Friedrich Engels, proto-Nazi

Since my last post, I have been reading a great deal of material by the great theorists of communism - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao - as well as some other more contemporary communist writers. I found the very early material, by Engels and Marx, very intriguing, and not for the first time I was struck by the similarities between 19th century German socialist thought and that of German National Socialism.

This quotation I found to be noteworthy. After the socialist revolution, Engels writes,

The anarchy within social production is replaced by consciously planned organization. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. It is only at this point that man finally separates in a certain sense from the animal kingdom and that he passes from animal conditions of existence to really human ones. The conditions of existence environing and hitherto dominating humanity now pass under the dominion and control of humanity, which now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature, because and in so far as it becomes master of its own social organization. The laws of man's own social activity, which have hitherto confronted him as extraneous laws of nature dominating him, will then be applied by man with full knowledge and hence be dominated by him. Man's own social organization, which has hitherto confronted him as a process dictated by nature and history, now becomes a process resulting from his own voluntary action. The objective extraneous forces which have hitherto dominated history now pass under the control of man him self. It is only from this point that man will himself make his own history fully consciously, it is only from this point that the social causes he sets in motion will preponderantly and ever increasingly have the effects he wills. It is humanity's leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. [Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880]

Isn't this a description of Germany after the National Socialist revolution of 1933? Or what that revolution intended to achieve? 

Marx, Hitler - and the other National Socialist writers - aren't sufficiently read and understood. That is to say, people attribute false things to them, and intellectuals are often content to accept the misconceptions built up around their ideas, instead of reading Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, and Myth of the 20th Century to learn what 'Hitler really said' or what 'Marx really said'. Which isn't to say, of course, that their ideas are beyond reproach: simply that people don't put the time and effort into gaining a proper understanding. Suffice to say, were one to immerse oneself in the canonical writings of German National Socialism, and see The Triumph of the Will, to really understand what German National Socialism was about, one would begin to see close similarities between the ideas expressed in the Engels essay and those in the National Socialist writings (and the Triumph film). I challenge the unprejudiced reader to do this.

Hitler has, in the pages of Mein Kampf, no time for Marxism, of course: but one has to make a distinction here. Mein- is a classic piece of Marxist socialist literature: it has the tone of a Marxist text, it is written with the voice of a Marxist - even the title Mein Kampf evokes Marxist 'class struggle', and, as we know from reading the book, Hitler loves words like 'worker', 'proletariat', 'bourgeois', and so forth. The social commentary, the sympathetic descriptions of the poverty, indigence, poor living conditions of the German working-class, is patterned after Marx. But - he is anti-Marxist. What he is really opposing is (what I call for the purposes of this essay) Bolshevism, which is Soviet communism (and he conflates two disparate parties, the German Social Democrats and the Communists, treating them as one and the same, and viewing them both as 'Marxist'). Hitler builds his theories on the back of theoretical Marxism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels, the Marxism and German communism of the 19th century; but he has concocted those theories specifically to combat the Marxism of Lenin, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxembourg and the other Sovietised, Judaised communists of the early 20th century. (As to what his reaction would be to the non-Jewish communists - the Ho Chi Minhs and Maos and Castros - is anyone's guess).

This leads to the question: what is Marxism anyhow? Surprisingly, Marx didn't write much on politics. His Kapital, on the surface of it, is an economic text - like Keynes' General Theory or Hayek's Prices and Production (1931) - and of interest mainly to students of economics (and Marx was a great economist with a better understanding of market forces, supply and demand, than many Keynesians today). Marx's great political text is The Communist Manifesto, but Marx didn't write it - Engels did. It was Engels who developed Marx's ideas into a fully-fledged, coherent, consistent ideology, and it was Engels who really formulated the doctrines of 'dialectical materialism' and 'historical materialism'. Certain of the ideas people misattribute to Marxism - e.g., the 'immiserisation thesis', the doctrine of the 'inevitability' of socialist revolution - were really the work of Engels, although, in fairness, Engels was merely expanding upon hints in Marx's work, amplifying them to the n-th degree (and, by doing so, making Marx look foolish to later generations). Lenin, particularly in the foundational communist text State and Revolution (1917), takes Marx even further: the book is a mathematical proof of the necessity of class struggle, class war, violent revolution and a brutal mass extermination of the 'class enemy' - from Engels' version of Marx. Much of what people know as 'communism', 'Marxism', comes from Lenin.

