Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mad Men. Show all posts

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Romney or Obama '12? American Jews, the Euro and a Return to Gold



'Carthage must be destroyed': I've always, so long as I've been a nationalist, subscribed to the notion that 'America must be destroyed'. (I mean, by 'America' what I call 'The Anglo-Judeo Alliance' (America, Israel, the United Kingdom)). In the 1930s, after the election of Roosevelt, the US, the UK and Jewish-Americans entered into a sinister alliance, which proved to be the most destructive and malevolent force in the history of Western civilisation up to that time; the alliance, as we know, started (and finished) WWII, laid waste to Europe, enslaved the Western half and gave over the Eastern half to communism... We nowadays assume that America was always liberal, anti-"racist", anti-German, pro-Israel and pro-immigrant, but that wasn't the case: America only took that turn comparatively recently, in the past eighty years after Roosevelt. (Likewise, "The West" has only been liberal, pro-Israel, etc., since 1945). We in the West are still in the grip of three men - Roosevelt, Churchill and Churchill's friend and political accomplice Chaim Waizmann - who have been running the show, in effect, since the 1930s. It's this sinister alliance which has been at the root cause of all the problems in the West since then. Which is why I look at anything that sets today's America - Roosevelt's America - back with untrammelled glee.

Having said that, there are two Americas: there is today's America - the America of Wal-Mart, Zionism, anti-depressants, Afro-Americophililia which venerates Martin Luther King Jr. as a secular saint - and the 'old', good America of the immediate post-war period, which is portrayed by the TV series, Mad Men (2007-2012). Paradoxically, it's the old America - which was run by handsome, immaculately-groomed WASPs like Don Draper - which bombed German cities, occupied half of Germany, cut German rations below starvation levels, and tortured and hanged Germans at Nuremberg, and it's the old America I prefer to today's. I wouldn't like to live in 1962, of course - I don't think anyone of my generation could survive a day without mobile phones or the Internet or DVDs - but, in the old America (and old Australia) of 1962, I would have lived in an ethnically-homogeneous society. America, right now, is suffering - from its defeats in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, from Obamanomics, from enormous Mestizo immigration, from blighted cities like Detroit, from geopolitical decline - but this isn't the same America that enforced the Morgenthau Plan, and it's not the America of WASP scions Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling (who would have been horrified by Obama). If there were any justice in the world, the old America should be the one suffering, not the new, but such is life.

The question is, who should, in the upcoming US presidential elections, a nationalist support? Who do we want to win? Who will (inadvertently) help the nationalist cause the most?

After September 11, it became clear that the perpetrators of the attack (whoever they were) had gauged American psychology beautifully. The perpetrators sought to provoke America and give it the impetus to undertake rash, precipitous action - i.e., invade a country like Afghanistan, which they couldn't possibly hope to conquer (at least, by using their standard conventional-warfare tactics) and thus give it its second Vietnam. The results, in 2012, are better than could be expected: two lost wars, and on top of that, America's proxies Israel and George lost a total of three wars. It would take a very skillful leadership to negotiate one's state to an improved power-position, in spite of such a succession of military defeats, or perhaps really good luck (America won half of Europe off the Soviet Union, nearly fifteen years following its catastrophic defeat in Indochina). America, fortunately, doesn't have that skillful leadership. Military defeats have led to a geopolitical decline, a loss in power and prestige. America has lost Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela (which are now firmly in the anti-American camp), longtime enemies Russia and China have become stronger, and long-suppressed Germany and Turkey are, incredibly, beginning to resume their natural leadership roles (perhaps, at this rate, even Japan may awaken after its seventy-year slumber). This is quite a fall from the late 1990s, when America (and Israel) were at the peak of their political and economic strength.

