Stalin's Revenge: Trump, Weimar and the American Revolution of 2020

I. 

America at present finds itself caught in the throes of a communist revolution. Many conservative commentators have noted that the upheaval bears a resemblance to the Cultural Revolution in China, which is true enough, but comparisons should also be made to the communist revolutions in Germany in the period 1918-1923 and Hungary in 1919. In particular, the establishment of a Soviet (the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ) in the middle of Seattle recalls the establishment of the Soviet Republic in Bavaria. 

While the recent upsurge may be a fleeting phenomenon - Kurt Eisner's Soviet did not last long, and neither will Raz Simone's - what is important is that nothing like CHAZ has ever been attempted on American soil. America today is looking more and more like the Central Europe of a hundred years ago. And that has led me to pick up and re-read a classic anti-communist work from that time, one which is written by a Central European - Hitler's Mein Kampf. It contains a great many insights which are pertinent to America's travails (and the Anglosphere's, as Australia and England are following the same path as America). 'Woke' capital, the defection of conservatives to the Left, bullying by 'SJWs' - it is all anticipated by Mein Kampf. 

Peter Brimelow once wrote a famous article, 'America's Immigration Policy - Hitler's Revenge?'; I think that the events in America today are a case of Stalin's revenge. In the early 1990s, Soviet communism collapsed, and with it, American communism. The left-wing activist Max Elbaum describes in his Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Mao, Lenin and Che (2002) the meltdown of the non-CPUSA and non-Trotskyite communist groups  in 1989: in that year, the pro-Russian communists were dealt a deathblow by the anti-communist revolts in Eastern and Central Europe, and the pro-China communists by the bad publicity after the Tiananmen Square massacre. After 1989, communists such as Elbaum tried their hand at a non-Leninist leftism before giving up, and by the 1990s, most of the hardened Marxist-Leninist cadre disappeared into obscurity. The consequence was that we enjoyed, in the 1990s, the first decade in over a hundred years which was free of communism (in that respect, the 1990s seem like a golden era). Leninism had in that decade suffered an ignoble fate and one which for it was worse than death: it became the subject of postmodern humour and irony - see, for example, the famous Seinfeld episode 'The Race' (1994). But after Obama's election and Occupy Wall Street, Marxism staged a remarkable comeback, with the results we all know. And the reason for the communist revival is not hard to discern. As Ann Coulter argues, it is immigration - massive, non-white immigration - which is to blame: if you import Third World people, you import Third World Marxism. This has what has tipped Western nations to the Left. In the Anglosphere, the two foremost Center-Left parties - the US Democratic Party, the British Labour Party - have been transformed into communist parties in all but name (and Center-Left parties elsewhere in the West (e.g., Australia, France, Germany, Sweden) have followed their example). But communists understand that parliaments and elections will only get you so far, and they feel that they cannot rely upon a 'bourgeois' figure such as a President Biden to deliver the goods; hence, they are resorting to time-honoured Leninist methods - intimidation, riots, violence... The use of these has shattered American society, and the communists will not let up in their offensive, as they believe in the long term their tactics will pay off. The riots may peter out, the Seattle Soviet may dissolve - this time. But what happens next time? And when will be 'next time'? A stormy decade lies ahead. And Stalin may have the last laugh. 

Here I am throwing around the words 'Marxist', 'Bolshevik', 'Leninist', 'communist' liberally, and this raises the question of definition. We can sum up Marxism in bullet points - e.g., Marxism is a political concept that encompasses theories of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, historical materialism and so forth; we can also connect it to the actual political regimes in Moscow and Beijing, and the franchisee parties that these regimes ran all around the world; but we must acknowledge, in the last analysis, that Marxism cannot be defined by mere reference to Soviet politics fifty years ago or textbooks on dialectical materialism. Marxism surpasses history and theory. Marxism exists beneath the surface of society, it then bubbles, it erupts; it is a primal force, an underground force and a spiritual force; it is what Evola would call daemonic. As Hitler says in Mein Kampf: 

International Marxism is nothing but the application - effected by the Jew, Karl Marx - of a general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith; but in reality that general concept had existed long before the time of Karl Marx. If it had not already existed as a widely diffused infection the amazing political progress of the Marxist teaching would never have been possible. In reality what distinguished Karl Marx from the millions who were affected in the same way was that, in a world already in a state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. 

Few of the Black Lives Matters protesters, rioters, looters and arsonists have read Marx's Kapital or Engels' Anti-Dühring. The same can be said of the statue and monument defacers and destroyers; the corporations who have donated large sums of money to 'anti-racist' causes and who are promoting Black Lives Matters propaganda; the Social Justice Warriors who are banning movies and TV shows and are getting people fired... What counts is the underlying feeling. Modern Leftism can only be understood if we look at as a species of animus directed against a particular ethnic group. Leftism champions socialism, but hates the white working-class, which it regards as the most reactionary and 'racist' of all the social strata; it champions feminism, but hates white women, the 'Karens' and the 'Beckys'; it champions anti-racism, but hates the culture, institutions, history, habits, social mores of a particular race - the white race. 

How can Leftism, and its offshoot Marxism, be defeated? My advice is that we on the Right could do worse than following the precepts of Mein Kampf - a textbook written by one of the 20th century's foremost practitioners of anti-communism. It is true that one in the 1990s and 2000s could reasonably view Mein Kampf as rather dated and anti-communism as a relic of the Cold War; but old ideas have a way of coming back into fashion, as recent events have shown. 

The trouble is that many on the Right - the Far Right and Center - are perfectly aware of the communist problem, but are not casting about for an anti-communist solution, and certainly not the one proffered by Hitler. The Americans on the Right are clinging to the American tradition of democracy (and for the purposes of this essay I define democracy as a fair and even contest between two or more competing parties). 

The American system has survived for hundreds of years, and will continue to survive for hundreds more - if it is left alone. Hitler, in chapter three of Mein Kampf, 'Political reflections arising out of my sojourn in Vienna', runs through the structural defects of democracy and the parliamentary system, and these defects of democracy can be classified as endogenous, that is, internal to the system. The hide-bound devotee of democracy will remain impervious to such criticisms, as these by themselves do not demonstrate that the system is heading towards collapse. But later in 'Political reflections', Hitler plays his trump card. He asks: what if a political force which is exogenous, i.e., outside the system, intervenes? What if a stranger to democracy enters into it and no longer wants to play by its rules? Then democracy collapses. American democracy will meet this fate, unless communism relinquishes its hold on the Democratic Party, the press, Hollywood, academia, the 'woke' corporations, indeed, the public consciousness itself. But that seems unlikely. Trump may win the next election, but communism will not keel over and die; if anything, it will redouble its efforts.

II. 

I will return to this subject - the death of democracy, as postulated by Mein Kampf - later. For the moment, I want to reproduce some passages which I feel have become extremely pertinent. 

The first of these concerns the subject of bullying, in particular, bullying by the liberals and leftists in the official media; this passage applies, in 2020, also to bullying by Social Justice Warriors on social media: 

Within less than two years I had gained a clear understanding of Social Democracy, in its teaching and the technique of its operations. 

