Saturday, November 30, 2019

The Metalstorm: Why some nationalists dislike the Nazis



I.

After the eruption of hostilities in Europe in 1914, the English - and the Americans - produced a torrent of literature denouncing German and 'Prussian' cruelty, aggression, rapacity, militarism, authoritarianism, racial self-aggrandizement, Machtpolitik, Kultur, and war crimes (real or imagined); a hundred years later, this torrent shows no signs of abating. But if the English polemicists and the German nationalists - who wrote rebuttals - agreed on one thing, it was that 'Prussianism', 'Prussian militarism', 'Prussian ethical-socialism' (as Spengler called it), defined the essence of the German national character.

To Spengler, each of the five leading nations of the West - England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy - could be summed up a certain Idea, a style, a culture, and it is this that distinguishes one nation from the other. In much the same way, a certain style of each race - in that most racialist and ethnocentric of sci-fi TV shows, Star Trek - helps us to tell one race apart from another, so much so that one would never mistake a Klingon for a Vulcan, a Romulan for a Ferengi. Of course to a Ferengi or Klingon, all kinds of difference - mainly political - exist within the race, but the casual outside observer hardly sees these: he only sees unity and homogeneity. And this uniformity is determined by the style of the race as much as the genetics.

After Germany's defeat in 1918, venerable German institutions - the German Army, the German General Staff, Junkerdom, and the East Prussian state itself - survived; after Germany's defeat in 1945, they were destroyed. Nothing of them remained, not even the 'Prussian Idea' itself. We see here the complete disappearance of a culture, a style. Only ghosts of it linger: we find fleeting images of it in the first three Star Wars movies, in episodes of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, in the multitude of computer and board wargames devoted to WWI and WWII. Pertinent to this subject - the prevalence of Nazi and 'Prussian' types in popular culture - is this comment at Steve Sailer's site:

Having Nazi bad guys in situations where Nazism isn’t at all relevant is just the mark of a lazy writer who can’t be bothered to develop good antagonists on their own. Even in situations where they aren’t actual Nazis, the aesthetic provides a convenient visual shorthand.

In Star Wars we would know the empire was evil just by looking at the officers’ uniforms, which were heavily reminiscent of the uniforms worn by Wehrmacht and SS officers during WW2. Additionally, the peaked caps were shaped like those worn by Imperial Japanese military during the war. Add in the patrician affect of Imperial officers(a lot like the aristocratic manner stereotypical of German officers in movies of that period) and you have instant baddies without having them say or do anything evil. Vader’s helmet was specifically designed to be recall the German stahlhelm.

But times of changed. It seems that American filmmakers no longer want to depict dapper fascists. To judge by the listings of upcoming movies at IMDB.Com, Hollywood seems to have slowed down on the production of one of its staples - the anti-German war propaganda movie: I count only one WWII drama slated for release in 2020.

In the world of politics, outside of entertainment and popular culture, the 'Prussian' - with his monocle, riding crop, long boots, dueling scars, smart uniform, and cap set at a jaunty angle - has ceased to exist. His resurrection was predicted by Yockey on the reasoning that while one can kill a man, one cannot kill an idea: one can lop off the top of a tree, but so long as the tree has roots deep in the soil, it will regrow. But 75 years after the end of WWII, this analogy has been shown to incorrect.

The disappearance of 'Prussianism' violates one of the tenets of geopolitics - that nations almost always revert to type. For the past 75 years, Japan has kept its head down and sought to avoid being noticed, and it shies away from all war and all power-politics. But because of the recent Chinese bellicosity in the South China Sea, smaller nations such as the Philippines and Vietnam are looking to Japan as a protector, and as a result, Japan is being forced to accept the mantle of a leading Asian power. One cannot escape one's geopolitical destiny. But for Germany, this law has been suspended. In all the negotiations between the UK and the EU over Brexit, France has taken the lead: the understanding is that France, and not the faceless EU bureaucracy, which gives voice to the sentiments of the EU, and if Boris Johnson or Theresa May want to parley, they must parley with Emmanuel Macron. Germany has been conspicuous by its absence. One would think that Germany was not the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the Continent, and that it had no opinions on what is the most important question for the EU for the 21st century. The British press, performing its traditional role of stoking British resentment against the Germans, continually tries to goad Germany into making provocative statements on Brexit, but Merkel refuses to take the bait.

II.

The Germans will not be taking up Spengler's 'Prussian Socialism' any time soon. But suppose that certain prerequisites were fulfilled for its return, one of the prerequisites being the election to office of a German nationalist party (such as the AfD): what would happen then? I think we all know the answer. England and America, Israel and Russia, would demand that the results be overturned and 'democracy' restored - otherwise, war.

The world will ignore the calls of the 'international community' for sanctions and war only under one condition: that it ceases to believe or starts to doubt that the Holocaust happened. As part of a public relations campaign for German nationalism, the new German nationalist government could deban all Holocaust Revisionism within Germany's borders and promulgate Revisionism across Europe and the world. It could muster up an international task force of forensic investigators to take examine the 'death camps' of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor for traces of the poison gas which killed millions of people. If no traces were found, or even if the final report of the investigators was divided on the matter, doubt and confusion would be sowed in the minds of British and American public - the same public which normally would join wholeheartedly the chorus of condemnation of the nationalist Germany.

One can dream: the above scenario at the present seems highly unlikely. The reason for that is that German nationalists, even nationalists of the most populist and civic stripe, are faced with a paradox, and this is: they cannot win power without the help of Holocaust Revisionism, but they cannot disseminate Revisionism unless they win power.

The stalemate can only be broken by a miracle. In the South Park episode 'Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus', God visits Earth and before an assembly of South Park residents, offers to answer one question - any question. One of the South Park children, Stan Marsh, asks a question which is quite trivial. God answers it easily (with His perfect and omniscient knowledge) and then departs the Earth, promising to return in the year 4000, much to everyone's dissatisfaction. Now, suppose that this celestial visitation were to occur today and the question was asked of God, 'Did the Holocaust happen?'. Suppose that God's answer was no, and that Hitler and the NSDAP did not order the extermination of Europe's Jews, did not gas the Jews (or shoot them en masse) and did not kill 60,000, let alone six million, Jews. And then suppose that God's answer was beamed into the minds of every sentient being on Earth: that and only that would bring about the change in the attitude of humanity towards Germany that the German nationalists so sorely need.

This story line - and indeed, it will remain nothing but a story - implies that Holocaust Revisionism constitutes a revelation to the world (and in my daydream above, a divine revelation), but in truth, the world has known, and known for some time, that the Holocaust did not happen. But this understanding has not been acted upon because those in authority will not acknowledge the truth of Revisionism.

When I am speaking of those in authority, I am speaking of three leading groups in particular. These are:

International Jewish groups. If six million did not die, then Jewry would lose its right to Palestine. Jews see the Holocaust as a religious justification, in accordance with ancient Talmudic prophecies, for the recovery of the lost State of Israel.

The Anglo-Conservatives. By 'Anglo-Conservative', I mean American and British conservatives of the Victor Davis Hanson and Rush Limbaugh sort. Usually boomers, they hew to the official party line on WWI and WWII and America's involvement, and they hate German nationalism (of any era) with a vengeance.

Left-wing journalists. If God were to come to Earth (as per my South Park fantasy above) and reveal the truth to the world regarding the Holocaust, the media would simply refuse to report it.

All politics is an activity related to power, Yockey writes, and we would assure the triumph of Revisionism were we were to knock the three groups out of their leading position in the power structure. The question is, how?

III.

It goes without saying that the 'Prussian' is a soldier. This is important for the reason that in German nationalist ideology, politics is tied to war.

The Left takes the same view of politics. One of the dirty secrets of 20th century communism is that no communist won power without waging war beforehand: the successful communists did not win elections in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, they won battles. Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Tito, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Castro: all commanded soldiers, their example presenting a stark contrast to the anemic leftism of today.

The former left-wing terrorist T. Derbent wrote a classic monograph, 'Categories of Revolutionary Military Policy' (2006), which is a treatise on military science and left-wing politico-military strategy. Much of it can be applied by both the Left and Right: the white nationalists in William Pierce's Turner Diaries (1978), for instance, followed the same strategy as the left-wing urban guerrilla groups operating in the 1960s and 1970s. (Pierce, much to his chagrin, was compared by hostile reviewers to the left-wing Brazilian guerrilla Carlos Marighella).

And this brings us to the heart of the problem. Warfare has changed since the time of Hitler and the Kaiser, Guderian and von Moltke. In the first half of the 20th century, the Germans led the way when it came to warfare, but since then, 'Prussian militarism' and the institution of the General Staff have become archaic, outmoded. This partially explains, to my mind, the success of computer games such as Hearts of Iron IV. Gamers can exercise their 'Prussian' world-conquering urges and live vicariously through it, but they can also return to a distant past which is unlike our present and in some respects qualitatively better.

But in other respects, nationalists see the past as worse than the present. No nationalist in the West wants to see a return to WWI or WWII. Today nationalists see white life as something precious and whites as an endangered species. Our sons are not be sent off to die in wars, and no blood of a white Western man is to be spilled.

And this contravenes National Socialist (and 'Prussian militarist') doctrine. In the wartime book 'The Spoil of Europe' (1941), written by an anti-Nazi, Thomas Reveille, we find an (mostly accurate, to my view) enunciation of the fundamental principles of National Socialism:

The State, according to Hitler, has a twofold domestic task. The first is to ''forge the sword” which shall "secure for the German Volk the land and soil that is due to them on this earth” and "their position as lords of the world.” The second domestic task of the Nazi State is to ensure "the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and spiritually similar living creatures.” This twofold task is to be pursued simultaneously. In case of need, however, the latter should be temporarily sacrificed for the former...

[In order to conquer Europe, Germany needs] The forging of the sword and the creation of an indissolubly unified Germanic community in the existing frontiers of the Reich. The Nazi doctrine always assumes that the sword must be ultimately wielded in order to achieve each major objective...

Germany's mission is to rule the world and to fulfill this by any and all means. Europe is the center of the world. The Reich has obligations to its kith and kin overseas. It has also the imperious duty of making Germany's acquisitions perpetually secure not only by forging a sword for their defense but also by a simultaneous attack, through political disintegration or war, against possible enemies and coalitions. Full account is also taken of obstacles to the process of the continuous outward push of Germandom. 

The white nationalist may like the Volk talk, the talk of blood and soil, and the goal of 'the preservation and advancement of a community of physically and spiritually similar living creatures', which sounds rather like David Lane's slogan of the 14 words. But the 'forging of the sword' frightens the white nationalist, because a war waged by any European or Western nation automatically entails casualties - white casualties. And indeed, not only white nationalists but most European white men object to going to war, possibly because they  understand (more than they did a hundred years ago) what it means. As Steve Sailer writes in 'The Dregs of War', 



I want to mention how this latest phenomenon supports John Mueller’s hypothesis in The Remnants of War (which he should have titled The Dregs of War).