The reason why this is important to nationalism is because the internal policy of a country - e.g., the ideology of its leadership - is largely determined by external geopolitics. Fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, would never have gotten off the ground without the example of Germany and Italy, and the fact that Western Europe has been so liberal democratic, so pro-Zionist, for seventy years comes about from the Allied victory in 1945. Were the Allies - that is, Churchill, Roosevelt and Waizmann and their spiritual heirs -  to suddenly become geopolitically weak, then the ideology of Europe would change. Just as Libya, Syria and Egypt, in the absence of the Arab secular socialism of Ghaddafi, Assad and Mubarak, stand in danger of turning towards the most extreme (Salafist) Islamism - Europe could turn to Far Right conservatism and fascism.

The Left understands this process very well. Both Mao and Lenin attributed the success of communism in their countries in part to China's and Russia's military defeats at the hands of the Japanese and Germans respectively. Without the displacements brought about by war, China and Russia would probably have remained non-communist. In the case of Europe and Germany, it's all about getting the boot - the American jackboot - of one's neck. Once that boot is removed, Europe can breathe a little more freely, and then start behaving like itself.

In order for German nationalism - and by nationalism, I mean the ideology of the German NPD, the DVP, the Freie Nationalisten and others - to succeed, certain fundamentals must be in place. Germany has to be strong again. And what is good for Germany, in this case, is good for Europe and all of the West.

In the post-WWI, Weimar period, Germany was stronger, politically, more sovereign than it was now (surprisingly enough). America, which was largely responsible for the Allied victory, had no interest in occupying Germany and making Europe a permanent vassal (although it did interfere by breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire, giving Poland its independence, and so forth). As a result, Germany, France, Italy, Britain, were largely left to their own devices. France quickly became the ascendant power on the Continent (much to the alarm of Britain) and pushed Germany around quite a bit; but, all the same, Germany was never as pulverised, demoralised and brainwashed as it was after 1945. After Hitler's ascent to power, of course, Germany became steadily more powerful, more sovereign, and resumed its old, traditional role of The German Bully. It goes without saying that this would never have happened had the Allies been as brutal and repressive in 1918 as they were in 1945.

Which helps explain why nationalism, in Europe, can only be achieved in stages. I've always thought that the likes of the NPD were too ambitious for this reason: I want to say to them, 'Hang on a minute, Germany has been under Anglo-Judeo occupation - politically and mentally - for the good part of seventy years; and now you want it to become a great, powerful and sovereign nation, like it was in WWI and WWII, and the Weimar era, and thus bring down the wrath and enmity of the USA and Israel upon your heads'. One has to walk before one can run. Fortunately, Germany is beginning to walk. Prior to 2011-2012, Germany was part of that amorphous entity called 'Europe', that is, the EU, and if there was a sovereign state in the EU, it was Brussels. Now, of course, Germany has leaped to the forefront and de facto owns the Continent.

It's as though a long-running company - let's call it Western Civilisation Holdings, European Division - had a CEO who all of a sudden became sick and unable to perform his duties (interestingly, Forbes had a recent article, 'New York Times proves Clint Eastwood correct - Obama is a lousy CEO', 03/09/2012). The members of the board get together and discuss the worsening situation: 'It's evident that we need a new CEO to replace this one. Who is there? Why not that Fritz guy? He can do the job... In truth, there's no-one but him who'll take it on anyway'. Fritz is a former CEO, who was demoted a long time ago in an internal coup following a scandal - a man of great competence and skill, who is known for being hard but fair, capable of getting the job done, but something of a bully. If you want Fritz, you have to obey him unconditionally, and overlook his abrasive manner, his guttural way of speaking. The board decides: 'We've no choice! Fritz it is'. And Fritz resumes his old position, without barely batting an eyelid - it's as though he never was away. Formerly, there was resistance to him, but now, because of the extent of the crisis, there is none. Fritz doesn't gloat over his return to power; Fritz is where he is because, in part, he's not the type to gloat. Instead, he sits down with the board members, opens the company's books, and recounts, in a pedantic fashion, the company's rather dire fiscal position, and the harsh measures needed to remedy it...

