I. Introduction: The 'Axis' Australia First Movement
I have read the article The Dawn of Australian National Socialism and here I am offering some thoughts in response.
Some call it 'National Socialism', Yockey calls it the 'Resurgence of Authority', I call it 'Neo-Nazism': all refer to the one and same thing. I do not like to use the term 'National Socialism' much, as it is hard to define, like so many political concepts (define for me, if you can, 'democracy' or 'liberalism' or even 'socialism'). One problem I have with the term is that 'National Socialism' can be applied to many socialisms: was Mao's communism 'National Socialism'? Stalin's? Perhaps the word 'Nazi' works better at distinguishing the German National Socialism from all the others, but the word 'Nazi' has now in 2020 been destroyed through overuse and misuse.
The Dawn article raises the question: can there be such a thing as an Australian 'Nazism'? Stephensen and the Australia First Movement (AFM) were not Nazis in the sense of being card-carrying members of the NSDAP; but then, neither were many of Hitler's collaborators - Degrelle, Tiso, Pavelić, Quisling, Szálasi, and others. Stephensen - and his letters, his essays in the Publicist, prove this - sympathised with the Nazis from 1937 onwards, and in an offhand manner, you could classify him and the entire AFM as Nazi sympathisers. But we do not know how far that sympathy would have extended. If we were to sketch out some alternative history fantasy - along the lines of Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle (1962) - in which the Germans invaded and occupied Australia, we could use it as a foundation for speculating as to whether or not Stephensen and the AFM, in these circumstances, would have crossed the line from sympathy to collaboration. Based on the evidence, I answer yes, Stephensen and AFM would have collaborated.
More controversially, Stephensen and the AFM sympathised with the Japanese after the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese war in 1937 and up to Pearl Harbour. Again, we must ask how far that sympathy would have extended. Suppose that, in 1942, there had been a Japanese invasion and occupation (something much more probable than a German): would Stephensen and the AFM collaborated? A strong possibility is that at least the Western Australian branch of AFM would have, which is why the Australian government rounded up the AFM and interned them in a concentration camp (along with other Nazi and Japanese sympathisers) for the remainder of the war. (Stephensen himself, before and after the beginning of his pro-Japanese phase in 1937, poured cold water on the notion of a Japanese invasion of Australia and mostly refused to discuss it; if he did touch upon it, he would use it in an argument for one of his favourite theses, that Australia could not rely for its defence upon Britain).
Even though the AFM ceased to exist and Stephensen's political career came to an end nearly eighty years ago, the AFM / Publicist circle should be studied because they formed the mold for contemporary Australian Far Right activism. When I read about the AFM, I experience a shock of recognition: we modern activists tread along the roads which were laid down by the AFM in the late 1930s and early 1940s. (The AFM's fervently pro-Nazi and bilious anti-Semitic journal, the Publicist (1936-1942), could be compared to one long series of 4Chan 's**t-posts'). Everything the AFM did in the 1930s and 1940s bears on what came in the decades afterwards. Today's Australian Neo-Nazis are ideologically descended from Billy Miles, the activist who founded the Publicist. And he could be described as the grandfather of 20th century Australian nationalism; he coined, or at least helped promulgate, the slogan 'Australia First' as early as 1917.
(I should note here that the AFM did not officially form until October 1941; before then, the AFM circle had been informally gathered around the Publicist. Throughout this article I use 'AFM' to refer to the Publicist circle before and after the AFM's founding).
The older Miles played Socrates to Stephensen's Plato, and probably is the one who bears responsibility for steering Stephensen - and a generation of Australian nationalists - towards sympathising with National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan. It is the AFM example that shows that nationalism for one's own country can co-exist with a sympathy for German National Socialism - and so do the examples of Degrelle, Pavelić, Tiso, Quisling, etc. (It should be noted that both Stephensen and Miles in the late 1930s had close contacts with German agents - real live breathing Nazis - in Australia's pre-war diplomatic underworld and Stephensen commingled with Japanese agents in this period as well).