Mueller is the Woody Hayes Professor of National Security Studies at Ohio State. He argues that Kursk-Orel battles between mass armies in open fields are over. If they gave that kind of war, nobody would show up.

His specific examples had to do with the 1990s Balkan Wars, which were portrayed in the press as driven by ancient mass enmities. But Mueller argues that the amount of bloodlust in the overall populations was quite low. The various states had massive problems with draft evasion. Basically, nobody wants to go to a modern battlefield with state of the art weapons because everybody figures they wouldn’t last long in the metalstorm.

Sailer points to the conflict in Ukraine as an example of the new kind of war, a war which differs from WWII: 'The Battle of Stalingrad, it isn’t. So far'.

Because the realities of war have changed, then, the Far Right needs to grope around like the Far Left (as Derbent does in his monograph) for a new politico-military strategy.

IV.

We should keep in mind that the socialist and conservative regimes in Western Europe today were (in the case of France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, and Denmark) installed at the point of a bayonet: the British and Americans waged a ferocious war to 'liberate' them from fascism and Far Right conservatism. It could be that the Far Right, the nationalist Right, in those countries may need to wage another war to win them back: quite possibly, the Merkels and Macrons cannot be pushed out any other way. If that is the case - and keep in mind we are in the new age of the 'dregs of war' - what would that war look like?

Years ago, a poster on 4Chan/Pol detailed a long-running fantasy of his - a fantasy informed by the Terminator movies and other cyberpunk pop culture works. A race of cyborg warriors would time-travel from the future, wage war against the Merkels and Macrons, and free Europe. This post stood out for me, as I  - in a similar science-fiction-ish mood - had indulged in a similar daydream. And at the time it seemed quite logical to me, given the circumstances, that the only army which could take on the liberal establishment and win would be one composed of super-soldiers using a technology far advanced from that of present.

In my scenario, the soldiers would win eschew a direction confrontation with the armies of Europe and avail themselves of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara guerrilla tactics, which, to my mind, would prove to be extremely effective.

Of course I understand that such a war (cyber-war?) can only take place only in the realm of fantasy. But does another way forward exist? Bismarck famously said that politics is the art of the possible, and by this he meant there is more than one path to the fulfillment of a political task. He may have been right in this, but at present, I can only see one possibility - one which is (I admit) quite impossible. 


Sunday, November 10, 2019

Cyberpunk and shopping malls: On becoming blue-pilled and dropping out of the movement





I.

Over twenty years ago, I read a book on postmodernism by a left-wing author who decried the horrible world of the postmodern age: a world of Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990) brought to life, a world of 'hyperreal' capitalism (like that depicted in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987)), a world of gangsta rap (a musical genre which encourages African-Americans to shoot each other for the possession of pairs of Adidas sneakers), a world of the hitherto unknown and frightening phenomena of the Information Superhighway, Virtual Reality, Cyberspace, Cybersex, 'Electronic Mail'... The author, a baby boomer, wrung his hands in despair over these cultural and economic developments, but I had the opposite reaction: the postmodern Brave New World sounded exactly like the one I lived in - and exciting and fun to boot.

At the time, had I been indoctrinated with white nationalist and dissident Right ideas, I would have commiserated with this left-winger and lamented white Western Man's lost authenticity; perhaps, had I National Bolshevik tendencies, I would have shaken my fist, too, at the Center Right which in the nineties celebrated the End of History and the downfall of communism. But - and this is no coincidence - at the time I was fairly innocent of any politics. In the nineties, I voted, I was interested in social questions, I felt sympathy for the plight of oppressed brown folk overseas (the Palestinians and the Kurds), I was interested in the important policy debates of the seventies and eighties (monetarism versus Keynesianism, for example); but at the same, I wasn't necessarily a political animal. I myself only became truly politicised after discovering the ideas of the Far Right in the 2000s.

In the 1990s, extremist ideologies flourished: you had survivalists, militias, evangelicals, cults like the Branch Davidians and Heaven's Gate, terrorists of the Left and Right (Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh), skinhead gangs, and for me most important of all, white nationalists, and it was in this decade that the careers of Tom Metzger, William Pierce, Richard Butler, Ben Klassen and Don Black began to take off. But because of the then-novelty of the Internet, the ideas of these men did not spread far and wide, and for the most part, the general public (the 'normies', of which I was one) did not encounter them. My politicisation only commenced after the Internet became available in every home, and it was then that I discovered White Nationalism 1.0  (as Hunter Wallace calls it) - and with it, anti-Semitism and Holocaust Revisionism, Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey, Savitri Devi and George Lincoln Rockwell... Before my 'red-pilling' in the early 2000s, I had spent the nineties in a state of (what seems to me now to be) blissful ignorance.

These days, quite a few in the Far Right movement look back on the 1980s and 1990s through rose-coloured glasses - they will see the 1990s, for instance, as the 'last conservative decade'. I feel nostalgia, too, for the decade of my lost youth, but for different reasons. To explain. Becoming 'red-pilled' can liberate you but at the same time it can impose its own peculiar burdens. Obsessions with certain political or social questions can spiral out of control - one only has to see how global warming (which may be real or not) has drawn many white people into what is akin to a cult. At the least, thinking too much about a subject such as the 'white genocide', the 'great replacement', the 'scramble for Europe' can weigh you down; you begin to feel a tremendous sense of duty which can make itself felt in every nook and cranny of your life. Shedding that responsibility, then, becomes attractive, and so does looking backwards to the time when you did not feel that responsibility.

Assuming that 'blue-pilling' is desirable, how does one do it? The answer is: one can't. For instance, once you make the discovery that the mass gassing of Jews in giant gas chambers in WWII probably didn't happen, and that the Jews insisting that it did happen are doing so for mostly for religious reasons, you simply cannot forget it in a hurry. One would need to perform a lobotomy on oneself.

The same applies to that other subject beloved by white nationalists: the 'colour of crime'. Knowledge of that signifies that one has become worldly, streetwise; renunciation of that knowledge means that one has reverted to being a naïf, a simpleton.

One cannot attain a state of forgetfulness and recover lost innocence, but one can change one's perspective, and key to that is the recognition that much of the Far Right lives in the past.

Take, for example, race-mixing: who, in the current year, cares about it? And who, in 1989 or 1999, had a problem with it? Only white nationalists opposed race-mixing and were obsessed with it (and punishing it - witness the popularity of the famous passages in the Turner Diaries (1978) concerning the 'Day of the Rope'). This explains why every evening on 4Chan/Pol outsiders will try and spam the board with race-mixing pornography. They know that it 'triggers' the white nationalists, Neo-Nazis and Alt-Rightists, and they experience a transgressive, almost erotic thrill in this 'triggering'. But the 'normie', looking at it all from the outside, would see it as ridiculous, and rightfully so. Race-mixing, and pornography depicting it, would have transgressed social mores in 1930 or 1830, but not in the current year.

The posting of German National Socialist material from the 1930s and 1940s constitutes another example of being out of sync with the current year. The NSDAP speeches, articles, book chapters seems particularly incongruous when they appear on websites which are not German, and furthermore, the old German material does not seem to gel with the other content, which mostly concerns breaking American and European news. But, on closer examination, it becomes apparent that the old German speeches and writings represent, to the editors of Radio Aryan, Renegade Tribune and CarolynYeager.Net, an authenticity, a truth, which has been lost in the modern era; they serve the same purpose as Rick Deckard's photographs (taken in the 19th century?) strewn across the top of Deckard's piano in Blade Runner. They are intended to evoke a past which is more pure, more beautiful, than the present.

Hunter Wallace's Occidental Dissent recently featured some footage (entitled 'Paradise Lost') of St Louis in 1965  - and indeed, that footage does manage to capture a Paradise Lost, a lost world of handsome men and beautiful women, white men and women, all of whom deported themselves in the best Mad Men style (and Mad Men was another exercise in nostalgia, conveying a longing for the lost white past). Meditations on the decline of the white West, a decline which dates from the post-war era, form a staple of dissident Right polemics, and without a doubt, these touch upon a truth - the cleavage between the old world and the new. Sometime around 1990, it was as though a segment of our familiar white, Western world was teleported and joined into the world of Blade Runner, postmodernism and cyberpunk.

The cyberpunk genre of science fiction was conceived in the 1980s by authors William Gibson (Neuromancer) and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), but as old as it is now, it still manages to capture the essence of modernity - much more so than German National Socialism or Southern nationalism - and it remains popular enough to the extent that a much-hyped upcoming XBox game, Cyberpunk 2077, promises to deliver to gamer fans a return to the good old eighties cyberpunk / Blade Runner experience (see 'Neon and corporate dystopias: why does cyberpunk refuse to move on?'). It is true that the trailers for Cyberpunk 2077 depict a locale ('Night City') which is bereft of children, families, the elderly - all of whom we would expect to see in the everyday life. But even so, 'Night City' stands closer to our world than the world of Berlin in 1940 or St Louis in 1965.

Fragmentation, a sense of loss, and the sundering of wholes - whether they be ethnic, religious, national, class - accompanies the postmodern and makes up one of postmodernism's most persistent themes. That subject is tackled by the author of the article, 'California is a Real Life Cyberpunk Dystopia', but when he comes to how it relates to race and immigration, multiculturalism and 'diversity', he takes the politically correct line. But no matter, he has done us a service by making an important fact evident, and that is: the Los Angeles of Blade Runner of the future year of 2019 lacks the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the Los Angeles of the 1940s. (The latter era, the era of film noir, numbers among the inspirations for Ridley Scott's film). In Blade Runner, only one to two dozen whites seem to live in Los Angeles; all the rest have moved away - perhaps to another planet, 'Off World'. (Interestingly, the much-maligned sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017), boasts more white characters than the original).

The white characters of Blade Runner look at this state of affairs as a fait accompli - nothing much can be done about it. But a white nationalist / dissident Rightist would say otherwise. He knows (or claims to know) the precise point at which the old, authentic world of yesteryear transformed into a cyberpunk dystopia; he knows who is responsible for that change (Jews, globalist elites, liberals, baby boomers, Cultural Marxists, Illuminati Satanists, corporations, et al.); and he opines that present conditions will worsen unless his advice is followed.

Deckard and the other white denizens of Los Angeles in 2019 (and not to mention the protagonists of Neuromancer and Cyberpunk 2077) would disagree with the last of these propositions, one can imagine; they would retort, 'How can things get any worse?'. And they would deem the other two theses - who is responsible for the transition and when it happened - as largely irrelevant.

