The Menace of Unity: To Uniform or not to Uniform?

Much of the nationalist political struggle isn't about impressing one's ideas on 'ordinary people' (however they may be defined), but about positioning oneself and one's ideology in relation to other nationalist groups. One does that in a number of ways. One can write articles and books explaining why one's 'line' is different from the other fellow's (in much the same way Lenin did for most of his political career, churning out endless treatises on why a rival Marxist theoritician's path was the wrong path, or why such-and-such a faction in the Russian socialist movement were bounders and blockheads). It's a useful and extremely important exercise - Lenin's diatribe writings have stood the test of time and are still used, by the contemporary Left, today. But there are other, more subtle, and more practical means: one of these is the multi-denominational event, when a bunch of nationalist individuals and groups turn up to listen to one another's speeches, or just socialise. The question is, how is one to stand out? Suppose you are hosting other nationalists at some venue, like King Henry VIII receiving some foreign dignitary (the King of Scotland, or the French Ambassador) in the TV show The Tudors (2007-2010). Your first duty is to impress upon them the power of your organisation. That means festooning the back wall with a giant banner with the logo of one's group, wearing a special, very distinctive t-shirt and cap with one's logo, and maybe even going so far as wearing tie-pins, belt buckles and rings with one's logo. That sounds excessive, but I can name at least three or four nationalist tendencies and groups which do a roaring trade in a range of nationalist, Far Right and racialist paraphenalia associated with their particular group. Skinheads will go to the extent of having jacket patches and even tattoos with their group symbols. All of this 'visual propaganda' serves the purpose of sending a variety of messages - unspoken messages - to the groups of the opposing tendencies.

As I wrote in my last post, the nationalist scene is awfully competitive in some Western countries. The question is, how does a group stand out? How does it leap ahead of the pack? Forget chopping and changing one's ideology to appeal to a mythical 'Joe Normal': how does one get noticed by Joe Normal in the first place? How does one distinguish one's group from all the other groups?

I'm not an expert, by any means, on Hungarian Far Right politics. But I'm willing to believe that, ten years or so ago, there were a variety of Hungarian nationalist groups and parties on the scene. Jobbik, for the time being, has crushed them all. Its ideology is uncompromising, extreme, inflammatory, unapologetically anti-Semitic and pro-fascist (that is, pro-Arrow Cross, the great wartime Hungarian fascist party). We all know the clichés of modern political science (first popularised by Hitler in Mein Kampf) to the effect that the masses only like blacks and whites, extreme polarisations: they don't like subtle politics. What's more, they want The Truth with a capital 'T': and, in Hitler's politics, that means saying downright inflammatory and offensive (usually offensive to x ethnic group) things which stand to get one in trouble, while lauding oneself for one's courage and even foolhardiness. ('There's just something about me: I must speak the truth, even if I go to jail for it'). The Hungarian masses, certainly, don't want soft soap from a Far Right Hungarian nationalist: they want to hear about how the Jews, homosexuals and gypsies are poisoning Hungarian life, and they expect to hear it from that nationalist politician alone (no liberal democratic politician, no matter how "conservative", will dare a word against Jews, gypsies and homosexuals). Similarly, while there must be "moderate" Islamist parties in Afghanistan, somehow it's the Taliban which rises to the top (in occupied Palestine, it's Hamas, in Lebanon, Hezbollah). And, on the Left, the Third World is littered with the wreckage of socialist (but not Marxist) parties which were passed over in favour of the communist ones. Fascism, Islamism, Communism: three brutally simple, and durable, doctrines.

But, in addition to having a frank, uncompromising, extremist ideology, Jobbik had another ace in the hole, and that was the Magyar Gárda. This was a militia - an unarmed militia - composed of men who wore uniforms resembling those of the Arrow Cross. The Magyar Gárda, to me, looked perfectly inoffensive: their get-up had a quaint Central European feel about it - except for the military boots, you could be forgiven for thinking that they were peasant herdsman who lived in the mountains... But their appearance drove the liberal media and politicians into a frenzy. Footage was shown, on TV, of the Magyar Gárda marching, with headlines like 'The Rise of the Far Right in Europe' - these were reports portending all sorts of calamities. Really it just a bunch of men marching in uniform (but not in the armed forces, or the police), but, to go by the liberal media, you could be forgiven that the sky had caved in.

We see the same phenomenon repeated elsewhere - e.g., with the treatment of the Patriots of the Ukraine, another paramilitary-type group. And, no doubt, if a similar uniformed (or half-uniformed) bunch of nationalists were to appear in Britain, the liberal establishment would go into a frenzy, and demand that the old 1936 law against the wearing of uniforms 'for political purposes' be dusted off and applied again. (Some nationalist commentators argue that the English Defence League does break the uniform law. In their view, the fact that the EDL hasn't been jailed only proves that the EDL are in collusion with the state).

