Joe Owens returns!

Joe Owens has returned to YouTube after having had his YouTube channel deleted a few weeks ago. National Action - the banned UK Far Right group - were responsible for having the channel deleted. They had complained to YouTube about one of Owens' clips, which used some photos or footage 'owned' by National Action, and YouTube went and deleted the clip in question and then Owens' entire catalogue (which contained well over a hundred videos).

National Action were retaliating against Owens, who had been attacking National Action ever since they first appeared. He had called the National Action 'kiddies' 'dafties' - i.e., morons - and implied that they were 'agents of the Secret State'. Owens views any Far Right group which doesn't practice electioneering and civic nationalist populism as either agents provocateurs, snitches who work for the security services or the Left, or as time wasters and fools. He could be right, so far as I know, about National Action: their appearance and behaviour strikes me as being bizarre, and, as he observed once, despite National Action's avowed fascism, they don't look as clean-cut and disciplined as the old, real fascists of the 1920s and 1930s - Mosley's BUF, for example. British life has degenerated in the past twenty or so years, and so has British Far Right politics; Owens considers National Action to be a symptom of that degeneration. I'm inclined to agree with him on that point... Much of what National Action did seemed counter-productive, and to me they represented a step down.

A lot of nationalists don't like Owens; I do. But I've found that, after a time, the excitement generated by Owens' ideas when you first encounter them wears off, and it's then that his world view appears rather constricted and limited.

To Owens, nearly every Western country boasts a civic populist party which every decent and self-respecting nationalist should throw his weight behind. Owens particularly likes Donald Trump, Marina Le Pen, Nigel Farage (when he headed UKIP) and Australia's own Pauline Hanson. OK, so far so good; but (and here's my objection): suppose you, as a nationalist, have joined Hanson's One Nation and during the election campaign gone around handing out fliers and knocking on doors; suppose, through your untiring efforts and grass-roots activism, you've helped contribute to One Nation's extraordinary electoral performance and to Hanson's winning a seat in the Senate; what do you do in the three years until the next election? Ditto Donald Trump: what do you as an American nationalist and racialist do in the next four years now that he's been elected? Owens implies that we ought to 'support' the successful populist candidate, perhaps by marches, demonstrations, letter-writing campaigns, etc. which are to be aimed at helping the candidate push through any legislative agenda; Owens doesn't really offer specifics. To me that hardly seems a constructive and efficient use of an activist's energies. Besides which, politicians such as Trump don't really need that much in the way of help from activists, particularly street activists; Trump, from the looks of things, looks ready to get to work on building the wall, deporting the illegals, as soon as he  takes office - he doesn't need any encouragement, any prompting, from the base. Nationalist activists, in these scenarios, can be as useful as a fifth wheel. This is why so many on the American Far Right who supported Trump now seem to be struggling to come up with a rationale for their existence.

This raises an important point. The likes of Trump, Hanson, Wilders, Le Pen form part of the liberal democratic system, and parties in that system do not usually attempt to motivate their members to do anything other than campaign and vote on election day - they don't direct them to take up 'extra-parliamentary opposition', for example. Selznick writes in the introduction to his The Organizational Weapon (1952):

Most political parties, organized to function only in the electoral arena, mobilize their adherents only partially. Such groups are usually content to win a general loyalty, and to “get out the vote.” This is consistent with their limited constitutional role. But if a fuller mobilization is attempted, integrating the members so effectively that they become available for continuous deployment in many arenas, a reservoir of energy will be developed that can be used outside the normal framework of political controversy. A source of power is tapped which may be used in conspiratorial ways to gain influence for an elite that cannot compete effectively at the polls.

Selznick cites, as examples of this 'mobilisation', the NSDAP's use of the SA during the period of the Reichstag fire and the Enabling Act in 1933; also, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party's use of marchers, striking workers, and 'action committees' (which occupied factories and government buildings) during the communist coup of 1948.

Selznick's 'organisational weapon', as we can see from his definition of it, can be used and applied by communist, fascist, Islamist groups... We can characterise it as practice, not theory; ideology doesn't come it - or perhaps we can say that the practice is the theory.

So the question is: does Owens want nationalists, populists, racialists to have absolute power or to just to win a few seats? Does he want a mainstream, nationalist political party which operates within the confines of the normal political process, or does he want an 'organisational weapon'...

Karl Loewenstein and the Search for a Führer

I see numerous threads on 4Chan every week on fascism, German National Socialism, etc., and often the posters try and reach, through discussion, what those ideologies were, how they worked and how they would work in Western countries today. Often these discussions make fascism out to be more complicated than it is. But simplicity in theory and practice constitutes one of the hallmarks of a 'totalitarian' ideology - see communism, for instance, or Islam, both of which have reached millions of uneducated, unintellectual and often illiterate people - and fascism is no exception to this rule.

If one wants a good summary of what National Socialism and what it did - from an outside perspective - one should no further than Karl Loewenstein's 1937 monograph 'Dictatorship and the German Constitution: 1933-1937', originally published by the Chicago Law Review. It can be found here and elsewhere on the Internet. The dense paper, in 39 pages, deftly sums up just about everything National Socialism did up to 1938, and all of National Socialism's political theory. Even though it is written by a German Jew who hated the Hitler government, I recommend it for its objectivity; it doesn't stray from the facts and doesn't lapse into hysterical denunciation. It doesn't obfuscate the subject matter, either, by bringing in topics such as Nazi occultism, Hitler's cosmic evil, etc.

