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

I. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And: 

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler concludes: 

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 


 

So, Heimbach, you want to be a commie?

I. 

Recently Matt Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker's Party caused a scandal by renouncing white nationalism and crossing over to communism. But watching Heimbach's video here with a commentary by Alternate Hypothesis, I could find no real evidence of any Marxism in Heimbach's new Weltanschauung. 

This disappointed me somewhat, as the idea of a conversion from Far Left to Right intrigues me. In the Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek observed that fascists can frequently convert to communism, and communists, to fascism (Hayek here was propounding an early version of horseshoe theory), and I initially thought that Heimbach's recent change of heart would constitute another instance of that Left to Right and Right to Left phenomenon, that, in other words, Heimbach would be following in the footsteps of Jacques Doriot, a fascinating figure who made a transition from communism to fascism. But I am not quite sure that Heimbach has thought everything through. 

Alternative Hypothesis refers to Heimbach throughout as a Nazi. Is he one? The answer is no, not in the usual (German) sense of the word, only in the American. Alternate Hypothesis' video has made me realise that when Americans use the word 'Nazi', they are making a cultural and class distinction: they are referring to redneck and hillbilly white nationalists who hail from what Colin Woodard calls Greater Appalachia. The Traditionalist Worker's Party, and Schoep's National Socialist Movement, were made up of men of this stripe, as is (most likely) the Aryan Nations prison gang. Surrounded by such people, day in and day out, one can understand why it was that Heimbach, even in his Naz Bol days, declared that he was a socialist and champion of the working class. 

So why did Heimbach break from the Right? It becomes clear from the video, and Heimbach's back story, that Heimbach is a man who craves fame and celebrity, and it is this that explains why he made the jump. He wanted acceptance from his peers. Being a white nationalist, Neo-Nazi, Naz Bol, makes one an outlaw in society, and while some on the Far Right relish that outlaw status, others find the life of an outlaw hard going, understandably enough, and it is the wavering type that will evince a desire to come in from the cold and be a 'normie', even at the expense of renouncing one's beliefs, cutting ties with one's comrades, and foregoing one's status in the movement.

Unfortunately, Heimbach has been misled - by the political establishment that controls the media / entertainment complex, education, organised religion and so forth - as to what 'normal' is. The Far Left is composed of what Steve Sailer calls the 'coalition of the fringes', and that is: Social Justice Warriors; Greta Thunbergs; crazy cat ladies who voted for Hillary; LGBT activists, Jewish, Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, Muslim and other minority activists; Marxists (real and crypto); antifa and anarchists; Hollywood progressives; crusading liberal billionaires of the George Soros / Mark Zuckerberg / Bill Gates type; degree-holders in black studies, queer studies, women's studies, and post-colonial studies... The political establishment has succeeded in framing this coterie of cranks, oddballs, misanthropes and radicals as mainstream. But the reality is that the 'KKKrazy glue' (to use Sailer's phrase) that holds the coalition together is hatred of the average white American male. Now, while the Coalition of the Fringes does contain whites, these left-wing whites do not represent salt of the earth American whites, who are mostly either indifferent to politics or who voted for Trump. The conclusion, then, is that Heimbach, who is looking for crossover appeal to 'normies', is looking for it in the wrong place. While the newly-minted leftist Heimbach may meet with approval from the Left, he will never get it from the Right or Center. Yes, it is true that the average Republican opposes racism, but he does so only from the position that 'Democrats are the real racists', Martin Luther King Jr was a conservative, white nationalism is identity politics and therefore collectivist, etc., etc. In other words, the average conservative opposes racism not from perspective of a Marxist or antifa, but a middle of the road civic nationalist who would rather not talk about race at all. 

Heimbach's conversion may have been misguided, but the question of Heimbach's socialism remains interesting. Even before his recent break from the Right, Heimbach, along with Matt Parrott, Richard Spencer, Eric Stryker, Hunter Wallace and other 'wignats' and 'Naz Bols' was accused of attempting to steer the nationalist and racialist movement towards communism. Here I will be the exploring what communism, in 2020, means and how any adoption of it by a nationalist may entail some conclusions which he will find quite unpalatable.

I will be resisting the temptation to write another anti-communist polemic - we have enough of those. The fact of the matter is that right-wing polemics cannot approach communism in a detached, analytic manner because they cannot consider a single tenet or thesis of communism in isolation from the whole. A nationalist writer cannot examine, say, Lenin's political position in the year 1905 or 1917 as a subject in itself because he knows what happened after 1905 or 1917, and he feels compelled to draw a connection between Lenin's position at that time particular point in time and communism's subsequent history. It is difficult to write from a neutral, detached perspective when one is anti-communist: one feels a moral obligation to lecture the reader on the evils of communism, and so, when one writes an abstract article on (for example) Che Guevara's theory of the foco, one will turn it - almost without intending to - into a sermon on the misery of life in communist Cuba. 

For the purposes of exposition, then, one must shut out or excise large sections of communist reality. I will concede that the reader may think that this is an evasion, as the Marxist Left itself believes only in looking at politics as a whole, not in parts. 

In communism and leftism, the connections that exist cannot be avoided. If you support Marxism in 2020, you must support, for example, 1) the Greta Thunberg-type radical environmentalism, 2) the mass non-white immigration into white countries, 3) the anti-covid 19 lockdown measures, and 4) the rioting, looting and arson underway at present win America's cities. Heimbach may be labouring under the delusion that one can take up a Marxist position and at the same time oppose 1), 2), 3) and 4). But Marxism does not allow you to pick and choose. One must go the whole hog, and that is the price of admission to the Marxist fraternity. 

II.

Before we proceed, we must define our terms. Until Lenin and the Russian Revolution, 'Marxist' referred to an adherent of the theories of Marx and Engels, nothing more. Hitler, in the first sections of Mein Kampf, uses the word in this sense and applies it to his opponents on the Left - the Social Democrats and their affiliates. Later in the book, after the November Revolution of 1918 and the formation of the German Communist Party (KPD), Marxism takes on its 20th century meaning: it is a form of socialism founded on principles laid down by Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) - what we know today as communism. (In 1917, Lenin insisted that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) change its name to the Communist Party, as a means of differentiating itself from other parties of the Left). Some anti-Soviet left-wingers have attempted to recover Marx from Lenin, but after 1917, in the public consciousness, Marxism and Soviet communism became inextricably linked: Marxism was transformed into Bolshevism, (what the Maoists call) Marxism-Leninism. 