But: many of the partisan and resistance fighters in German-occupied Europe claimed to be 'nationalist' during the war, even if they were on the Left; Greek communists claimed to be fighting for the Greek national cause, French communists for the French, and so forth. It is possible that, after a Japanese occupation of Australia, a split could have emerged between the Australian nationalists who supported the Japanese and the Australian communists who opposed them (on supposedly 'patriotic' and 'nationalist' grounds). Who knows, the Australian communists could have taken up arms and waged a guerrilla war with help from the Americans and the Russians, and in this scenario, the most notorious Japanophiles of the AFM (Stephensen, Adela Pankhurst-Walsh and her husband Tom Walsh among them) could have been denounced as traitors and even targeted for assassination. For it could have been that after the Japanese invasion and occupation, the AFM could have taken the same line as the collaborators in German-occupied Europe: yes, patriots were right to resist the invasion, but after the country's defeat, they ought to pitch in and help the occupiers rebuild the country and 'renovate' its culture.
This is an alternative history novel that almost writes itself. But in order to research it, one would need to examine the history of the collaboration with the Japanese in occupied Philippines, Thailand, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, Manchukuo, etc., as Australia is in Asia.
On that note, until I came across the AFM, I had no idea that the Far Right in both Australia and America contained sympathisers with Imperial Japan. Yockey, in his account of the American Isolationist movement, portrays the American Far Right ('nationalists', he calls them) as being either hostile or indifferent to Imperial Japan. But the example of the great American author, Ralph Townsend, shows that this is not entirely correct. Townsend wrote the anti-Chinese classic Ways That Are Dark (1933), extracts from which often appear on 4Chan, and his career followed the same trajectory as that of the AFM activists who were interned.
The pro-Japanese sympathies on the Far Right in America and Australia in the 1930s made sense geopolitically, as both Australia and America (at least the West Coast side of America) are Pacific nations and both regard China as a deadly enemy. In defence of their actions in light of what came after, Stephensen and Townsend in the 1930s were only following the adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
II. Predictions and the Führer Problem
This brings us to the subject of America and how political changes there today affect the prospects of 'Neo-Nazism' in Europe and Australia.
The circumstances of Trump's illness are shrouded in mystery. I am unable to ascertain whether or not Trump was ill or feigning illness as a publicity stunt; and if he was sick, was he sick with covid or something else? And what of the conspiracy theories - had he and the other Republicans been deliberately infected as part of what was an assassination attempt by the Left? But in the end, he will go on to win the election, and his victory will mark the beginning of the end of the lockdowns in America and Australia, as Australia (like most of the Western world) goes as America goes. This will free up the Far Right to start organising again (it is no coincidence that the activism of the Far Right in America has been suppressed by the lockdowns while that of the Far Left has been unimpeded).
But a Trump victory does not rule out a civil war in America; one commentator has compared the 2020 presidential election to the 1860. The Left does not think of much of Biden, and so will be saddened, but not surprised, by a Trump victory, and evidently it is making plans to resume rioting, etc., the day after re-election.
One result of Far Left malfeasance is that American 'normies', and even American conservatives, are beginning to rediscover anti-communism. The boundaries between the Center Right and Far Right are becoming subtly blurred. We in 2020 live in a landscape which differs completely from that of 2017, when the Center Right turned on the Far Right after Charlottesville. The conservatives - and not only in America - are catching up with the Far Right. But this was to expected; as Mike Enoch says, 'Everyone hates SJWs'. And the significance of this is that in 2021 the Center Right will be off the back of the Far Right, at least for a while.
What of Europe? My prediction is that it will remain 'pozzed' for some time. Yockey, in Enemy of Europe (1953), blames the American occupation of Western Europe for Europe's general 'pozzedness'. But the trouble is that even if America were to let go of Europe - and even if the entire North American Continent to disappear into thin air tomorrow - the political, social and economic structures erected by the by the Anglo victors would remain. Germany, in particular, labours under a system which is not democracy but a parody of democracy, a system in which political parties dominate every aspect of political and social life.