Once you view German National Socialism - and fascism - in this light, it can be easily discerned what the fundamental principles of the creed were and how, in turn, these can be applied in Western countries outside of Germany. Admirers of Hitler who come from countries with a tradition of 'democracy' and 'freedom' (especially the Anglo-Saxon countries) will be taken aback by Loewenstein's account: 'So that's how National Socialist Germany worked? I didn't know that'. They might - being steeped in Anglo-Saxon classical liberalism - come to reject Hitlerism unless they overcome their prejudices. Certainly a vast gulf exists between contemporary political practice in National Socialist Germany and America today. The various Jewish and liberal critics of Trump who compared him to Hitler don't know - as we can see from Loewenstein - what they're talking about.

Having said that, if we are to study both the history of Hitler and of Trump, an important lesson can be learned. The lesson is: the quality of one's leader determines the success of one's political movement. Any of the Republican candidates for the presidency except for Trump would not have won against Hilary: they lacked his charisma, his connection with large audiences - and, as it turned out, the American electorate as a whole - and his well-defined media persona. Likewise, you cannot conceive of a National Socialism without Hitler. The party - and the German state itself - pivoted on him like an inverse pyramid. Re-reading Hitler's writings on 'personality', the leadership principle and the rest, and you soon realise that these were intellectual and political justifications for his rule. And there's nothing wrong with that: the majority of Lenin's writing constituted one long argument for the permanent and uninterrupted 'dictatorship of the proletariat', viz., the dictatorship of the 'vanguard party', the Bolsheviks, and for his own rule. Communism relies on charismatic and authoritarian leaders just as much as fascism does.

The closer one is to fascist theory - e.g., books by Evola - the easier it is to lose sight of the simple and obvious truths about fascism; Loewenstein's work serves as a corrective. It gives an answer to the question: why have all the attempts to revive fascism since the war failed? Because the leader principle, the great man principle, plays such an important role in fascist theory and practice - in German National Socialism, for example, the Führer stands at a nexus of state, party and nation - I make the argument that the deficiencies of the post-war fascism can be attributed to the failure to observe this principle. Simply put, we lacked leaders, or we lacked good ones. One couldn't see the likes of Francis Parker Yockey, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, Tom Metzger, performing the offices of a Führer (even though these men displayed some leadership capability within the confines of their immediate circle). The truth is that they wouldn't have done well even in mainstream Republican-Democratic politics.

As stated in the previous post, the populists in Europe have managed to attract a wide following mainly because of their distinct and recognisable - if not always universally admired - leaders: Le Pen, Farage, Petry, Wilders... In Australia we have the populists Hinch and Hanson, both of them are celebrity politicians who have been known to Australians for decades.

All the populists, of course, represent a different politics from ours - even though they could be classified as 'Far Right'; all of them would reject the constitutional order outlined in Loewenstein's paper - they would back away from it in horror. It goes without saying that Pauline Hanson wouldn't serve as a Führer-type.

In Australia, then, we Australian nationalists must search for a Führer - one who is clean-cut, presentable, media savvy and a little bit 'fash', a lot like the Americans Richard Spencer (National Policy Institute) and Nathan Damigo (Identity Evropa). These men have their critics, but the future leader of the Australian nationalist movement should model himself on these men. To a certain extent, it matters little what Spencer and Damigo say and believe - what matters more is what they look like; humans tend to go off visual, and not verbal, cues.

The Australian federal election of 2016 and the National-Trotskyites

I.

We saw mixed results for the Australian Far Right - and I use that term loosely - in the federal election: an amazing (and entirely unexpected) result for the populists Pauline Hanson and Derryn Hinch (both of whom are, like Donald Trump, TV celebrities) and comparatively poor results for the remainder.

Firstly, the figures for the mainstream parties. According to the Australian Electoral Commission's first preference by party count, the (mainstream center Left) Labor Party won 4.7 million votes, or 34.73%, and the (mainstream center Right) Liberal-National coalition, 6.87 million votes, or 42.04%; the Greens, an environmentalist party which aspires to be Australia's leading third party and these days seems to have been largely infiltrated by Marxists, won 1.38 million votes, or 10.23%. (Another alternative party, and one which I voted for, the Animal Justice Party, won over 94,000 votes or 0.70%).

How did the Far Right do? One Nation garnered over 175,000 votes, or 1.29%, Katter's Australian Party over 72,000 or 0.54%. The pro-Zionist, evangelical party Rise Up Australia, over 68,000 or 0.51% and the other pro-Zionist party, Australian Liberty Alliance, over 25,000 or 0.19%. Australia First Party NSW (Incorporated) won over 6800 votes, or 0.05%, the Citizens Electoral Council, a Larouchean outfit, over 5000, or 0.04%. Palmer United did very badly, only getting 315 votes, or 0.00%. Derryn Hinch's Justice Party lagged behind Australian Liberty Alliance, winning over 16,000 votes or 0.12% (but they did score a Senate seat). To rank these parties by first preference vote:

1. Pauline Hanson's One Nation
2. Katter's Australian Party
3. Rise Up Australia
4. Australian Liberty Alliance
5. Derryn Hinch's Justice Party
6. Australia First Party NSW (Incorporated)
7. Citizens Electoral Council
8. Palmer United

Most Australian nationalists (including myself) regard Pauline Hanson as a charlatan and an opportunist, but Pauline Hanson's One Nation was, for this election, what the Australian people wanted from the Far Right. The party won over 13% of the vote in the New South Wales seat of Paterson and 15-20% in four Queensland seats, and four seats in the Senate. Not bad for a party which was written off twenty years ago.