But otherwise, they would agree with our fringe rightist (or leftist) in that the cyberpunk / postmodernist world is bad. As the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan notes, postmodernism imagines 'a world without nature'. At the end of the original version of Blade Runner (the version which was released in cinemas in 1982), Deckard and Rachael flee Los Angeles (and all its neon, rain, smog, darkness and Asians) and return to nature; in the closing scene before the end credits, Deckard pilots his flying car, Rachael by his side, over the sunlit rollicking hills of regional California.

II. 




After first coming across William Pierce's famous Dissident American Voices Internet radio broadcasts, I treated them as entertainment. But after listening to a dozen broadcasts in a row, Pierce's sermons had their desired effect, and I began to ask myself if there was something to what Pierce was saying. The question bothered me enough to prompt an exploration, and I soon discovered Stormfront and Michael Hoffman II's writings on the Talmud. From that point on, there was no looking back. I abandoned my 'normie' political position (or absence of a political position) and with it, my 'normie' commonsensicality.

It took me some time to recognise that the Far Right (as well as the Far Left) upholds certain morals and values which would strike the 'normie' as being quite strange. The strictures of white nationalism and dissident rightism command one to forgo certain activities which the 'normie' regards as innocuous - for example, the watching of anime (see this rather bizarre article from the Renegade Tribune, 'Anime is unhealthy - here's why you need to stop watching it').

Robert Stark's radio show features a wide variety of guests, many of whom stand at the fringes of the Far Right movement or even outside the Far Right altogether. Stark, a bohemian, prefers the novel and the unusual, and at first sight his guests seem to be an odd bunch of characters - but in comparison to many white nationalists (like the author of the aforementioned article) they really are not. In Stark World, you are allowed to like anime. This explains why, to me at least, so many of his guests seem comfortable and familiar: they remind of the people I went to university with.

Both the Far Right and Left share a puritanical distaste for consumerism - and shopping malls. In contrast, Stark likes shopping malls, and did a broadcast with Matthew Pegas and David Cole in which the three share fond reminisces of the malls of their youth. Compare this to passages from the leftist Carl Boggs' book, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000), which offer a rather sour Marxist denunciation of nineties shopping mall culture:

In such a transformed American political culture lies another powerful element of post-Fordism: an unprecedented resort to personal consumption, which finds ready expression through the countless images circulated in the spheres of advertising, mass media, popular culture, sports, and fashion... The shopping mall perhaps best embodies this post-Fordist reality... The consumer mall functions in an altogether different way to induce privatism and passivity, constituting a main linkage between corporate agendas and everyday life... [By the 1970s] soon even people who made up the urban poor could partake of a consumer world made more seductive by a wide array of glittery images, media spectacles, and material inducements of all sorts. As part of the revitalized American dream, sprawling malls and shopping centers became virtual universes unto themselves, escapes from the demanding regimen of work and everyday life - all fueled by advertising, the credit economy, increased physical mobility, and of course the wonders of sophisticated technology. 

In his program on shopping malls, Stark observes that malls created a sense of community. Boggs differs, and sees that community as false, artificial:

Reflecting on how commodification sustains an ethos of privatised withdrawal, Lauren Langman argues that mall culture offers a type of pseudodemocratic experience that gives people a sense of public engagement while also discouraging in myriad ways any genuine civic participation... Here the mall phenomenon serves as yet another conduit of corporate colonisation in that the commodification of social (and political) life can easily generate a false sense of empowerment that works its magic across class, regional, ethnic, gender and age divisions... For adults the mall constitutes a ubiquitous outlet for selfhood through the acquisition of clothes, electronics, cosmetics, videos, music CDs, and the like.

To Boggs, we can't have that. We can't have this either:

It should be noted, as well, that other places where people gather - restaurants, cafes, bars, theaters - are also frequently located in or near shopping malls. For young people, in particular, this prime outpost of consumerism offers glitzy alternatives and a constant stream of seductive images and spectacles that provide temporary tangible relief from the mundane world of job insecurity, career anxieties, school, family and personal problems, or simply boredom. Hence, the mall phenomenon, deeply rooted in everyday life, far transcends in its impact the historic presence of the downtown Chamber of Commerce in most American cities. 

Boggs should be happy, as for a multitude of reasons, shopping malls in America seem to be entering a stage of terminal decline. (Amusingly enough, the Wiki article on the phenomenon of the 'Dead Mall' makes a connection between the decline of the mall and one of Robert Stark's favourite themes: 'Due to their often retro and outdated aesthetic, dead malls as a cultural phenomenon are often loosely associated with vaporwave aesthetics and music'). The point is that the American leftist Boggs here sounds uncannily like a Southern nationalist or white nationalist. Both the American Far Right and Left regard capitalist consumerism as sinful, evil, perhaps irredeemably so, and their sermonising on the subject recalls Protestant evangelising, so much so that the possibility exists that the attitudes of both the American Far Left and Right are rooted in the faith of their holders' upbringing. The fervor of William Pierce always reminded me of that of a hell and brimstone evangelical, and perhaps Pierce was influenced, unconsciously, by the Southern Protestantism of his childhood...

A reaction against this moralism accounts in part for the success in the 2010s of 4Chan/Pol and Chan culture. In true postmodernist fashion, the 'based irony bros' of 4Chan did not take politics seriously, at least not as Pierce, Duke, Metzger, Black and Butler did, and secondly, they condoned (and did not condemn) some of the most serious vices of contemporary Western man: marijuana, pornography, 'vidya' games and Mountain Dew. As a matter of fact, 4Chan gives free rein to almost every form of licence. This stands in contrast to the moralism of the old Far Right. In my experience, the nationalist movement founded in the seventies and eighties disapproved of every vice with the exception of alcohol. 'Old nationalism', then, seems more serious, more out of touch with modernity, and less fun than the 'new nationalism' which, through the medium of 4Chan, denounces modern 'degeneracy' while simultaneously reveling in it.

On coming across Pierce's radio broadcasts for the first time, I saw Pierce as an entertainer. From this I gained the false impression that, as I delved further into it, 'the movement' would prove to be as equally as fun and entertaining. How wrong I was! 'The movement' as such should be characterised as filled with negativity. Given that, how are 'normies' to be attracted to it? In contrast, the postmodernist, 'End of History' culture of the nineties did show some negativity, but overall this was leavened by postmodern superficiality and lightness.

III.

To sum up. To paraphrase Sadiq Khan, the Pakistani mayor of London, 'white genocide', the 'great replacement', 'demographic engineering' forms part and parcel of living in the big city - the Neuromancer or Blade Runner big city. (Of course one could leave the city, and thereby escape being confronted by 'demographic engineering' that way, but the fact is that most of the white population of any Western country chooses to live in cities). As to whether this existing order can be overturned remains to be seen. It is possible: stranger things have happened in politics.

In the ideology of the Far Right, the Western city is seen as a prison from which there is no escape, a prison in which one is forced to share with non-whites, Jews, communists, degenerates... Postmodernism takes a somewhat more positive view. It sees man as a spectator who encounters a multiplicity of shifting, divergent perspectives. The implication of this doctrine is that one can escape the obsession with 'white genocide' by changing one's perspective: as the saying goes, if you don't like the conversation, change the channel. Having said that, one could end up in the same predicament as Bruce Springsteen - there may be '57 channels and nothing on'. 






Sunday, September 1, 2019

American white nationalism: Will the wolf survive?



I.  The Marxification of the US conservative movement

It seems that the Epstein suicide scandal eclipsed the most three mass shootings - the news cycle in America is fickle and ephemeral - and to judge from recent news reports, the American public has already moved on from Epstein. But the political reaction to the mass shootings is worth analysing in depth because of what it reveals about American politics, and American dissident Right and white nationalist politics in particular.

The establishment American Right called for gun-grabbing and pronounced a fatwah on 'white nationalism' and 'white supremacy' soon after the El Paso shootings, and this was spear led by the National Review, the mouthpiece of Conservatism, Inc.:






The term 'white supremacy', if not invented by American communists, has been appropriated by them, and you can correctly infer - most of the time - that anyone who uses it in 2019 is either a communist or infected with communist ideas. (So far as the term 'white privilege' or 'white skin privilege' is concerned, we can be certain as to its provenance: it most definitely was coined by American communist groups - in particular, the neo-Maoist and Third World Marxist groups of the 1970s). Communists more or less control American political life, or at least, what I call the back end of politics, not necessarily the front end. For example, the candidates running in the Democratic Party primaries for the 2020 presidential election may not be card-carrying communists, but they are pandering to a base that supports communism and Marxism. (Given that many of the proposed Democrat policies (such as free healthcare for illegal immigrants) are unpopular with actual registered Democrat voters, the question is who are the candidates trying to appeal to: who is it that runs the Democratic Party?). As to why the conservatives of the National Review and similar publications are pandering to the Far Left, the answer is that these conservatives believe that they can cut a deal with the Left, much like the conservative Christian Democrats of East Germany, who you can read about here.

Anne Applebaum's book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012) details how the Christian Democrats and other conservative Central and Eastern European parties were absorbed into the communist political system during the postwar Soviet occupation, and, to add insult to injury, forced to take Marxist ideology on board - Marxism became part of their 'conservative' platforms. The US Republican Party seems, at present, to be undergoing a similar transition, but one would never guess from surface appearances alone that this Leftification is taking place. The Republican Party, and the conservative moment, spends much of its time denouncing socialism, and Trump - who is hated by the Left above all - follows their lead. This is why I said before that communists have taken over the back end but not the front.

II.  The three factions of American white nationalism

Ironically enough, American white nationalism forms one of the last bastions of conservatism and right-wing ideas in America: they are doing the job that the Republican Party and the mainstream conservative institutions should be doing but are not. With that in mind, let us look at the three main factions of the American white nationalist (or anti-immigrant nativist) movement and their relations to Trump, who is (according to the media) white nationalism's man in the White House.

The Trumpian Populists. The supporters of Trump still exist on the dissident Right, even though the impression on the dissident Right is that Trump has largely discredited himself. Trump will be going to the 2020 election with some awful metrics not in his favour: how many immigrants, legal and illegal have entered America, before the beginning of his first term and at the end; how many miles of the wall have been built; how many American jobs have been lost to immigrants, legal and illegal. Trump has performed poorly on all these except for, perhaps, the last - the job market may be finally moving in favour of the native-born. The question is whether or not one or more rays of sunshine suffice, whether they justify the Trump presidency. Judging by the numbers overall, Trump, if he had been an employee at his own organisation or a contestant on his own TV show The Apprentice, would have been fired long ago. The Trumpian Populists on the dissident Right will not abide by this, however, which reminds me of something the Jewish conservative Michael Savage said of Trump's followers - that they are akin to a cult. (Another irony: Savage, a Jew - and Jews occupy prime place in white nationalist demonology - stuck up for white people after Trump's recent condemnation of 'white supremacy').