Why is this? The reasons are twofold, in my view.

The first reason is the fact that there is a sort of uniform. White Western people aren't mean to wear uniforms of any kind: they are meant to, aesthetically, 'Do their own thing' and 'Be an individual'. Muslims, to be sure, are allowed to dress the same, or nearly the same. Hijabs, Chadors and Burkahs all help conceal a Muslim woman's individuality and mark her out as belonging to a particular ethnic and religious group. The same goes for the austere dress of the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews (then there are the moderately religious Jews, who wear kippahs but don't wear black 19th century clothes, like the Haredim). In the West, negating one's own individuality, by dressing the same way as the fellow next to you, is really, really dangerous - if the negator is white. This sort of self-negation suggests that you don't put your own unique tastes and preferences first: instead, you put them second, to something else - collectivism.

The second reason is the militarist discipline - the fact that these outfits, boots, etc., look military, and that the marchers are acting in a unified, disciplined way (which is what a march is). Again, the liberal establishment disdains this and abominates it as a sort of collectivism. Men (especially white men) concentrated on a single purpose, a single goal, subordinating themselves, like rowers in a rowing race, and acting in a unified, harmonious and even mechanical way: that's dangerous. It may even lead to socialism, and hence, following Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), serfdom. Hayek's book was a impassioned, brilliant defence of 'Anglo-Saxon liberties' which were, at the time of writing, being challenged by the Communist and Fascist alternative. Hayek's fear was that the collectivisation and planning of the war effort would carry on in to peace time, after the successful conclusion of the war, in the Anglo-Saxon countries... What is socialism but the mechanisation and militarisation of peacetime activities, e.g., economic ones? Another, unspoken fear of the Hayeks is - what if such a system actually works? Now, in 2012, we have plenty of evidence that it doesn't work: if the East Germans - the most disciplined, self-subordinating, efficient and 'Prussian' of all the peoples of Europe - couldn't make communism and the planned economy work, well, no-one can: certainly not Cubans or North Koreans! But you never know...

Aside from that angle - that 'Fear of marching white men is really a fear of socialism' - it's also a reaction that is purely aesthetic. The typical establishment liberal finds the sight of Jobbik-style marchers more disgusting than, say, the sight of two gay men kissing.

At any rate, fighting against the white man's desire to subordinate oneself to a group is a lost cause. We have plenty of subcultures - Goth, Emo, skinhead, metal, and so forth - based on a visual and aesthetic conformity. But even outside that, there's the trade unions...

The latter example is a particularly illuminating one. For around about two weeks now, construction workers in the CFMEU and other unions have been blockading the building site of a department store building in the Melbourne Central Business District: among their litany of complaints is that the construction company - Grocon - won't let union members identify themselves, on site, by allowing them to wear union patches on their jackets or stickers on their helmets. Symbols (and the feeling of belonging that these symbols give them) are important to these men - important enough to lose pay over. This morning, acting upon a court order brought against the strikers, by Grocon, mounted police attempted to break the blockade. (See the picture above). Some poor horses were punched, and some of the strikers were pepper-sprayed... (The TV news footage shows a bemused Chinese immigrant woman staring out of a McDonald's window at the goings-on: all the strikers, and the policemen, were white). The media gleefully recounted that it was like the 'good old days' of the industrial militancy of the 1970s and early 1980s. (I saw two bearded student types, one of them waving an Industrial Workers of the World flag: anarcho-syndicalists, trying to associate themselves with this episode of militancy?).

I pass the building site, and now the strikers, every day on my way to work (I had a union flier thrust into my hands one day). These men are real blue-collar: they seem to be of a particular type - Aussie, middle-aged, often overweight, and they smoke and swear a lot. But what is striking is that they dress more or less alike: they wear a kind of semi-uniform. It's a long way from neofascism, but we have to remember that fascism emerged, originally, from anarcho-syndicalism (which in turn was based on 'spontaneous' worker's socialism sprouting out of trade union militancy).

At any rate, I didn't get to see the riot this morning. But it's good to pay attention to such things: they haul you out of the incestuous confines of nationalist politics. If we were to put all the members of the various racialist, nationalist and Far Right Australian groups together in Lonsdale Street in Melbourne - there wouldn't be half the number of union strikers that were there, in that same street, that day. Granted, the unionists had a strong economic incentive to be part of the union and participate, but, at the same time, they are losing money every day of the strike. (Not as much as Grocon, which claims it is losing $370,000 a day). All of that unified effort, collectivism, self-sacrifice and abnegation of one's own individuality - on behalf of white men. Gives one pause, doesn't it? Why can't nationalism do the same?