It should be noted that the above parties don't represent the Australian Far Right in its entirety. At the moment, there are two tendencies in the Far Right here and elsewhere in the West: the electoralists and the activists. The former believe in running in elections; the latter, 'activism' along the lines of the French nationalist group, Génération Identitaire - that is, putting stickers on lampposts, climbing up the side of the buildings, and hosting sit-ins, lie-ins and die-ins.

There's value in 'activism', but, as that nationalist scold from Liverpool, Joe Owens, points out, marches don't change anything - after all, a million marchers didn't stop the Iraq invasion in 2003. As for electoralism, none of the above 'Far Right' parties on offer seem to get to the essence of what Australian nationalists - particularly the youth - are interested in, which is (to use one of Yockey's terms) an Idea: that Idea being a compound of white nationalism and neo-Nazism, what Yockey would call (after Spengler and the German Idealist school of philosophy) the Resurgence of Authority in the Age of Absolute Politics. When I meet nationalist youth, that's all they want to talk about. Granted, a gap exists between what they want and what the Australian electorate wants - at this point, an openly 'Hitlerist' party would get even less votes than Clive Palmer's - but, in the end, that hardly matters. The ultimate success (or failure) of nationalist politics will depend upon geopolitical - and what Yockey calls spiritual - realities.

To get some understanding of this, let's look at Europe nearly a hundred years ago, in the year 1923 - the year of Hitler's Munich beer hall putsch. Europe then was divided up between four great powers: Germany, France, Italy and England, with France and England being the stronger of the four. Flash forward to 1933, and all this had changed. In the words of Yockey (from Enemy of Europe, 1953):

During the 1930’s, French mastery over Europe dwindled away like a morning mist. There was no great crisis at that time, no epochal war. The very fact of the European Revolution of 1933 [Hitler's ascent to power] dissolved French hegemony without a struggle, without a trace of hostilities. France’s position was due solely to material factors, to simple control of the apparatus of power. The inner qualities of the régime that had this power at its disposal were not equal to asserting and preserving it. This régime was the bearer of no World-Hypothesis, no Idea, no Ethic. Its dynamism a crude desire for mastery: it utterly lacked the feeling of a superpersonal Mission, lacked a world-outlook, a European Hypothesis. When it was confronted with the European Revolution of 1933, its power simply evaporated. Bayonets can give one neither a good conscience nor the Inner Imperative to rule. The vassals defected, and France suddenly found itself in the position of a vassal vis-à-vis England. The choice of its lord and master was the last formal act testifying to the political existence of France as a nation.

By 1943, ten years later, Germany - now the sole power on the Continent - and the US were locked in a deadly struggle for control; Italy, France and England had ceased to exist as independent political units. In 1953, we see Europe - and Germany - partitioned between the US and Russia. Forty years later, the USSR had ceased to exist and Russia had departed from Europe. Now, in 2016, Russia seeks to exert diplomatic influence and is using the time-honoured Soviet method - subversion - to do so. Generally, though, the US rules the roost in Europe, and the great political problem of our age is: how to get the US off Europe's - and Germany's - back, how to bring about the 'Resurgence of Authority'?

Elections hardly come into this at all, but this isn't to say that the Trump candidacy for president isn't important: it is. But the Trump candidacy only bears on the internal political arrangements of the US. For the past seven and a half years, the US has been ruled by a cabal of Marxists in the Obama administration, the media and the SJW (Social Justice Warrior) movement; this troika will be swept out of power if Trump wins. The Left knows this, and we can see - as the likelihood of Trump winning increases - them beginning to panic. But the US will remain the US, just as China - after the sudden purge of the ultra-leftist Gang of Four faction of the communist leadership party in 1976 - remained China. The Trump presidency - which will lead to the dramatic downfall of the Obama Left - won't affect political realities. Perhaps a US 'made great again' will prove to be stronger; perhaps it will beat back its enemies (Russia, China, the burgeoning threat of Islam); but a Trump administration won't free Europe from its bondage and servitude of the past 75 years.

But one interesting implication of a Trump electoral win is that it will free up Europe - and the West - to name the Muslim immigrant as the 'Inner Enemy' (to use Yockey's and Carl Schmitt's term); Trump has no time for 'political correctness', and he recognises Islam as the Enemy. Measures - political measures - may follow. As to what those measures will be, they can vary. As Yockey writes (again in Enemy-):

This organic right to determine the inner enemy is not always exercised in the same manner. It may be open: arrest, sudden attack, shooting down at home, butchery in the streets. It may be concealed: drawing up of punitive laws general in their terms but applying in fact only to one group. It may be purely formless, but nonetheless real: the ruler may attack verbally the individual or group in question. Such a declaration may be used only to intimidate, or it may be a method of bringing about assassination. It may be economic pressure— such a tactic is naturally the favorite of Liberals. A “blacklist” or boycott may destroy the group or individual.