As to how Germany could be 'uncucked'... In the 1991 movie King Ralph, the entire British Royal Family dies in a freak accident, and a yokel from America (played by John Goodman) is discovered to be next in the line to throne; hilarity and hi-jinks ensue. For Germany to free itself, the entire elite of Germany - which must number in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands - would need to vanish in a similar freak accident. Next in line to the throne would be the German nationalist and Far Right formations - the AfD, the informant-riddled NPD, and assorted skinhead and Neo-Nazi groups. All of these are hardly a prepossessing bunch, but they are all Germany would have in terms of political leadership.
The moral is that it is only internal collapse which can bring about the displacements which in turn lead to change. Historical observers ask why it was that France, in 1936, did nothing to stop Germany from remilitarising the Rhineland. The answer is that France at the time was experiencing a political and economic collapse.
Now, we could hope for a similar implosion in Germany's 'democratic' order, but barring a miracle, that will not happen. The problem comes down to lack of leadership - charismatic leadership. The Nazi slogan goes, 'Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer'. If we are to look at Germany and Europe today, we must ask: where are the Führers? This is a singularly important question, as fascism subscribes to the great man theory of history. Fascism could be considered a system of neo-monarchy; the Duce or the Führer steps into where the King would be in a feudal or dynastic regime. The Volk, the people, constituted the infrastructure of National Socialist Germany; the Führer (and the rest of the NSDAP leadership) the superstructure.
From that perspective, the Neo-Nazi movement resembles one of those royalist tendencies in Europe from hundreds of years ago which await the return of an exiled king or which get behind a pretender (or more accurately, a claimant) to a throne. Such 'royalist' political movements can survive and even prosper for a long time. The Peronist movement, for example, in Argentina waited nearly twenty years for the return of the exiled populist and quasi-fascist Juan Perón. Political tendencies such as the 'royalist' can prevail because concreteness can be located at their center: the tendency is bound up with a particular person. It is significant that Germany collapsed militarily one week after Hitler's death; Hitler, while he was alive, held the Third Reich together. In America, the Republican Party's relation to its leader has become like that of the NSDAP to its Führer, and so the question is being asked, what will the Republican Party do once Trump goes?
Can a 'royalist' movement survive the death of its leader? The populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long, founded a Share the Wealth movement during the Great Depression which attracted a significant number of Americans; after he was assassinated in 1935, the Share the Wealth clubs fell apart. Likewise, Maoism disappeared from China almost immediately after Mao's death in 1976. One could enumerate many such cases. (Trotskyism could be the exception to the rule, as Trotskyite parties have only multiplied after his assassination in 1940, but Trotkskyism claims to be only a continuation of Leninism - the Leninism supplanted by Stalinism). But that places Neo-Nazism in a position which is unique of all the ideologies in the world: it seeks to survive as a nostalgia movement designed to promote the wise policies of a deceased leader. Perhaps an ingenious political thinker could transform this liability into an asset.
III. 'Not for Export'
Hitler said famously that 'National Socialism is no article for export'. This quotation has been used in arguments for the thesis that German National Socialism is restricted to Germany and consequently, the Anglo nations - America, England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada - have nothing to learn from Hitler's teachings.
German National Socialism may be divided up into three periods: the Years of Struggle (1919 to 1932), the golden years in which Germany enjoyed a national revival and great foreign policy success without bloodshed (1933 to 1938), and finally the Third Reich years (1939 to 1945). As Carolyn Yeager points out, white nationalists - and the dissident Right - tend to lavish praise on the first two periods and heap scorn on the third. They take this dim view of the Third Reich years for reasons which I will not elaborate here. What is important to note is that intellectuals and scholars of the Far Right will pass over the Third Reich period in their researches. Mein Kampf gets the lion share of their attention, even though that book - crucial as it is to understanding the National Socialist Weltanschauung - was written by Hitler as a young man in the Years of Struggle; the main enemy in Mein Kampf is not the Jews, but the French.
