Requiem for a Heel

I. Mourning and celebration

Who is celebrating the assassination of Qasem Soleimani? Who is commiserating?

In the first group - the celebrants - we find the opponents of Hezbollah and the aging Mullah regime in Tehran: Israel; the Syrians who are against Assad; the Lebanese protesting against the Lebanese government and Hezbollah in recent months; the Iraqis protesting against Iranian influence in Iraq in the past few weeks; Saudi Arabia and any other Arab nations in the Gulf who regard themselves as enemies of Iran. Outside the Middle East - and in the West - it is mostly the 'Ziocons' (Zionist conservatives) who number among those who are crowing and exulting. Many of the 'Ziocons' openly displaying their bloodlust are 'burgers' (that is, Americans, to use 4Chan parlance), although a few are British.

(Over the years, 'Ziocon burgers' have steadily infiltrated the dissident Right - which is surprising, given that the Far Right, especially in America, has been anti-Semitic for the past eighty or so years. Aficionados of Israel and admirers of the Jewish people have never been made welcome on the American Far Right, but they are now trying to turn the tables and make the anti-Semites unwelcome - see the comments thread at this article by Steve Sailer on the assassination. If I'm to make a prediction for the coming decade, it is that the Ziocons will increase their attempts to infiltrate the Far Right - and purge it of anti-Semites - as they make the Far Right their new home: they will abandon the Center-Right, which, as it becomes less and less credible, will continue to lose popularity).

But most on the dissident Right are mourning Soleimani's death or wondering anxiously what it portends for the future. The majority of the dissident Right is made up of what I call the 'anti-imperials'. This faction - by far the largest - sees the Mullahs and the rulers of all the other aging, kleptocratic and despotic regimes in the Third World as 'anti-imperialist' by dint of their anti-Americanism. The anti-imperials feel vaguely sympathetic to the Left, but they rarely characterise themselves as National Bolshevik ('Naz Bol'); rather, they prefer to call themselves 'populist' or 'anti-war'. On this side of the ledger stand mainstream political figures such as Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard, and also fringe libertarian individuals and groups - LewRockwell.Com, AntiWar.Com, Keith Preston's AttackTheSystem.Com - and a plethora of 'conservative' pundits: Stephen F. Cohen, Pat Buchanan, Saker in His Vineyard, Moon of Alabama, Philip Giraldi, Eric Margolis... On the fringes of the Right, a few prominent white nationalists have migrated over to anti-imperial country, among them Richard Spencer, Hunter Wallace, Mike Enoch, David Duke.

Many of the aforementioned pundits began with one ideology in their early years and subtly shifted away from it in their later. David Duke and Pat Buchanan moved away from racialism and immigration-restrictionism; the writers at AntiWar.Com and LewRockwell.Com, free-market liberalism. The newfound appreciation for Iran and Russia, 'anti-war' and 'anti-interventionist' American foreign policy, necessitates the throwing of one's original ideology overboard. One can then set sail to the land of Red and Brown, of 'Neither Left nor Right', of Naz Bollery. The Red Brown ideology does entail some radical contradictions, but these hardly seems to bother the anti-imperials. A conservative ought to oppose Muammar Gaddafi for his long-time bank-rolling of leftist terrorism; a socialist, Gaddafi's staggering wealth (Gaddafi was worth $USD200 billion at the time of his death). But the inconsistencies were shunted aside during Gaddafi's ouster, and Gaddafi ascended to the pantheon of anti-imperial demi-gods.

II. The last decade summed up

In retrospect, the two most important events for the Far Right in the last decade were the Arab Spring of 2010-11 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, both of which set the Far Right on a new path.

At the start of the decade, despots held sway in countries dominated by an ideology which was either left over from the Cold War (countries such as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe) or which could be described as post-Marxist (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ukraine, Russia). The former group of despots never won an election which could be described as 'free and fair' in the best Jimmy Carter-approved manner; the latter group did win elections initially, but as time went on, they wanted to stay in power past their mandate, and so came increasingly to rely upon state repression.

Most of these despots used their position to enrich themselves, some of them becoming as rich as Croesus. Their rule produced - over the long term - economic, social, intellectual, and cultural stagnation, but it was widely assumed (by observers in the West) that these men would stay in power forever, as their subjects were passive, apathetic, and disorganised. The Arab Spring put paid to that notion. (But the Arab Spring should have been anticipated, as the Arabs, by nature, are a disputatious people given to great emotional excitement). A few years later came Maidan Square and the ouster of Yanukovych in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians sought, once again, to emancipate themselves from Russia.