Heimbach, the Naz Bols, the Wignats, have stated that they are sympathetic to the Bernie Sanders Left. The question is, how far to the Left does the 'democratic socialism' of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) extend? Are the Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, the DSA, Marxist? And if so, which Marx is it: the Marx of the 'democratic socialists' or the Marx of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao? The lines between the two forms of Marxism have, after Sanders, become increasingly blurred, and this is no accident, as Lenin would say: the result has been brought about by the Left deliberately. The communist Left wants to use 'democratic socialism' as a Trojan horse and as a gateway drug to Bolshevism. 

In order to expand on the subject, we need to turn our attention to the interaction between Marxist theory of old and the post-communist practice of the present. Our story starts after the fall of communism in Europe, thirty years ago, and here I will give some of my reminisces of the immediate post-communist era.

Many intellectuals and bohemians in the West became indoctrinated with Marxism after attending university in their youth. I was fortunate in that, by the time I got to university and began reading books on politics, economics, philosophy and other weighty subjects, the Soviet Union had been extinct for two years. Without the example of 'really existing socialism' before me, communism (and anti-communism) lacked immediacy, relevance. In my browsing of the local library, I happened upon Marx Refuted: The Verdict of History (1987), an anthology of anti-communist writings by Soviet dissidents and Anglo intellectuals. Its arguments against Marx as a thinker, and its hardline, uncompromising stance against Marx and socialism, impressed me so powerfully that I could never look at Marx the same way again; the book turned me away from Marxism for all time. Interestingly, the authors by and large did not take a free-market liberal position so much as an anti-socialist one; indeed, they often strike an anti-political, post-communist chord, one which almost anticipates Fukuyama's 'End of History' essay published two years later. Marxism has been found wanting, its long reign is over, and now that we are on the verge of finishing with it, we can get on with our lives... The book's theme was reinforced when, in my wanderings around campus, I came across Trotskyists running a stall, hawking copies of Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936). I asked myself who cared if Stalin betrayed the ideals of the Russian revolution, given that communism had imploded in the former states, had vanished in Eastern Europe, and had fallen out of fashion (as an economic-developmental model) in Africa and Asia. The conclusion I drew was that the Trotskyists and their pamphlets and books belonged in the past. If I opened up the Trotskyist newspaper the Green Left Weekly, then on sale at university campuses, I would see an illustration of the profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in a row - the 'gallery of men with beards', I called it. One could almost smell, in the pages of that newspaper, musty air left over from the 19th century. Trotskyism evoked the politics, culture, ideas of the turn of the turn of the century in a nostalgic fashion; in fact, like the genre of Steampunk, it aimed at recreating the atmosphere of the Victorian and Edwardian era, the difference being that it situated itself in the Central and Eastern European cultural context, not the British and Anglo-Saxon. 

I have spent much time recounting my experiences with Trotskyism because Trotskyism dominates the Far Left in Australia - of the dozen communist groups we have here, nine of them follow Trotskyism. But all of them share in common the belief that Soviet communism was good until, at some point, it turned bad. Three of the groups hold that Bolshevik revolution was 'betrayed' in 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the Secret Speech; for the other nine, the revolution was either 'betrayed' in 1924, when Lenin died and was succeeded by Stalin, or in the years 1927 to 1929, when Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and the USSR. 

But to return to the narrative. In the 1990s, I was exposed to many political ideas but never committed to any one of them; I would read Hayek and Friedman one day and vote Labor the next, and never felt strongly about communism one or the other. I looked at Marxism as an antique, and like Keynes - a centrist - I saw no need to abolish the entire system of free enterprise so as to prevent the evils of unemployment and inequality. But, after my exposure to white nationalism and Neo-Nazism, I threw my lot in with the radical Right, and as a result, I took communism far more seriously, and dedicated myself to the study of it. 

I came to see that Lenin had attempted to come up with a solution to a problem - of how to apply Marxism in the Third World. The layman's understanding of Marxist theory of revolution is that it is a theory that only concerns industrialised nations such as England and Germany, and the white countries of Western Europe and its colonies. But Lenin wanted it applied to Russia and the black, brown and yellow countries - the 'oppressed nations'. Lenin believed that Russia was an oppressor nation, but understood (perhaps on an intuitive level), that while Russians are biologically white, Russia is not white all the way through - it is composed of over 180 different nationalities, the vast majority of them Asian or at least non-white. Russia, after the October Revolution, identified with its Asian side over its white: it became part of the rising tide of colour against white world supremacy, as Lothrop Stoddard argues in the book of the same name. 

Lenin also needed to make a departure from orthodox Marxism so as to take into consideration the fact that Russia's social and economic system, unlike Germany's or England's, was geared to the past. Recognising this, Lenin rebuilt Marxism accordingly and turned it into a peasant doctrine. This explains why it is that Marxism-Leninism achieved its greatest successes in agrarian countries - Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam... 

Surprisingly enough, Lenin agrees with Fukuyama on some points. Both declare that the transition from feudalism to capitalism is 'progressive', and thereby good; so is the transition from constitutional monarchy to bourgeois liberal democracy. Both grade fascist, colonialist, military, or imperialist rule as 'reactionary', and thereby bad, and both put these political forms in the same category as feudalism, medievalism and monarchy. Neither appreciate nationalism. (Lenin makes an exception for the nationalism of countries oppressed by wealthy and powerful Western European ones: Irish nationalism meets with his approval, as would have the later Third World nationalism, had he lived to see it). The main difference between Lenin and Fukuyama lies in their disagreement over socialism. To Fukuyama, history comes to an end with the arrival of 'free markets' and 'democracy', whereas to Lenin, history progresses past these. But both men follow Hegel in seeing a forward-moving motion in history. 

Fukuyama's theories suited the post-communist era perfectly, Lenin's did not. Leninism, in its pure form, can only be applied in countries experiencing revolutionary upheaval. In what countries, in the post-communist era, can we find that upheaval? 

None, you might say: but you are mistaken. It is only after an honest examination of the period that we are forced to admit that the answer was staring at us in the face all along: the upheaval can be found in the countries that went through the Colour Revolutions of 2000 to 2010, and then the Arab Spring of 2010 to 2011, and then the Maidan Square uprising in Ukraine in 2014.