I recognized the infamy of that technique whereby the movement carried on a campaign of mental terrorism against the bourgeoisie, who are neither morally nor spiritually equipped to withstand such attacks. The tactics of Social Democracy consisted in opening, at a given signal, a veritable drum-fire of lies and calumnies against the man whom they believed to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the nerves of the latter gave way and they sacrificed the man who was attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. But the hope proved always to be a foolish one, for they were never left in peace. 

The same tactics are repeated again and again, until fear of these mad dogs exercises, through suggestion, a paralysing effect on their victims. 

Through its own experience Social Democracy learned the value of strength, and for that reason it attacks mostly those in whom it scents stuff of the more stalwart kind [Donald Trump?], which is indeed a very rare possession. On the other hand it praises every weakling among its adversaries [Mitt Romney?], more or less cautiously, according to the measure of his mental qualities known or presumed. They have less fear of a man of genius who lacks will-power than of a vigorous character with mediocre intelligence and at the same time they highly commend those who are devoid of intelligence and will-power. 

Here are some passages on the alliance between the finance-capitalists and the communists - an alliance which, until recently, would have seemed to we moderns something paradoxical. It is only now, with the onset of 'woke' capital, that we understand some of what Hitler is talking about (for a list of corporations that support the Black Lives Matter, antifa and communist riots, see here). 

What other country in the world possessed a better-organized and administered business enterprise than the German State Railways, for instance? It was left to the Revolution to destroy this standard organization, until a time came when it was taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized, in the sense which the founders of the Republic had given to that word, namely, making it subservient to the international stock-exchange capitalists, who were the wire-pullers of the German Revolution... 

Without knowing it, the [communist] worker is placing himself at the service of the very power against which he believes he is fighting. Apparently he is made to fight against capital and thus he is all the more easily brought to fight for capitalist interests. Outcries are systematically raised against international capital but in reality it is against the structure of national economics that these slogans are directed. The idea is to demolish this structure and on its ruins triumphantly erect the structure of the International Stock Exchange... 

The internationalization of our German economic system, that is to say, the transference of our productive forces to the control of Jewish international finance, can be completely carried out only in a State that has been politically Bolshevized. But the Marxist fighting forces, commanded by international and Jewish stock-exchange capital, cannot finally smash the national resistance in Germany without friendly help from outside. For this purpose French armies would first have to invade and overcome the territory of the German Reich until a state of international chaos would set in, and then the country would have to succumb to Bolshevik storm troops in the service of Jewish international finance. 

Finally, here is Mein Kampf on the ineffectual anti-communism of the conservatives: 

At the elections to the Reichstag the growing number of Marxist votes indicated that the internal breakdown and the political collapse were then rapidly approaching. All the victories of the so-called bourgeois parties were fruitless, not only because they could not prevent the numerical increase in the growing mass of Marxist votes, even when the bourgeois parties triumphed at the polls, but mainly because they themselves were already infected with the germs of decay. Though quite unaware of it, the bourgeois world was infected from within with the deadly virus of Marxist ideas. The fact that they sometimes openly resisted was to be explained by the competitive strife among ambitious political leaders, rather than by attributing it to any opposition in principle between adversaries who were determined to fight one another to the bitter end. 

And: 

Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of the mentality which underlies the general concept of life to-day. For this reason alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against Marxism. For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same poisons and its conception of life in general differs from Marxism only in degree and in the character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois world is Marxist but believes in the possibility of a certain group of people - that is to say, the bourgeoisie - being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews. 

III.

Now we come to the passage in which Hitler prophecies the death of democracy. 

On a spiritual training ground of that kind [service in parliament] it is not possible for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to carry on the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they have never seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary quacks who represent the white race are generally recognized as persons of quite inferior mental capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that they could not seriously entertain the hope of being able to use the weapon of Western Democracy to fight a doctrine for the advance of which Western Democracy, with all its accessories, is employed as a means to an end. 

That is to say, one cannot fight Marxism in the name of democracy. Marxists do not revere democracy, and they treat it as a means, not an end, and a means that is to be discarded at will: 

Democracy is exploited by the Marxists for the purpose of paralysing their opponents and gaining for themselves a free hand to put their own methods into action. When certain groups of Marxists use all their ingenuity for the time being to make it be believed that they are inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it may be well to recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same gentlemen snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote, as that principle is understood by Western Democracy.

The German Revolution of 1918 to 1919 woke the conservatives up like a bucket of cold water: 

Such was the case in those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental shortsightedness, believed that the security of the Reich was guaranteed because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own hands, backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters and Jewish dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in which so many parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous parliamentary wizards [Mitch McConnell?] who represented bourgeois democracy could have believed that the brutal determination of those whose interest it is to spread the Marxist world-pest, of which they are the carriers, could for a moment, now or in the future, be held in check by the magical formulas of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism will march shoulder to shoulder with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in securing for its own criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds are nationally orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate.

What happens when the Marxists lose an election, or if anti-communist legislation is passed? 

But if the Marxists should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this witch’s cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered to enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat Marxism, then the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end. Instead of appealing to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers of the Red International would immediately send forth a furious rallying-cry among the proletarian masses and the ensuing fight would not take place in the sedate atmosphere of Parliament but in the factories and the streets. Then democracy would be annihilated forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now be successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the exasperated proletarian masses - just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow they would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking that the Jewish drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed by means of Western Democracy. 

Hitler concludes: 

As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of binding himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving his own interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no longer useful for his purpose. 

IV.

The above describes, to a tee, what America has been undergoing since at least the election of Trump. The Far Left, and its sympathisers on the Center Left and Right, have been using unconstitutional means to oust Trump. (When I say 'unconstitutional', I mean the refusal to accept established political rules, customs, traditions; this refusal may not breach the American constitution as written, but it does breach the spirit of the constitution). The Left is forever accusing Trump of breaking the rules, but it is the political actor that is breaking the rules. For example: the Left does not follow one of the underlying principles of democracy, and that is the doctrine of the consent of the loser; the Left does not recognise Trump's win in 2016 as legitimate, and instead of ceding power to its opponent after its having been defeated in a fair contest, it has sought to use its power in the spheres outside the electoral and parliamentary to unseat Trump. 

In theory, political power in a democracy resides in elected officials, but in practice, it is diffused throughout the political organism. It can be found in the Deep State (the police, the secret police, the military, the armed forces, the public sector, education) and also civil society (the trade unions, the chambers of commerce, the churches, the sports bodies, and most importantly of all, the media / entertainment complex). The last of these, the media / entertainment complex, has in 2020 become a virtual political power in itself. It has waged an unrelenting war against Trump from the beginning, and some elements of the Deep State have joined in the campaign. Only recently, certain of America's generals have been praised for their 'defiance' of Trump; both this insubordination and the praise of it are unprecedented in American history, and the conduct of the generals has fueled speculation by the Left that a military coup d'état could push Trump out of office. 