In these circumstances, 'constitutional rights' go out the window:

It goes without saying that the exercise of such a right has no connection whatever with any written “constitution” which purports verbally to distribute the public power in a political unit. Such a “constitution” may forbid such a declaration of inner enemy, but units with such constitutions have never hesitated in need, and have often invoked such procedure independently of need. Thus the transatlantic part of the anti-Europe coalition in the Second World War carried out, quite independently of necessity, since there was no real inner enemy as a matter of fact, extensive inner persecutions directed against groups [German, Japanese and Italian-American] and strata of its population. It does not affect the political nature of this activity that it was done by culture-distorting elements [i.e., the Jews who ran the Roosevelt administration], for the organic laws set out here describe all political units whatever, even if they fall into the hands of political and cultural outsiders.

The idea that Trump may do any of the above has brought dismay to the Left: the Far Left - in particular, the Marxists - regard Muslim immigrants as 'agents of revolutionary change'; they want to use them as foot soldiers to destroy the West. What if those foot soldiers are locked up, expelled or prevented from entering Western countries?

No doubt about it, the Trump presidency will be seismic, earth-shattering. But Europe - and Australia - are still beholden to the US; they will imitate Trump if and only if Trump wins.

II.

Reading Yockey, we see that Islam, rightly understood, is 'political' in the sense meant by Yockey and Schmitt: Islam names the enemy, it abides by the friend / enemy distinction. We also see that Islam forms an 'Internationale' - a political entity that transcends borders. I argue that the 'Hitlerist' movement today in 2016 is an 'Internationale' and is 'political'.

The implication of this is that 'Hitlerism', like Islam (and communism in the old days) in fact forms a political organism, a state. It bears this distinguishing characteristic - one which differentiates it from the 'Far Right' parties in Australia - even though its representatives may be an unprepossessing bunch. As such, it is subject to all those laws expounded by Yockey in Imperium - 'The Laws of Totality and Sovereignty', 'The Law of Constancy of Inter-Organismic Power' and the rest.

One of Yockey's insights in that book was that a political organism can make a bid to expand its power, fall flat on its face and see an increment of power transferred to its enemies, the other political organisms. George W. Bush's disastrous attempt to expand US power in the Middle East by invading Afghanistan and Iraq serves as one example: the US went into a sharp decline while its enemies - Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, the Palestinians - strengthened.

But a loss of power and prestige need not always be so dramatic: sometimes a political organism can lose power and see its strength ebb away without war. Something - or someone - within the organism may distort it, turn it away from its natural direction, pervert it from its aim. This frequently happens when a group or groups within the organism make it serve the purposes of other states.

This is something that has been happening on the Far Right - here in Australia and elsewhere in the West - for the past 15 or so years. Simply put, the energies of the Far Right have been diverted away from the advancing of its political position and towards improving that of Russia, Iran, Syria and the Palestinians.

I should state that I've been delighted by the US decline: as the US weakens, we 'Hitlerists' grow stronger. But at the same time, the other enemies of America are benefiting during its decline, and to my mind a big difference exists between wanting to see your own position strengthen at the expense of America and working to improve that of America's enemies. The latter gives an instance of what Yockey called 'distortion'.

Earlier I drew a distinction between 'Hitlerism' and the Far Right, especially as it exists here in Australia. Really, the two make up a continuum. The difference is that 'Hitlerism' forms a pole, or 'political center' (to borrow a term from the Marxist Hal Draper) around which the rest of the Far Right more or less revolves. Some tendencies, such as white nationalism, stand close to the pole; others - such as Katter's Australian Party and One Nation - stand far, far away. But all are connected. If the Far Right in general suffers from an outflow of power to a rival political unit, so does its 'Hitlerian' constituent. Which is why even the 'Hitlerists' ought to be concerned by the transfer, or leakage, of power from the Far Right to the Syrians, Russians, Iranians and the other foes of the 'West' and 'NATO imperialism'.

III.

The Far Left has been about as equally as corrupted by Putin and the others, if not more so, and many have remarked on the extent to which the Far Left rhetoric - especially on Syria and the Ukraine - mimics that of the Far Right. One can attribute it to Russia's clever strategy of betting on each horse - slinging bagfuls of cash to both the Far Right and Left in equal measure - but I think that it goes further than that. A Trotskyite tendency exists on the Far Right, and has for some time. The Trotskyites among us seem to have taken one idea from Trotsky in particular - that of 'permanent revolution' - and applied it within a nationalist context; I call them the National-Trotskyites.

What is Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution? It posits that the entire world - or at least Europe and its colonies - behave according to a Marxist textbook; the world has progressed, politically, to the point where the capitalist order breaks down under the weight of its own contradictions and is replaced by the socialist one; workers everywhere are ready to take up arms against their masters, and stand right at the tipping point of revolution. The fact that some countries are not as developed economically as others doesn't matter; neither do the contradictions inside those countries other than the socialist / capitalist  - e.g., contradictions between different religious belief systems, cultural practices, etc.