The other two factions of white nationalism are divided when it comes to Trump and his re-election: on the one side are the Greg Johnsons, who run with 'Trump is all we've got' argument, on the other, the Hunter Wallaces, who are of the 'Punish Trump and Conservatism Inc. at the polls' school.

This brings us to the next faction of white nationalism: the genteel conservatives. In this category we find Greg Johnson (Counter-Currents), Peter Brimelow (VDare), Jared Taylor (American Renaissance), Kevin MacDonald (Occidental Observer), Steve Sailer (Unz.Org) and a few others who seek to make white nationalism 'respectable' and 'American'. They do not really seek to make great changes to America's social, economic, political structures: they only  want to return America to the days when it had a white majority, the time when it was last the 'historic American nation' - the America of 1960 or 1970 or even 1980. The genteel conservatives belong to the mainstream of the American conservative and nativist tradition, and for that reason, do not go near controversial topics such as Holocaust or WWII Revisionism. For example, Johnson is renowned for castigating European fascism (while simultaneously exploiting it thoroughly at Counter-Currents), and even MacDonald, anti-Semitic as he is, will not touch 
Holocaust Revisionism and German National Socialism with a barge pole.

The genteel conservatives are disappointed with Trump by and large, and a few (such as Johnson and Taylor) have openly denounced him.

The National Bolsheviks make up the third and final category. Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent leads this gang - other contenders for the leadership such as Richard Spencer seem to have disappeared into obscurity. When it comes to the Trump administration, Wallace takes the same positions as the Marxists. He preaches class war, e.g. he opposes Trump's tax cuts for 'the rich'; he opposes any US intervention in Maduro's socialist paradise; he opposes US intervention in Syria; (he wants the US to pull out of its piece of Syria and hand it over to the Russians; in much the same way, the US Left wanted to relinquish South Vietnam to the communists of the North); and, it goes without saying, he opposes American warmongering and interventionism while supporting Russia's. In the American National Bolshevik worldview, capitalism as a system is viewed as the enemy and economic and social policy must be directed towards the interests of the (white) working class. It follows quite naturally then that Wallace, along with many others of the National Bolshevik and Alt-Right faction of white nationalism, was strongly attracted to Andrew Yang campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Ideologically, the National Bolsheviks more less stand on the same side as the CPUSA in 1975 or 1985.

One may object that the comparison is invalidated by the fact that the CPUSA  championed busing and the like in the 1970s, and actively fought against segregation, Jim Crow, state's rights, for most of the 20th century. But this ignores the underlying racial dynamics in American communism at the time. An interesting and trenchant critique made of the CPUSA in the seventies and eighties was made by the Third World Marxist, 'anti-revisionist', New Communist Movement - the same movement that invented the concept of 'white privilege' - to the effect that by around 1970, the CPUSA had geared itself surreptitiously towards a class struggle on behalf of the white working class only. In practice but not in theory, the CPUSA had become the domain of Jews and blue-collar WASPs, and by way of contrast, the New Communist Movement had embraced black, Asian-American, Puerto Rican and Chicano nationalism and racialism. Unlike the CPUSA, the New Communist Movement understood that the identity politics of the 1970s presaged the future of American leftism, and so by the 1980s, the Movement had thrown its weight behind Democratic Party African-Americans running for office (the most famous of these being Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic nomination in the presidential primaries of 1984 and 1988). This divide between the two communisms should be not be seen as a mere historical footnote: events have shown that the New Communist Movement won the argument: in leftist circles in 2019, a non-white, 'ethnic' communism rules the roost. The Gus Halls, for all their rote denunciations of 'racism' and 'white supremacy', belonged to old guard - which was mainly white, and Jewish - of US Marxism, and is to this tendency that the Wallaces and Spencers vibrate in sympathy with.

It goes without saying that the National Bolshevik faction repudiates Trump. The brilliant Wallace has written some of the best polemics against him - polemics which are witty and amusing.

III. A fourth faction?

Here belong the white nationalists who cannot be categorised, or at least, cannot be classified as Trumpian populist, genteel conservative or National Bolshevik. Because they do not belong to the big three, they lack political power and should be viewed as minor players on the white nationalist scene.

In this rag-tag collection of individualists, we get: the occult, pagan and Satanist nihilist types (Andrew 'Weev' Auernheimer and the Atomwaffen Division gang) who endorse violence and accelerationism; the bohemian and avant-gardists of the Alt-Left (see Robert Stark); the neo-pagans and conspiracy theorists (see the Renegade Tribune and the like). The nihilists and neo-pagans claim to be grounded in meat-and-potatoes National Socialism, whereas the Alt-Left are so far away from it - and traditional white nationalism - that they may as well be on another planet. Sometimes you can stray so far from your roots that you lose your moorings.

IV. The end of white nationalism

James Kirkpatrick of VDare writes that 'The Alt Right remained a coherent force even after Charlottesville until it was essentially crushed by government action, lawfare, defunding and deplatforming'. White nationalism could meet with the same fate. But it faces its biggest threat from forces which are internal, not external.

In politics, one needs to bow to certain realities, one of these being the fact that even the most elitist and aristocratic political movement needs to form a party, run in elections and win votes. To those ends, some nationalist organisations do better than others. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) at present leads the pack of German nationalist parties - its electoral success has left the National Democratic Party (NPD), Third Way and others in the dust. Likewise, the Brexit Party in the UK has become Britain's premier nationalist party and has eclipsed UKIP, which went astray following Farage's departure. (UKIP after Farage left the mainstream of British politics and descended into the murky netherverse of the British Far Right, to the level of the British National Party, Britain First and other now inconsequential parties).

Because of the unique structure of the American political system, a third party in America will never succeed; America has always been and always will be a two-party state. Anyone on the dissident Right, then, who wants to engage in politics must work with the Republican Party. (The communist Left instinctively this principle, i.e., that in the last analysis, one's best efforts should be made within the sphere of mainstream politics, which is why the Left has expended so much energy on infiltrating and corrupting the US Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party). The implication of this is that the dissident Right must get used to looking at the Republican Party as its own and struggle to wrest control of it from the hated donor class, which wants unrestricted non-white immigration.

In 2015-16 a miracle occurred: a Far Right populist and avowed nationalist undertook a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, won the primaries and then the presidential election. But after Trump's inauguration, the donor class faction of the party struck back and seemed to have taken control back from the civic nationalists and populists. Or perhaps Trump's heart was never in it in the first place. One can understand the disappointment of the American white nationalists. Yes, Trump should be praised for several of his initiatives (such as the proposed Public Charge law), initiatives which would have been unthinkable ten years ago, but so far, Trump has not performed up to expectations.

Imagine that you manage a large retail store and hire a store detective or security guard to apprehend shoplifters and other rapscallions, but despite an enthusiastic attitude, the new employee only delivers on 10-15% of what he promised at the interview - he does not meet his key performance indicators (KPIs, in today's annoying corporate jargon) at all. To make matters worse, the previous man who occupied that position - a skinny black homosexual who had attitude problems and hated the company - performed better when it came to certain metrics. (Obama had deported more illegals than Trump). By all rights, the new employee should be fired and replaced - but, say some of the store owners who are fond of him and praise him , 'He's all we've got'. Indeed, he is all you've got - and what does this say about Trump? The Republican Party? White nationalists in general? Given that the Tories under the new British prime minister Boris Johnson (who is ideologically sympathetic to Trump) seem to have gone back on their earlier promises to curtail immigration, one has to ask why the Anglo-Saxons find it so difficult to close their borders and why the Italians and Hungarians find it so easy?

The Far Left in the US and UK are playing a long game; they don't expect to win overnight. Any year now they can expect to take complete control, and this will happen, like the Czechoslovak communist coup of 1948, without a shot being fired. Time is on their side, but the clock is ticking for white nationalists, who want results and want them now.

When they don't get those results, white nationalists are inclined to give up, and are then faced with the question of what to do once a return to an American white majority no longer seems possible. This became one of primary themes of the discourse of Andrew Yang's white nationalist followers. We began to hear, on the Robert Stark radio show and elsewhere, talk of a 'post-America', that is, a post-white America. One compelling argument for Yangism, made again and again (see here for an example) was that 'White America is going down the tubes, so I may as well kick back and enjoy the decline - and pocket my $1000 a month UBI cheque'.The prevalence of that argument and its ready acceptance by many white nationalists indicate that by early 2019, white nationalists had become severely demoralised.

Such demoralisation ('black pilling', in chan speak) will lead white nationalism down some strange paths. Suppose you are a white nationalist, and out of a desire to hew to the center (or cowardice, or both), and you are willing to steer away from certain uncomfortable subjects out of fear that you will alienate 'middle America', among those subjects being Holocaust Revisionism and revisionism regarding America's involvement in both world wars; suppose that you find yourself in opposition to any sort of German nationalism, like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and at the same time broadly supportive of any Polish nationalism, like Wilson and Roosevelt; suppose you have reached an uneasy peace with right-leaning Jews of the Israeli nationalist sort, Jews who applaud Bibi Netanyahu's highly effective 'anti-infiltrator' border wall; suppose you have reached a 'black pilled' state of mind, and now despair of Americans ever getting their country back from illegal immigrants (in the way Italy, Hungary and Israel seem to be doing); where does that leave you? The answer is, on the same page as the conservatives who never gave a damn about thwarting non-white immigration in the first place; that is, the anti-white nationalist, anti-fascist, anti-anti-Semitic conservatives - David French, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, Kevin D. Williamson-type conservatives, schmaltzy 'America is an idea' conservatives, Never Trump conservatives... 

Saturday, August 17, 2019

A Trump Recession ? It's already here






I. The Role of Gold

Because of the inverted yield curve, slowing GDP and the recent downturn in the stock market, pundits have been forecasting a Trump recession. But the recession is already here, if we are to consider one single variable - what is called the Dow Gold ratio, which is the Dow Jones Industrial Average divided by the price of gold. This bold statement requires a lengthy explanation of the purpose gold serves.

Gold has been used as money for thousands of years, because its value changes extremely little, if it all: it is the ultimate store of value. When a currency (such as the Venezuelan bolivar) becomes worthless, gold acts as a refuge, and so do other hard assets (such as silver, diamonds, land) which, by definition, cannot be used up quickly (unlike oil).

But this proposition regarding gold's efficacy, a proposition which has been viewed as nothing more than common sense for millennia, is apparently contradicted by the daily fluctuations in the gold price: don't these ups and downs prove that gold is unstable? And if so, how can gold function as mankind's preeminent store of value?

The truth is that ups and downs in the gold price reflect a change in value of a currency in terms of gold, not the other way around. When Roosevelt devalued the US dollar against gold in 1933, the gold price went from $USD20.67 an ounce to $USD35 an ounce: after the devalution, more dollars were needed to pay for the same amount of gold - the dollar had lost value in terms of gold. (Whereas the US dollar before devaluation could buy 1/20th of an ounce, after devaluation, it could buy only 1/35th). Roosevelt had devalued the US dollar against gold by around 75% and had thereby deliberately cheapened the dollar. This was understood by economists at the time, who thought in terms of classical economics, which said that gold is the constant, currency is the variable.