To narrow our focus onto the Colour Revolutions (and to put the Arab Spring and Maidan to one side): years ago, I read of a left-wing activist who stated proudly that the Revolutions were applied Leninism, Leninism put into practice, but unfortunately, I never screencapped that quotation, and now I cannot find it anywhere on the Internet (I have found a throwaway line in a paper by the academic David Lane (not the white nationalist David Lane!), 'The strategy of the coloured revolutions is Leninist in conception', but Lane does not dig in here and go into detail). Anyone who has a passing acquaintance with Leninist theory can understand what that left-wing activist meant. Lenin, like Fukuyama, throws 'authoritarian' leaders in the same bag as the feudalists, monarchists and medievalists: these systems are all reactionary, must all be overcome, and must all be overthrown and replaced with 'democracy'. (I dislike Fukuyama's (and Lenin's) habit of using simplistic, single-word political concepts - 'democracy', 'dictatorship', 'centralism', 'freedom', 'authoritarian', and the like - words which become more hazy and nebulous the more you look at them; but, one must recognise that neither man is inclined to complexity and subtlety, and if one writes on them, one must be willing to use their language). In the Leninist world-view, 'authoritarianism' is to be toppled in what is a liberal-bourgeois 'democratic' revolution - exactly the sort that Fukuyama applauds, and exactly the sort that the Coloured Revolutions sought to bring about.

As to why these 'democratic' revolutions did not flow and merge into 'socialist' (that is, communist) ones, the Leninist theory has its answers there as well: the proletariat, the working-classes, were defeated in a succession of class struggles, etc. Perhaps because of these failures, Western communists in the years 2000 to 2010 refused to acknowledge that the Coloured Revolutions could be considered to be revolutions as such, and so therefore could be accounted for by Leninist theory. In the 2000s, Communists scorned and reviled the Coloured Revolutions, and alleged that they were a put-up job, a scam. In their view, the perpetrators of this fraud were the CIA, George Soros, American neoconservatives, American think-tanks, the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission... In this the Far Left took the same line as the Far Right, remarkably enough. 

One cannot have communism without Lenin - he is to communism what Muhammad is to Islam. The communists who oppose the Coloured Revolutions have departed from Lenin's teachings and strayed from the path of righteousness. But perhaps they were correct in doing so, as Lenin's model poses all sorts of questions. 

Take the 2019 protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese communist government. China has denounced them as another instance of a CIA- and Gene Sharp-contrived Colour Revolution, as China, along with Russia, hates and fears Coloured Revolutions, but given that China is a socialist and Marxist state, is China not justified in condemning the Revolutions from a left-wing perspective? If the communists in China are on the Left, then the protesters in Hong Kong must be on the Right. In Marxist-speak, the Hong Kong protest movement could be described as reactionary, even counter-revolutionary.

Now Marxism's troubles begin. If a repressive and authoritarian communism in China were to incite a liberal and bourgeois revolution in Hong Kong (a revolution which, according to Lenin's theory, can progress into a communist revolution), then history must go around in a circle. We can solve that paradox by pointing out the obvious - that China ceased being socialist forty years ago, that it is now state-capitalist. But, the more one thinks about the implications of that truth, the more one sees that they upend Lenin's (and Marx's) theory altogether. The question then becomes: is Fukuyama right?

III.

Both the Far Right and Left share a disdain for the Coloured Revolutions (and the Revolutions' alleged architects Soros and Sharp). But a real communist understands the progressive potential in bourgeois revolutions and ought to throw his weight behind any of these, whenever they occur; he must support revolution by any means necessary. He must take this position if he wishes to follow Lenin and therefore Marx, as Lenin buttressed his arguments for the necessity of the bourgeois revolution and the 'revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat' with copious quotations from Marx and Engels. Leninism incarnated Marxism in the 20th century - or so the Soviet Union and Red China wished us to believe. 

Assuming that this claim of the Marxist-Leninists was correct, the difficulty faced by the wignats and Nazbols becomes apparent. If you want to be a socialist, you must be a Marxist; if you want to be a Marxist, after 1917 you have no choice but to be a Leninist; if you want to be a Leninist, then by all rights you ought to get behind the bourgeois democratic revolution, as it has manifested itself in the Coloured Revolutions, the Arab Spring, Maidan. And it is this consequence of socialism that the Heimbachs, Spencers, Wallaces, Strykers cannot abide.  

Is it socialism? Socialism and the Civics, Patriots and the Pie and Mash Squad

A nationalist comrade sent me the following - from a Facebook thread - recently and asked if the below account of NSDAP social and economic policies was 'true':

Multi-national industries in occupied territory were particularly targeted for state ownership

* Large public works programs supported by deficit spending

* Disbanding of all private welfare institutions, in an effort to socially engineer society by selecting who was to receive social benefits

* The National Socialists provided a plethora of social welfare programs under Nazi’s concept of Volksgemeinschaft which promoted the collectivity of a “people’s community” where citizens would sacrifice themselves for the greater good. The NSV operated “8,000 day-nurseries” by 1939, and funded holiday homes for mothers, distributed additional food for large families, and was involved with a “wide variety of other facilities.”

* During the 12 years of the Third Reich, government ownership expanded greatly into formerly private sectors of strategic industries: aviation, synthetic oil and rubber, aluminium, chemicals, iron and steel, and army equipment. The capital assets of state-owned industry doubled during this same period, whereby the nationalization caused state-ownership of companies to increase to over 500 businesses.

* By the late 1930s, taxation, regulations and general hostility towards the business community were becoming so onerous that one German businessman wrote: "These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth,'

A particularly interesting one for you history deniers:

* The Nazi social welfare provisions included old age insurance, rent supplements, unemployment and disability benefits, old-age homes, interest-free loans for married couples, along with healthcare insurance, which was not decreed mandatory until 1941.

Yes, I can say that all the above was true.

I came across my first account of German Nationalist policies in a beginner's textbook on Keynes, which described how Sweden and National Socialist Germany flourished throughout the Great Depression because of (what the author believed) was Keynesian policy.

At the time I read the book - the mid-1990s - rural and regional Australia was afflicted with great unemployment as a holdover from the recession of the early 1990s, a slump which was compared by many to that of the 1930s. So the German National Socialist and Swedish Social Democrat fiscal and monetary remedies proved to be attractive to me. (But I wasn't a fascist sympathiser at the time: I still believed in the Holocaust, and found Hitler, National Socialism and fascism abhorrent).

Another friend has added, to the above Facebook exchange:

The fact the Nationalist Socialist Germany is considered economically Left by many today, shows how far to the economic right we are.