From this doctrine, the Trotskyites deduce that the only 'revolutions' that can occur in a country are communist ones - or they are not 'revolutions' at all and so are unworthy of notice. An adherent of the theory of permanent revolution, then, will see liberal and bourgeois revolutions - such as the Arab Spring of 2011 and the overthrow of Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014 - as being either communist (or, in Trotsky-speak, 'socialist') in character or not revolutions at all. (Trotskyites don't believe that a historical progression from liberal democracy to 'socialism' exists. Instead, they hold that a true communist will want to skip any liberal and bourgeois reforms and go straight to revolution: what is desired is a jump from point A to point C and a skipping of point B in between).

Another corollary of the theory is that Trotskyites must lend 'military, but not political' support to regimes which are anti-Western, in particular to the regimes which came to power through revolutions and coups - the Ayatollahs in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assads in Syria, Ghaddafi in Libya and the rest. (Strongmen such as Milosevic in Serbia and Putin in Russia are acceptable, even though they came to office through ostensibly legal and constitutional means, because they are sufficiently anti-NATO, anti-Western, anti-imperialist). Trotskyites support these states, and may even proclaim them to be  'revolutionary' (despite the fact that the regimes may - and this is especially true in the case of Iran - violently suppress their communist parties). This habit of the Trotskyites goes all the way back to the 1930s, when Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia: the regime of the emperor Haile Selassie was upheld by Trotsky as 'anti-imperialist', simply because it was engaged in a war against the White Man. We could view the Assads, Ghaddafis, Putins, Milosevics, Husseins as the Haile Selassies of their time. The Trotskyite support for these regimes relates back to the fact that Trotskyites don't pay much attention to the internal contradictions which appear in a revolutionary situation: it is sufficient that a Milosevic or Hussein or Putin regime takes a stand against the NWO (New World Order), because, from the Trotskyite point of view, the stance alone of these countries makes them 'socialist', 'anti-imperialist' and therefore not worthy of further investigation.

This relates back to the Russian revolution of 1917, which saw the explosion of a number of pent-up tensions - between the nobility and the peasantry, capitalism and feudalism, Orthodox religion and irreligiosity, progress and backwardness, autocracy and democracy; in their studies of the revolution, the Trotskyites only regard the main contradiction - between capitalist and socialist - as decisive.

All this is relevant to we nationalists because Trotsky's doctrine of permanent revolutionism has been transposed and applied to the Far Right. To look at the case of America alone: David Duke, Paul Craig Roberts, Pat Buchanan, et al., all take the pro-Putin, pro-Assad, pro-Iranian Ayatollah line on the grounds that these men are all revolutionaries against the NATO-imperialist One World Global New Order - Duginite rebels against the White West. Dugin's peculiar brand of Russian nationalism is predicated, not on a love of Russia, but on a hatred of the West and the White Man; he shares the illusion - along with the Left - that the US today is run by and for WASPs, racialists and white racial supremacists who are the savage oppressors of blacks and other non-whites. (The Left, in the 2000s, used to refer to George W. Bush and the Republicans as 'white nationalist'). It's odd that David Duke should share a platform with Dugin. But Duke long ago ceased being a Southern nationalist and has since become an Iranian nationalist.

IV.

All this raises an interesting question: what would a National-Trotsky political party look like?
In order to answer that, we need to look at Trotskyite theory and practice of politics and the party.

The first distinguishing characteristic of a Trotskyite political party is intense factionalism. This is a residue of Trotsky's own political career. At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Marxists were more of a movement than a party - much like Occupy Wall Street or the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s - and in the Russian communist party itself, lines between party member and non-party member, and member of one faction and another, were fluid. Contrary to myth, the Bolsheviks never split from the Mensheviks in 1912 and continued to work with them - and their other rivals, the Social Revolutionaries - even after their victory in the Russian Civil War. Trotsky himself, a longtime activist in the Russian Marxist movement, never became a Bolshevik - much less a 'Leninist' - until 1917. This multi-faceted and confused character of Russian communism during and after the 1917 revolution explains, in part, why Trotsky engaged in non-stop factional manoeuvring, leap-frogging from one faction to the other, forming and in turn dissolving cliques and alliances. In his intrigues, he behaved much like a character from Game of Thrones, and his preference was to work through the men at the top of such and such a faction or group within the party - coming to mafia-like deals and arrangements between party bosses, as it were. He went directly over the heads of the masses - i.e., the Russian and Soviet working-classes - and even the party rank and file; he was much more inclined to deal 'man to man' with other leaders.

He retained this 'factionalist' view of politics throughout the remainder of his life. Even after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, he viewed his Trotskyite splinter group as merely a faction of the Soviet communist party (albeit one standing outside the Third International), nothing more. By the mid-1930s, after his failure to reconcile with Stalin and the Soviet party, he instructed his French followers to dissolve their organisations and reconstitute themselves as a faction inside the French Socialist Party (the SFIO) - this was his famous 'entryist' period - and win the bourgeois socialists there over to Trotsky's version of communism. (Some time afterwards, the Trotskyites took to infiltrating the mainline pro-Soviet communist parties as well).

Perhaps we should call the 'factionalist' tendency of Trotsky and Trotskyites 'movement-ism'. They saw themselves as one little sliver belonging to a wide-ranging Marxist and socialist movement, a movement without clear boundaries and with constant revision in its internal arrangements.