The Third Reich period ought to be studied the most, for in the last analysis it is this on which Hitler and the NSDAP will be judged. So, what resources do we use? For the purposes of a study of the political history - and not just the military history - of the Third Reich years, books published in the war and immediate post-war years provide the best store of knowledge, even if these are written by Germany's enemies (and virtually all of the books in English from that time are), as they are (surprisingly enough) relatively free of the bias of later years. None of the books from the war mention the Holocaust, and only a few of them mention the gas chambers; at the very most, they will make in passing allusions to an 'extermination' of the Jews, and even then they choose not to dwell on it, as they feel that they lack the evidence to verify the Jewish atrocity claims. (Most writers, even during the war, did not take the propaganda utterances of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and the Polish government in exile all that seriously). The 1942 book, The New Order in Poland (1942) by Simon Segal (presumably a Jewish author) describes the hard lot of Jews and Poles under German occupation but gives us a reasonably fair and balanced account. One is almost tempted to call the work Holocaust Revisionist even though Revisionism had not come into being yet.
The wartime accounts disprove the 'No article for export' thesis, as it becomes clear that Germany did a great deal of exporting National Socialism in the years 1939 to 1945. Millions of Europeans were mobilised - many, admittedly, against under duress - for the German war effort, such that Europe came to be a cross between a beehive and a foundry. To the modern reader, German-occupied Europe foreshadowed the European Union (but a different European Union to the one we know today). And indeed, in Albert Lauterbach's Economics in Uniform: Military Economy and Social Structure (1943), we find headings such as 'European Union - National Socialist Edition' and 'Continental "Socialism" on the German Model'.
In principle, Lauterbach likes a European Union; in practice, he does not like it - if the Germans are the ones running it.
I cannot claim, as others have done, to have uncovered the secret of the actual intentions or discussions of the Nazi rulers, and evidence from German sources on definite details of the proposed Nazi reorganization of Europe has been limited. However, unless the term Grossraumwirtschaft is used in an unusually narrow sense, it seems to make little difference which particular administrative technique of domination the Nazis proposed to use. They might or might not decide to admit local puppet governments, they might apply different methods of control to various regions, but their general policy was always directed toward a centrally planned management of all Europe's economic activities in the exclusive interest, as they saw it, of the German nation.
In other words, in the event of a decisive German victory, the policy envisaged was clearly a militarized Grossraumwirtschaft within a comparatively self-sufficient European continent, controlled by National Socialist ideas, interests, and methods. The power and potentialities of such an economic and political unit were bound to be tremendous.
It is the German influence, the German control, the German domination, which was resented the most. England fought two wars (and in the process destroyed itself) to prevent Germany from becoming the leading force on the Continent, and one of the main geopolitical objectives of England and America after the war was to prevent a German return to ascendancy. But inevitably, the Continent will fall into the German orbit - it is doing so already. Germany exerts a magnetic attraction even under its present hapless leadership. Books such as Lauterbach's give us a portent.
I began my political life as a pan-European, an advocate of European unity, of Imperium Europa - it was a vision inspired by Yockey, Thiriart and Mosley - and it was not until the 2010s that I came across the writings of Yeager and started to myself how it was how the structure of the new Imperium would work. Which European nation would do the heavy lifting? The question answers itself. We know which nation it is, and it is not Portugal nor Ireland nor Denmark nor Hungary, it is not even England nor France. And once I began to explore the matter, my writings began to meet with a frosty reception. Talk of European unity, pan-Europa, would induce warm fuzzy feelings, but I once I brought up the subject of Germany and the Germans, well, that only served to awaken latent hostility towards Germany that was always simmering below the surface. And this is related to one of the persistent themes in the wartime writings by Anglos, an objection to the National Socialist idea of the Herrenvolk. Anti-Nazi propagandists mistranslate Herrenvolk as 'Master Race' when it means something more like a 'People who are Gentlemen', and this mistranslation in itself is revealing. Hitler's Table Talk offends because Hitler here states crudely and bluntly that Germany could do a better job of running Ukraine and the tracts of German-occupied Russia than the Ukrainians and Russians themselves. And that really gets up the nose of the dissident Right movement. We on the Far Right can accept the idea of a qualitative differences between races but not nationalities.