Ive heard these before, they are more or less true (with important caveats, that being the intent of government ownership). This was the way the world was then. Before neo-liberalism and deregulated lassez-faire capitalism, these kind of policies were normal. Look at Post WWII tax rates in America. Positively wealth redistibutionary.

On the subject of high taxes: the Great Depression was caused by tax and tariff increases. It all started in the US:  Herbert Hoover imposed the 60% Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1929-1930 and then raised the top rate of income tax from 25% to 63% in 1932, and countries all across the world - including the UK, Australia, Japan and Germany - responded with their own Hoover-style super-tax and tariff hikes. The US recession went global as a result.

On coming into office, Hitler didn't cut income taxes, but he did, according to supply-side doyen Jude Wanniski, exempt shares in the top German companies from capital gains tax; he also cut taxes for companies that reinvested their profits. On the trade front, he negotiated trade agreements - or barter agreements, rather - with thirty countries, which circumvented the huge Smoot-Hawley tariff blocking off international trade. (His autarchy policies, which encouraged self-sufficiency, were intended to be another way of getting around Smoot-Hawley).

The West - and Japan - recovered after the war because of cuts to the enormously high Depression and wartime tax rates. Those post-war rates do look high to us today - the top rate of income tax in the US, even by 1980, was 70% for anyone making over $USD100,000 - but because of generous loopholes, rebates and deductions, hardly anyone paid them. In addition, by 1950, the gold standard and fixed exchange rates had been reintroduced. As for the tariff walls of the 1930s, these were knocked down after a series of free trade agreements, including the much-aligned GATT.

But I digress; I'm leading into a discussion of supply-side economics, when what I want to write about here is Hitler's socialism. The above Facebook quotation raises the question: what leads us to characterise certain politicians as socialist, even Marxist? Is it their social policies - like those of Hitler's, listed above - or is it something deeper... I believe the latter. What makes a politician socialist, even Marxist is his championing the cause of a particular class - the working class. For this reason, I view Trump as the most socialist - even Marxist - American president in the last hundred or so years. He has donned the mantle of saviour and protector of the (white) American working class, and so should rightly be considered socialist even if he doesn't see himself that way. The fact that Trump does not endorse Marxist-Leninism, and most likely never has read a word of Marx or any other socialist intellectual, doesn't matter; what does is that he has managed to present himself to the American workers as their representative.

In contrast, Sanders - who campaigned as a self-conscious socialist, that is, a socialist who recognised himself as such - did not succeed in winning the votes of the blue-collars in the Democrat primaries; he only managed to attract the middle-classes - the white collars - and the bohemians. That seems paradoxical, to be sure, but modern politics is filled with paradoxes.

Sometimes what a politician says matters more than what he does. Lenin claimed to be 'for' the working classes and the peasantry and yet starved them to the death and executed them in the millions; but we should still - in my opinion - see Lenin as a genuine Marxist and socialist and class warrior... By that criteria, Hitler, too, should be regarded as a genuine socialist - and even Marxist - regardless of whether his policies were, objectively viewed, 'for' or 'against' the working class and their interests (and in the end, who is it that judges, we may ask).

Fascism finds its political center in the working classes, just as Trumpism does (but this is not to say that both fascism and Trumpism are the same thing). Back in the 2000s, when the English Defence League first appeared, it succeeded in enrolling many British working class men; its base was located in the British working class. It was this element, in combination with others, that gave the EDL its 'fascist' character. The EDL leadership may have protested that the EDL was a multi-culti, philo-Semitic, 'pro-Israel' organisation, but this rhetoric hardly fooled anyone. The resemblances between it and earlier, overtly fascist formations - such as Mosley's BUF - were blindingly obvious to students of history. The doctrinal purists of the Far Right who opposed the EDL pointed, like the EDL leadership, to the 'Zionism' of the EDL and its multi-cultism, and they raised suspicions that the EDL may have been formed by agents of the British 'secret state', but all this ignored the implicit whiteness of the EDL and the implicit fascism.

In fascism, practice precedes theory, and part of that practice is the cultivation of a working-class base - doctrinal purity comes later. And so does any other form of purity. We must acknowledge that many of the followers of the EDL, and the Neo-Nazi 'skin' movements, came from the ranks of the lumpenproletariat, not the proletariat (but a fine line exists between the two). How much more beneficial, for the Far Right, it would be if these uncouth types could be discouraged from entering the movement and more clean-cut and well-presented types (like those overall-wearing, cloth-cap wearing proletarians in Soviet iconography) could be persuaded to join. But alas, in politics, things don't work out that way. You can't pick and choose; nor can you isolate and segregate certain factions of the Far Right from the other. Nor can you say that you only want 'good' working class people to join. (For the past thirty or so years, the Far Left has been keeping out of its ranks what it regards as the 'bad' members of the working class; as a result, it has gutted whatever working class membership it had and turned itself into a bourgeois, non-working class and non-socialist (in the true sense of the word) movement).

The EDL seems to have waned, but several anti-Islamist offshoots - such as the North West Infidels and the South West Alliance linger, and so do the Australian equivalents: the UPF, Reclaim Australia, True Blue Crew... This so-called Australian 'patriot' movement does boast a sizeable working class following, and could be said to be quasi-fascistic in some respects. Like the EDL, it has been corrupted by Zionism and civic nationalism, but, on the other hand, it does show fascist potential - more so than the political parties with which it is aligned (Rise Up! and Australian Liberty Alliance). In other words, they stand close to the socialism of the NSDAP variety, about as close as the skinhead formations. Ideological proximity to the tenets of the NSDAP doesn't equal identity, of course, but the skins and the patriots are the closest we'll get - for the time being - to an Australian neo-fascism.

The interesting thing about the UK scene is that the civic nationalist and the overtly fascist groups are prepared to work together: see an account of a 2016 Liverpool demonstration here, which saw the civic-nationalist, 'hooligan' outfits NW Infidels, SW Alliance and the Pie and Mash Squad standing alongside the (now banned) National Action, which was a self-proclaimed 'national socialist' group. I take this as evidence that the gap dividing the two tendencies in Britain has been bridged. Likewise, that gap could be surmounted here in Australia.

In Defence of 'Scum' Nationalism

Joe Owens has done another inflammatory video - he cranks out half a dozen a week - attacking other British nationalists and proffering civic nationalism, populism and UKIP as the solution to all of nationalism's ills: this one is entitled 'REAL NATIONALISM or SCUM nationalism'.