Another example of a US president ordering a devaluation occurred in 1971, when Nixon took America, and the world, off the gold standard for good. The US dollar and other currencies floated and were no longer fixed, and the price of gold rose from $USD35 an ounce all the way up to $USD850 by 1980 - a depreciation of over 2400%.Such an enormous decline in the value of a currency leads to inflation, and that is precisely what happened in the 1970s: other US prices, most notably the price of oil, silver, copper, land and other commodities, followed gold in an upward trajectory.

But prices can travel the other way. When gold fell from $USD850 an ounce to $USD300 in the years 1980-82, other prices followed in train and America (and the world) experienced a sudden, shocking deflation. In a short amount of time, the dollar had appreciated by over 60% against gold in a dramatic change from the monetary policy of the high inflation, weak dollar 1970s; too many US dollars existed in circulation during the Jimmy Carter years, too few in the Reagan (or at least in the first two years of his first term). The classical economists would have called the increase in gold under Nixon, Ford and Carter a devaluation, the decrease under Reagan a revaluation.

The blame for these wild swings in value of the US dollar - which had severe political consequences for the entire world - lies with the central banks, which are in charge of supplying currency, or money. If a central bank prints too much money, the currency will lose value, and the price of gold and other commodities in that currency will rise; conversely, if the bank prints too little, the currency appreciates and prices fall.

To explain the process in more detail. A central bank injects currency into circulation by printing money and using it buy things - usually government bonds. If the Fed prints $US1, spends it on a bond, and that dollar is not demanded, i.e., no-one wants it - then the Fed has supplied $USD1 extra above demand and, as a result, has weakened the currency and increased inflation. The same works in reverse. If the Fed sells a bond for $USD1, the purchaser pays for the bond with $USD1 which is then removed from circulation by the Fed. If that now missing $USD1 was demanded by the market, and cannot be replaced with a substitute, then the currency will strengthen and prices will go down. Deflation results.

A central bank, then, needs to adopt a target when adding or subtracting currency. Three schools of practical economics differ as to what that target should be.

The Keynesian school - which is the dominant one today - argues that interest rates ought to be the target, and one interest rate in particular, the rate on overnight loans between banks (alter this rate and others will follow in sympathy). In the Keynesian model, low interest rates cause people to borrow more and spend more, and this increased borrowing and spending drives economic growth. But seeing as growth is always inflationary, the consequent inflation must be tamed through interest rate hikes, which cause people to save more and spend less. The economy is to be blown up or deflated like a balloon.

The monetarist school garnered a huge following in the 1970s and early 1980s, but has since lost its appeal. The monetarist argument is that the precise number of dollars (or any other currency) in circulation can be measured by an aggregate called the money supply. If this aggregate is continually expanded at a modest level, then economic growth is assured. But like the Keynesians, the monetarists believe that too much growth leads to inflation, which needs to be subdued not by high interest rates but a sharp reduction in the money supply.

The principles of the third school, the classical, are today only upheld by the supply-side economists. They want the central banks in charge of the really big currencies (such as the US dollar, the yen and the euro) to target the gold price; the smaller currencies should then be fixed to the bigger ones. As for interest rates and aggregates such as the money supply, these can be ignored. Contrary to the Keynesian school, the supply-siders opine that interest rates should be set by the market and not by the central bankers.

How, then, would a gold standard work? Suppose that the Fed sets the target of keeping the US dollar at 1/35th of an ounce of gold. If the market price of gold drifts above $USD35 to, say, $USD40, speculators will buy gold from the Fed at $USD35 and sell it on the open market at $USD40, making a $USD5 profit each time. The Fed, in this instance, sees bars of gold flying off its shelves, and so takes action, withdrawing enough US dollars in circulation to bring the market gold price back down to $USD35 an ounce.

Again, the same works in reverse. Suppose that the market price of gold drops to $USD30 an ounce. Speculators buy gold on the open market at $US30 an ounce to sell to the Fed at $USD35, again making a $US5 profit each time. The Fed's stockpile of gold builds up as newly purchased bars of gold begin to line its shelves. But for each transaction with the speculators, the Fed pays in freshly-minted dollars. This new addition of dollars injected into circulation leads to a weakening of the dollar overall, and so the market price of gold floats back up to $US35.

The gold standard mechanism works with a beautiful, admirable simplicity. So why was it abandoned? Nixon took America off gold because he wanted to devalue the currency and increase the supply of dollars in circulation. The gold standard stands in the way of the latter and imposes a harsh discipline. In 1971, Nixon had come under the sway of Keynesian and monetarist advisers who wanted to break that discipline and depreciate the dollar - after all, inflation brings about economic growth, and won't a depreciated currency make America's exports cheaper and more attractive? The gold standard was holding America back.

Seeing as the US dollar stood at the heart of the post-war international monetary system, a floating US dollar would lead to floating foreign currencies as well: under Bretton Woods, the deutschmark, pound, yen, lire, franc and other currencies were all fixed to the US dollar and so were as 'good as gold'. After the US left gold and depreciated its dollar, other countries floated their currencies and depreciated in tandem. The euro was devised in response to the global inflationary crisis of the 1970s.

II. The Decline of the Dow

Where does the stock market come into this? Rightly considered, the Dow Jones represents the value of America's capital stock, the worth of America's biggest companies. Any money invested in an enterprise should be seen as gamble - the rewards of capitalism arise through taking risks - and if we were to gather up all the gambler's chips at America's most elite casino and put them all into a pile, and then take one random average sample from that pile, we would have the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And how are we to assess the worth of that handful of chips? By dividing it by the dollar price of gold. This is the Dow Gold Ratio.

We read here, in the caption above the Macro Trends Dow Gold chart:

Dow to Gold Ratio - 100 Year Historical Chart
This interactive chart tracks the ratio of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the price of gold. The number tells you how many ounces of gold it would take to buy the Dow on any given month. Previous cycle lows have been 1.94 ounces in February of 1933 and 1.29 ounces in January of 1980.

So, as we can see, the Dow hit record lows in 1933 and 1980. It hit record highs in August 1929 (18 ounces), January 1966 (27 ounces) and August 1999 (42 ounces!) - all very good years to be an American.

How does Trump's record compare? The Dow sagged after 9/11 but was still high throughout Bush 45's first term, hovering around 25 ounces. But the Dow began to decline midway through Bush's second term, and after the financial crisis of 2008-09, the Dow bottomed at around 6 ounces during August 2011 and took a long time to recover. In the month Trump was elected, we see a big spike. Rapid growth ensued and the Trump boom was underway.

But all has not been smooth sailing for Trump. Under his watch, the Dow peaked at 22 ounces in September 2018 and has been dropping ever since. The last three months of 2018 saw the Dow take a severe battering, and the present downward turn is even worse.




As to why, the reasons are threefold:

Interest rate hikes. The Fed hiked rates multiple times throughout the Trump presidency but left them flat in the Obama years. A paranoid might say that the Fed is out to get Trump:




While it is the case that interest rates are still extremely low, each interest rate hike functions as a tax hike and hurts the Dow each time. This effect is compounded by the Dow's fragility after years of Bush 45 and Obama.

Tariff hikes. The market are reacting adversely towards Trump's trade war with China. On this, little remains to be said - many pundits have covered it already.

The increase in the gold price. Supply-side economist John Tamny wrote back in June:

All of this matters because President Trump’s calls for dollar weakness have picked up in the past week. While a dollar purchased 1/1200th of an ounce of gold when the 45th president entered office, it now purchases 1/1439th. The dollar is weaker, it’s weakening, and by extension the tax on investment without which there is no growth is rising.

The US dollar has lost even more ground since Tamny's article, the gold price having climbed to over $USD1500 an ounce.


In an article written at the beginning of August, Tamny gives an update:

Yesterday’s selloff presumably reflects investor worry about the dollar, and where Trump is taking his trade war. The dollar is rapidly falling, and as the Nixon, Carter and Bush presidencies should remind us, a falling currency always correlates with slow growth since devaluation is a tax. Tariffs limit the ability of the world’s best companies (that would be American companies) to sell around the world. Economics isn’t very complicated.
President Trump should realize this, or his advisers should help him to realize this. He’s wisely staked his presidency on a healthy economy and stock market. Good for him. Every president should. The problem is that tariffs and devaluation never correlate with a good economy, and by extension never boost stock markets.

III.  Recommendations

What should Trump do to arrest the Dow's slide? A supply-side economist would recommend three courses of action.

The first is that Trump should get rid of his éminence grise, trade adviser Peter Navarro, the man who provided the intellectual foundations for the levying of the trade sanctions against China. After dumping Navarro, Trump should call for a ceasefire in the trade war with China (and Europe). This prospect seems unlikely, as protectionism, one of the constants of Trump's political career, forms one of the cornerstones of Trumpianism. But as the markets continue to deteriorate, Trump may at some point be forced to face reality.

The second is that the Fed should abandon interest-rate targeting and go back to gold price targeting, and aim at keeping the dollar's value in terms of gold steady - at maybe $USD1500 an ounce. Again, this is extremely unlikely, as economists, central bankers, academics, the media, would all put up tremendous resistance to a return to gold and fixity.

The third is that Trump could cut taxes - again. In the 2016 campaign, he ran on a platform (designed by supply-side economists Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow) of reducing income tax rates to two brackets of 15 and 25%. After taking office, Trump did manage to slash income and corporate tax rates, as well as rates for small businesses, but the top rate of income tax (37%) still stands far above the top rate of company tax (21%). By bringing the top rate of income tax down to 25%, Trump will achieve near parity. But does this scenario seem likely? Trump could run on such a platform in 2020, but at present, there is no indication he will.

In the interim before 2020, he could - as some of his advisors are urging - index the capital gains tax to inflation by executive order, thereby bypassing a hostile Congress and indifferent Senate, and such a measure would produce beneficial effects, one of them being a market rally, so the supply-siders argue.

The recent crisis has revealed a tension in the Trump administration between the supply-siders and the protectionists - a tension which was there from the beginning of Trump's 2016 campaign. The supply-siders advocate 'hard money', that is, a strong currency and no devaluations, whereas the protectionists - or more accurately, the mercantilists - advocate 'soft money', that is, a weak currency and devaluations when need be. Even before he ran for the presidency, Trump had been biased towards soft money; after all, the thesis of the soft money advocates - that a weak currency boosts exports, fixes the trade deficit and creates jobs for American workers - resonates with the protectionist-obsessed Trump, who views trade as a zero-sum game (that is, in order for one trading partner to benefit, the other must lose). From the outset of his 2016 campaign for the presidency, the supply-siders knew that Trump subscribed to mercantilist notions, but made the calculation that a President Trump would deliver on tax cuts and could be dissuaded from pursuing a trade war against China and Mexico - in other words, they banked on supply-side Trump winning out over protectionist Trump, closing their eyes to the historical fact that the latter was stronger than the former. But now that truth - regarding Trump's fealty to mercantilism and 'soft money' - has become too obvious to ignore.