Today, plenty of movement exists in this movement. Trotskyite organisations form, dissolve or split; they gobble one another up in 'unity mergers' (Trotskyites call this process 'regroupment') and form new organisations. They seek to expand by poaching - that is, borrowing or stealing - 'cadre' members (that is, activists who actually bother to do any work) from one another's organisations.

The Trotskyites have come under criticism from the Left for all this. The conventional Marxist view is that a Marxist Leninist should ideally be a mass movement and one which boasts large numbers of working class members; as well as this, the Marxist Leninist party should be a party of what Lenin calls a 'party of the new type', namely one organised around Marxist Leninism as a central principle. According to this Marxist critique, Trotsky, who was there at the birth of Leninism, never really was a true Leninist. (As to what 'Leninism'  was: in my view, it was whatever Lenin said or did at the time). Trotsky never truly appreciated Lenin's precepts, and he treated the communist party as being, in essence, the same in its factional structure as any social democratic party (such as our Australian Labor Party, which is highly factionalised).

The second distinguishing characteristic of a Trotskyite party is (and this is related) lack of party-building. We may define party-building as the expansion of the party through enrolling more and more members (particularly working-class ones) and indoctrinating and educating them. Trotsky saw not the need for it. His doctrines (including the doctrine of permanent revolution) entailed that the working classes everywhere were fermenting and at the point of revolt against their capitalist masters; no need to work on enrolling them - they would join the Marxist-Leninist movement of their accord. Trotsky seemed to base this doctrine on his own experiences in the quasi-anarchic Soviets. A critical Marxist commentator, Joseph Green, writes:

Trotsky seemed to have felt that his views about organization were verified by the Russian revolution of 1905 and, in particular, by the emergence of the Soviets. Neither the Bolsheviks nor the Mensheviks nor any other party had foreseen the Soviets, which could thus be regarded as a creation of the self-activity of the masses. Moreover, no single party came to the head of the Soviets, but instead the various factions and parties cooperated. Trotsky held that, indeed, Soviet decisions were simply obvious and beyond party. As he wrote: "From the hour it came into being until the hour it perished, the [1905 St. Petersburg] Soviet stood under the mighty, elemental pressure of the revolution, which most unceremoniously forestalled the work of political consciousness. " And, he said, "Its 'tactics' were obvious. The methods of struggle did not have to be discussed; there was hardly any time to formulate them." Moreover, Trotsky himself played a prominent role in the St. Petersburg Soviet, which, in his view, made him essentially the leader of the revolution and made his personal activity far more important than the influence of mere party organizations on the revolutionary movement...

Trotsky was influenced in his anti-organizational views by the stand of a number of socialist leaders in Germany, Austria and Poland. His view of party organization was particularly close to that of Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg stressed the role of the mass strike and revolutionary mass action in opposition to the growing conservatism of much of the German socialist leadership. She was no doubt right in this. But she saw the growing conservatism as the inevitable result of party organization, thus denigrating party organization rather than seeking to build up truly revolutionary organization. Moreover she thought that the conservative party leaders would be forced, at the moment of crisis, to go along with the revolution by the spontaneous mass upsurge. This too denigrated the need to build up revolutionary organization. And her views on organization were widespread in the left-wing of the German socialist movement.

This view of the party was reflected in the way the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPL), in which Luxemburg did much of her work, was organized. The leadership of the SDKPL was informal; the leaders weren't too concerned about organizational matters; and they weren't bound by holding definite posts...

The upshot of this is that the Trotskyite parties are never that well organised - at least not in comparison to mainstream political parties such as, say, the Labor or Liberal parties (or even Pauline Hanson's One Nation). Nor do they pay much attention to the crucial task of steering a Marxist-Leninist party through a doldrum period - when the 'objective conditions' are not ripe for 'socialist revolution' (since 1989-1991, the entire Marxist-Leninist movement has been going through one long doldrum period). Because revolution is just around the corner, party-building and organisation in the face of adversity are not required.

Finally, we come to the third distinguishing characteristic: internal authoritarianism. Trotsky and the Trotskyite leaders after him behaved like dictators within their organisations; as Joseph Green puts it euphemistically, most Trotskyite parties have a 'harsh inner life'. Trotsky treated the party as if it were an army and he the general. In an army, poorly-performing officers are sacked and replaced, poorly-performing units are broken up and incorporated into new ones, disobedient soldiers are disciplined and court-martialled. Substitute a) officers for cadre members, b) units for branches and c) soldiers for rank and file members, and you get an idea of the inner life of a typical Trotskyite organisation. (On the subject of discipline, it should be noted that in one of Britain's most famous and powerful Trotskyite outfits, Gerry Healy's Revolutionary Workers Party, badly-behaved members were punished by being beaten). Organisation in a Trotskyite party tends to be loose at the bottom and tight at the top. Trotsky's experience in the St Petersburg Soviet led to the view that he, as a socialist leader, was in charge of what was little more than a rabble, a mob; he saw it as an army blessed with a never-ending stream of new recruits. Military-like discipline, then, seemed to him to be more than appropriate. As for the charge of dictatorialness, well, Trotsky admired dictators and strongmen such as Robespierre and Cromwell, and saw himself as a strongman.