My advice to any nationalist group is: do what Jobbik did, and get some gear together, get it on, and give the appearance (appearance is the operative word) of renouncing your identity and subordinating yourself to the group. It doesn't have to be a military-style uniform: it could be a t-shirt, a belt-buckle or a tie-pin.

'To uniform or not to uniform?' is a question which has been asked, countless times, in post-war nationalist circles. There is a whole thread, on the neofascist forum IronMarch.Org, about it, with many intelligent arguments, for and against, on both sides. Reading it makes one aware of the role played by the uniform in politics, whether it be on the Far Right or the Far Left.

I found this comment, from Benjamin Noyles, particularly insightful:

It depends on your aim, In some cases it may be that being militant and threatening, alienating and frightening may just be the only way to get anyone to pay attention to you. Certainly almost nobody in the group below would have been known if they did not activly go out of their way to offend everyone - it got them speaking venues in university events across america, tv interviews, radio shows, full media coverage, the works. The Uniform was just a tool to get people to change their perceptions so in this sense they were artists rather than a sincere political movement. They knew that the american right wing was going to be dead unless it learned to embrace it's shadow. what does it look like when an artist of all people babbles in an interview about how they are not this or that and they don't want to upset anybody.

Like with a musical subcluture being marginalised can also be the appeal for some, and can in time make itself acceptable.



- Really it all depends what your aim is at the time and the task you are doing.

He's right, he makes a good point. We have to consider the political and intellectual context of the times, of course. America was in the period of the early 1960s, so ably depicted in the TV series Mad Men (2007-2012), when the WASP hegemony of America (and the West) was at its full height) and the New Left was just beginning to cast its dark shadows over Western lands. The American Far Right, at the time, was starving. The likes of Rockwell just couldn't break through to mainstream America in order to warn them of 'The Negro and Commie Jew-fink menace'. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to work with respectable Far Right conservative organisations, and even front groups for (what he called) National Socialism; but he came away burned each time. He recounts the story in his autobiography This Time the World (1961) (I re-read parts of it tonight for the first time in years, and I still find it as brilliant and demented as ever). One can say he went too far, but one has to laud his courage for doing what he did in the first place. His theory may have not been that sound, but in his actions, he showed himself to be a real fascist and a real showman - an heir to Goebbels...

Am I counselling nationalist groups to dress like the Rockwellian Nazi bad guys in The Blues Brothers (1980)? No, and even the mere suggestion of such a thing brings out some strong opposing reactions from nationalists - even nationalists who post on a neofascist message board like IronMarch.Org. I'm making the point that Rockwell (who was well aware of it) broke the media embargo against Far Right nationalism and racialism with his methods, and, I'm sure, for a time, blew every single rival nationalist and racialist group out of the water.

Back to the Basics: Hardcore Neofascism for Britain

Poor old Nick Griffin! The Guardian has written a piece on Fatty Nick's denunciation (in a "report" authored by him, and released last week) of the English Defence League for excessive "Zionism". There's also a 48-minute speech, by Griffin, which, according to Counter-Currents, is 'An excellent exposé of the English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad movement as a Jewish-controlled false opposition'. Wait a moment: 'Jewish-controlled'? Doesn't that sound... "Nazi"? Isn't it the case that "Anti-Semites" who peddle zany "conspiracy theories" about Jews are dragging the British nationalist movement down? Aren't they all "Nutzis"? These were the Griffinite positions of five or so years ago; anyone who remembers the Griffinite line from then must be chortling now...

I must confess I have a personal stake in the matter. Five or so years ago, there were quite a few nationalist activists on the Australian scene who preached the Griffin doctrine (which I now call 'Breivikism'): the movement, in Australia, would only take off if all the "Nutzis", crazy anti-Semites - including me - could be purged. Continental Far Right-style, anti-Islamist populism was the order of the day. In all fairness, Far Right populism has done well on the Continent - especially on the Western side (or Europeans closely related, by dint of culture, to the Western side - e.g., the Scandinavian nations Finland, Norway and Sweden). It was a reasonable assumption that the same type of tactics could be applied, and meet with similar success, in Britain. Given that the nationalist movement had been, for the thirty or so years prior to the advent of Griffin, doing so badly, five years ago I was inclined to give Griffin the benefit of a doubt and wait and see if his new approach would work. But I was certain that Breivikist, populist anti-Islam wouldn't take off in Australia, simply for the (obvious) reason that we don't have a large Muslim population (unlike Britain, France or Holland). Yes, we have plenty of Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and a burgeoning Indian population: but not that many Muslims. Europe, on the other hand, is in danger of being Islamised and Africanised out of existence (although the Breivikist anti-Islamics take care not to mention the Africans - that would be "racist").