To judge by recent events, the Far Left has completed its long march through the institutions. But it is not only the institutions. The covid lockdown (which has been lauded to the skies by the communist Left) and the Black Lives Matter riots prove that the Left has colonised the American, and Western, public consciousness. How else do we explain the scenes of mass hysteria? The uniformity of slogans in both the covid and 'anti-racist' discourse? America, and the West, is being guided through Yuri Bezmenov's famous four stages of subversion. And it is at this point that democracy breaks down, as voting, and the will of the majority, now count for little. (As Hitler writes in the Vienna chapter in Mein Kampf, 'At first I was quite surprised when I realized how little time was necessary for this dangerous Great Power [the media] within the State to produce a certain belief among the public; and in doing so the genuine will and convictions of the public were often completely misconstrued'). 

On that note, to what extent was George Floyd a creation of the media? But such a phenomenon was not unknown in Hitler's day: 

It took the Press only a few days to transform some ridiculously trivial matter into an issue of national importance, while vital problems were completely ignored or filched and hidden away from public attention. 

The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to be in a long lifetime. All this was done, despite the fact that such names were utterly unknown and indeed had never been heard of even up to a month before the Press publicly emblazoned them. At the same time old and tried figures in the political and other spheres of life quickly faded from the public memory and were forgotten as if they were dead, though still healthy and in the enjoyment of their full vigor. 

V. 

Hitler wrote Mein Kampf as a salesman: at the time, he was selling a product to the German people, and specifically, the German Far Right. His prescriptions for communism worked in Germany ten years after publication, but, one may object, will not work for America, as substantial differences between America and Germany (and America and Europe) exist. 

But Hitler's analysis of communism, at least, does hold true for America, as 2020 America has traded places with Weimar Germany. 

Americans live under a regimen of democracy, Germans do not. Democracy, in Germany since the war, means the rule of Merkel and the parties (the SPD, the CSU/CDU, the Greens, the Free Democrats), and any parties (such as Alternative for Germany (AfD)) outside this circle are regarded as 'undemocratic' even though they may play by the rules of democracy as conventionally understood. The AfD functions as though all the norms of  democracy - the fair contest, the equal chance, the consent of the loser, etc. - apply in Germany when in fact they do not. In America, in contrast, the norms still apply. But now that American democracy has come under sustained and ferocious attack by the Left, the foundations of the democratic state will be chipped away as they were in Weimar. 

Liberal historians have puzzled over why Weimar fell so easily to Hitler, as easily as a tree which has grown rotten and hollowed out from the inside topples in a storm. The truth is that Weimar democracy had attrited by 1933 and had been damaged irreparably by years of relentless and savage assaults by the Left (after 1928, the communists directed most of their (not inconsiderable) firepower at the Social Democrats (the SPD), a party which was one of the main pillars of Weimar). But in today's historiography, the NSDAP and Hindenberg reap most of the blame - the Far Right, not the Far Left, is said to have bored away at democracy from within and caused its collapse. It is clear, however, from Mein Kampf that the NSDAP would not have succeeded - indeed, it would not even have been formed - if not for the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and the Left's subsequent antics, as Hitler freely admits. 

Ann Coulter in her column reflects that a hundred years ago, Americans did not take to Bolshevism. It is the historical unpopularity of socialism in America, and the continuing survival of American democracy, which has led to complacency among conservative Americans who look to communism on the Continent and say to themselves, 'It can't happen here'. But alas, it can. A President Biden may disappoint the Far Left in much the same way as President Obama did, but one must take the long view: communism moves incrementally, two steps forward, one step back, and America has moved leftward under Obama and even further leftward under Trump to a degree which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. It is not inconceivable that in years to come America will turn into Cuba or Venezuela. 

I mentioned earlier the prescriptions of Mein Kampf. If we in the Anglosphere were to follow the book literally, we would form a third political party, wear uniforms, hold huge rallies, make demagogic speeches, mobilise a bunch of paramilitary toughs to keep order at party rallies and crack communist skulls... But that would be applying, in a mechanistic fashion, tactics which would not be appropriate for America in 2020 (for one, third parties in America have never worked and never will). The conditions for the efficacious use of such tactics have not been met, the time is not ripe. In contrast, by 1933, democracy in Germany had been eroded; Weimar resembled nothing more than a collapsing glacier. In such a state of affairs, freedom - and chaos - reign. The reason why the NSDAP got away with street violence is because the Far Left got away with it. (On that topic, the Trump supporters at his upcoming rallies may be subjected to violence by the Left (we saw a foretaste of this in the lead-up to the election of 2016). That would violate another of the unwritten rules of democracy, namely, the principle of allowing your opponent's rallies and conventions to proceed without intimidation and violence, and again it is something that would have been unthinkable twenty or even ten years ago).But when cracks and chasms appear, opportunities present themselves. One of the unintended consequences of the recent upheaval is that not only does it represent a breakthrough for the Far Left, it represents a breakthrough for the Far Right. The Left's devices can, and often do, backfire - remember the case of Chile. 

 

 


 

How did Simone Veil survive Auschwitz?

Auschwitz 'survivor' and pro-abortion activist, Simone Veil, has died at the ripe old age of 89.

How did she survive Auschwitz? Over 1.5 million people died there: this was the worst death camp in the history of the world. The odds of surviving the Chernobyl disaster (which only killed 32 people, according to Wiki) would be greater. Day in, day out, this camp was specifically designed for killing a) as many people as possible and b) killing as many Jewish people as possible - either through gassing or starvation or overwork.

Worse would be the odds of surviving to 89. A spell in one of Stalin's gulags, or Mao Tse-Tung's, would severely reduce one's life expectancy, and we could expect an internment in Auschwitz - which killed more people, proportionately, than any one of Stalin or Mao's camps - to do the same.

Weil's name and that of her sister (another survivor) appear on a Holocaust memorial:

As one of the more than 76,000 Jews deported from France during World War II, Veil appears on the Wall of Names at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, under her maiden name Simone Jacob. So do her father André, her mother Yvonne, her sister Madeleine and her brother Jean. Of the five, only Madeleine and Simone survived the ordeal, though Madeleine would die in a car crash just seven years after the war.

Could it be that others whose names appear on that memorial - which commemorates the Jews gassed to death by Hitler - also survived?

Could the British Labour Party have been saved from Corbyn? An anti-communist strategy

In my previous post, I gave a grossly simplified picture of how communists operate. I said that the main objective of the communists in Hitler's time was to win over the working classes, who, in communist theory, were the most revolutionary of all the classes and were amongst those who suffered the most from the inequities of capitalism. The impression I gave - and the impression Hitler gives in Mein Kampf - is that the communists spent a lot of time exhorting, persuading and haranguing the working classes in mass meetings in the street or in smoky taverns and the like. The truth is, however, that they don't now go about it this way, and haven't done so for a while.