Which isn't to let Marx off the hook, by any measure; it isn't to say that Marx's ideas were right, or good: it's just an illustration of how ideas can develop. In the case of Hitler, it's an example of how one can absorb the aesthetic of Soviet communism, even the tone (the literary tone) of a writer like Lenin or Marx (particularly the vitriol and contempt), and the high ideals (the beautiful socialist ideals) of an Engels, and come up with something completely original - and completely opposed, antithetical, to one's influences. Perhaps it's similar to the adaptation of Christianity, a Semitic, Middle Eastern doctrine, by the Celtic and Germanic barbarian tribes: the doctrine becomes nativised, acclimatised, to the soil of the countries it was transplanted to (in much the same way Christianity has been adapted, and transmuted, by Africans). In the arts, and in popular culture, we see this all the time: rock music began life as an Afro-American musical form, which was then white-ified by Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

We should, of course, be asking the question: is Marxism true? In politics, however, theoretical truth - or falsity - often doesn't matter. The center-piece of Marx's and Engel's theories - the theory of surplus value - may have been refuted from the outset by many economists: certainly, if Marx got that theory wrong, then he got everything wrong, because he built all of Kapital on the explication of that one theory. But that theoretical disproof didn't stop communist revolution. As Hitler - and the rest of the European anti-communist movement realised - communism can only be refuted with fists and bullets. Intellectuals are the 'discussing class', as Schmitt points out in Political Romanticism (1919), but for communists, the 'truths' of communism aren't up for discussion, and anyone who disagrees with them is the 'class enemy', and has to be executed, starved to death, marched into a gulag... It's a kind of inverse Hegelianism. In Hegel, 'truths', such as Christianity, or the liberalism of the French Revolution, occur in time - that is, they manifest themselves in distinct historical epochs and dominate everything in those epochs. 'Truth' and 'untruth' manifest themselves in time, as historical facts. Kojève illustrated this idea with an example: suppose you are to write, at 9 a.m., that 'It is the afternoon', on a piece of paper, and then put that paper in your pocket. At that time, the statement on that paper is not true: but, take it out of one's pocket during the afternoon, and read it - it is true. It is often the case, Hegel notes, that the 'truth' in a particular historical period only becomes so, becomes 'fact', after a war or struggle of some kind. And so, under Bolshevism, Hegelianism becomes into the doctrine that 'truth' is imposed, by force, in the course of a war, during the advent of a historical epoch (e.g., the transformation from capitalism to socialist revolution).

Now, though, at this point in time, the fighting for the 'truths' of Marxism is well and truly over: we can look at it from the viewpoint of genteel intellectuals.

A common criticism of Marx, made by so many that it has become an intellectual cliché, is that his 'social commentary' (that is, descriptions of poverty, misery, suffering, brutality and exploitation) in Kapital isn't 'How things are now', that Marx was a Victorian, and a Dickensian; this leads to the corollary, 'Marxism was true for Victorian England'. Perhaps Marx's selective accounts were just assembled for the purposes of propaganda - and Kapital is propaganda. This is the argument of the Hayek-edited volume, Capitalism and the Historians (1954), which is counter-propaganda to Marx's propaganda. But, even so, Kapital, isn't just social commentary: it's an economic model. In the same way, the journalist and publicist Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works (1978) - the first lengthy explication of the supply-side economic model (devised by Wanniski's tutors, the economists Robert Mundell and Art Laffer) - is interspersed with real-life case studies drawn from political and economic history. Combining journalism, polemic and economic theory really is quite common in practical, applied economics (and the Keynesian Paul Krugman is a journalist and polemicist as well as an academic economist). As Althusser points out, the theories of Marx are true - in particular, his theories of value are true - regardless of whether or not the 'social conditions' of Kapital have improved or not (although Althusser writes with the moral indignation of someone who seems convinced that they have not improved - i.e., as if he was not living in 1960s France, but in the slums of Dickensian England).