We all know how the Griffinite project turned out. He went as far as he could go towards Ziophilism of the Breivik and Wilders type: but then two other groups - the English Defence League and the new British Freedom Party - went even further. The EDL had great success in mobilising British working-class people, especially (previously apolitical) soccer hooligans and chavs, and leading them on exciting, Mosley-type, BUF-type marches, and into confrontations with the police and activists for Islamism and "anti-racism". Just like the old days of the 1930s - or the 1970s, when the National Front did more or less the same thing.

As to why Griffin's project failed - I could blame the man himself (he's turned into a British version of Pauline Hanson, and is quite clearly in it only for the money now). But, more than that, nationalist political parties have a short shelf life. They are conceived, as political units, in certain historical and cultural circumstances which are unique to them and their time. The National Front came into existence in the turbulent 1970s, when the first wave of mass non-white colonisation of Britain was getting started; the British National Party, in the early 1980s, when that first wave became a solidly-established, and stoutly-defended, bridgehead. Now, of course, in 2012 - to use a WWII metaphor - the invaders have broken out of their bridgehead, have seized Paris and Brussels, and are now standing at the Rhine. The killer blow to Britain is about to administered. Or perhaps it won't be over quickly: Britain will suffer a slow, agonising death, the death of the thousand cuts (one such cut we saw at the Olympics opening ceremony). In any case, British nationalists are in a different position than they were in 1974 or 1982. They have to adopt new tactics, a new ideology, a new charter. Which means that old warhorses like the British National Party, or the National Front, have to be put out to pasture. (The same thing could be said of that relic from Australia in the late 1990s - Pauline Hanson's One Nation).

At any rate, the Guardian reports that there are now (by nationalist standards) a massive number of British nationalist and Far Right parties on the market:

The most striking aspect of this year's elections was the number of far right parties competing alongside the BNP. In England, local elections were contested by 149 candidates from far right groups other than the BNP, and in some areas these out-performed the 30-year-old party. In Dudley, for example, the BNP was forced to watch its old and more ideologically extreme rival, the National Front, attract more votes. This owes much to a series of personality clashes and ideological splits that have spawned an increasing number of groups, including Britain First, British Freedom, British People's party, England First, National Front, English Democrats, Democratic Nationalists and the Britannica party. Most lack resources and members, but their emergence reflects a scene that is in transition and has not yet decided on its destination.

This really gave me pause. How the devil is a British nationalist group to distinguish itself from the competition? How is to become, in the jargon of business, a 'market leader'?

The answer, I think, is this. The British groups - or the leading ones, such as the EDL, British Freedom Party and the British National Party - have swung as far as possible to the 'left' of the Far Right, that is, towards Wilders and Breivikism. Now it's time to swing back the other way - towards Mosley, Lord Haw-Haw and John Amery, some of the most decent and principled men British politics in the 20th century has ever produced.

As for visuals, nothing conveys power and punch like this:



This is, of course, Jobbik, who revive the ideology, and appearance, of the wartime Hungarian Arrow Cross, but aren't a revivalist party as such: they have their own look and own ideology (unlike John Tyndall and Colin Jordan's 1960s-era group, the National Socialist Movement):



Nothing wrong with uniforms as such, just make them original uniforms.

But wait, aren't paramilitary uniforms banned in Britain, under the infamous 1936 Public Order Act? Well, that Act is open to interpretation. In any case, to judge by the evidence (and I am willing to be contradicted on this point), the Act's provisions against 'uniforms for political purposes' weren't used to arrest the members of the National Socialist Movement: other provisions were used instead. (The Act has been used, quite a few times, since then, and not always against nationalists: e.g., the Act was supposedly used against the British miners during the miner's strike of 1984). Most arrests, detentions, prosecutions, of nationalists since the 1960s have come about through the breaking of laws forbidding freedom of speech on race. An excellent article, on the history of the "anti-fascist" and "anti-racist" laws and their applications to British nationalists and fascists, can be found here: 'British Fascism and the Measures Taken Against It by the British State' (1998) in the Libertarian Alliance journal. (I advise all nationalist activists, especially nationalists with a bent for law, to read it).

I'm inclined to believe that the National Front, which used many of the street tactics of fascism (just as the EDL does today) refrained from outfitting its members in uniforms because it wanted to distance itself from the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, and the uniformed clowning of the 1960s NSM (and other related Rockwellian groups) - not out of a fear of being shut down by the provisions in the Public Order Act.