Today's Germany, and its liberal democratic politicians, of course, are far away from being nationalist. But at least it is slowly clawing its way back to its position in 1918, when the Kaiser abdicated and German liberals and communists instituted the Weimar Republic. Things in politics take time - it's taken Germany seventy years to reach its current position...

The same could be more or less said of Turkey, and who knows, maybe even Japan will grow a backbone. To me, however, the main concern is Europe - as Kevin MacDonald says, 'The [nationalist] revolution will begin in Europe', and I think that things, as they are in Europe, are progressing nicely. My only fear is a resurgence in American strength. One can never say never in politics, and it's possible that the Anglo-Judeo Empire may come roaring back. In other words, the match is still ongoing, and one shouldn't call the match at half-time. In this instance, however, I'm not willing to be prudent, and I think that America (and Israel) are down and out. They aren't going to have the streak of luck that they had in the 1980s, with the resurgence of America under Reagan, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then the Soviet Union - and the surreptitious abandonment, by its enemies China and Vietnam, of the communist project.

The fate of America has implications for Australia, of course. Australia has never been a sovereign nation: prior to the 1930s, it was a vassal of Britain, and then, when America began its big acquisition of European states - Britain, France and Poland - the British subsidiary, Australia, came under American ownership. The absence of sovereignty is not necessarily a bad thing: small states, like Romania, or Belgium, have traditionally been content to let a bigger country run things, and let's face it, not every country wants to be a leader. But when the sovereign power, the 'protector', of Australia, is the Anglo-Judeo Empire, then Australia has problems. Jewish-Americans determine America's foreign policy (and, by extension, Australia's) and a large part of its internal policy as well. This wouldn't be a problem if Jewish-Americans were a race of super-beings, but the fact is that they're not. White people make mistakes - it was a series of mistakes by President Herbert Hoover which brought about the Great Depression, and the ascent of Roosevelt, and his Jewish-American 'advisors', to political power. But (so the classical anti-Semite thesis runs), Jews, in the long run, tend to make more mistakes than white people.

Which brings us back to the problems of economics. Many advocates of supply-sideism believe (correctly) that America's, and the West's, economic problems today are largely the result of America, and the world's, abandonment of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in 1971. They are perfectly right in this, I believe, and had America been still on gold, the 2008 financial crisis (and its aftermath) would never have happened. But the supply-side analysts are mistaking the effect for the cause. One has to ask: why did America abandon gold? It had stayed on gold for a hundred years prior to 1971, out of a belief that abandoning gold, and undertaking a system of floating exchange rates, would lead to inflation, disorder and ruin (as it did during the American Civil War, when America (briefly) abandoned gold). My thesis is that Nixon broke up Bretton Woods, and left gold, largely at the urging of his (Jewish-American) economists, and what's more, stayed off gold because of those same economists (initially, he put it about that the abandonment of gold was a temporary measure, but, after he announced, in 1973, that the float was permanent, he oversaw a huge stock market collapse - which was, in real terms, the worst collapse in value since 1929). We know the results, of course, of Nixon's decision: monetary chaos and disorder (which led to, among other things, the creation of the euro). The reason why Nixon, and subsequent US presidents, didn't reverse this decision was because Jewish-Americans occupied all the positions of power and influence - in finance, economics, journalism, academia and so forth. Classical anti-Semitism says that Jews will make the wrong decisions, again and again, more often than not; it also says that Jews prefer chaos to order. It's almost as though they gain a pleasure and delight in flushing a country down the tubes, while not being consciously aware that they are doing so. (Indeed, when they lead a country, as they do America, they will blame its travails, not on themselves and their bad decisions, but on external circumstances of which they have no control; what's more, they will make problems out to be more difficult than they actually are; and claim that these problems are, ultimately, insoluble).