Owens shows us a few clips of odd British nationalists at demonstrations, some of whom seem lumpenproletarian and defective. We see a few strange-looking and obese people. I was struck by the sight of one youngish man (at 06.18), walking with a cane and who appeared to have gout - a rich man's disease. Owens contrasts this with photos of nationalist demonstrations - including those held by the National Front - from the 1980s, when nationalists, and British people as a whole, were skinnier and fitter.

I can't speak for the British nationalists, of course; I can only speak for the Australian. Owens' video does relate back to us. A common complaint which has been heard on the Australian scene for years is, 'Why can't we attract more decent and healthy people - nice, well-educated, clean-cut, middle-class types...'. The answer is that those types for the most part don't participate in fringe politics, whether it be of the extreme Right or Left (and we should keep in mind that the ranks of the Far Left itself today are filled mainly with 'marginalised' people who appear weird or defective in some way - not healthy proletarians). The ones who do will, at the most, vote for the civic populists - such as One Nation, Rise Up!, Australian Liberty Alliance. They may even join those parties (but it should be noted that Australians in the main do not like joining political parties, even the mainstream ones). In other words, the 'nice, normal' types will gravitate, always, towards the mainstream political parties or their offshoots (such as the civic and populist formations); what's more, they confine their political activities to participation in the normal electoral process - that is, campaigning for parties and voting for them. They don't recognise that a politics exist outside the electoral sphere; they don't want constitute themselves (as the Far Left does) as an 'extra-parliamentary opposition'.

This brings us back to a criticism I made earlier of Joe Owens: those of the electoralist mentality believe that one should engage in politics only on election day (in state and federal elections) once every three years; for the intervening periods between election days and campaigns, one ought to just to sit idle - and perhaps fulminate, as Owens does, against those nationalists who are doing something during those periods.

Owens is asking a lot. We in Australia have just had a federal election, in which One Nation did well, and this year the state of Queensland will hold an election in which One Nation is expected to well. Those Australian nationalists outside of Queensland, then, are meant to do nothing and go to sleep for the next three years until the next federal election, when they ought to - according to Owens' recommendations - campaign and vote for One Nation, again.

But, contrary to what Owens says, politics in Australian nationalism does manifest itself in between elections and outside elections. In fact, we ought to take up a Marxist-Leninist, 'totalitarian' view of politics. Here is Selznick in the Introduction to The Organizational Weapon (1952):

The nature of bolshevism cannot be understood unless we grasp the fact that Leninist political doctrine rests upon a broad interpretation of the nature of power. In particular, bolshevik theory and practice recognize that power is social,- generated in the course of all types of action (not simply the narrowly “political”) and latent in all institutions.

This insight stems in part from basic Marxist theory and in part from the over-all aim of bolshevism—a total transformation of society that will invest every institution with political meaning. Leninism views politics as omnipresent. As a consequence, bolshevik strategy has identified vast new areas of political potential in what are usually thought to be nonpolitical special-purpose social institutions and mass organizations. This theory of power has increased the sensitivity of bolshevik strategy to unconventional methods of gaining influence. Exploitation of these devices has helped to keep the communist movement from adapting itself to constitutional methods; in this way, it has rejected the path of accommodation taken, for example, by most sections of the international socialist movement.

The bolshevik pursuit of power is subversive (1) because it is not limited to the areas where constitutional, responsible power is won, but is carried on everywhere in the social structure, wherever an increment of power can be squeezed from control of an institution or a portion of it; and (2) because communism knows no stopping place in its search for power short of concentrating total control in its own hands. This unceasing and unbounded struggle, associated with the politicalization of every facet of society, is a basic characteristic of totalitarian politics. Many of communism’s specific techniques are found elsewhere as well, but total subversion summons all the devices normally hidden in the interstices of a political order, emerging temporarily and episodically in times of constitutional weakness or crisis.

It is convenient for a subversive group to seek sources of power that may be won without bidding for direct popular support. Consequently it is better to work where small disciplined minorities can have their greatest impact. These are areas neglected by the major political forces, where the marginal strength of a minority can be most effective. Recognizing the importance of such areas of operation. Leninism stresses the need to build organizations designed to compete effectively in nonelectoral arenas.

There you have it: Joe Owens and civic nationalism refuted in four (not so simple) paragraphs. Communists understand the above on an intuitive level, even though they would not have phrased it as bluntly as Selznick does here; so did the earlier generation of British nationalists such as John Tyndall. Owens belongs to that generation which was well-versed in 'totalitarian' theory and practice, which is what makes Owens' rejection of building 'organizations designed to compete effectively in nonelectoral arenas' so jarring.

To return to Australia: our nationalists and populists were given a signal opportunity to engage in politics in 'nonelectoral arenas', to summon 'devices normally hidden in the interstices of a political order', on Australia Day. They could have held some event to commemorate our national day. But, so far as I know, Hanson's One Nation, Katter's Australian Party, Hinch's Justice Party and the rest did nothing. I can reveal that one function was held in Victoria, attended by representatives of four nationalist organisations - and most of these attendees were what the Left, and the media, would characterise as 'Neo-Nazis'; Owens might even think that one or two of them were 'scum nationalists'. The point is that the civics, populists, anti-Islamic patriots, were conspicuous by their absence on that day, in Victoria at least; they could have held their own civic nationalist, 'anti-Nazi', 'anti-white nationalist' Australia Day commemoration, but they didn't. Only 'Neo-Nazis' possessed sufficient motivation, and organisation, to do anything.

As the Americans say, 'Personnel is policy', and when most of those who are driving ordinary, day-to-day activity in the nationalist scene are 'Neo-Nazi' and 'scum' nationalist, that scene will take on a 'Neo-Nazi' character by default. That's what happens when the civics and 'nice people' abandon the nonelectoral arena.

The same process can occur within an organisation which is infiltrated by communists: it becomes communist because most of the personnel is communist. When the communists who are members are the only ones bothering to turn up to meetings of a British Labour Party branch or a trade union, and doing all the legwork, the non-communist members - who are usually apathetic and don't have the energy or the motivation to put up a fight for the control of the organisation - will be thrust out. Selznick in his book describes this progression many times. In order to justify the sidelining of non-communists in a target organisation and that organisation's takeover, the communists will call upon a doctrine Selznick calls 'activism', which says in essence, 'We communists are the ones turning up to these sparsely-attended meetings, we are doing most of the work, so therefore we deserve the right to rule'.