Let's, for the moment, go to the Continent, where even more repressive "anti-fascist" laws apply. The German constitution expressly forbids the wearing of uniforms. But what of this? Here are pictures of the latest offshoot of the German Freie Nationalisten / Autonomous Nationalist tendency. They are a nationalist 'flash-mob' called The Immortals. They wear freaky V for Vendetta masks:







In truth, I find these plastic masks very frightening. They remind of the Autons from Doctor Who:



Or worse, that Michael character from John Carpenter's Halloween (1978):

I think this is pretty terrible. Masks, of course, have their own power; in classical theatre, they allowed actors to assume the personalities of the characters they played on stage. The impression conveyed the Immortals' mask isn't exactly positive.

The fascists of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, didn't wear masks, of course. Fascism is about, among other things, naked publicity, drawing attention to yourself and your cause. The showing of one's face, in public, is a dangerous enterprise for someone on the Far Right, considering that so many communists in Europe were prepared to harm or even kill you, or, at the very least, apply pressure to have you removed from your place of employment, your home, etc. The showing of one's face was an indication of one's courage, foolhardiness, and pride.

But as for uniforms, especially paramilitary uniforms - that's a different thing altogether. I'm sure that reams of material have been written on the psychological effects of seeing large numbers of men march by, in paramilitary uniform; or being part of a group of men in paramilitary uniform. Academics (who specialise in writing treatises on fascism) will say that uniforms confer, on their wearers, a feeling of belonging, cohesiveness, identity, and of status, power and authority - which is all correct. But, simply put, men like uniforms, because they make men feel, and look, good. And there's a feeling of safety in numbers, too, when the group is primarily of uniformed men: and a nationalist needs that feeling, when he is facing down a crowd of hundreds, if not thousands, of Trotskyites, anarchists, Antifa, who are literally baying for his blood. (Wearing a suit and tie - the 'uniform' of the conservative - just doesn't cut it in those circumstances). The militant Left, too, believe in safety in numbers: they indulge in foolhardy acts of provocation and violence because they are part of a large group, and large groups tend to be less inhibited about these things.

At any rate, aren't the Immortals, pictured above, wearing uniforms 'for political purposes'? Granted, the German law doesn't use that phrasing, but the intent is the same. When you think of it, there are plenty of groups and subcultures - e.g., anarchists, skinheads, even 'Gay Pride' protesters who wear identical pink shirts - who are political and who adopt uniforms of one sort or another. What makes the fascists unique is that they use paramilitary uniforms.

I think that the Public Order Act, in Britain, really needs to be tested, pushed to its limit, by British nationalists who wear paramilitary outfits. We need to see what the definition of a 'uniform for political purposes' is. Granted, the British state will use any excuse to ban a march or arrest members of a nationalist group. But...

I've come to the conclusion that, for a country like Britain, things have deteriorated too far to be arrested by a mere, reflexive and reactionary British Far Right conservatism. The old institutions don't have to be preserved, they must be destroyed (and they are being destroyed, by the anti-white clique that controls Britain, anyway). Perhaps only a Libyan-style uprising could work. At any rate, the British parliament needs to be shut down, and elections suspended for at least ten years. Britain, too, needs to become a republic and to exile, permanently, the Windsor family.

As regarding policy: the white man has to reclaim sovereignty, in his own lands, before one can make the really big, important decisions - on the nationalisation of property, on which immigrants to keep and which ones to expel, and so forth. The communists in Russia, Cuba and China understood this: they seized power first, and made up policy later, improvising, and responding, to a large extent, to the unique circumstances their individual countries faced.

So political power, for nationalists in Britain, can only be achieved by a white, working-class and radical political party, with a Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist base (in other words, a party like the old fascist parties). The old 'preservationist' brand of Enoch Powell Far Right conservatism just won't cut it.

As it is, if present trends continue, there won't be a Britain in fifty years: there'll be, instead, a new country - Afro-Indo-Islamistan - where Africans, Indians and Muslims are the dominant ethnic groups, and the 'old' British are relegated to a minority.

Ideologically, of course, the Lord Haw-Haws, Mosleys, Amerys, and, by extension, the Hitlers and Mussolinis, have to be embraced, not spurned. The words "Nazi" and "Fascist" shouldn't be rejected: they should be seen as badges of honour. Isn't there something clean, clear cut, appealing and reassuring about the 'old' ideologies? One knows what one is; one knows where one stands. I'm sure that the Indian Maoists - one of the few genuinely Marxist groupings around today - feel the same about their simple, clear-cut ideology. It's not a case of fetishism or nostalgia; no, it's a case of, to paraphrase Nietzsche, 'How one becomes what one is'. That is, acknowledging and embracing one's true self. Which is quite a change from the British nationalist movement of today, which has become schizophrenic under the influence of the Nick Griffins and Tommy Robinsons.