Sunday, July 21, 2019

Who killed Australian fascism?




What do I mean by 'Australian fascism'? I mean the ideas of white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, neofascism - the subject of this article here on the Far Right in the Ukraine and the Balkans - as manifested here in Australia. These ideas form part of a post-war Far Right tradition chronicled adequately enough in Martin E. Lee's Beast Reawakens (1997) - a dreadful book written by a liberal antifa but one which serves as a good history of the developments in the Western Far Right since WWII.


The Far Right, neofascist idea has seen rises and falls, peaks and valley, in its fortunes, and in Australia, towards the end of the present decade, it has slumped. A strange malaise, at present, grips the movement.


As to what has brought this about - the first reason is as follows. The force of Anglo conservatism acts as a countervailing weight to any imported ideas from the Continent (and neofascism, Third Positionism, National Bolshevism, are imports from the Continent, mostly from Germany). Australians fought in the Boer War, WWI and WWII for the British, in the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan War for the Americans: fighting for the Anglo, and against Germany in particular, is in our blood. We see ourselves as part of the Anglosphere, and it is to the politics of the Anglosphere to which Australians will return when times are uncertain.


The second reason is that in Australia from around 2014 to 2015, the Australian Far Right bought heavily into a new British export - the ideas and approaches of the anti-Islamic 'Patriot' movement, as exemplified by the English Defence League, the Football Lads Alliance, Casuals United and a host of other Far Right organisations and gangs formed out of the British soccer hooligan movement. The problem with the 'Patriot' idea - as manifested here in Australia - was not that it failed, but that it succeeded, beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. In the space of a few months, it gathered hundreds, if not thousands, of followers and mobilised hundreds at probably what were the biggest Far Right marches and rallies in Australian political history. Far Right nationalism in Australia for many years since the war has been situated in the shadows and fringes, but in the peak years of the 'Patriot' movement, it was brought kicking and screaming out of the darkness. Here were ideas being brought to the masses with a vengeance. But the 'Patriots' lacked the political infrastructure needed to sustain the movement, and after a time, its followers realised that there was little of substance to it - there was no 'there' there. And so it collapsed. The activists who had signed up with the 'Patriot' movement were left high and dry - like drug takers who, after ingesting a drug, experience euphoria and an onset of energy, and then collapse into depression and exhaustion following the inevitable come down. Under the influence of drugs, one goes from hero to zero in the space of a few hours. Would the drug taker have been better off had he not taken it? The answer is yes. That answer would be sensible, and it would be sensible, too, to damn and curse the men who had sold us the drug - the hucksters and pied pipers who had foisted the anti-Islamist, 'Patriot' movement upon us.


After the implosion of the 'Patriot' movement, the Far Right contracted. The 'Patriot' movement had opened up doors, and just as abruptly, closed them: the 'Patriots' showed the Far Right that a connection to the masses was possible - that the Far Right could be transformed into a mass movement - and then curtailed that possibility. After 2015, the Far Right would be forced to return to its old venues - talks and meetings were to take place once again only in bars and club houses - and its old shadowy existence. The remnants of the 'Patriot' leadership (those who were not informants and agents provocateurs) renewed their political activity, but this time went inward, not outward. They formed what the Germans would call a Männerbund which sought to encourage the pursuit of physical fitness among its members. (Politically, it leaned in the direction of Alt Rightism, 4Chanism and Trumpianism). But the overweight and unfit members entering the Männerbund gym remained so going out. As a result, a strange Far Right version of 'fat acceptance' and 'body positivity' took root, where overweight men were upheld as the ideal: they were to be considered to be 'big' and 'strong', just the sort of men who were to stand up to commies in a street battle, in comparison to the men of the Far Right who were slender and blessed with flat stomachs.


We certainly have traveled a long way from the viewpoint of Otto Skorzeny, Otto Ernst Remer, Francis Parker Yockey and the other personalities of Lee's Beast Reawakens. It should be noted that the journey has taken us away from Europe and back to America. Under Obama, whatever appeal America had to the Far Right - in Europe and Australia - melted away, and Russia adroitly stepped in to fill the vacuum, cementing its position by around 2014 (the year of the annexation of the Crimea and the beginning of the war in Eastern Ukraine). America staged a comeback after Trump, and Putin receded shortly thereafter, and it is at this point that 4Chanism and Alt Rightism hit their high water mark. But, despite the fact of his good intentions, Trump has shown himself to be ineffectual at delivering his promises on immigration, whether it be legal or illegal, and now the Far Right is looking to Hungary and Italy for heroes... But the break is not yet complete. So Far Rightism in Australia has taken a circuitous path back to the Angloism of WWI and WWII, the Angloism which fought and defeated (what Yockey calls) 'Prussian Socialism' in not one but two world wars. Hence the malaise.

Sunday, January 27, 2019

The Mystical Sand Book: Holocaust Revisionism explained for Leftists







I.                     Introduction: Left anti-Semitism?

Recently, the scandal – or pseudo-scandal – of ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ in Britain has been making headlines around the world. I find the subject somewhat baffling: I am unable to determine whether these left-wingers – who are invariably white British, or Muslim, or Jewish – in the Corbyn Labour Party are real anti-Semites or not. My confusion stems from the fact that I perhaps stand too close to the subject: I have been a fully-fledged anti-Semite (according to the IHRA’s definition) for nearly twenty years, and as a result, I tend to evaluate the newfound anti-Semitism of the British Left (from what I’ve seen so far) as being rather weak and watered-down. But, I am told – by outraged conservatives, and certain sections of the British Left itself – that this new wave of left-wing anti-Semitism is really strong stuff.

It is my observation that what calls itself the ‘Jewish community’ habitually exaggerates anti-Semitism and attempts to make it out as worse than it is, and as a consequence, the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism goes too far, as it makes virtually any discussion of Jews and Israel by non-Jews ‘anti-Semitic’, and thereby cuts off any criticism of Jews and Israel at the knees before it has left the starting gate. Quite possibly, any rules and regulations against anti-Semitism as defined by the IHRA cannot be complied with: given the definition’s broadness, its scope, one always – whenever one touches upon the subject of Jews, Israel, the Holocaust – runs the risk of falling of falling foul of strictures against anti-Semitism. One thereby has to ask if this effect was intended: did the framers of the definition want any intellectual who talks about the Jewish people to stand in danger of thinking of himself as an anti-Semite and thereby feel an accompanying sense of shame? Some religions strive to induce a false sense of guilt as a means of social control. Is anti-anti-Semitism a religion?

Most of the polemics and the back and forth on the subject of British left-wing anti-Semitism have appeared in the Weekly Worker, which is a left-wing tabloid (run by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)) whose letters pages serve as the closest thing to a free-for-all discussion forum for the British Left – a kind of communist 4Chan: the editors will cheerfully print letters from just about anyone of a Marxist Left orientation, no matter how crack-brained or politically incorrect they are. In this the Weekly Worker shows a tolerance and restraint which is unusual for the Left, which cannot, to save its life, run a left-wing equivalent of Stormfront or 4Chan, because, being traditionally obsessed with control of discourse, it does not like discussion which threatens to wander off the reservation. We find plenty of free and frank talk on Jewish subjects in the Weekly Worker. But, in all the writings there and elsewhere by the British participants in the left-wing anti-Semitism scandal (men such as Tony Greenstein, Moishe Machover, Gerry Downing) and sympathetic onlookers (Jewish intellectuals such as Norman Finkelstein and Gilad Atzmon), I find little to no Holocaust denial: I see that they subscribe to the notion that, during WWII, Germany gassed six million Jews in giant gas chambers. One has to ask why this is so. These men have already travelled a great distance towards anti-Zionism, but will not make the final leap into Holocaust Revisionism. And it is only Revisionism which can defeat Zionism, because, as I will attempt to show in a moment, the Holocaust serves as the metaphysical foundation of the State of Israel, Zionism and Judaism itself.

I am here going to make the assumption that many on the Left stay away from Revisionism because they find it too hard: that is to say, it requires – because of the often poor presentation of its chief arguments on Internet forums – too much effort and time to comprehend, and on the surface of it, never seems to get down to core principles. From the outset, most Revisionists will bombard their readers with facts and figures, and references to documents, eyewitness testimonies and demographic studies which are usually obscure to the non-initiated. Worse, Revisionism seems to revolve around chemistry and engineering: it is not possible to cremate x amount of corpses of y amount of time, or the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and other camps could not have functioned, were they real, in the way they are described in Holocaust literature. All this tends to overwhelm the casual reader. The average Marxist-Leninist will spend a great deal of time and energy on reading up on, for instance, the intricacies of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia – look at the libraries of commentaries the Revolution has produced  – but he will not waste precious time on Revisionism, a subject which does not lie within his traditional sphere of interest. So here I will try, for the benefit of my reader, to prune Revisionism to its essentials: no degrees in chemistry or engineering are required.

II.                   The Cabbage Fields of Death

To begin with, we must establish what the Holocaust is. It consists of three connected historical theses, none of which can be denied without calling the entire official Holocaust narrative into question. The first is that Hitler and the NSDAP leadership ordered the extermination of Europe’s Jews, as outlined in documents such as the Wannsee Protocol of 1942; the second is that this extermination, which did take place, was accomplished primarily through gas chambers disguised as showers, and (on the Eastern Front) mobile gas chamber vans (there was shooting there as well – this is what is called the ‘Holocaust of bullets’); the third is that six million Jews (or one third of world Jewry) were killed, five million in Europe (nearly 3.1 million of them Polish) and one million in occupied Soviet territory. (As to what happened to the corpses: in Europe, most of these were disposed of in crematoria, and in the USSR, on bonfires).

Now, at this point, alarm bells should start ringing in my reader’s head: your first thought may be, ‘Is that what the Holocaust is? What he says above doesn’t sound right’. In fact, the above sounds a little… implausible, and I may be accused of twisting the story in order to give it that slant. But I can assure the reader that I have given a factual account. The problem of ‘ringing alarm bells’ comes from the fact that the Holocaust story in itself sets up a cognitive dissonance. The lay person who believes in it thinks, ‘Yes, I give this gas chamber story credence because every single book, newspaper, movie, TV show in the world says that it happened; besides which, there are plenty of witnesses who have been there, saw it happen, met Doctor Mengele, and have a tattoo on their forearms’. But on the fringes of their conscious awareness lurks another thought: ‘From my basic knowledge, most mass murders in the 20th were carried out through starvation, disease and overwork, and to a lesser extent, through shooting and decapitation. I can’t understand why the Germans went about it in such a laborious and inefficient manner, why they used exotic weapons such as the gas chamber, and why they went to so much trouble to dispose of millions of corpses – wasn’t there a war on?’. This can lead to a real conflict in the mind of every person who thinks over the Holocaust for himself.