America's progress, economically, under Obama has been an interesting textbook study in Keynesianism: to whit, Keynesianism has been tested under near-perfect laboratory conditions, and been shown not to work. Obama has devalued the currency against gold, just like Roosevelt did, and instituted a huge program of public works and deficit spending, like Roosevelt; he has also sought to raise taxes - like Roosevelt - to an astronomic degree - he hasn't achieved this goal yet, but may, if he gets his way and allows the Bush Jr. tax cuts to expire and levies new taxes (we can see his proposed tax hikes from this article from the Wall Street Journal):




It's enough to make a supply-sider choke. Obama wants these tax increases because he's an instinctive socialist, of course, but mainly, he wants them because he's a Keynesian. The old New Deal / Keynesian doctrine was that the economy was driven by consumer spending. Because the poor spend their money more than the rich (who have a tendency to save), the rich have to be taxed and their wealth redistributed to the poor - who will go on and spend it. (At the same time, interest rates have to be driven down, so that people will save less and spend more). All this is designed to bring about 'full employment' - something which is conspicuously absent under the Obama administration.

Bernanke, of course, has been the partner in crime, monetarily, with Obama. The Keynesian monetary doctrine is that the currency has to be devalued until it's a worthless peso, in order to bring about an inflation, 'lower interest rates', 'boost exports' and 'create jobs' (not that the policy of devaluation has done much good for Zimbabwe). The US Federal Reserve has succeeded spectacularly in implementing devaluation: since 2000, the US dollar has been devalued, against gold, by nearly 800%. (In contrast, Roosevelt devalued the dollar from $USD20 a gold ounce to $USD35 - a devaluation of 75%). Bernanke's third round of devaluation - or 'quantitative easing' - will, no doubt, devalue the dollar even more. (Because the global economy is so interconnected, other currencies - such as the Australian dollar, the pound and the euro - will have to be devalued in tandem). More rising commodity prices, more chaos, more political upheaval in the Middle East and the rest of the world, more US economic stagnation...

So what will the US presidential election bring? The founding text of supply-side economics is Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works (1978), which is to supply-sideism what Keynes' General Theory- (1936) is to Keynesianism. Wanniski was a journalist by trade, not an economist (although he was tutored, in the supply-side doctrine, by two professional, academic economists, Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer). One consequence of this is that half of Wanniski's great work is devoted to his unique musings on politics, in particular, electoral politics, or what he calls his 'political model'. The supply-sider, John Tamny, gives a capsule summary of it:

In The Way the World Works, the late Jude Wanniski’s classic 1978 book which explained how economies grow and contract, he introduced an electoral model that remains controversial to this day. Put plainly, Wanniski argued that the electorate always gets things right, or in his words:
“…the electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.”

No doubt many readers are scratching their heads in response to the above, but as Wanniski put it to the late William F. Buckley (paraphrase), “You’re likely smarter than every individual inside a packed football stadium, but collectively those individuals are smarter than you are.” The wisdom of crowds….
The logical response is that if the electorate is so smart, why then did it foist on us ghastly presidents of the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama variety? Isn’t the electorate instead overemotional, and too impassioned to vote the right people into office? Readers would have a point, but going back to Carter’s election, and really long before that, the electorate has gotten it right every time. We may not have always liked the end result, but the electorate has always been right.

['Jude Wanniski's Electoral Model Points To a Slim Romney Victory', Forbes, 16/09/2012.]
In the Wanniski electoral model, the electorate's wisdom is greater as a whole than in the sum of its parts, and pretty much has what the economists call 'perfect information', which Wikipedia summarises as thus:

In microeconomics, a state of perfect information is assumed in some models of perfect competition. That is, assuming that all agents are rational and have perfect information, they will choose the best products, and the market will reward those who make the best products with higher sales. Perfect information would practically mean that all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times (including knowing the probabilistic outcome of all future events), and therefore always make the best decision regarding purchase. This is physically impossible, however, as the Bekenstein Bound provides a physical limit to the amount of information that can be stored in a given physical system (in this case, a market participant). Still, perfect information is a common assumption in economic models because it allows mathematical derivation of desirable results. ['Perfect Information', Wikipedia]
In its collective wisdom, the electorate is an economist, and what's more, a supply-side economist. When it comes to elections, then, it prefers a politician who is a supply-sider. But when such a candidate isn't available (and more often than not, they aren't), the electorate will go for more of the same - or a socialist who will redistribute wealth to the suffering...