Cultural Productions IV: 'True Blood' and the logic of white Southern secession

Sometimes you just get the wrong impression of a TV show. Female fans of True Blood (2008-) had always, when telling me about it, conveyed that the show was about sex - and, by implication, sex with attractive vampire men. Years before seeing the show for the first time (last evening), I had seen a still from the show somewhere (on the Internet, or maybe in the DVD shop), showing a naked actress lying on a bed, or a couch, with two handsome, muscle-y young vampire men about to insert their fangs into her... From this I concluded that True Blood was nothing more than soft porn for women. I was dead wrong on this, as I will show presently.

In general, I like vampire and werewolf shows: the recent resurgence, of Romantic and Gothic horror themes, in the white Western culture (a resurgence brought about by the Twilight craze) I find very interesting. One sees vampire and werewolf themes in folk stories all around the world, of course, but it's the Romantic elements that make the depiction of vampires in the West which make it uniquely white and Western. Even as the popular culture of the West becomes more and more ethnicised and non-white, traditional Western, white and racialist themes manage to sneak themselves in through the back door, so to speak, and evade the politically-correct TV or movie maker - who wants every show or film to be 'diverse', and portray non-white minorities (Afro-Americans, Indian immigrants, Hispanic immigrants) as supermen or oppressed or both, and white people as evil or incompetent. As the American white nationalist Yggdrasil notes, it's these kinds of shows - e.g., Downton Abbey (2010-) - which often tend to be hugely successful with a white audience; likewise, it's actors who appear in these sorts of films and TV shows - e.g., Twilight star Rowan Pattinson - who tend to be hugely successful (despite their appearing in films which get uniformly bad reviews from critics). True Blood belongs in that category of unconsciously pro-white cultural productions. Upon watching it, I saw - almost at once - that the show is not about soft porn, but about the South, and the white people there. It's a celebration of their community, values, morals - and the cause (the Lost Cause) of Southern Independence in the American Civil War.

Unlike Twilight - which is set in a small, white, ethnically homogenous town of Forks County, Washington D.C. (in the rainy, cloudy North - ideal for vampires) - True Blood is set in the (small, white, ethnically homogeneous) town of Bon Temps, in the Deep Southern state of Louisiana. The heroine, Sookie, played by Anna Paquin (the New Zealand actress who played the mutant superheroine Rogue in The X-Men (2000) is a waitress in a redneck café, who has telepathic powers - she can listen in to people's thoughts - which are a burden to her (she finds her ability uncomfortable and irritating). (The character does, in fact, bear a similarity to some of the telepathic characters in the X-Men - Professor X, Jean Grey, Psylocke, Rachel Summers, the White Queen - which I'm not sure is intentional or not). Her life changes forever, of course, when the handsome, enigmatic vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) enters town: Bill is a courteous Southern gentleman, nearly two hundred years old, and an American Civil War veteran (who fought for the South). They fall in love (of course). But, just as in Twilight, this fictional universe is full of bad as well as good vampires, and Bill's full-time job becomes one of protecting Sookie from all the bad vampires who want to suck her blood. As you can imagine, the series is a formulaic one, and pretty much writes itself - just like Twilight does (all the instalments in the Twilight movie series are iterations of the same basic story, and one has difficulty telling them apart).

The twist in this show is that, in this fictional universe, all of the vampires have come out in the open - it's as though Edward and the Cullen family in Twilight openly reveal themselves to be vampires. Some of the vampires, like Bill, agitate for their 'rights' and strive to be seen as a victimised minority - and indeed, much of the series is a satire of the gay rights movement (and the push for gay marriage). The character of Bill resembles character Ben Bruckner (Robert Gant) from Queer as Folk (2000-2005), a dreary, sanctimonious gay-rights activist who is regarded as boring by his fellow gays, and I initially thought that they were the same actor. Certainly, they dress and look the same, and both of them are regarded as dullards and kill-joys by the members of their respective 'communities'. Bill spends a lot of time in the series lecturing, in a tedious fashion, on the 'myths' and 'misconceptions' normal humanity has regarding the vampires. In this, he's like Ben Bruckner, who was endlessly lecturing on the 'myths' about contracting HIV.