Perhaps one of the reasons why they don't manoeuvre in this manner is because they know, were they to put their ideas plainly and frankly to the working class, that they'd lose - almost every time. Just imagine a debate between a communist speaker and a nationalist in an auditorium filled to the brim with the type of Aussie 'bogans' - working class types - who attend Patriot / Reclaim Australia rallies. The communist would inveigh against the evils of capitalism, and attempt to win the working lads and women over to communism; the nationalist, on the other hand, would sell Far Right nationalism, perhaps even some variant of neofascism or white nationalism. It would be an interesting sight, watching the communist straining his rhetorical muscles and using all his intellectual power to win over converts to Trotskyism or Maoism or Stalinism or whatnot; but we can say in advance that he'd lose. Hitler once said that the German workers truly want socialism, just not socialism of the international - i.e., Soviet - type. The same could be said of Australian workers...

Communists then, knowing this, are inclined to try a different tack and go about their job in a more roundabout way. In his classic work, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (1952), Philip Selznick writes:

[The communist] use of “unity” tactics and of peripheral organizations is based on the assumption that leaders of mass organizations [i.e., the British Labour Party] and those who mold public opinion [i.e., intellectuals] are susceptible to manipulation. Through such activity, oriented to elites, the communists seek to gain access to the major sources of power in the society. In general, the direct relation of the communists to the masses comes only after considerable preparatory work among the “natural” leaders of workers, farmers, and middle-class groups. (Chapter 8, 'Problems of Counter-Offence')

In the Bolshevism of the early days - Lenin's times - communists were to look at such 'petit bourgeois' 'elites' as enemies; now they are to look them as potential friends:

Such intervening elites, standing between the communists and the masses, have always been regarded as the “main enemy” in bolshevik political strategy. Although this basic perspective has not changed, latter-day communism has adopted amore flexible and sophisticated approach to the “petty-bourgeois” leaders and publicists. Lenin stressed the need for a frontal attack upon these elites to isolate them from the masses. In this, however, he displayed too much faith in the potentialities of open communist agitation; his successors have relied more on deception, using the techniques he himself developed. This has required an attempt to gauge the differential vulnerability and potential utility of elite members for the movement, instead of writing them off as simple collaborators and defenders of the “class enemy.” (Ibid)

That's how, as I've written before, the British communist movement gained almost complete control of the British Labour Party: instead of appealing to the working class Britons who would ordinarily vote for Labour, they went straight to the political institution which (supposedly) represents those workers and took it over. In Selznick's book, the communist appears, not as an orator who stands on top of tables in smoky taverns, haranguing the workers (the image Hitler used in Mein Kampf) but as a giant, amorphous organism - a blob - which extends itself and probes every nook and cranny in an institution, every interstice, with the intent of exerting control.

British communists are not satisfied with installing the aged Marxist Jeremy Corbyn as leader: some holdouts - liberal socialist types - still exist in the party, which must, in the communist view, be turned into a 'party of the new type', i.e., a communist party, or to use communist weasel-words, one more responsive to the British people's need for 'social justice' and one that encourages 'participatory democracy'. To this end, communists set up a front group - a support group for Corbyn, called Momentum - as a means of giving communists an entry point into the party.

You'd think - given the irrelevance and powerlessness of the non-communist section of the Labour Party (which failed to oust Corbyn as leader) - that it would be all smooth sailing for the communists. Unfortunately, British communism doesn't consist of one 'vanguard' party - the monolithic Communist Party of Great Britain performed that function in the old days of the Soviet Union - but dozens. All sorts of sects and microparties have, since Corbyn and Momentum, emerged from the woodwork, and each of them wants their piece of the pie. We are now treated to the unedifying spectacle of several parties and groups - including AWL (Alliance for Worker's Liberty), Left Unity, Worker's Power, the Independent Socialist Network, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) and a host of others  - battling for power. This has been taking place not only in meeting halls but on Facebook and Twitter. They are fighting each other - and, incidentally, the hapless, naive non-communist liberals who wandered into Momentum thinking that its objective was to further the welfare of their communities.

The whole affair reminds me of a wrestling match, and it's one I enjoy hugely. Amusingly enough, some communist groups are so despised by the others that they seem to have been barred from participating in Momentum: these include the large and powerful, and obnoxious, Trotskyite sect the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW), which is descended from the Militant Tendency, which, as you may know, heavily infiltrated the British Labour Party in the eighties before being expelled.

Above the fray floats Corbyn, serene and untouched, a man who has been a member of the Labour Party for thirty years and a lifelong communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; Corbyn never made the mistake of commiting himself to a particular communist sect or party - he remained a 'lone wolf' communist his entire life. His non-sectarianism, and his deep cover entryism, are now paying off.

In an interesting article, the Jewish journalist Nick Cohen makes much of the ideological differences between the various actors struggling for power within the Labour Party:

To understand the collapse of the Labour party just at the moment we needed it most, you must understand the history of the far left. Stalinist communists used to hate and murder Trotskyists. By contrast, at least some Trotskyists could give the impression that they were against mass murder in the name of the revolution. These differences are less pronounced than they once were. But it is a measure of the morally and politically disastrous position Labour is in that these old battles, once of interest only to left-wing historians, have contemporary force.

Corbyn and much of the trade union leadership are the Stalinists’ fellow travellers. Corbyn wrote regularly for the communist daily the Morning Star, and still praises it today. His chief spin doctor Seumas Milne regrets the fall of the Soviet Union. The ‘Stop the War’ coalition Corbyn chaired has replaced support for the Soviet Union with support for Putin, as indeed has Milne. John Rees, Stop the War’s national officer, says that he is against ‘regime change’ in Syria. For good measure, the ‘anti-imperialist’ backed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, describing it as the ‘Russian state defending its interests’.

Most pertinent for our story is Andrew Murray, of the Communist Party of Britain, who was once parliamentary lobby correspondent for the Soviet state-owned Novosti news agency. He is now Len McCluskey’s chief of staff at Unite, and yet another Stop the War apparatchik. As luck would have it, he is also the father of that apparent enemy of the ‘hard left’ Laura Murray. No less a figure than Jeremy Corbyn hired her as a Labour party adviser.

The Alliance for Workers Liberty is, by contrast, resolutely anti-Stalinist. Its origins lie in Trotskyism. Shachtmanite Trotskyism if you want to be picky about it, named after Max Shactman, a mercurial American activist, who could at least see Stalin’s terror for what it was, and eventually gave up on Marxism. I will say this for the AWL, amid its totalitarian theory and regimented thinking, it has a record of honourable opposition to modern dictatorships, and has not joined the rest of the far left in supporting any secular or clerical variant of fascism as long as it is anti-Western. Naturally, the heirs to the Stalinists of the 20th century hate it.

Go through the article by the supposedly innocent Laura Murray and you see the ghouls of the past, shaking off the graveyard soil, and stalking the present. She objects to the ‘extreme Trotskyist politics’ of the AWL, in language that a Stalinist from the 1930s would instantly recognise. The supposed moderate damns them for their ‘uncritical support for Israel’ – by which she means that it does not want to abolish the ‘Zionist entity’ and drive the Jews into exile – and its ‘fanatical support for the European Union’ – by which she means that the AWL doesn’t see the EU as a capitalist club, as any supporter of Corbyn must.