IV. AFM and the Jews
A staple of German propaganda during the wars is: German rule will do good things for your country. In the chapter, 'The Occupied Countries and Fortress Europe' of German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts during the War (1944), we find:
Countries conquered by the German army fulfil a threefold function in German propaganda: as occupied territories, they are reconstructed; as neutrals, their approval is quoted, as allies, they send troops. Reconstruction starts with the arrival of the German soldier, whom National Socialist propagandists describe as even more civilized and considerate than did propagandists of Imperial Germany Germany builds new schools in the protectorate, it repairs devastation in the Ukraine; the Dutch, Danes, and Slovaks enjoy the blessings of her protection, and the consolidation of France advances rapidly after her submission. The appreciative response of the conquered is regularly stressed, and whenever possible the German character of the conquered territories: Alsace is rescued and returns to the homeland.
[From a German news broadcast:] Colmar, a German town in Alsace, with its Gothic St. Martin’s Cathedral, shows little sign of damage. This town has been wearing a strong French ‘make-up’ for the past twenty years, not at all in keeping with its German character . . . Life in Colmar is returning to normal.
The phrase ‘returning to normal,’ like the word ‘reconstruction,’ occurs frequently. In Norway, in Denmark, in Holland, life returns to normal in a very short time. But there is something more than normality in the German picture of reconstruction. Liege, which had been a very dirty city, was turned by the efficient Germans into an earthly paradise. The railroads which the French had neglected were thriving. And there was remarkable engineering in process to unite the north of Norway with the south. The German listener is regularly informed of every school that is re-opened in conquered Russia. On the German radio, conquered Europe becomes a region of flowers, gladness, and reconstruction.
The Germans may have repaired infrastructure, true, but what of the cultural and racial domain? National Socialism is 'Not for export': if you were a Jew or Mason or Bolshevik in wartime Hungary or Norway or Greece or Holland or France or Italy, you could take comfort in the phrase; the Nazis would leave you unmolested because 'It can't happen here', that is to say, National Socialism is only for Germans, not for Hungarians or Danes. France is to be allowed to rot under Jewish or Communist or Masonic domination because Germans - being selfish - do not want to share the blessings of National Socialism with the French.
But of course that was not true.
While some conquered lands are always referred to as conquered, others, in propaganda, regain their neutrality. They achieve this status by adopting Germany’s enemies as their own. The first enemy they acknowledge is the Jew. The quisling governments, step by step, adopt National Socialist principles of anti-Jewish legislation.
The dissident Right today should take great interest in that legislation, study it, examine it. But an Australian nationalist can object that it was all European, specifically Continental European, and that European-style anti-Semitism would have found no foothold here in Australia. But, eighty years ago, an Australian Far Right political movement walked down the same road as the Continentals in regard to anti-Semitism, and that movement was the AFM. In the most succinct book on the AFM, The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement (1968), Bruce Muirden writes that in 1941:
Stephensen also found a foe in Cyril Pearl, editor of the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, who had asked the government to act against the Publicist... Pearl said of the Publicist that 'month after month it churns out a stale mixture of rabid anti-British nationalism, Nazi-inspired, and anti-Semitism and windy Fascist pseudo-philosophy'. Stephensen's counterblast had in it a certain inevitability: 'We of the Publicist do not know whether or not the editor of the Sunday Telegraph is a Jew'.
I think Pearl's characterisation of the Publicist is harsh but true. (Amusingly, Stephensen typically responded to his opponents with a typical Far Right tactic which is still used today on 4Chan and other forums: he accused them of being Jewish).
Muirden goes on to say of the Publicist contributors:
Miles, Graham, Arnold and Stephensen were beyond question anti-Semitic, and their increasingly unpleasant attacks on Australian Jews constituted one of the least savoury and defensible aspects of Publicist and Australia First propaganda. When the flow of Jewish refugees from Europe increased from 1938, the Publicist became more offensive. Miles and Stephensen, who gradually became as adept as his master in Jew-baiting...
The Jewish refugee question in the 1930s obsessed the AFM circle. Publicist contributor William Hardy Wilson, an architect who lived in Melbourne, designed a concentration camp for the Jews which was to be situated in the Dandenong Ranges. (The name of this camp? Israelia).
Stephensen's attitudes to Germany on the outbreak of war are interesting. Muirden recounts:
Stephensen wrote in the delayed September Publicist that before the war he had done his best to create goodwill between Australia and Germany, 'not because I held a brief for the Germans, but because I thought Australians were being mentally weakened by the revengeful Jewish campaigns of anti-Hitler hate which for years has flooded our Australian news press. If we are to fight against Germany, let us at least fight for an Australian, not a Jewish, reason'.