I got a bad impression of True Blood from the first pilot episode. I've got a few DVD sets in my collection which I gave up on - The Killing (2007, Danish version), Boardwalk Empire (2010), The Wire (2002-2008) - after a few episodes, out of sheer boredom and dislike. I gave up on The Wire after one episode: I just don't enjoy watching Afro-American actors, and couldn't bring myself to care about any of these Afro-American characters. (An Afro-American gets killed, by a drug lord, in the ghetto - who cares? I don't). I was on the verge of putting True Blood back on the shelf after the pilot episode, mainly because the show didn't gel for me, and because I found the Afro-American character, Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), extremely annoying. She is obnoxious, foul-mouthed, reads books on politics and has a chip on her shoulder about white "racism" and is just annoying in general. But, despite her, the show is good, and after the first episode, I persisted with the series, because I wanted to see what would happen next, and was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps it's an instance of the pilot not being representative of the series as a whole. A bad pilot, being the first one the audience sees, can make or break a show. The first series of Breaking Bad (2008-2012) takes the unusual step of showing its first and second episodes out of sequence: the second episode is played before the first. That means the viewer is plunged right into the middle of the developing story line. The producers of Breaking Bad made this decision, probably, because they didn't feel that the first episode was good enough to be shown first, and maybe the producers of True Blood should have done the same.

So, I found the stock character of the 'sassy, young, black woman feminist' to be extremely annoying in the pilot. But, in later episodes, Tara is shown to be living with her mother, who is a drunk (falling down, sleeping on the floor, urinating in your pants drunk), a drinker of something called 'Captain Morgan', and a follower of that evangelical, revivalist, Baptist brand of Christianity that Afro-Americans are partial to. (Later, in the series, she is shown begging her daughter for money to pay for her own exorcism - she believes her alcoholism is caused by a 'demon' inside her). In other words, Tara's mother confirms the worst stereotypes of Afro-Americans that all of us non-Americans get from reading David Duke and Jared Taylor. As a result, the character of Tara became a little more believable and realistic to me.

The only other prominent Afro-American character in True Blood is the short-order cook Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis). Again, he's annoying in the pilot - portrayed as a homosexual who is superior to all the rednecks her serves - but he redeems himself, later on, in my eyes, when he is shown to be moonlighting as a drug dealer, gay prostitute and would-be pornographer: by conforming to our worst stereotypes of homosexuals, he becomes, to me, a lot more realistic and believable. He lives in a beautifully furnished apartment, which, with its rugs and cushions, seems Turkish or Arabic or Bedouin. He is an amusing homosexual, like the men in Queer as Folk. (The peculiar thing is that shows like these, which portray gay men as being promiscuous, drug users, and so forth, are intended to be pro-gay, and portray homosexuality in a positive light. The producers, directors and writers, however, don't seem to understand that many people in the audience will see this sort of behaviour as bad, not good, and get a negative impression of gay men and the 'gay community' in general...).

That's the Afro-Americans - what of the whites? It's interesting that this series portrays white Southerners, especially rednecks, in a good light. This is quite a change. The Jewish-American film critic, Pauline Kael, wrote, in the 1960s, that Southerners were portrayed, by Hollywood, as venal, lascivious, sensual, bigoted, intolerant, depraved, and so forth (she was referring to movies like the Sidney Poitier anti-white classic, In the Heat of the Night (1967) and the Marlon Brando movie, The Chase (1966)). This was a trend in Hollywood for quite a while. Kael, in her essay, deplored this negative characterisation of Southerners, and implied that it was 'liberals' (that's a code-word, in her writing, for 'Jews') for shoving it down the throats of the audience. Indeed, the evil white Southerner (especially the bigoted, overweight evil white Southern sheriff, who chews tobacco and says 'Nigra' a lot) was a stock character in American movies and TV for a while. But True Blood is devoid of anti-Southernism. Perhaps it's because the show is based on a series of books written by a white Southern author, Charlaine Harris, who looks like this:

As you can see, a very typical white American type. Interestingly, Bill Compton is invited, by Sookie's grandmother, to give a speech at her women's club (which meets at a church) on his Civil War experiences. The audience is, of course, all-white, except for the Afro-American Tara, and is moved to tears by Bill's reminisces. In another scene, at Sookie's grandmother's house, Tara upbraids Bill for the fact that his family owned slaves before the start of the war. He very gently, very courteously, puts her in her place and then manages to change the subject.

Many, many years ago, I saw a quote from a Afro-American commentator, who said that while white Americans loom large in Afro-American history, Afro-Americans are only a footnote in white American history. That's certainly the case here. The slavery question is a side-issue for the townsfolk who are interested in the Civil War: what's important is how the Civil War reflects Southerness, whiteness, their history, their values. White history is something for them to cling to, in an uncertain, dangerous America - what the author of Occidental Dissent calls 'Black Run America', that is, America run on behalf of (but not by) black people.