Fascinating stuff, and this relates back to my earlier article on left-wing anti-Semitism. But Selznick - also a Jew - would regard these doctrinal differences as by and large irrelevant. He believed that once you let any Leninist - philo-Semitic or anti-Semitic or Semitic-neutral - into your organisation, your goose was cooked.

In his chapter, 'Problems of Counter-Offence', Selznick offers a comprehensive and subtle strategy for beating back communist infiltrators in academia, trade unions, political parties and other institutions which are frequently targeted by communists for penetration. In my view, the non-communist elements of the Labour Party should follow Selznick's recommendations; they could end up de-Marxifying the party and making themselves electable again.

Now, you may ask, is the British Labour Party worth saving? British nationalists would answer 'No'. They despise the Labour government of 1997-2010 for bringing millions of non-white immigrants - Indians, Chinese, Africans, Muslims - into the country. The men and women running the government at the time - Blair, Mandelson, Brown, Harman - were not, so far as I can ascertain, card-carrying communists; they were liberal socialists who hated the British working class and wanted to replace them. It's these 'Blairites' who now form the nucleus of the anti-Corbyn opposition within the party. What British nationalist would want to see them succeed?

The Corbyn and Momentum saga is important because it gives us a real-life political case study which serves to illustrate how communism works; Selznick's theses have been validated by it. And Selznick's observations pertain to, I think, nationalism. We on the Far Right are now being subject to manipulation by forces outside of us. Selznick defines the organisational weapon in his 'Introduction':

We shall speak of organizations and organizational practices as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutional order of the arena within which the contest takes place. In this usage, “weapon” is not meant to denote any political tool, but one torn from its normal context and unacceptable to the community as a legitimate mode of action. Thus the partisan practices used in an election campaign—insofar as they adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the contest—are not weapons in this sense. On the other hand, when members who join an organization in apparent good faith are in fact the agents of an outside elite, then routine affiliation becomes infiltration.

Organizational weapons exploit a source of power that is latent in every group enterprise. This is the capacity of almost any routine activity to be manipulated for personal or political advantage.

Selznick goes on to give some concrete descriptions of how an organisational weapon may be put to use. The essential thing is that it applies to us: Little Vladimir Putin, and the Kremlin, have put together an organisational weapon to subvert, manipulate, infiltrate nationalists and Far Right organisations such the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Greece's Golden Dawn, France's Front National, Italy's Forza Nuova and others. Putin has done this not only to the Far Right but to the Far Left as well - and also to tendencies in between (such as libertarianism).

Communism still the the threat? 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010)

I recently managed to see Curt Bowers' documentary, 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010), which I recommend to anyone on the Far Right. While the documentary is deeply flawed, on an intellectual level, and doesn't offer what I see as being the correct solution to America's ills (Christian fundamentalism, conservatism and the values of the Founding Fathers), it will change one's views of communism. One can glean the content of Bowers' research on Cultural Marxism from other sources (e.g., William S. Lind), but it's in this documentary that one can find it all in the one place. What's more, much of the documentary was new to me - I hadn't heard of the 'Cloward-Piven strategy' before seeing it - and I'm sure that a good many others will something new in it too.

So what is it about? Bowers claims to have attended, as a young undergraduate in the University of California in Berkeley in 1992, a Marxist conference held by some respectably-dressed academic greybeards. It was at that conference that these Marxists outlined their strategy for the future and vowed to press on with communism and not be dissuaded by the recent dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe - events which were more devastating to communism than any theoretical refutations of Karl Marx's texts. The strategy was to infiltrate and make use of the burgeoning homosexual and environmentalist movements and mount an assault on capitalism, the traditional heterosexual family, Christian morality, in the name of "social justice", "equality" and the rest. To achieve this end they would make use of the traditional communist method of setting up front groups (with names like 'Centre for Political Progress and Change') which would agitate for environmentalism or illegal immigrant rights, for example, while concealing the communist intentions of their founders.

Communists in America have traditionally practised entryism in trade unions, Christian religious groups, academia, education, organisations such as American Civil Liberties Union and the Democratic Party); also movements such as the Afro-American civil rights movement, the 1960s student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the anti-nuclear weapon movement, feminist movement... It goes without saying that Bowers' thesis isn't that communism brought these movements about: communism didn't invent homosexuality, environmentalism, the anti-war movement, Afro-American civil rights... It's a matter of harnessing the energy of the mass movements and exploiting them for communist purposes.

In 2008, as a legislator in Idaho, Bowers wrote a controversial op-ed article in a newspaper which declared that American communists and their associated 'front groups' and 'fellow travellers' had succeeded in implementing many of the goals outlined at that conference in Berkeley in 1992. The article aroused shock and indignation, but also met with public support. It was after that episode that Bowers turned his attentions to researching the American left-wing radical and Marxist groups which had played such a large role in America's decline. 'Agenda-' is the result.

One of the good things about 'Agenda' is the use of diagram charts. Here's one, showing the drift of the Democrat Party (especially under Obama, Reid and Pelosi) to the Far Left, and the drift of the Republican Party to where the Democrat Party once stood:

 

Here is Bowers' other chart diagram, which traces the progressive lineage from Marx to Obama.

Bowers relies upon many of the classics of American anti-communism, such as Cleon Skousen's 'The Naked Communist' (1963) - and also interviews with leading conservatives, including a few former Republican Party politicians and also the New Zealand Americaphile conservative author, Trevor Loudon. It's for this reason - the reliance on secondary sources - that Bowers' documentary (and the chart above) contains a few errors - errors which wouldn't have been made, perhaps, if Bowers had bothered to read books written by actual communists.

One error is the ascribing of too much importance to Fabianism. The Fabians weren't Marxists and have had little influence except outside the Labour Party of Britain, the Australian Labor Party and perhaps the Indian nationalist Nehru. It's true that the Fabians did provide a few 'useful idiots' - people who were sympathetic to Lenin, and then Stalin: Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Sidney Webb. But one shouldn't confuse a useful idiot with an actual communist.

The other error regards the Frankfurt School. I haven't read much of them - only a little Marcuse - but I know enough of them to question whether the Frankfurt School really did found Cultural Marxism and political correctness - which is what Bowers, William S. Lind and other conservatives assert. The Frankfurt School really were men of the thirties and forties, while political correctness emerged (in the West) in the 1990s. Paul Gottfried wrote a book, 'The Strange Death of Liberal Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium' (2005) which is about the rise of political correctness and goes into the doctrines of the Frankfurt School in detail (he knows enough about the School to be considered an expert), and he doesn't link them together.

Another error is Bowers' assertion that North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, China and the rest are communist states. But what we have in Vietnam, Laos and China is a curious anomaly: authoritarian states which are one-party states with a political system which is ostensibly communist but with market economies. China and Indochina stopped believing in communism a long time ago, although there is no sign that the communist parties in those countries will relinquish power.