Althusser views Marxism as one step up from economics: he sees it as a 'science' - almost a metaphysic - which is above and beyond economics, sociology, social commentary. It appears that the dialectics of Marxism is really what fascinates him (as it did Mao). And it is the dialectical materialism, and historical materialism, which is the second line of attack against Marxism: to whit, according to the theory, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the backsliding of China towards capitalism after 1979, couldn't have happened. Communist societies can't devolve into capitalist ones - any more than frogs can turn back into tadpoles, or butterflies into caterpillars. Time, history, "dialectical development", doesn't go into reverse. While it is true that Marxist theorists - the Maoist, 'anti-revisionist' ones - cobbled up rather contrived, tortuous, theories as to why the Soviet Union was, after Khruschev, a 'capitalist' nation, these theories don't explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, and were devised before the collapse. As for China: how did a 'capitalist roader' clique, under Deng Xiaopeng, manage to steer China away from a communist economy (and towards a hybrid communism-capitalism) while retaining communism in its legal and political forms? The only conclusion a Marxist can draw  is that the communist revolutions in Russia and China were rather weak to begin with - or perhaps they were false starts for communism, and the 'inevitable' collapse of capitalism, and the advent of socialist revolution, is still a long way off. Which is rather dispiriting for the true Marxist.

Marx, like Hegel and Spengler, was very much in the German 'historicist' thinkers. The danger of such lines of thought is that one is committing oneself to historical predictions of great events, just around the corner: if those events don't come true, one is in the same position as those American Christian Fundamentalist prophets who are promising Armageddon and the end of the world next Tuesday. Hegel got around this difficulty by pronouncing that world history came to an end about 1812 or so; any events after that were post-history, so to speak, because the world had reached the apex of its development. But Engels made some wild-eyed predictions of global economic collapse and socialist revolution, and even went so far as to make some (very implausible) predictions as to what the future socialist world would look like (e.g., money would be abolished, children taken from their parents and raised in collective schools - true of Pol Pot's Cambodia, but not anywhere else). Lenin was more circumspect, hedging his bets: his position is, 'We don't know', what the world would look like exactly after the advent of socialism and the downfall of capitalism. But, along with Engels, and Stalin, he still believed in the 'inevitability' of the collapse of capitalism.

It is this 'historical materialism', this 'dialectic', which makes a true Marxist - theoretically speaking. Kapital is a description of an economic system which inevitably develops into class tension, leading to class struggle and class war. But as to the resolution of that struggle, Kapital is, by my reading, vague: the resolution could be trade unionism and the amelioration of Dickensian working conditions; or it could be out and out Engels-ism (i.e., the abolition of property), leading to Bolshevism, Leninism, revolutionary war and the rest. Lenin devoted most of his writing and polemic to proving the latter - that, to be a true Marxist, one had to be a Leninist. Stalin and Mao followed him in this.

But possibly the basic Marxist theory could be taken in a different direction. I read Mein Kampf over ten years ago, and, noting at the time the socialist content of the book, came to agree with Hayek's characterisation, in his The Road to Serfdom (1944) of both German National Socialism and Soviet Communism as springing from the same root. I toyed with the (rather unconventional) idea that perhaps Marx had been right, in his predictions of socialist revolution, the downfall of capitalism, but that his theories came true, not in Soviet Russia, but in National Socialist Germany. (Yockey, on the other hand, looks at (what he calls) 'The German Revolution of 1933' as confirmation of Spengler's predictions). Which is an oddball position, I admit, but one held by a good many European communists in Hitler's time who were attracted to, and converted to, German National Socialism and Italian Fascism.