Occidental Dissent's push for a renewed Southern secessionism is a good one. White nationalism is a deeply flawed, American ideology (which boils down to, in the words of one nationalist comrade of mine, 'I don't like niggers') which doesn't carry well to countries outside of America (e.g., Australia) which traditionally have never had a big black population (African immigrants only started coming here to Australia in the past ten years or so - they were imported as 'refugees' by humanist church groups and refugee advocates), or a big and powerful Jewish population either. Besides which, whites, as we know from white history (which is so heavily touted by the white nationalists) are known for killing each other in the millions, for the sake of nationalism, or religion, or ideology (fascism versus communism versus liberal democracy; or Southern secessionism versus Northernism): they have never undertaken any war in the name of race and whiteness. The notion of a politicised white race, of the white race as a political entity, is without precedent. And, indeed, even the racialist states of the South, or the racialist state of South Africa, referred to whiteness in the context of Southern secessionism and Boer nationalism respectively.

Because Southern secessionism does have a historical precedent, and does refer to existing political realities, it could work. White nationalism, though, which was invented in the past forty years (by David Duke, a Southerner and a resident of Louisiana) is without precedent and doesn't accord with the realities of human nature. It's artificial, in other words. What's more, it requires a lot of work - a lot of indoctrination and propagandising - for Bulgarians, Greeks and Russians, for example, or Romanians and Hungarians, or Serbs and Croats, to see themselves as all being part of the one white race. One has to be a universalist - and, almost, a Christian, filled with brotherly love for one's fellow whites - to be a white nationalist. That's impracticable. But the doctrine of Southern secessionism is eminently practicable, given that the South is a distinct entity and is (relatively) ethnically homogenous: given that the rest of America is going to the dogs, why not just cede? The US Republican Party has always, since the time of Nixon, taken the votes of white Southern voters for granted. But, in between elections, the Republicans betray the South - by foisting huge numbers of Mexican and other Mestizo immigrants on them. Presumably, Romney will, if he wins the next election (on votes from whites mainly in the Mid-West and South) turn around and shaft the Southerners once again, by amnestying the 11.5 illegal Mestizo immigrants, and by inviting millions more to come across from Mexico and other Latin American states... Romney will do this because, as a Republican in 2012, he is convinced that the Republican vote will collapse without the votes of the 'powerful' Hispanic electoral bloc (in reality, most Hispanics don't bother registering to vote); what's more, he is part of the American business class, which is convinced that the American economy will collapse without low-wage, low-skill Hispanic labour; and he is beholden, like every white Western politician, to the anti-white clique, which wants to eliminate, once and for all, the white peoples in their own lands. So, given this, the logic of Southern secession is impeccable.

As to how this will be carried out - what the mechanics of it are - that is another question. One mustn't build castles in the air: one has to work with the existing situation. At the moment, the Southern secessionist (like the nationalist activist here in Australia) must articulate his viewpoint and inculcate his tendency as much as possible, and build and build... The idea has to take root first. From that, actions - political actions - will follow.

Aside from the theme of 'Southernism', True Blood has another theme, and that is drugs. Unlike Breaking Bad, which is about crystal meth, True Blood is about Ecstasy. People in the show consume a drug, called 'V', made out of vampire blood (well, it's not made out of, but pretty much is, vampire blood, consumed in minute quantities). Sookie's brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten), a loveable loser and simple-minded road worker (what we Australians would call a council worker - municipal councils are in charge of maintaining the roads here), takes some 'V' in a small dose and then begins to act like an Ecstasy-addled nightclub raver. He stumbles into a redneck café, his pupils heavily dilated, and tells his redneck friends (much to their amusement) that he loves them. He runs his hands over a woman's forearm and declares that, because his senses are now so heightened, he can feel every hair... Looking at some daffodils growing in a garden, he sees tiny sparks shoot out. I found these scenes to be among the funniest in the show. Later on, his 'V' inspired trips become more and more intense, and he enters a kind of virtual-reality world, which looks like one of those house-music videos from the late 1980s (the nightclub rave culture had its own music - house - to go along with the effects of drugs like Ecstasy, and was, to Ecstasy, what acid rock was to LSD). He becomes involved in a relationship with a woman who is an 'organic vegan', who wears hippie/gypsy clothes, and is a 'V' addict... All of this is damned odd stuff, which one doesn't expect to see in a Southern setting.

At any rate, the show is (and in this, the women viewers who told me about it were correct) very sexual. That is, it has about as much graphic sex as a Spanish movie: this is unusual, given how prudish North American culture is. In one comic sequence, Jason overdoses on 'V', swallowing an entire test-tube, and gives himself a permanent erection. Eventually, he goes to a doctor, who gets rid of the erection by sticking in a king-sized hypodermic into his penis and draining out all the blood.

Generally, the women in this show are over-sexed. Which again is unusual. Perhaps this is a return to the theme of the randy, licentious Southerner, which we last saw in those sixties movies. But whereas was portrayed as hateful in those films, in True Blood, the South is an object of adoration.