implies that we nationalists have little to no agency and that we are easily manipulated and duped by the political establishment. But such conspiratorial-minded views are gradually becoming more and more accepted. Most of us on the Far Right believe that the notorious Combat 18 was a creation of the 'Deep State' as was the German NSU (National Socialist Underground). We have our suspicions about the EDL (English Defence League) and Britain First looks more and more fishy by the day as well. As for Jack 'The Pak' Sen's British Renaissance, the less said, the better. Nationalists are getting wise to all this...

Aside from creating provocateur and front organisations from scratch, the 'Deep State' avails itself of the method of inserting provocateurs into the scene. This is what the German 'Deep State' has done to German nationalism (neo-Nazism). As Carolyn Yeager writes of the NSU trial,

In various parliamentary inquiries as well as during the trial itself, every effort to pin down what happened meets a barrier when it comes up against the intelligence services. The most sensational case is that of Andreas T., an informant leader who was sitting in the Internet cafe in Kassel on April 6, 2006 when the owner, Halit Yozgat, was shot. Andreas T. lied, pretending that he didn't even know of the place. Police investigations on the suspicion of murder were shelved to protect his identity from becoming known, and the files of Hesse's intelligence service remain under lock and key.

Tino Brandt is another key figure for connections between the NSU and the intelligence services. The Thuringian “Nazi” was unmasked as an informant in 2001 and was branded a traitor in the right-wing scene. Since then, he's been convicted and sentenced for sexually assaulting a minor. The secret informers for the intelligence services are a pretty sleazy bunch. I believe these informers are there to stir up activism and petty crime that they can then report to the intelligence service, giving them cause for cracking down on right-wing parties or organizations.

The venerable German neo-Nazi party, the National Democratic Party of Germany, has become hopelessly riddled with informers and provocateurs. In response to a speech by Michèle Renouf, 'In defence of Germany's National Democratic Party', one acerbic commentator wrote:

Petronius

Posted March 14, 2016 at 7:06 pm |

NPD is by now a tiny, powerless, incompetent, non-influential, rapidly vanishing party, dozing in a limbo state or zombie mode, undermined to the hilt by Verfassungsschutz snitches and agent provocateurs, thus kept alive by the state to always have a brown bogeyman and a garbage dump for any right-wing thought ready. It is also burdened with a substantial share of hopelessly narrowminded sectarian NS nostalgics blocking any progress or broader popular appeal. I hope it dies as soon as possible, being undead already.

Finally, it should be noted that the German neo-Nazis do their cause no good when they make use of street-fighting tactics. Like the EDL, Britain First, the National Front and countless other British Far Right groups, the German nationalists make a practice of provocatively marching through indifferent or hostile neighbourhoods with the intention of arousing the communist Left, who show up in large numbers with the intention of 'smashing the fascists'. In what becomes a waste of taxpayer's money, large numbers of police are required to keep the two warring parties apart, and the bewildered and alienated townsfolk are treated to the sight of one group of misfits screaming and chanting at another group of misfits separated by a police line. The nationalists here are behaving like an invading army and they don't do any political work - they don't canvass the locals and try and work out what their concerns are. And by not appearing smart and well-turned out (like Norbert Hofer, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen) and by dressing in weird outfits, they don't give those same locals a positive impression of nationalism.

 The large presence of skinheads and provocateurs in their ranks, along with the reliance upon confrontational tactics, explains, to a great extent, the decline in the NPD's electoral fortunes and the dim view Germans have of them. It's no wonder, then, that German voters are abandoning them for Alternative for Germany (AfD).

III.

It's parties such as the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the AfD which point the way forward for neo-Nazis - on the Continent and elsewhere in the West. The politicians of the FPÖ have enjoyed their recent success by campaigning mostly on local issues. Grass-roots politics is combined with a concern for social welfare. In an AFP article, 'Even in "Red Vienna", Austrian far-right is king' (May 7th, 2016), we find:

Paul Stadler, since October the FPOe head of Simmering council, is no fan of mass immigration, of Muslim "parallel societies" or "economic migrants" taking jobs from Austrians.

"Austria is still a Christian country, and at the moment it looks like we are being overrun by Islamism," Stadler told AFP. "We have 500,000 unemployed. The more we take in, the harder it is to deal with the native inhabitants."

But, he says, such matters are "for the television". His job as a local politician is to deal with day-to-day concerns like public transport -- something the left forgot how to do.

"The SPOe were very arrogant. They didn't listen to the people any more, they governed over their heads," Stadler said in his office in Simmering town hall. "We talk to the people, find out what the problems are and deal with them."

That strategy has won the FPÖ hundreds of thousands of working-class votes. It can be applied here in Australia. Nationalist activists campaigning for office only need to relegate Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, 'debating anti-whites' and 'fighting white genocide', the rights and wrongs of the wars in Syria and the Ukraine, predictions of race wars, conspiracy theories regarding the New World Order, to the background - the masses aren't interested in these subjects as we are - and concentrate on what the above AFP article calls 'day to day concerns'. Instead of imposing our ideological preoccupations and obsessions on the masses, we allow the masses to impose their wants, worries and cares on us.

 In Australia, we should look at running at the council level, not at the state and federal - which are the province of the two major parties. The councils represent the one chink in the enemy's armour.

To some, I may appear to be contradicting myself here: that I'm advocating neo-Nazism on one hand and advocating the doing away with it on the other. But one's radical ideology needn't be thrown out the window in the pursuit of electoral success: one can be a grass-roots populist and at the same time retain a political world-view which is radical and intellectual. The Militant Tendency in Liverpool in the 1980s gives us the best example of this. That crackbrained Trotskyite outfit infiltrated local Labour Party branches in Liverpool, got themselves elected to the City Council, and within a short amount of time achieved absolute control over that body. How did they do this? By listening to the working-classes and by breaking down Trotskyism - which, like all Marxist-Leninist theories, is highly esoteric and intellectual - into layman's terms. One could say that they returned Bolshevism to its roots. I argue that the same can be done for Hitlerism.