Yanukovych and the Arab despots responded to the uprising with varying degrees of force, Gaddafi and Assad being the worst. At this point we saw the appearance of what I call the Gaddafi doctrine. At the beginning of the Libyan uprising, Gaddafi responded to his opponents with disproportionate violence: at one anti-Gaddafi protest outside an army barracks, Gaddafi's son ordered soldiers to fire on the crowd with anti-aircraft guns (!) (see Paul Kenyon's Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa (2019)).
Under the Gaddafi doctrine, any opponent of the anti-imperial despots becomes what Yockey calls an Inner Enemy. He is to be stripped of any rights as a consequence, and can be starved, kidnapped, tortured, raped, killed, his house and city leveled and turned into rubble, his family pauperised... 

In the past few months, we have seen a fresh round of protests by the Arab (and Persian) masses in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran; against both Assad's forces and the Kurds' in Deir Yezzor, Syria; against the Islamist HTS militia which holds sway in the rebel enclave of Idlib, Syria (which has been the recipient of a ferocious aerial bombardment and shelling by Putin and Assad, an attack which has killed hundreds and caused over 500,000 refugees to flee). Ideologically, these protests take neither ideological shape nor form - they cannot be classified as liberal or communist or Islamist - and it is not exactly clear what the protestors want; but the question is, do the protestors deserve to be punished, and punished as per the harsh strictures of the Gaddafi doctrine. 

The answer of the anti-imperials seems to be - yes, whereas mine is no.

By any stretch of the imagination, I cannot be considered a humanist or liberal or Arab-lover. I certainly do not want Syrian refugees in my country any more than the Turks or Saudis want them in theirs, and I do not want to take up a collection for the good people of Idlib. All the same, I wouldn't wish Assad on a dog.

This view of mine - a 'normie' view - sets me at odds with the vast majority of the dissident Right, as does my acceptance of information from 'normie' news sources - AFP, Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera - on the Middle East. (I recommend this excellent summary of the Syrian War, from the Council on Foreign Relations, as the best guide to the war).

I look at Syria or Venezuela or Yemen as I would a horrific car accident. And what is the 'normie' response (I won't say the moral or Christian response, although I'm tempted to) when you pass by a car accident with wreckage and bodies strewn everywhere? It is this. You shake your head in sorrow, say a prayer for the injured or dead, stay out of the way of the emergency service workers, walk on, and go on about your business - thinking, 'There but for the Grace of God...' - and that's about it.

My attitude strikes me as being normal, and that of the anti-imperials, abnormal. During the 2010s, I stopped understanding them. Venezuela under Maduro has been plunged into misery - a misery which has inconvenienced Venezuela's neighbours, who have been forced into take in hundreds of thousands of refugees - and I agree with the 'normie' view (a truism, really) that Venezuela would be better off were Maduro to be removed. But we can't have that, according to the anti-imperials, as that would be 'regime change', a 'CIA Guaidó coup'. Fighting 'regime change', for the Carlsons and Gabbards, has become a principle which is sacred and one which has been elevated above all others.

The Tulsi Gabbard, 'anti-war', 'anti-regime' change doctrine is not built on solid foundations, and even a lackluster personality such as Shay Khatiri - an Iranian liberal activist who writes for neoconservative and anti-Trump publications - can tear it apart with ease. Perhaps it is the extreme incoherence, inconsistency, illogicality of the anti-imperials bothers me more than anything else.

Added to that is the enormous amount of time and energy expended on, for example, propping up the regime of Assad: how many videos and essays by dissident Rightists have been devoted to 'proving' that the April 2018 Douma gas attack was 'staged'? (According to the anti-imperials, the gas attack was either a) faked or b) actually carried out - more self-contradiction! - but by Syrian rebels who sought to frame Assad. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, went as far as to say that British intelligence did the gassing. My assessment is that Lavrov is not telling the truth or is the victim of a delusion. But that opinion puts me in the minority: the amount of adulation of the Putin regime in the American dissident Right media - as opposed to lack of it in the mainstream Russian media itself - boggles the mind). 

The anti-imperials claim to be 'against war', but of course want the wars in Syria and Ukraine to continue - to a successful conclusion for Russia. Assad has become since 2015 a puppet of the Russians, and seeing as the Assads have been in power in Syria for fifty years (!) this year, the Russians are working towards another fifty. But why do the anti-imperials laud this goal? Why do they want the Assads, Putins and Maduros to stay in power in perpetuity? Why are they investing so much energy in this cause? Why are they neglecting the program of Yockey, as outlined in the last chapters of Imperium (1948) - Yockey, the original Naz Bol?