It's not my intention to debate the rights or wrongs of this, merely to inject a note of realpolitik. We need to acknowledge the facts. If 'Neo-Nazis' predominate in the most basic day to day activities of the Far Right, then they will invest it with a 'Neo-Nazi' character - it matters little whether they are 'scum' or not.

The Worst Enemy of 'National Socialism'

I.

Most nationalists don't like the word 'neo-Nazi': they prefer the term 'National Socialist'. I myself refuse to refer to the post-war sympathisers and revivalists of Hitler as 'National Socialist' because that would imply that they are the one and same with the German National Socialists of the NSDAP. I believe that a continuity of sorts exists but not an identity. The term 'post-Nazi' manages to encapsulate the post-war Hitler revival movement best, but I regard it as a little specious. Better to stick with 'neo-Nazi'.

 It's true that this pejorative term is used by the enemy - just like its cousins 'racist', 'sexist', 'white supremacist' and the like - but by embracing the term we neuter it. Besides which, you can use it to get right down to brass tacks when discussing politics with someone. 'My political beliefs are neo-Nazi': such a statement cuts right to the essence of things and leaves very little by way of doubt in the mind of your interlocutor as to what your actual beliefs are. It saves time.

 In order to explain what neo-Nazism is, we need to define what the historical German National Socialism was. I'd sum it up in six points: 1) anti-Semitism and folkish German nationalism; 2) the doctrine of inequality between races, nations and men (the 'theory of personality' as Hitler calls it); 3) the leader principle, or Führerprinzip; 4) anti-communism; 5) the importance of improving the lot of the working class and recruiting from the working-class; 6) the importance of struggle - that the good things in life (or in politics at least) can only be won by struggle. One can find the best explication of these doctrines in Mein Kampf.

 And what is neo-Nazism? It's most commonly defined as an attempt to revive those doctrines. A.V. Schaerffenberg's Nazi Questions and Answers (2008) gives us the best introduction to neo-Nazism, Yockey's Imperium (1948) the most impressive intellectual foundation.

Neither of these authors really revise the doctrines of Hitler: by and large, they leave them unchanged. In the same way, Marxist-Leninism hasn't changed much in the past hundred years. The immutability of both these ideas - Leninism and Hitlerism - explains their survival into the 21st century. Neo-Nazism itself has been around in one shape or form for seventy years.

This long-livedness makes it superior, in my eyes, to other 'nationalist' and Far Right ideologies and tendencies. Recently an excellent article appeared in the Occidental Observer on the shortcomings of the Nouvelle Droit or European New Right - a school of thought which rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s and then went the way of all fads. I can imagine newer tendencies, such as the Alt Right, going the same way. Neo-Nazism outlived the European New Right and will outlive the Alt Right, simply because intellectual ideas need to be given political form, and this is what neo-Nazism does for the intellectuals - it gives them a party. This is what the original Nazism and fascism did as well. The European New Right made a hero out of Carl Schmitt, who, it will be remembered, joined the NSDAP (along with Martin Heidegger, another New Right hero) in 1933.

 The fascist parties gave intellectuals of the Right a home, the communist parties, the intellectuals of the Left. Communism and fascism resemble one another. Both make a fetish of the great individual, the man of genius, what Marx disparages as the 'cult of personality', and it's this side of the German National Socialist doctrine, I think, which tends to rub its critics up the wrong way. These men - ostensibly 'Far Right' and 'nationalist' and 'racialist' - don't believe in Hitler's genius because they hold to egalitarian theories. They subscribe to a form of Marxism. We know that Marxist theory teaches that all men are equal and that the masses - in particular, the working-classes - are the ones who make history. (In practice, the Marxist regimes of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, East Germany and the rest put their leaders on a pedestal and made a cult of them: the communist party line was that the revolutions in those respective countries were brought about by the individual initiative of those very great men...). The anti-Hitlerians take egalitarianism at face value. They don't follow the doctrine of racialism to its logical conclusion: that if you believe in the inequality of races, then you must believe in the inequality of nations - and men. And, from the inequality of men, we can deduce the Führerprinzip: responsibility for political decisions must be reserved for those superior men, the men who are (in Spengler's words) 'master-types' to whom the masses owe unquestioning obedience. In the words of the Italian Fascist slogan, 'Believe, obey, fight!'.

 In National Socialist propaganda, the Führer, the German Volk and the Wehrmacht form three pillars of the German national genius. The Hitler detractors take umbrage to this: how can one nation (Germany) set itself above another? Doesn't white nationalism preach that white nations such as Ireland, Portugal, Bulgaria, Finland, Serbia and Montenegro are all equal?

And on the subject of Hitler's alleged genius, his critics accuse him with making many questionable decisions (the implication being that had they been in charge, they would have done better). They don't believe in his greatness, and what's more, don't believe that any man - much less a politician - can be great.

 Oddly enough, it's the Left which understands the theories of 'personality' (viz., the cult of individual genius) and Führerprinzip - and national greatness too. While the anti-Hitlerians may decry neo-Nazi celebrations of Hitler's birthday as cultish, the Left has no problems with celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday and making it an American national holiday. Likewise, after the 1917 October revolution, the Left made a fetish of Russia and Russian nationalism (and Russian imperialism), recognising Russia as a superior nation. One may wonder, how many Anglophone left-wing intellectuals after 1917 strove to learn Russian? Or, after 1949, Chinese? As for democracy, the communist parties which made up the Comintern (and later the Trotskyite Internationals) were never that big on it. Even today, the communist parties run their organisations like disciplined military units and their members show more self-restraint, more subordination to authority, than our present nationalist mob. But one could say that the Marxist-Leninism of Stalin, Mao, Trotsky represents a dishonest fascism, a mealy-mouthed, hypocritical fascism which is unable to say, plainly and frankly, what it is.

One may object to German National Socialism on the grounds that it was for Germans only - that National Socialism doesn't carry across to white nations other than Germany. But we need to look at this in context. After WWI, Europe was ruled by four Great Powers, each with their sovereign independence, each with a number of smaller countries (and colonies) within their sphere of influence: Germany, Britain, France and Italy. By 1939, France and Britain had lost their sovereignty and had fallen, along with Poland, under the sway of America; by the middle of 1944, Germany, the sole power on the Continent, was engaged in a ferocious struggle with the US for control of Europe. It was in this period that Italy ceased to be a sovereign political unit. The project of Italian Fascism - along with the fascisms of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Holland, etc. - became subordinated to the German. In connection with this, it must be recalled that Hitler's racialism was not directed at the Negroes or the Muslims or Chinese or Indians but against the Jews. By 1944 the Italian racial doctrine became explicitly Hitlerian; Fascist Italy, along with France and other European countries, had consented to the round-up and deportation of Jews. Politically and intellectually, all fascism and Far Rightism by 1944 had become Germanised and 'Nazi'; paraphrasing Sir William Harcourt, Europe's Right had said, in effect, 'We're all Nazis now'. This is why I characterise neofascism (the remnants of fascism which survived the war) as neo-Nazi.