 Tamny does a good account of recent US electoral history, in the light of this model, and makes the interesting point that Obama really is the reincarnation, economically, of George W. Bush:



Readers can cite the long list of errors made by Obama since his election, I’ll agree with many of their criticisms, but the reality is that absent egregious errors of George W. Bush’s own making, there’s no President Obama today. Republicans can wail that they don’t recognize what the U.S. has become (funny because Obama extended the Bush tax cuts, followed Bush’s lead on the bailouts and nosebleed spending, reappointed Bush’s Fed appointee in Ben Bernanke, and doubled down on Bush’s weak dollar policies), but the reality is that policies given us by admittedly clueless Republicans gave us Obama. Of course in doubling down on Bush’s policies of dollar debasement, heavy spending and bailouts, along with his own personal disaster in the form of Obamacare, President Obama was disciplined by an all-knowing electorate.

Unbeknownst to Obama, Bush handed him the opportunity of a lifetime in the form of an economy that was on its back. Here it can’t be stressed enough that when economies are recessing, they are healing themselves. The greater the downturn the greater the recovery, and that’s the case because the greater the downturn, the more the healing that is occurring. If Obama had sat back and done nothing upon arrival in Washington, he would today be presiding over a nice recovery. And then if he’d sat back and done nothing while adopting Reagan/Clinton dollar policies, he’d be presiding over the kind of boom that would have him on the verge of a Reagan style victory circa 1984.
But as we all know, Obama wasn’t immune to the “do something” illness that endangers the political health of nearly every politician, and because he wasn’t, he proceeded to try and fix an economy that would have fixed itself if left alone. The pro-growth policy in Obama’s case was to be Clinton-like with the dollar, and then do little else. Obama reversed the latter playbook, he’s as a result presiding over a sick economy that should be strong, and as the electorate dislikes failures, Obama’s days in the White House are numbered. [Ibid.]
Tamny is, of course, quite disappointed in Romney, as are many supply-siders, Republicans and conservatives, but he still believes that Romney will be the winner:



Indeed, Obama’s only hope for a voter reprieve lies in his opponent, Mitt Romney. Oblivious to the historical truth that Americans consider themselves winners soon to be among the 1%, Romney has pursued his own version of class warfare with targeted tax cuts, China bashing that plays to society’s losers in a nation of winners, and an alteration of Obamacare that fails to remove one of its most offensive aspects: mandated insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.

Put plainly, Romney doesn’t understand an electorate that is seeking a growth message. The electorate is dying to fire Obama, history says it will given its aversion to failures, yet Romney’s timidity with regard to policies actually meant to grow the economy point to a close win for Romney when it should be a rout. Wanniski’s electoral model says so. [Ibid.]
I will say that, by supply-side standards, Romney's tax policies pass muster, as the above table shows: in 1986, Reagan cut the top rate of income tax to 28%, which is what Romney wants to do. The Republican Party thoroughly understands supply-side fiscal policy. The trouble is that the Republicans don't fully appreciate the supply-side doctrine on monetary policy, and the 'bad' monetary policy (i.e., massive dollar devaluations) swamps the 'good' fiscal policy. As Tamny observes:

Bush partisans point to the ’03 tax cuts, and while it’s true that those cuts were the only smart major legislation achieved on his watch, they were more than blunted by the above-mentioned mistakes, not to mention the Bush Treasury’s weak-dollar policies that revealed themselves on day one in the form of the much lamented Paul O’Neill. The list of errors by Bush (think steel and softwood lumber tariffs,  Ben Bernanke,  Harriet Miers, Obamacare designer John Roberts?) could surely fill a book, but with space in mind, his saving grace in 2004 was that the horrors of his dollar policies had not quite hit the economy yet, plus we were at war. The electorate unhappily gave him another shot; one it presumably came to regret.