The last sentence at first appears to be an evasion until we think it over. Stephensen's drift is that Australia in 1939 had no reason to 'fight against Germany', and so, had not reason to go to war. This was in keeping with Stephensen's anti-war position throughout all his career; he fiercely objected to Australia's participation in British punitive expeditions in Sudan, China and South Africa and, it goes without saying, Australia's entrance into the war on the British side in WWI.
V. Priorities
I have dwelt on the AFM circle at length because I wish to make the point that German and Nazi-inspired politics did not drop into Australia from the heavens; it is not a utopia without a material basis; it is not a castle in the sky. The AFM, and Stephensen, eighty years ago provided us with a precedent. One can ask whether the AFM's politics are entirely appropriate to the present day. I answer no: I myself do not believe that Melbourne's Jews should be interned in a concentration camp in the Dandenongs. More important is the fact that politics of the Stephensen sort once existed in this country. In the same way, today's Southern nationalism - a uniquely American product, definitely not for export - is founded on historical practice. It once existed. Much of the dissident Right makes fun of the Americans because of their inability to organise at a national level, e.g., form a nationwide party capable of taking on the Democrats and the Republicans; but at one point, the Southerners formed their own ethnostate - the Confederacy - and printed their money, elected their own president, etc., and even after their crushing defeat in the Civil War they maintained a regime of segregation right up until sixty years ago. In Far Right politics, one must always be grounded in the historical, the actual. So, if you want to build a Hitler-centered and anti-Semitic movement here in Australia, look to the example of the AFM, whose leaders networked with NSDAP members in Melbourne and Sydney. One will arrive not at a 'Nazism with Australian characteristics' (to paraphrase Mao) but at the least a nationalist philosophy which could be considered to be Nazi-compatible, Nazi-adjacent, a philosophy that puts the AFM in the same sphere as Petain, Tiso, Quisling, Pavelić and others.
No doubt, 'Nazi-adjacent' politics poses all sorts of difficulties. A biography of Quisling reveals that a tension - which manifested itself behind closed doors - existed between Quisling's Nasjonal Samling and Norway's German occupiers. The Germans demanded that Quisling's party be reorganised along German lines so as to make it more like the NSDAP; they attempted to reorganise Norway's labour organisations along German lines as well (and in doing so met great resistance). Overall, a tension existed between the Norwegian interests and that of German 'New Order' imposed upon Europe. Both Hitler and Quisling shared the same ideology - fascism - but shared the same ideology of nationalism as well, and it was their differing perceptions of the national interest of their respective countries that led to a clash. Similar complications would have emerged in Australia had the Axis won the war: the ideology of Stephensen and Miles would inevitably have clashed with that of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese.
But such is politics. In the end, when one evaluates a political system, one must do so by the criterion, how far did it go to meet my political priorities? A Marxist in the early years of the Soviet regime would have been perfectly indifferent to the famine, poverty, misery and deaths brought about by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He would have justified it all on the the grounds that, in the USSR, for the first time in history capitalism had been abolished and a dictatorship of the proletariat introduced. Socialism trumps humanism in the Marxist's world-view. We could here make an analogy with an anti-Semite - an obsessive anti-Semite of the Stephensen or Miles sort - living in German-occupied Europe. Accounts of Europe in that period make it sound like an unpleasant place, to put it mildly: Europeans lived through great suffering, deprivation and misery - black markets, rationing, Allied blockades, Allied bombing, deportations, labour conscription, starvation... But the anti-Semite living in German-occupied Oslo or Athens, Budapest or Paris, could at least console himself with the thought that someone was finally doing something about the Jewish problem - and the Mason problem and the Marxist problem. The great French nationalist thinker, Charles Maurras, loathed Germany and spent a great deal of his career attacking it, but he loathed Jewry more, and he criticised the Vichy 1940 anti-Jewish laws as being too soft. Maurras never had a good word to say about the Nazis, but I am sure that - when pressed - he would have admitted that the German occupation had its positive aspects. (Maurras resembled Miles in temperament to a great degree - both were irascible old men - with the main difference being that Miles was favourably inclined to the Germans).