This is all mere quibble, however. It's after seeing this documentary that I understood the true character of Obama. I'd previously seen him as a standard centre-left Democrat who wanted - like any other US president - strong economic growth, social harmony, prosperity... Obama and his fiscal and monetary stimulus have been a massive failure, of course, and he and all his supporters know it; but what if he didn't want economic prosperity? It's only after you look at his radical left-wing neo-Marxist background that you begin to understand that maybe Obama wants economic stagnation. He wants the capitalist system to fail - and for government and the welfare state to step in. Everything Obama puts forward is designed to push the communist agenda. He wants illegal immigration and gay marriage because he subscribes to neo-Marxist fantasies of gays and Latinos as being "oppressed" (oppressed by the wicked heterosexual WASP, that is); he wants Obamacare because he wants an America that is dependent on the government for its healthcare (and housing, and employment, and education); he wants to combat global warming because he wants state control over the industries (and the Americans) who produce carbon emissions; he attacks the rich because he wants class war between worker and capitalist; he uses the slogan 'Change' because he believes in dialectical change, that is, the transition from a capitalist society to a socialist one.

Is Obama a Marxist? J. Edgar Hoover made the distinction between five types: the open, 'card-carrying' communist; the undercover communist who conceals his beliefs from view; the potential communist convert; the fellow traveller; and finally, the dupe, or useful idiot. By all accounts, Obama was an avowed Marxist in his youth, either an open or undercover one, or maybe a potential convert. This by itself doesn't mean and could be considered a youthful dalliance; after, all we in Australia recently had a prime minister who, in her undergraduate days, was a Maoist. But the fact is that Obama has always associated with communists and left-radicals, and his appointees seem to be left-over commies and the radicals from the 1980s - the type who supported the Sandinistas and Palestinian nationalism and who made plane trips to Moscow and Cuba. What's more, communists campaigned for his election in 2008 and his re-election in 2012, and various radicals and malcontents (such as Jeremiah Wright and the bisexual former New Left terrorist Bill Ayers) form his milieu. There is his family background - his mother, Stanley Dunham, and his mentor, the hardline Afro-American Stalinist Frank Marshall Davis. One can overestimate the influence of one's family on one's politics - after all, I'm sure quite a few people on the Far Right had Far Left parents, and vice versa. But the point is, when one puts this all together, it seems too much of a coincidence. My estimate is that Obama is at the least a fellow traveller or a dupe.

The documentary raises some interesting questions. One is the extent to which communists wield power in our society and to what extent they have become the masters of contemporary social movements such as environmentalism and homosexualism. (One can easily verify for oneself Bowers' claims regarding the communist and Far Left involvement in both of these). But more than that is the general culture: how did the media, for instance, become so unquestioningly pro-multi culti and pro-immigrant? How did we get a justice system where rapists, murderers and illegal immigrants wander around free and unpunished while the likes of Emma West are locked up for something they said on a train?

Future historians will chart the degeneration of Western society from the 1960s, when left-wing radical baby boomers, with the help of "humanist" conservatives, pushed through an agenda of 'change' and 'progress' which has nearly destroyed Western civilisation, mainly through mass non-white immigration. During the 1960s, Australian communist groups were at the forefront of 'change' - campaigning the loudest for the abolition of White Australia and for indigenous rights, simply because they believed that these would be useful to the Soviet and Chinese communist cause. One has to ask: supposing that the communists in Australia had been locked up in concentration camps (like Hitler did to the German communists) or butchered (like Suharto did to hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists) - would the abolition of White Australia gone ahead? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the changes of the 1960s couldn't have been stopped that way. But move forward a few decades - it's certainly true that, had prophylactic measures been taken against British and American communists, Obama wouldn't have won election in 2008 and 2012, Emma West wouldn't have gone to jail and the British Labour Party most likely wouldn't have been able to bring in 3.8 million immigrants from 1997 to 2010.

The White Nationalists blame the West's modern ills on 'Jewish-owned MTV'; the EDL and the other anti-Islamics blame it on Islam; Bowers, on communism and lack of prayer in schools. I think Bowers - more than the White Nationalists and the anti-Islamics - is onto something. This is where we Far Rightists, neofascists, Neo-Nazis come in. We don't know much about prayer in schools but we certainly know about fighting communists.

Bowers has shown us the enemy; now it's a question of which tactics we use to defeat them.

In Praise of Neo-Stalinist Doctrinairism: Censorship, Entryism, Infiltration and How to Prevent Them

I have been following the recent Pat Buchanan saga, as recounted in the excellent Hadding Scott series, 'A Closer Look at What Happened to Pat Buchanan', with minimal interest. Buchanan was fired from the American TV news station MSNBC in January this year. According to Scott, the producers and directors of the station stacked the deck with "minority" (that is, Hispanic, lesbian and left-wing) TV personalities, and got rid of the old centre-right populist war horse Buchanan for, well, political and racial reasons. I like Buchanan - who in the movement doesn't - but find his brand of paleoconservativism tepid. There isn't enough hate in Buchanan to impress me, and I was somewhat appalled to read a recent article of his, praising Obama for his "skill" in negotiating an inheritance tax increase with the Republicans - which offended my anti-Obama, and anti-anti-supply-side tendencies, in one foul swoop.

But the Buchanan incident is a recent, timely reminder how of how media and political commentary can be shaped, by publishers, editors, producers, directors, to suit the needs of a political agenda. David Irving remarked recently, for instance, that Murdoch (the owner of that British institution, The Times newspaper) has stacked the deck with columnists with Jewish names (and with, presumably, just the right pro-Israel and neoconservative credentials). This is normal in politics, of course, and there's nothing wrong with it. A political website, or the political commentaries in a newspaper, or a political journal, should reflect a basic 'party line' and publish material which is faithful to it - nothing more and nothing less. You wouldn't expect, for instance, the Australian Maoist (!) newspaper Vanguard to carry articles with my by-line, for instance, or even the by-line of a moderate liberal conservative like Andrew Bolt. No political organisation can be expected to undermine itself; indeed, as Carl Schmitt remarked, political parties are every day engaged in struggles for their survival, and dominance, just as warring states are. They face the existential question: to be or not to be, just like contending states (and all states, in Schmittian theory, contend).

Which brings us to the topic of my article. All the lessons in practical politics - i.e., founding and managing a political organisation - I've learned at first hand: no-one taught me, and certainly, there were no books, no manuals, to teach me (in the way that there are books teaching you D.I.Y. home repairs, or calculus, or Windows, or French). I've had to learn things which were known to political activists eons ago. One thing I have learned is: when it came to political organisation, Stalin was right.