 Despite the 'Germanness' of the National Socialist doctrine, and despite the fact that it was implemented eighty years ago, many of its ideas could still be carried across to other white countries (and solve a good many social and political problems thereby). In Australia, a nationalist government could introduce labour laws modelled on National Socialist Germany's; young men and women could be conscripted into an Australian version of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls (both of which were patterned on communist youth formations).

 But it goes without saying that, in these times, an insurmountable wall prevents us from introducing anything like Hitlerism here (or, for that matter, any Western country). Communist and fascist youth organisations originated in countries which were ethnically homogenous. In many Melbourne and Sydney schools, the non-whites - who are the children of non-white immigrants - can often outnumber the Aussies, and a mixed-race nationalist and fascist youth organisation, composed of Aussies and non-whites, would be a contradiction in terms. (For that matter, it's difficult to imagine Chinese or Russian communist youth organisations with members who are African). Much of historical fascism can't be transposed to the modern era. In today's multi-culti, bastardised, mixed-race Western societies, the old slogan, 'Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer' - 'One people, one kingdom, one leader' - doesn't hold true and can't hold true. George Lincoln Rockwell, who died in 1967, and Francis Parker Yockey, who died in 1960, would have been shocked and appalled by today's Melbourne, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Athens...

II.

One can't turn the clock back, and all the ideologies on the Far Right today face the same uphill battle. We can't return to the same ethnically homogenous societies of the 1960s and even the 1970s and 1980s - at least, not without a terrible fight.

Now, I think that neo-Nazism - with its doctrine of the importance of struggle - is uniquely suited to that task; but a great many of its critics on the Far Right don't agree. Despite the fact that everywhere on the Far Right it dominates - and even the detractors of German National Socialism, such as Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents, pay lip service to it and make their bread and butter from it - it doesn't rank high in the opinion of many. Like that other venerable racialist movement, the Ku Klux Klan, it has fallen into disrepute. Duke admitted, in his autobiography My Awakening (1998), that by the end of the 1970s, the mass infiltration of provocateurs (and degenerates) into the Klan had turned it into a violent and criminal organisation, hardly a vehicle for the white man's racial struggle; Duke had no choice but to leave. Neo-Nazism finds itself in a similar quandary. It's now tainted by an association with skinheadism, which is as unlike the historical German National Socialism as could be (see here).

 One has to ask if the powers that be deliberately engineered this situation. Did they use their power and influence in mass media and popular culture to help create the skinhead subculture and push it towards neo-Nazism, and to eventually make the skinhead subculture the public face of neo-Nazism? I've heard speculation along those lines from a few people on the nationalist scene; one of them is Esben Kristensen, the leader of the National Socialist Movement of Denmark (DNSB). As Kristensen notes, the shaven heads, bomber jackets, braces and Doc Marten boots look 'stupid'. It could be that the enemy has waged psychological warfare against its political opponents by manipulating the more impressionable and naive of them to adopt a 'stupid' look. In addition, the enemy has succeeded in encouraging an ethos of immoral and degenerate behaviour - violence, alcoholism, wife-beating - of making that behaviour acceptable, if not laudable, within the confines of that group.

 If we trace the history of skinheadism, it can be seen that skinheadism turned neo-Nazi after the formation of several skinhead rock bands under the aegis of the British National Front after 1978 - precisely at the point when the National Front had become the third-largest political party in Britain and a threat to the British establishment.

One should ask: who, exactly, introduced skinheadism into the British nationalist scene at that time? Who encouraged it to grow, flourish? And doesn't it to stand to reason that the British 'Deep State' would have taken some form of action in 1978 to disrupt, divert or destroy the National Front - and British Nationalism - by utilising provocateurs and degrading the morale of British nationalists through infiltration and subversion...

III.

It's quite true that skinheads belong to the working class - as do the chavs and bogans - and the working classes, as pointed out earlier, form the bulwark of any National Socialism, whether it be of the historical German National Socialist or the neo-Nazi variety. But, in order to defend myself, I will quote scripture here. This is a famous passage from Mein Kampf:

[The worker] cannot be raised from his present standing and incorporated in the.. folk-community by means of goody-goody meetings where people talk about the brotherhood of the people; but rather by a systematic improvement in the social and cultural life of the worker until the yawning abyss between him and the other classes can be filled in. A movement which has this for its aim must try to recruit its followers mainly from the ranks of the working class. It must include members of the intellectual classes only in so far as such members have rightly understood and accepted without reserve the ideal towards which the movement is striving. This process of transformation and reunion cannot be completed within ten or twenty years. It will take several generations, as the history of such movements has shown.

The most difficult obstacle to the reunion of our contemporary worker in the national folk-community does not consist so much in the fact that he fights for the interests of his fellow-workers but rather in the international ideas [i.e., communism] with which he is imbued and which are of their nature at variance with the ideas of nationhood and fatherland. This hostile attitude to nation and fatherland has been inculcated by the leaders of the working class. If they were inspired by the principle of devotion to the nation in all that concerns its political and social welfare, the trades unions would make those millions of workers most valuable members of the national community, without thereby affecting their own constant struggle for their economic demands...

The reservoir from which the young movement has to draw its members will first of all be the working masses. Those masses must be delivered from the clutches of the international mania. Their social distress must be eliminated. They must be raised above their present cultural level, which is deplorable, and transformed into a resolute and valuable factor in the folk-community, inspired by national ideas and national sentiment.

A few sentences stand out here: the worker must be raised from his present standing 'by a systematic improvement in the social and cultural life of the worker until the yawning abyss between him and the other classes can be filled in...'; the masses 'must be raised above their present cultural level, which is deplorable, and transformed into a resolute and valuable factor in the folk-community, inspired by national ideas and national sentiment'. Hitler places the emphasis on lifting the working classes up, improving their culture and their conditions, ennobling them. The skinhead movement can't be said to be Hitlerian in this regard; neither can chavvish nationalist and Far Right movements such as the English Defence League and Britain First.