That conflict is compounded when you learn that the Holocaust story we hear today is a cleaned-up version of the original. Take this news article from the Ohio newspaper, the Youngstown Vindicator, from February 2, 1945 – a few days after the liberation of Auschwitz: ‘Reds liberate thousands in torture plant – Report says Soviets find “Nazi death factory” in south Poland’. Pravda correspondent Boris Polevoy tells us

Dissatisfied with early methods of execution by which victims were machine-gunned in trenches which they themselves had dug, the Germans ‘increased production by mechanizing the murder plant', Polevoy said.

 Perhaps the most elaborate apparatus was an electric conveyor belt on which hundreds of persons could be electrocuted simultaneously, then moved on the belt directly into furnaces.

 ‘They were burned almost instantly, producing fertilizer for near-by cabbage fields’, Polevoy said.



The above sounds like something taken out of a pulp novel, comic book or adventure movie. And it comes from an impeccable source: a Soviet journalist attached to Pravda (which is, incidentally, a Russian word meaning ‘truth’) who was there when the Russians liberated the camp. Peculiarly enough, most of the best evidence we have for the Holocaust -  the wartime reports of Polish exile and Jewish groups, and the evidence heard at the Nuremberg trials - abounds with tales of mass killings carried out by the Germans using cartoonish murder methods. (In the Nuremberg trial transcripts of June 1946, we read that the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson accuses the Germans of killing 20,000 Jews at Auschwitz with an atomic bomb).



Holocaust narratives from this period tend to deconstruct themselves, and the Youngstown Vindicator is a case in point. It starts off well enough, with descriptions which tally with the contemporary accounts we have all heard of the liberation of the camps and the discovery of the atrocities there; it speaks of ‘several thousand tortured, emaciated inmates’, who were ‘ghost-like apparitions blown to the ground by the slightest breeze, ageless and sexless’, of trains arriving in 1941, 1942, 1943 filled with ‘Russians, Poles, Jews, Czechs, French and Yugoslavs’ who were ‘jammed in sealed cars’. So far so good, as this accords with the footage we have all seen of the liberation of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But then we read something which sounds a little dubious: ‘Dozens of square miles are saturated with human blood and literally blanketed with human ashes’. Then: ‘The main department was the “smelting furnace” where, after elaborate torture, victims were burned’. Finally we come to the electrified conveyor belt which, after killing ‘hundreds’ of victims, drops them off into a furnace which then turns them into fertiliser for the Auschwitz cabbage gardens. All this could have happened, but seems highly unlikely.

It raises the question as to what the men who put these stories together were thinking: did they really believe that newspaper-reading public was that stupid? They must have, and furthermore, they were correct in their assumption: Europeans and Americans at that time accepted whatever appeared in a newspaper or book as gospel. But one cannot argue with success: mixing in absurdities with facts worked for the Allied and Russian propagandists of the time. In this sceptical age, they would have been howled down.

III.                 The Sand Book

In most essays on the Holocaust, the Holocaust Revisionist will attempt to refute it by reference to forensics, documents and demographics. Here I will not take this route: that is, I will not attempt to ‘refute’ the Holocaust, and as stated before, I will not be discussing autopsies of concentration camp cadavers or the chemical composition of samples taken from Auschwitz chamber walls. I will instead talk about how the Holocaust relates to the Jewish religion.

The most remarkable thing about the Holocaust story is that it matches – to an extraordinary degree – prophecies made in the Babylonian Talmud which were written some 1500 years ago. According to the Talmud, at some time in the future, Gentiles will murder a vast number of Jews by throwing them into ovens and burning them to death. But dead does not mean dead in this case, as the murdered Jews will magically return to life, and God, seeing their sacrifice, will allow them to reclaim the lost Kingdom of Israel. And as to the number of murdered Jews, it is – as you may have guessed – six million. The name given to this event, it is, of course, the Holocaust. (The word Holocaust means ‘burnt offering’ or ‘holy sacrifice’ or ‘burnt offering to God’, and it comes from the Greek word kauston, which means ‘to burn’).

The below 4Chan post sums it up: 




Elie Wiesel in his autobiographical novel Night (1960) records that the Germans tried to kill him four times at Auschwitz, once by throwing him into a giant fire pit in the ground (which he miraculously survived). Wiesel’s use of this image – a Jewish man being thrown into a pit of fire, from which he emerges unscathed – is no accident,  as Wiesel studied the Torah as a youth and evidently incorporated imagery from the Talmud into his account. (Jewish folk literature influenced the writings of Wiesel and other survivors as well: Jewish folk tales often depict extraordinary persecution of Jews by Gentiles and are coloured by an absurdist and surreal tinge. We could call the strange quality of these stories ‘Kafkaesque’, but that would be putting the cart before the horse, as according to the arguments of some literary scholars, much of Franz Kafka’s work stems from motifs drawn from Jewish folklore).   

A number of points arise from all this.

1.       These Talmudic passages explain why the number of Jewish fatalities always stands at six million. If you compare the death toll from, say, the Great Leap Forward in China, or the famine in Ukraine in the early thirties, you see all sorts of figures bandied about. As a science, demography does not always gives us the precision we would like, and it would stand to reason, then, that the Holocaust death toll would fluctuate. But no: it always stays the same. And it must stay the same, because otherwise it would not conform to the prophecy of the Talmud.

2.       We also have the same explanation as to why the official Holocaust narrative insists that the majority of corpses were disposed of in ‘ovens’ and by burning. (Now, crematoria differ from ovens, but the Talmud – if the Holocaust narrative is true – gets it mostly right). The six million needed to be ‘burned’ for the ‘burnt offering’, the ‘burnt sacrifice’, to take place.

3.       If the Germans in WWII did not murder six million Jews, and did not throw the corpses into giant ovens, then reality did not conform to the prophecy, and Zionist Jews – that is, the Jews who wanted to create the lost Kingdom of Israel – have pulled a fast one on God. If I were God, I would be displeased by this, and if I were today’s Jews, I would fear their God’s wrath – as their God, to judge by what is written about Him in the Old Testament, sounds like a vengeful fellow. The Holocaust is sustained by the active belief of Jews and non-Jews, which is why the ‘Jewish community’ seeks to outlaw disbelief in it.

4.       The death and resurrection narrative of the Talmud prophecy explains why so many Jews have ‘survived’ the Holocaust. Given that over one million people died in Auschwitz, survivors of the camp should be as rare as hen’s teeth, and yet, they are legion, and they all have the same story to tell (they all dodged the gas chambers by a whisker, they all met and spoke to Dr Mengele, etc.). To take an analogy from WWII: we know that, according to the official historical record, only a few thousand German soldiers survived the encirclement and destruction of the 200,000 men in the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of ’42 – ’43, but let us suppose that soldier after soldier from the Sixth Army had turned up alive straight after that catastrophic defeat: I would begin to doubt either the official record or at least those soldiers’ claims that they had served in the Sixth Army. And yet, when it comes to Holocaust survivors (and Auschwitz survivors in particular), we are not allowed to express any such doubt. The most puzzling thing is that starvation, exposure and overwork in any death camp (with or without gas chambers) would destroy one’s body and lower one’s life expectancy severely, and yet, many of the Auschwitz survivors have lived to a ripe old age some seventy years after the event. But all this can be explained by the religious aspect of the tale. The facts have changed to conform with the religion, because according to the Talmud, millions of Jews must survive the immolation so as to reclaim Israel. And so we must overlook the self-contradictoriness of this miracle.

5.       You cannot believe in the Holocaust without believing at the same time, in Judaism. Suppose that someone tells you that they are not Christian, that they do not subscribe to Christian religious beliefs, but at the same time declares that they believe single word in the Book of Revelations, and that the apocalypse foretold in there is just around the corner – then they would be guilty of a self-contradiction. People who believe in the Holocaust – which is mostly everyone – find themselves in the same boat as that Christian. If they believe that one part of the Talmud is true, then they must believe in the rest – all 22 volumes of it. They are, rightly understood, Gentile followers of Judaism, and they must accede to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as it was, after all, God’s will.

We understand, now, why the IHRA and other Jewish groups see Holocaust denial as an attack on Jewish identity. The Holocaust can be identified with not only Zionism, but Judaism itself – it can be said constitute the very essence of both. If you deny the Holocaust, you deny Judaism and Israel’s right to exist.

The consequence of this is that, if the Holocaust was disproved and the story was no longer believed in, Israel would be forced to give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, and may even cease to exist altogether - a happy outcome for the Left, which for the most part seems to regard Israel as the most racist and evil state in the world.

IV.                The Bourgeois Influence

But even if, as in the above scenario, Israel were to vanish, and the Palestinians were to be liberated – and have their homeland returned to them – leftists would be aggrieved, as the worldwide spread of Holocaust Revisionism would give a great impetus to the German nationalist (that is, Neo-Nazi) cause and strike a blow against anti-Nazism and anti-fascism. In the past forty years, the opponents of German National Socialism – which is just about everybody of any political persuasion – have, in their efforts to prosecute German National Socialism and propagandise as to why it is a bad thing, invested nearly all of their resources in the Holocaust story. Anti-Nazism has come to pivot on the Holocaust, whereas, during the war, it did not. A survey of all the books, articles, plays, movies, novels, museum exhibitions on the Holocaust will reveal that it only attained its prominence in the decades following the war: as the 4Chan post indicates, while plenty of references to the Holocaust of the Jews and the six million Jewish dead-to-be proliferate in the media dating all the way back to the 19th century, the Holocaust did not by and large enter the public consciousness until around the 1970s, when it became the central exhibit in the prosecution case against German National Socialism and the main reason for opposing German fascism and for supporting the State of Israel. And because almost everything anti-Hitler is tied up in the Holocaust story, once the buttress which is the Holocaust is removed, the case against National Socialism collapses, and National Socialism’s opponents will need to cast around for other reasons to damn it.