In the classic The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (1939), which was most likely authored by Stalin, we embark on a mad roller-coaster ride through the ideological permutations, the ideological twistings and turnings, of the Russian Communist Party. Right from the beginning, Stalin tells us, Lenin was beset by foes within the Russian socialist movement, who wanted to corrupt Russian socialism and turn the worker's movement away from Lenin's unclouded, pure vision of the eternal truths of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin is with us at every ideological juncture - from Leninism and into deviation - and Stalin, sometimes alone out of all the Bolsheviks, remains faithful to Lenin's original vision and always leads the Bolsheviks back on track. Stalin's dogmatism, unwillingness to compromise, and faithfulness to the original letter of the founding party documents and the principles of Marx's scientific socialism, saves the day, again and again. Deviationists are remonstrated with or  "smashed". The world outside of the Soviet Union is beaten off, again and again. But the difficult circumstances for Bolshevism (only offset by the "dizzying success" of Stalin's collectivisation programme, which, as we know, led to the death by starvation of millions) only increase, and, by the time of the writing, the USSR is the victim of the plots and machinations of a Trotskyist-Japanese-Gestapo clique, who have infiltrated the Bolsheviks, and Soviet society, at the highest levels. (As we know, Stalin, and his brand of purist Marxist-Leninism, came out on top: hundreds of thousands of these rascals were done to death during the purges of the late 1930s, in an orgy of "unmaskings" and "smashings").

It's an illuminating book, and a foundational text for 20th century communism. Phillip Short, in his biography of Pol Pot, reports how Pol, and the Khmer Rouge intellectuals, devoured the book and applied its lessons. By the end of the Khmer Rouge regimé, tens of thousands (?), hundreds of thousands (?), of Cambodian communists were "unmasked" and "smashed", i.e., tortured and put to death, for being in cahoots with the CIA and the rival communist state of Vietnam. (Likewise, Short chronicles how Mao embarked on a series of purges of the Chinese communist party in the 1930s, using torture to reveal the "guilt" of his opponents). It's a sign of the pathology of communism that many of the party faithful in these three countries went to their deaths still believing in the goodness and rightness of communism and the communist leadership. Like a cult, communism brainwashed its members, and, like a cult, communism succeeded in inculcating feelings of deep guilt in the members it shunned and expelled.

Communists are a conspiratorial bunch, of course, and I myself love conspiracy theories about communists: the idea that Obama, for instance, was a secret communist (influenced from his childhood by his communist parents) and radical Black Power activist, on a mission to infiltrate the presidency - like an Afro-American 'Manchurian Candidate' - I found quite thrilling. Disappointingly, though, Obama turned into a centrist Democrat mostly controlled by the liberal Jewish wing of the party; he didn't do anything really radical. One can point to his socialised medicine health insurance scheme, for instance, or his call for higher taxes on the rich, as evidence of a secret Marxist-Leninist agenda, but: liberal democratic politicians, of the non-communist, social democrat variety, endorse the same policies in Europe. But I like the story, because it implies that a person in politics can be of tremendous self-discipline and dedication; furthermore, it implies that that person can succeed in gaining the highest office in the land. Think of the inhumanity of it - concealing one's true beliefs, from the world, infiltrating a leading political party, and then becoming head of state. One would have to be a superman to do that. (As a comparison, suppose that Udo Voigt, of the NPD, had infiltrated, from a young age, the German Social Democratic Party and ended up chancellor).

It's wildly implausible, to be sure. But, in politics, the world is a scary place, and there are people out there to destroy you, and, as Stalin chronicles in his book, the entryists and "wreckers" will try and destroy you by infiltrating your organisation, Trotsky-style (or they will set up a front organisation serving a political purpose which is kept secret from the majority of the members).

Years ago, I formed a nationalist group with a prominent individual on the nationalist scene here in Australia, and developed a close personal and political relationship with him (I in fact authored dozens of articles published under his name, which are now collected in book form). At the time, I thought all of the membership were in sync, ideologically speaking; but, after a while, I noticed some divergences in the line we were pushing. My friend and close collaborator kept on promulgating Troy Southgate's "National Anarchism": symbols and slogans for "National Anarchism" kept on appearing on our site, and my friend would refer to our group as "National Anarchist" at functions held with other nationalists (who were as bemused as we were). Eventually, we had a few demonstrations with "National Anarchist" symbols and slogans on our banners. I was pretty naive back in those days - as naive as Bambi - and didn't realise what was going on, despite all the evidence in front of me. But, after much inner struggle, I realised that the other members and I were being used for the purposes of "National Anarchism" - an ideology we didn't have any sympathy for, and didn't sign up for when we founded the group - and so I left. (I came across an essay by Southgate, on "National Anarchist" entryism, which is a detailed exposition of how "National Anarchist" activists should infiltrate large, well-established groups, Trotsky-entryist style, and bend them to "National Anarchist" purposes, very subtly and over time, with a combination of stacking the deck, manipulation and repeated indoctrination. Whether or not the co-founder of my group was following Southgate's script, I can't say. I still don't know to this day. The insidious thing is that a good entryist must deny, till he is blue in the face, when confronted with the evidence, and one can never really ascertain the truth. But, in all fairness, sometimes we do things in politics which we are perfectly unconscious of).

I decided that, with any future political endeavours - i.e., any new political groups - I would begin with a founding party document, that all members had to subscribe to (like a contract to read and sign before joining). That way, we would all be on the same page ideologically, so to speak, and unfortunate developments like "National Anarchist" entryism would be prevented. One of the problems with my previous group was that it lacked a constitution, a worked-out structure for the day to day management of the group, and a platform which would serve as a founding document. In other words, one needs, in a group, rules for the day-to-day functioning, and one needs a statement of common purpose. Terribly obvious, of course, but not to me at the time.

Previously I had thought, when co-founding the group co-opted by "National Anarchism", it would be good to be part of a collective with an amorphous structure in which things 'just happened'. In hindsight, that approach can work, perhaps, for Situationist and anarchist collectives (but then, even the original Situationist International degenerated, by some accounts, into a hierarchical and dogmatic organisation ruled by Debord). But, in a situation where there is no law, and there is, in fact, a state of pure anarchy, the man with the most resources ends up being the king: he ends up calling the shots. My "National Anarchist" comrade owned the website, and had the most money (and all the connections necessary to get things done, i.e., get shirts, banners, made), and so he ended up being the kingpin. Which is one of the reasons why, in my view, anarchism of any sort doesn't work.

Unfortunately, lightning strikes twice. My second political group - which didn't have a constitution, but at least did have a party platform, authored by myself - has been infiltrated and co-opted by a rival tendency. This time around, it isn't "National Anarchism", but white nationalist, white power, Neo-Nazi skinheadism.

I like to think of my own politics as being 'neofascist' or 'post-Nazi'. I admire Evola and Yockey because they worked with a clean slate: their writings are a brilliant reconstruction of the founding principles of the wartime and pre-war fascist movement; they reworked, revised fascism, and, in some instances, did away with part of it altogether. Evola achieved this with the aid of the occult doctrine of Tradition; Yockey, with the pre-war, 'Conservative Revolutionary' German thinkers Spengler and Schmitt. The result was that Hitler and Mussolini were adapted to the bleak realities of Cold War Europe.

White nationalism really is a weird doctrine - a universalist (i.e., applying equally to everybody) thesis, much like all American political theses - and, as for skinheadism, it is an equally strange combination of Jamaican 'Rude Boy' gang culture, mixed in with Neo-Nazism of the George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan, Savitri Devi type. It's where reggae and white nationalism intersect. On a personal level, I don't have anything against skinheadism, white nationalism, or Ku Klux Klanism - some of these types are very nice people. But they don't represent me politically, and they do tend to attract some lumpenproletariat types. Liberal popular culture makes great use of this fact, and uses it as a weapon against us.