In conclusion, we can say that Trotsky's a) factionalism, b) lack of party-building and c) authoritarianism set the precedent for all the Trotskyite organisations came afterwards and are what gives Trotskyism its peculiar character. Trotskyite parties strike many outsiders as being small, clique-ish and narrow organisations with little mass appeal,  run by bullying and dictatorial leaders who control almost every aspect of the membership's lives. In other words, they are cults. They tend not to do well at elections - in the 2016 federal election, the Socialist Equality Party won over 1600 first party preference votes, or 0.01%, Socialist Alliance over 3600 votes, or 0.03% - and get less working-class votes than the Far Right populist parties.

The Trotskyite way of doing things tends to be duplicated across the Left: Maoist cults resemble the Trotskyite, and I'm sure that, in the late 19th century - in the age of Marx and the Second International - there were more than a few proto-Trotskys running the equivalent of today's Trotskyite sects (a researcher could unearth a few).

Socialist organisations turn into cults and sects a) when they lose contact with the political mainstream (and the working-classes) and b) when they take up a position of ultra-radicalism. What is ultra-radicalism? The Trotskyites (and their cousins, the Maoists) follow Marx but disagree with other Marxists on the question of timing: capitalism, in the Trotskyite point of view, is 'decaying', in its 'death throes', and we are about to see a violent and sudden transition from capitalism to socialism. 'Intermediate trends' - such as an agrarian peasant revolt, a liberal and bourgeois revolution against a dictatorial regime - on the road towards socialism can be discounted. We see this Trotskyite tendency at play in the left-wing debates over the Bernie Sanders campaign. A conventional Marxist would regard Sanders as a step in the right direction, as progress - the fact that an open socialist got that far in the Democrat primaries is unprecedented. But the left-Trotskyites chide Sanders' followers on the US Left for having 'reformist illusions'. (Generally, left-Trotskyites are sectarian, right-Trotskyites are entryist. In the US, the latter group seems, after the demise of the Sanders campaign, bent on infiltrating the Greens and getting behind the candidacy of Jill Stein). No in-between exists for the ultra-radical of the Trotskyite or Maoist type. Indeed, right before his death, Trotsky made apocalyptic pronouncements to the effect that WWII would terminate in the triumph of either global communism or global fascism.

Communism has always possessed a cultish tincture: one could make the argument that the Soviet and Chinese communist parties were, at the time of the 1930s Stalinist purges and the 1960s Cultural Revolution respectively, nothing more than cults. The question is whether Trotsky-type cult organisations and parties can't appear in the Far Right milieu as well as the Far Left. My answer is yes. If the Stephen Cohens, Israel Shamirs, Pat Buchanans, William Engdahls and Gearóid Ó Colmáins were to form their own 'anti-imperialist, anti-NATO, anti-Zionist' parties, I'm sure that these would resemble Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, SEP (Socialist Equality Party)...

One other point of concordance between Trotsky and the National-Trotskyites is that both take a dim view of struggles for national self-determination. Trotsky inclined towards USSR / EU type supra-national, federal structures and called for a 'United States of Europe'. He only felt sympathy towards calls for national self-determination only in the context of a global revolutionary and communist struggle; bourgeois and liberal (that is, non-communist) struggles were to be ignored or regarded, in the words of Joseph Green, as being nothing more than a 'counter-revolutionary plot'. Added to this, Trotsky seemed to think that countries such as Russia and China which had freed themselves from the yoke of colonialism (i.e., had achieved independence from the White Man) were incapable of oppressing others and practicing their own imperialism. It's Trotskyite doctrines such as these which explain the hostility of many of today's Trotskyites towards Ukraine's attempts to emancipate itself from Russia. And the non-Trotskyite Left - and the National-Trotskyites - here follow Trotsky. Putin's Russia has freed itself from NWO Zionist, Masonic and Fascist imperialism, so by definition it can't be an oppressor of smaller countries within its orbit (or, for that matter, separatist nations within Russia); the Ukrainian revolution in the Maidan was not an expression of genuine nationalist feeling, but part of a counter-revolutionary plot. If Ukraine were really revolutionary, it would join hands with Putin and incorporate itself into Putin's anti-imperialist Eurasian Economic Union...

As stated before, Trotskyism believes in 'skipping over the stages' to revolution: any sort of 'reformism' or 'gradualism' is denounced, as it's important to proceed with revolution right now. In essence, it's a question of timing. We are to jump from one stage (the capitalist) to another (the socialist); Trotskyites don't concede that anything that can appear between these two stages is of political significance. Which is why they tend to reject bourgeois (non-communist) struggles for self-determination: they don't fit into Trotsky's scheme. Such struggles can even be counter-revolutionary.

But non-communist revolts - such as we saw in Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in 2011 - are lumped in the same category. Some Trotskyites insist that these were 'socialist' and 'revolutionary', i.e., communist; others view them as either being a non-event or the work of the CIA, Mossad, Soros and the global NATO / NWO imperialists - part of a counter-revolutionary plot, in other words. In the view of these suspicious and conspiratorial-minded Trotskyites, the Arab masses protesting were protesting against Baathist and Arab nationalist regimes which were already sufficiently anti-imperialist and anti-NWO - proof, then, of the Arab Spring's reactionary quality.

V.