 My point is that the system - the 'Deep State' - understands this, and understands it better than most nationalists; it could be that it has concocted the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, or at least helped it grow, as a means of sabotaging neo-Nazism and Far Right nationalism in general.

To many on the Far Right, this sort of thinking seems conspiratorial, and what's more, galling - it implies that we nationalists have little to no agency and that we are easily manipulated and duped by the political establishment. But such conspiratorial-minded views are gradually becoming more and more accepted. Most of us on the Far Right believe that the notorious Combat 18 was a creation of the 'Deep State' as was the German NSU (National Socialist Underground). We have our suspicions about the EDL (English Defence League) and Britain First looks more and more fishy by the day as well. As for Jack 'The Pak' Sen's British Renaissance, the less said, the better. Nationalists are getting wise to all this...

Aside from creating provocateur and front organisations from scratch, the 'Deep State' avails itself of the method of inserting provocateurs into the scene. This is what the German 'Deep State' has done to German nationalism (neo-Nazism). As Carolyn Yeager writes of the NSU trial,

In various parliamentary inquiries as well as during the trial itself, every effort to pin down what happened meets a barrier when it comes up against the intelligence services. The most sensational case is that of Andreas T., an informant leader who was sitting in the Internet cafe in Kassel on April 6, 2006 when the owner, Halit Yozgat, was shot. Andreas T. lied, pretending that he didn't even know of the place. Police investigations on the suspicion of murder were shelved to protect his identity from becoming known, and the files of Hesse's intelligence service remain under lock and key.

Tino Brandt is another key figure for connections between the NSU and the intelligence services. The Thuringian “Nazi” was unmasked as an informant in 2001 and was branded a traitor in the right-wing scene. Since then, he's been convicted and sentenced for sexually assaulting a minor. The secret informers for the intelligence services are a pretty sleazy bunch. I believe these informers are there to stir up activism and petty crime that they can then report to the intelligence service, giving them cause for cracking down on right-wing parties or organizations.

The venerable German neo-Nazi party, the National Democratic Party of Germany, has become hopelessly riddled with informers and provocateurs. In response to a speech by Michèle Renouf, 'In defence of Germany's National Democratic Party', one acerbic commentator wrote:

Petronius

Posted March 14, 2016 at 7:06 pm |

NPD is by now a tiny, powerless, incompetent, non-influential, rapidly vanishing party, dozing in a limbo state or zombie mode, undermined to the hilt by Verfassungsschutz snitches and agent provocateurs, thus kept alive by the state to always have a brown bogeyman and a garbage dump for any right-wing thought ready. It is also burdened with a substantial share of hopelessly narrowminded sectarian NS nostalgics blocking any progress or broader popular appeal. I hope it dies as soon as possible, being undead already.

Finally, it should be noted that the German neo-Nazis do their cause no good when they make use of street-fighting tactics. Like the EDL, Britain First, the National Front and countless other British Far Right groups, the German nationalists make a practice of provocatively marching through indifferent or hostile neighbourhoods with the intention of arousing the communist Left, who show up in large numbers with the intention of 'smashing the fascists'. In what becomes a waste of taxpayer's money, large numbers of police are required to keep the two warring parties apart, and the bewildered and alienated townsfolk are treated to the sight of one group of misfits screaming and chanting at another group of misfits separated by a police line. The nationalists here are behaving like an invading army and they don't do any political work - they don't canvass the locals and try and work out what their concerns are. And by not appearing smart and well-turned out (like Norbert Hofer, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen) and by dressing in weird outfits, they don't give those same locals a positive impression of nationalism.

 The large presence of skinheads and provocateurs in their ranks, along with the reliance upon confrontational tactics, explains, to a great extent, the decline in the NPD's electoral fortunes and the dim view Germans have of them. It's no wonder, then, that German voters are abandoning them for Alternative for Germany (AfD).

III.

It's parties such as the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the AfD which point the way forward for neo-Nazis - on the Continent and elsewhere in the West. The politicians of the FPÖ have enjoyed their recent success by campaigning mostly on local issues. Grass-roots politics is combined with a concern for social welfare. In an AFP article, 'Even in "Red Vienna", Austrian far-right is king' (May 7th, 2016), we find:

Paul Stadler, since October the FPOe head of Simmering council, is no fan of mass immigration, of Muslim "parallel societies" or "economic migrants" taking jobs from Austrians.

"Austria is still a Christian country, and at the moment it looks like we are being overrun by Islamism," Stadler told AFP. "We have 500,000 unemployed. The more we take in, the harder it is to deal with the native inhabitants."

But, he says, such matters are "for the television". His job as a local politician is to deal with day-to-day concerns like public transport -- something the left forgot how to do.

"The SPOe were very arrogant. They didn't listen to the people any more, they governed over their heads," Stadler said in his office in Simmering town hall. "We talk to the people, find out what the problems are and deal with them."

That strategy has won the FPÖ hundreds of thousands of working-class votes. It can be applied here in Australia. Nationalist activists campaigning for office only need to relegate Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism, 'debating anti-whites' and 'fighting white genocide', the rights and wrongs of the wars in Syria and the Ukraine, predictions of race wars, conspiracy theories regarding the New World Order, to the background - the masses aren't interested in these subjects as we are - and concentrate on what the above AFP article calls 'day to day concerns'. Instead of imposing our ideological preoccupations and obsessions on the masses, we allow the masses to impose their wants, worries and cares on us.

 In Australia, we should look at running at the council level, not at the state and federal - which are the province of the two major parties. The councils represent the one chink in the enemy's armour.

To some, I may appear to be contradicting myself here: that I'm advocating neo-Nazism on one hand and advocating the doing away with it on the other. But one's radical ideology needn't be thrown out the window in the pursuit of electoral success: one can be a grass-roots populist and at the same time retain a political world-view which is radical and intellectual. The Militant Tendency in Liverpool in the 1980s gives us the best example of this. That crackbrained Trotskyite outfit infiltrated local Labour Party branches in Liverpool, got themselves elected to the City Council, and within a short amount of time achieved absolute control over that body. How did they do this? By listening to the working-classes and by breaking down Trotskyism - which, like all Marxist-Leninist theories, is highly esoteric and intellectual - into layman's terms. One could say that they returned Bolshevism to its roots. I argue that the same can be done for Hitlerism.