VI. The hero ideal
In politics, one has to balance negatives with positives, and today, Far Right politics is overly weighted to the negative. A thoroughly representative American website, which I shall not name here, is filled every day with posts which are obsessively anti-Semitic, which denounce Trump as being a pawn of the Jews, which denounce Christianity, which promulgate depressing, fatalistic conspiracy theories, and which feature stories detailing some really unsavoury subjects. The same site also puts up speeches by Nazis and articles on Holocaust Revisionism, but it does so apparently out of a sense of duty, that is, only because it is expected to do so. The site's owner is definitely not a 'Nazi', and is a scruffy, bearded American white nationalist type - he does not even deign to sport a 'fashy' haircut like Richard Spencer. In its defence, I will say that the site champions things which it regards as positive - homeopathic remedies, a simple, agrarian 'Volkisch' lifestyle, veganism, and so forth; but on the whole this is too little, too late, and the positive is outweighed by the negative.
In contrast, the Southern nationalist emphasises the positive, and he has a hero ideal, an archetype which inspires him - the Southern Gentleman.
Hunter Wallace's Occidental Dissent used to be Southern nationalist but then dropped it; now its comments section is filled with who are nihilists who do nothing but sneer, scorn and 'spew anti-Semitic bile' (as Abe Foxman would put it) as a means of demonstrating their supposed integrity. There is a point when rote 'Jews this, Jews that' rhetoric becomes obnoxious, and Occidental Dissent - and so many other white nationalist sites - reached it long ago. Fine, get rid of the Jews and the Zionists, but what do you have to put in their place? The answer is, nothing: hence, nihilism.
If the Southern nationalist holds up the Southern Gentleman as his hero ideal, the German National Socialist holds up the German or Prussian soldier. This archetype - who debuted on the world political stage around the time of the Napoleonic Wars - evolved by 1939 into the one we are familiar with today through thousands of movies, novels, comic books, computer games... He is clean-shaven, has dueling scars, wears a monocle, wields a riding crop or baton or even a whip. Even though he is reviled by the rest of the world, the true German nationalist regards him as a hero, a positive rather than a negative. In German National Socialist ideology, he balances out anti-Semitism. Jewry, Masonry, Bolshevism, liberalism, feminism, national decadence, etc., are portrayed as obstacles which are preventing his rise.
Whatever you can say of him and the Southern Gentleman, and there are many intellectual criticisms one can make of both, it must be conceded that they are a something, not a nothing. The choice becomes one of having an ideal or no ideal.
As a rejoinder to this, the materialist will point out the obvious: neither of the two archetypes exists today. The materialist will regard this as the final refutation, because to him, what is in front of him is all there is and all there ever will be - if he cannot see an idea (and it is the nature of an idea that it cannot be seen) when he looks out his window, he does not believe in that idea. The vast majority of nationalists and racialists today in the West, especially in the Anglosphere, hold to materialism, and so will pour scorn on the notion of a revival of the two archetypes. But the argument can be turned back on them. You can make the observation that the ethnic homogeneity enjoyed by Americans (for example) during the 1930s and 1940s does not exist, so by their logic, that homogeneity will never return - ever. A good many American white nationalists have apparently accepted this rather defeatist argument, which goes some way to explaining why so many of them seem to have given up.
My advice to young 'National Socialists' is, make the German archetype your avatar, your totem. And form relationships with German nationalists (the 'based Kraut bros' in 4Chan parlance). In this you will be following the example of Miles and Stephensen. As David S. Bird writes in Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany (2012):
Miles ensured from this time onwards [1937] that his journal endorsed every aspect of German Nazism that came under its scrutiny in the belief that there was no conflict between national-socialism and 'Australianism'. He appeared to have no concern for public opinion other than brazenly to deny it and would go where even the appeasers feared to tread, endorsing Germany's claims for the return of colonies like New Guinea in September 1937. This was hardly 'Australia First', but it did elicit good wishes from Baroness von der Golz in Pommerania (sic) in December and an editorial acknowledgment: 'Your German leaders appear to us to be doing very well. May Germany prosper!'.
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