As we have seen, the lines between the Far Right and Far Left are becomingly increasingly blurred. The Far Right will support the Putins, Assads, Ayatollahs, Milosevics, Husseins and the rest regardless of the fact that these men have amassed extraordinary wealth for themselves (at the expense of their people); this is because the Far Right traditionally doesn't ascribe much importance as to the class character (capitalist or non-capitalist) of the regimes it supports. But, surprisingly enough, the Far Left doesn't seem to either: it's here that the Trotskyite doctrine - of ignoring the 'internal contradictions' of a regime, i.e., the extent to which is socialist and progressive - comes into play. Many Trotskyites supported the Iranian revolution of 1979 because of the revolution's 'progressive' (i.e., anti-Western, anti-imperialist) character: it ignored the internal contradictions. The fact that the Ayatollahs were against progressivism - on women's rights, religion, and the rest - didn't bother them; neither did the fact that, after the revolution, the Iranian theocrats murdered tens of thousands of people, among them former communist allies. (Healy's WRP, which had close contacts with the Iranian Left, was complicit in the deaths of these communists: allegedly it passed on information and identified them to the mullahs). To use Marxist speak, multiple contradictions were in evidence during the 1979 revolution, but the Trotskyites regarded the anti-imperialist versus imperialist one as being decisive, the one that overrode the rest. When it comes to Putin, Assad, et al., our National-Trotskyites more or less follow the same pattern.

Even some on the Left recognise this. The Australian communist Michael Karadjis writes, in a post on the MarxMail list, 10/8/2016:

The contrast of this reactionary "left" has-been mob is with the young people of the Arab world, who took to the streets to face bullets and tanks in 2011, and still fight on, despite the immeasurable terror launched against them by the near-genocidal counterrevolution that has the full support of Ali, Fisk, Cockburn, Hersh, Galloway, Anderson (the douche bag's name), alongside their close co-thinkers Trump, Cruz, David Duke, Le Pen, Boris Johnston, UKIP, Golden Dawn and all the rest of that far-right pro-Putin European party.

It is the youth of the Arab world that inspire the support of many of us on the western left. Strangely, it is those who kill them with tanks, barrel bombs, cluster bombs, ballistic missiles, starvation sieges and medieval tortures that inspire others on the western left.

A left-wing homosexual blogger writes:

Lets not forget he [Putin] also has unsavoury cheerleaders in the West too, like the BNP’s Nick Griffin, Front National’s Marine Le Pen and basically EVERY other neo-Nazi leader in Europe. You’d think, for the scores of gormless communists who idolise Assad these nauseating bedfellows would be a big wake-up call! But nooo. I’m also SO DONE with these lousy socialists defending Russia’s intervention. They’re idiots. If they had any sense they’d realise Russia is not ‘fighting terrorism’ but actually dropping deadly incendiary bombs on civilians. Why is there no leftist outrage about this? When America destroys a hospital, the world is livid, and rightly so. But when Russia does it, idiot left-wingers (who have the CHEEK to call themselves ‘internationalists’) shrug their shoulders and dismiss it as collateral damage! It makes me so mad. I just wish we could kill off this cringey love affair with Putin’s Russia full-stop. ‘He challenges American dominance!’, I hear the fascist apologist bleat. Fuck off. Who cares about his baseless ‘anti-imperialist’ credentials when he’s perpetuating a genocidal conflict in Syria. And back home in Mother Russia, Putin is destroying the free media, killing journalists and democracy activists, pouring cash into breakaway military juntas in East Ukraine, repressing Chechen nationalists and colluding with your ACTUAL Nazis in the persecution of LGBTQ Russians. If ‘the left’ had any sense or principles, they wouldn’t touch him with a 6ft bargepole. But they do. Hence, they’re idiots.

The question I ask is: what do we on the Far Right get out of the deal? Does National-Trotskyism increase our political power? Do we get any benefits out of it whatsoever?

We remember those thrilling days when Tehran hosted its Holocaust Revisionist conference in 2006: for the first time a state - a non-white one, but a state nonetheless - lent support to Holocaust Revisionism. This was of incalculable benefit to neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Revisionists around the world. (But alas, Mark Weber, the semi-Revisionist, informed the Iranian intelligentsia at a Tehran Revisionist conference six years later that the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis during WWII did indeed happen, only not the way that the history books describe it (this was the watered-down Revisionism of David Irving). After that, the Iranian leadership went back on their Holocaust denial). Iran in 2006 stands as an example of one of the few 'anti-imperialist, anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-NATO, anti-globalist' states which have done anything for us. Nowadays, the traffic all goes one way: German nationalist organisations such as PEGIDA and AfD support Putin and get nothing in return. What would Hitler have said? Indeed, what would any German nationalist leader of the past said...

At any rate, the future looks bright in Australia for we white nationalists, neo-Nazis, racial nationalists or whatever it is you want to call us: to my mind, the wins of Hanson and Hinch - and even the Zio anti-Islamic parties - represent a step in the right direction. As stated before, many of the Trotskyites and the other ultra-radicals have taken umbrage with the Sanders campaign and accused the Sanders camp of nourishing 'reformist illusions', of being 'gradualist' and the like, whereas more optimistic and less sectarian Marxists regard Sanders' success as a positive sign. I am of the same disposition as the gradualist Marxists when it comes to Hanson, Hinch and even the Australian Liberty Alliance: the fact that Australians voted for these parties in such numbers, and even gave two of these parties seats in the Senate, represents, to me, real progress.