The left-wing reader will interject at this point and note that the Left long opposed German fascism before the Holocaust was said to have occurred, and this is true enough, but the Left in 2019 in its current polemics against fascism has largely forgotten the antifascist writings of the Stalin-Trotsky era; it has come to rely overly much on wartime and post-war atrocity propaganda. The problem with that strategy is that once one experiences doubt regarding the Holocaust, one begins to doubt the associated atrocity stories as well. Take, for example, the case of the unfortunate SS man Oswald Pohl who was convicted at Nuremberg – and then hung – for, among other things, steaming to death inmates of Treblinka in ten steam chambers and making doormats out of their hair. (The steam chambers also appeared in the acclaimed work The Black Book: The Nazi Crime against the Jewish People (1946), in which the Germans were accused of parboiling, frying, electrocuting, and gassing Jews, and also suffocating them to death in vacuum chambers). It is possible that, even if the gas chambers never existed, the steam chambers may have, but that seems unlikely given the lack of hard forensic evidence for both. Could it be, then, that the prosecutors at Pohl’s trial were making it up? And the Jewish groups who authored The Black Book? And what of the wider claims such as the one made by the Poles, who insist (even to this day) that, during the war, the Germans gassed three million Poles as well as over three million Jews? As the Holocaust story unravels, the circumference of doubt widens.

How does all this relate to the Left? The Left has bought the entire Holocaust narrative for what seems to me to be two reasons.

The first is that the Left (and here I run the risk of alienating the left-wing reader) may pride itself upon being free-thinking, rational, and ‘red-pilled’, with the ability to see through the lies perpetuated by the bourgeois and capitalist political and economic system, but the truth of the matter is that it is not as free-thinking and independent-minded as it believes itself to be. It has been more influenced by the Western ‘bourgeoisie’ than it acknowledges. To explain. After the Russian liberation of the camps in Eastern Poland, the Soviet Union helped get the death camp propaganda ball rolling with breathless reports of German atrocities: Red Army war correspondent Vasily Grossman reports that large numbers of Jews were murdered in a basement in Treblinka, in an Edgar Allen Poe-esque ‘chamber of moving knives’ that cut the Jews into pieces; the bodies were cut up, burned and piled into heaps of ashes ‘twenty to twenty-five metres high’. (He also describes ‘In one place Jews had been chased into a pond full of acid… Their screams were so terrible that local peasants abandoned their homes’). But, even though the Soviets turned camps such as Auschwitz into exhibits of fascist crimes, communists in Eastern and Central Europe after the Nuremberg trials seemed largely uninterested in pushing the death camp narrative further: they did not convert it into the Holocaust narrative we are familiar with today. No: it was the Western half of Europe, and America, and the ‘bourgeoisie’ there, that founded the Holocaust story and perpetuated it through an endless campaign of Holocaust ‘education’ (really, indoctrination) which seemed to have reached a peak in the 1990s. The Left in Western countries received the full brunt of this along with everyone else, and it would have been a miracle had the Left not been sucked in by the Holocaust story (I myself remember being profoundly moved watching Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) in the cinema). This highly sophisticated campaign was carried out with a political intent. It goes without saying that the Jewish groups that sponsored the films, exhibits, museums, plays, etc., were all fervently pro-Israel. After all, the underlying message of Holocaust ‘education’ is that the Palestinians will simply have to put up with the theft of their country and their dispossession in the West Bank - because Nazis, because gas chambers, because the six million, because God gave the Jews the land. But times have changed. Now, thanks to the Internet, growing numbers of people (especially insouciant young people) are showing more and more scepticism towards the Holocaust narrative, and this is despite all the mandatory Holocaust ‘education’ classes and trips to the local Holocaust museum. But the Left remains stuck in the 1990s – in the pre-Internet era.

The second reason why the Holocaust narrative holds such sway amongst the Left lies in the Left’s antipathy to German National Socialism (that is a given) but also to Germany. Anti-imperialism forms one of the center-pieces of Marxist doctrine, and Germany, as well as being one of the founders of Western civilisation, was one of the biggest imperialist powers, which makes it one of the world’s worst offenders. (In Leninist speak, ‘imperialism’ refers to the white Western countries which partitioned the world – the coloured world – between them by around 1900; after the onset of the Cold War, it refers to one country only: America; after the end of the Cold War, it refers to – take your pick: America? China? Russia?). The Holocaust narrative fits in neatly with the Marxist narrative: an imperialist and capitalist power descends into madness and turns on an innocent and helpless minority, and carries out a cold-blooded extermination of it using the most modern and advanced industrial methods (insert thought-clichés regarding capitalism, modernity, etc., here). The Holocaust is what happens when you don’t have socialism! (Marxist socialism, that is, not the socialism of the ‘national’ kind). It was too easy, too tempting a target. And the fact that the Holocaust had been carried out by the German National Socialists, among the worst (and most effective) enemies of Marxism, made the story doubly appealing. 

One can understand, then, why the Left normally stays away from Holocaust Revisionism. But in my view they should embrace it, for the simple reason that, as it stands, the Holocaust story is an affront to the most basic standards of reason, evidence, proof.

Suppose that, 75 years ago, a gang of desperadoes rob a bank which is quickly surrounded by police, and, as what was intended to be a quick robbery turns into a siege, the gang takes twelve people at hostage, one of whom dies of a heart attack. The police storm the bank, free the hostages and arrest the gang and put them on trial – not only for armed robbery, but for first-degree murder of the person who died from the heart attack (in what should have been at the most an involuntary manslaughter charge). In addition, the gang are also charged with the premeditated murder of the eleven other hostages, even though all eleven survived. As evidence for this mass murder (which never happened), the prosecutors use photographs of the heart attack victim’s corpse, documents supposedly found at the gang’s hideout, and a confession coerced out of one of the gang’s members by torture or threats to his family. The final piece of evidence, which onlookers regard as the most compelling, is the eyewitness testimony of the eleven murdered people themselves, who all put in an appearance at the trial. At the conclusion of the trial, the gang members are either sentenced to death or life imprisonment. No-one spoke up for them – after all, they were admittedly bad characters, had made many enemies, and should have been in jail for other crimes – and decades later, they are still regarded as guilty, because, among other reasons, the survivors of the siege and their descendants will tell anyone who will listen how the gang took a dozen people hostage and murdered them in cold blood.

The reader can deduce that the above is an allegory for what happened to the Germans after the end of the war: the gang of robbers are the Germans, the police are the Allies and Russians, and the hostages are the Jews (and perhaps the Poles). I think the story can be used to understand why precisely it is that the Holocaust story is so objectionable. Standards of justice and law come into it, and ethics as well – is it right or wrong to use unjust and unlawful methods to take down a criminal gang? But more important than that, in my view, is that normal standards of reason, evidence and proof were breached. We are told that Polevoy’s, Grossman’s, Wiesel’s and Jackson’s obvious lies are in fact true, and axiomatically true, and anyone who professes disbelief in them is either insane or a cynical political operator who is twisting the truth, with malice aforethought, for Adolf Hitler (‘Telling lies for Hitler’, to quote the title of Richard C. Evans’ book on David Irving). This brings about a confusion for which ‘cognitive dissonance’ is too mild a word: a more apt term for it would be a mental rupture which causes a splitting of the mind. (And there is a word for that: schizophrenia).

But this is no accident, as theology tells us that confrontation with absurdities and unreason can assist one in making a leap into religious faith – in the case of the Holocaust, the Jewish religious faith.

V.                  Reactionary and Theocratic

 In his now-forgotten book Strategies of Revolution (1974), Régis Debray surveys some of the insurgencies of WWII and the post-war period: the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, Costas-Grivas’ EOKA in Cyprus, the FLN nationalists in Algeria, the 26th July Movement in Cuba, and the Irgun in Palestine. He writes, ‘The techniques of underground resistance are one thing, the various ideologies underlying them quite another’, and characterises the ideology of Irgun as a ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’.

He sums it up correctly, but his choice of words would, were he a British Labour Party member today, lead to his expulsion and blacklisting. The Left in the seventies and eighties could afford to be much more cavalier – and outspoken – regarding Israel and Zionism than it is now; for one, Holocaust indoctrination had not quite sunk in and sensitivities to anti-Semitism – real or imagined – had not been raised to a fever pitch. But now the British Labour Party has been given over to the ideology of Irgun, and any Labour Party leftist who disputes that ideology’s ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’ shall be punished. This state of affairs was brought about, not by Labour’s acceptance of the IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism, but by the Left’s acceptance some forty years ago of the six million, the ovens, the sacrifice to God: the rot had set in long before Jeremy Corbyn, Momentum, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Jon Lansman...


What, then, is the answer? It certainly is not left-wing anti-Zionism, which has been going on for a long time. Take, for example, this essay from over thirty-five years ago, by the American group Line of March:

The root of the problem is that the progressive, anti-imperialist movement in the US has consistently conciliated Zionism (liberal, ‘progressive’ Zionism of course!) and has refused to break with it as a thoroughly reactionary and chauvinistic movement that, in order to accomplish its dubious political goals, has become the handmaiden of imperialism in the Middle East. Contrary to the biblical nonsense about what God has promised his ‘chosen people’, Israel has, since its establishment in 1948, constituted, in the main, a European settler state and an advanced outpost of imperialist interests in the region. All the fanfare about Zionist ‘socialism’ and kibbutzim (which has conspicuously faded over the past decade) does not alter this fundamental fact one iota. [‘The Palestinian Revolution and the Struggle Against Zionism’, Line of March: A Marxist-Leninist Journal of Rectification #13/14, March-April 1983]

This sounds like something straight out of the Weekly Worker, and no doubt would be deemed ‘anti-Semitic’ (especially with its reference to ‘biblical nonsense’) by the IHRA.

In one remarkable passage, we learn that accusations of ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ are nothing new:

As Marxist-Leninists we must base our analysis and line on a concrete class and political assessment of the Jewish community and its politics. In doing so we can not allow ourselves to be cowed by demagogic charges of anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the chief of functions of the Jewish identity movement so far has been the attempt to hold the left hostage to the accusation of anti-Semitism. The mythology promoted by such groups as the New Jewish Agenda is that, at best, the Left has become ‘insensitive’ to anti-Semitism, that it has abandoned the struggle against it, and that it frequently permits its opposition to Zionism to spill over into anti-Semitism.

 Of course, when warnings on anti-Semitism are raised from within the Left, they do not take the explicitly reactionary form of the Perlmutters’ arguments. Indeed, they rarely take a concrete form at all. Rather they are generally raised as a ‘concern’ with the implicit intention of fostering an ideological conciliation of left wing Zionism. Although unspoken, this, we believe, is the real ‘concern’ of those who raise the specter of ‘anti-Semitism on the Left’. And to the extent that the US communist movement lacks a clear and thoroughgoing line and analysis of the Palestinian revolution and the struggle against Zionism, we will continue to remain vulnerable to such demagogic blackmail. [Ibid]


Here we find the theses of left-wing anti-Zionism expressed with admirable clarity and vigour. And the results, nearly forty years later, we can all see: Israel is still standing and left-wing Palestinian sympathisers are still being denounced for anti-Semitism, real or imagined. We can safely say that for the past forty years the Left has scarcely landed a blow against the Jewish State and Zionism. Why is this, one may ask? The answer is that they have not availed themselves of the deadliest weapon against ‘Reactionary and theocratic Zionism’, and that is Holocaust Revisionism.