Some sectors of the movement are lumpen-magnets: but this is no bad thing. The advantage of a lumpen-magnet group is that the group will attract bad people, who may attain a position of leadership, power, status and pride in such a (often miniscule) organisation, and keep them away from the established nationalist groups with good, decent ordinary white people. I'm a relativist, and I believe in tolerance and diversity: the skins, white power and Klansmen types can have their groups, and I'll have mine, and never shall the twain meet - except at the odd non-denominational nationalist event.

So how did my group get infiltrated by the white power tendency? Or, moreover, how can one tell if one's group has been infiltrated and co-opted? There is one simple method, which I call the 'attack test'. (It's a method which suits my personality - being a negative, nay-saying individual who likes to attack things).

The reader will recall that I wrote most of the articles for my old, "National Anarchist"-infected group. I was given a lot of freedom to write for that group: had I approached the "National Anarchist" co-founder with a proposal to write an anti-communist article, I would have seen it accepted, and published, at once; likewise, had I proposed an anti-feminist article, or an anti-neoliberal article, or an article denouncing Keynes, Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. But - and here's the crucial test - suppose I had proposed an article with the title, 'Against National Anarchism'. I would have been told that my article could not be published, 'in its present form', and certainly 'not with its present title'. All that nice talk about being a 'collective', which accepts article submissions written from 'many viewpoints', would have gone out the window. (As it is, I wish I had had the sense of mischief, at the time, to propose an article with that title, just to see the look on the co-founder's face).

The 'attack test' could be applied elsewhere on the political spectrum. Suppose I approached a journal for a Trotskyite front group - 'The Australian Federate League for Students and Workers', to use a made-up example - and offered an article attacking Stalin (from a left-perspective), or the Australian Liberal Party, or US foreign policy, or China, or Putin - it would be cheerfully accepted (providing that it was couched in the appropriate Marxist terminology). But had I proposed an article with the title, 'Against Trotsky', or 'Against Leninism' - it would be rejected. The 'attack test' really exposes the founding principles on which a group is based.

What counts, for the 'attack test', is the perspective. Many nationalist sites have articles by the likes of Alex Kurtagic or Colin Liddell attacking the BNP, for instance. These articles are attacks on the Nick Griffin faction of the BNP, or what side of British Far Right nationalism the BNP represents: they aren't criticisms of the BNP from a left-liberal or communist point of view, of course. But, were those same sites to denounce Holocaust Revisionism, or praise Israel and the Jews for their many splendid qualities, or suggest that South Africa's or Britain's whites be exterminated by black people - well, that would be odd. It would be a case of a political organisation contradicting itself. Nationalists don't set up sites to attack nationalism as such; they will only publish articles attacking nationalism if they are making that attack from the viewpoint of another faction. Which is something quite common, as factions of the Far Right, like the factions of the Far Left, are forever attacking one another.

So, as one may gather, an article proposal with the title, 'Against White Nationalism', and criticisms of the ideology of David Duke and Don Black, wouldn't go down well in an organisation with white nationalism as its foundation. (I quite like Duke and Black, but really am critical of white nationalism - considering that white nationalism has been around for forty years and hasn't made any significant political inroads (well, the present neofascist-leaning mayor of Rome does wear a Celtic Cross tie pin, which is something). Being an intellectual, and something of a Cartesian, I trace the failures of white nationalism back to the first principles, the axioms, of the creed: something must have gone intellectually with white nationalism at the start for it to fail in the long run). Likewise, an article attacking skinheads - 'From Rude Boy to White Power' - wouldn't go down well either in a skinhead magazine; nor would 'Against George Lincoln Rockwell' in a white power / self-proclaimed "National Socialist" journal.

Now, a Pierre Krebs-Nouvelle Droite group would accept such submissions, because white power, skinheadism and Neo-Nazism wouldn't form the foundation of such a group (and even the radical white nationalist William Pierce didn't like skinheads, or skinhead music, very much, despite founding the Resistance Records label). Likewise, a "National Anarchist" journal, edited by Southgate, would accept such submissions. But my group - which I started - won't. And, in the group's 'founding document' (which I wrote), Rockwell, "National Socialism", white-power white nationalism, skinheadism, Skrewdriver and Ian Stuart - are mentioned nowhere. But, according to the 'attack test', these are, in fact - without my knowing it - the principles on which my group is based. That is, the principles on which the group is based at present - they weren't there when I started.

With my new group, I began with Stalinist and Leninist intentions: that is, with the intention of maintaining a high degree of organisation, cohesion and agreement ideologically and politically. The founding principles, and 'party line', were expressed in the founding documents (and, really, should have been periodically affirmed, or revised, in formal group gatherings - i.e., communist party-type party congresses). This approach has a number of advantages: one is that members know what they are in for when they join the organisation; members know where their beliefs stand in relation to those of the party; members can amend, revise, any parts of the program in a formal, democratic way; members know that other members are on the same page as them, ideologically; members can determine, by referring to the founding documents, how far (or close) their present efforts and activities are in relation to the goals of the party. And so forth. Obvious stuff, but essential for any organisation, political or non-political.

I was somewhat remiss in holding party congresses and the like, and never did get around to writing a constitution (but then, constitutions of groups, like the constitutions of states, don't always need to be written on paper - Britain has no written constitution). At the time, though, I thought I had done a good job, and didn't see how I could have gone any further. Perhaps I should have had members of the organisation swear a solemn oath to uphold the principles of the organisation; and had them sign declarations in blood. (Evola writes on the importance of oaths, and promises, and notes how oaths are still regarded as being sacred, i.e., having a religious or spiritual dimension, even in today's secular and profane world).

Now, though, I see that I should have gone much further down the path of Stalinist-style ideological purity. One must make a holy grail of it. The most successful communist organisations began life as small bands of intellectuals and activists dedicated, unswervingly, to the dogma that is Marxist-Leninism. (And Hitler, from the other side of the fence, also upholds dogmatism, doctrinal purity and the small but fanatical membership in his Mein Kampf. But then, Hitler had the example of the German communist groups before him - some of the most disciplined organisations the world had ever seen).

As to how, I don't know exactly. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, referred back to the work of Marx and Engels; today's Scientologists, the work of L. Ron Hubbard; today's Mormons, Joseph P. Smith and all the Mormon leaders who came after; Muslims, the Koran and its interpreters. In order to be dogmatic, one must have a fairly large body of written work to be dogmatic about. The question is, can one theorise, and lead, at the same time? The answer is, of course, yes, and the above leaders (Hubbard, the Prophet Muhammad, Smith, Stalin, et al.) were prolific writers. All the same, it helps to have a division of labour, when it comes to theory and practice. It's more convenient to be a leader, and follow an existing body of theoretical (or theological) work, or to write a lot of books, and let someone else lead.