Indeed, by 2006 so disgusted was the electorate with Bush that it handed control of the House and Senate back to the Democrats. Amid this handover, an economy sapping rush into housing was taking place thanks to a weak dollar that forced limited capital away from future seeing companies a la the Reagan/Clinton era, and into the tangible inflation hedges of yesterday. To remember what the housing boom was like one need only refer to the Gilder quote from earlier about the Carter years, but needless to say it slowed economic growth enough that mortgage payments from overextended borrowers seeking shelter in homes started to come in late, or not at all. [Ibid.]
The supply-siders, however, did achieve a victory insofar as Romney - at the urging of the supply-side wing of his party - has promised a 'Gold Commission' to investigate the feasibility of a return to the gold standard. The Reagan administration launched a Gold Commission in 1981, and because the Commission was dominated by monetarists (advocates of a Bernanke-like policy of floating exchange rates and devaluations), it came out against a return to gold. The supply-sider Brian Domitrovic, however, makes a convincing argument that the mere fact of a Gold Commission frightened the Federal Reserve into tightening monetary policy and ending the devaluation of the US dollar. Who knows how a second Gold Commission will turn out if Romney is elected.

I don't like Obama, Bernanke, Paul Krugman and the legions of monetarists and Keynesians very much. I'd like to see their economics thrown into the dustbin of history, and see the election of a US president who will bring back gold, who will show gold to be superior to the present system, and thus refute the nay-sayers and reduce them to an impotent rage. This is despite the fact that any revival of fortunes for America (and the Judeo-American Empire) would be against my own best interests as a nationalist. It's a purely intellectual exercise...

Romney is a nice enough fellow, but a bland creature - a LDS Mormon (that is, a non-polygamist Mormon) whose only motivation in life has been to make money. He is financed by the shadowy Jewish-American (and maniacal Israel-Firster - he has dual citizenship with both the US and Israel) Sheldon Adelson, and can be expected, of course, to carry out a pro-Israel foreign policy (including bombing Iran, if need be) once elected. Which really doesn't mean that much, in real terms: it doesn't portend Armageddon for the enemies of Israel and Jewry - Israel hasn't won a war since 1982. It will be the same old Roosevelt-Churchill-Waizmann gang (with Netanyahu playing the role of Waizmann), but much less powerful, geopolitically speaking. In other words, more of the same.

Like Reagan (and Hitler), I believe problems often have simple solutions. Europe has to go first towards nationalism, and then the rest of the West will follow. In order for Europe to 'go nationalist', a certain number of prerequisites have to be met. The euro has to be fixed to gold, and Europe has to achieve a certain level of economic self-sufficiency (a goal which can be reached - Europe's oil needs can be satisfied by Norway and Romania, also, oil can be imported from Russia). After that, the millions of Muslim, Indian and African immigrants can be persuaded - nicely - to leave. It's then that a certain number of important lifestyle questions can be addressed. Europe's cities need to go car-less, and much, much needs to be done for animal rights. Europe also has to enact a program of public education, warning its youth about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle... Then there's a need to introduce the death penalty (for serious sexual crimes). But the economics has to be taken care of first. Luckily, Europe is moving, ever so slowly, towards self-sufficiency and a separation from the Anglo-Judeo global economic order, and towards Hitler's 'New European Order', or (the German ideologist Naumann's) 'Mittel Europa'.

What's the goal of all this? To ensure good lives for we white Westerners, and our children and grandchildren. America and Israel (and possibly Britain) will object, furiously, to the 'New Europe', but, over time, America and Britain (and Australia, New Zealand and Canada) will lean towards following the European example.














Tuesday, August 28, 2012

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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