But to put, for the time being, the question of the ultimate truth - or untruth - of Marxist theory to the side: something I've asked pondered upon, for a long time, is the question of why fascism was such a tremendously successful doctrine - garnering millions of adherents in a very short amount of time - when the Far Right, in the post-war period, right up to the present day, has struggled to gain a few thousand (according a recent German news report, the NPD only has six thousand members). One answer is, I think, a lack of class politics. Far Right nationalism, in the post-war period, goes into two directions: the individualist élitism of the Evola variety, or a conservatism which denies that classes exists and views the nation as part of a unified, homogeneous (e.g., class-less and without social division) whole. Whereas Hitler and Mussolini intuitively understood that society was based on class division, and utilised Marxist theories of class struggle, socialist revolution, etc., with great effectiveness. Which isn't to say that today's nationalist parties don't have plenty of working-class adherents - they do - just that the leadership doesn't utilise class and socialism to the extent that Hitler and Mussolini did. (As for the American Far Right, it is pure individualist: you only have to look at the excellent VDare.Com as an instance of how individualist and neoliberal the American Far Right is. In contrast, the American Left has reinvented itself in the Occupy movement and utilises class politics and so has been able to mobilise quite a large number of decent young Americans (and not so decent) and get them on to the streets. Socialism does exist in America, it just doesn't exist on the Far Right).

Althusser always defended Marx's Kapital against charges that it was out of date: Althusser's response was that capitalism was always evolving, and so today's capitalism (that is, the capitalism of the 1960s and 1970s) wasn't going to be the same as in Marx's. Whether or not this is true of capitalism - however one defines it - certainly, political theory is always evolving. The Marxist theory of the 1920s and 1930s, which Hitler and Mussolini lived and breathed, was fairly basic: what came after their deaths was, in comparison, highly sophisticated. One of the goals of the New Left intellectuals was to blow Marx, and socialism, up and reassemble them again. The left-wing French philosopher Deleuze did a similar job when it came to the philosophy of Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza. We intellectuals on the Far Right need to investigate the New Left's researches, adapting their reinvented Marxism to our own purposes, while at the same time retaining the 'brutalist', simplistic revolutionism of Lenin's State and Revolution, which was (if I am right) such a decisive influence on fascism.

In Praise of Neo-Stalinist Doctrinairism: Censorship, Entryism, Infiltration and How to Prevent Them

I have been following the recent Pat Buchanan saga, as recounted in the excellent Hadding Scott series, 'A Closer Look at What Happened to Pat Buchanan', with minimal interest. Buchanan was fired from the American TV news station MSNBC in January this year. According to Scott, the producers and directors of the station stacked the deck with "minority" (that is, Hispanic, lesbian and left-wing) TV personalities, and got rid of the old centre-right populist war horse Buchanan for, well, political and racial reasons. I like Buchanan - who in the movement doesn't - but find his brand of paleoconservativism tepid. There isn't enough hate in Buchanan to impress me, and I was somewhat appalled to read a recent article of his, praising Obama for his "skill" in negotiating an inheritance tax increase with the Republicans - which offended my anti-Obama, and anti-anti-supply-side tendencies, in one foul swoop.

But the Buchanan incident is a recent, timely reminder how of how media and political commentary can be shaped, by publishers, editors, producers, directors, to suit the needs of a political agenda. David Irving remarked recently, for instance, that Murdoch (the owner of that British institution, The Times newspaper) has stacked the deck with columnists with Jewish names (and with, presumably, just the right pro-Israel and neoconservative credentials). This is normal in politics, of course, and there's nothing wrong with it. A political website, or the political commentaries in a newspaper, or a political journal, should reflect a basic 'party line' and publish material which is faithful to it - nothing more and nothing less. You wouldn't expect, for instance, the Australian Maoist (!) newspaper Vanguard to carry articles with my by-line, for instance, or even the by-line of a moderate liberal conservative like Andrew Bolt. No political organisation can be expected to undermine itself; indeed, as Carl Schmitt remarked, political parties are every day engaged in struggles for their survival, and dominance, just as warring states are. They face the existential question: to be or not to be, just like contending states (and all states, in Schmittian theory, contend).

Which brings us to the topic of my article. All the lessons in practical politics - i.e., founding and managing a political organisation - I've learned at first hand: no-one taught me, and certainly, there were no books, no manuals, to teach me (in the way that there are books teaching you D.I.Y. home repairs, or calculus, or Windows, or French). I've had to learn things which were known to political activists eons ago. One thing I have learned is: when it came to political organisation, Stalin was right.

In the classic The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course (1939), which was most likely authored by Stalin, we embark on a mad roller-coaster ride through the ideological permutations, the ideological twistings and turnings, of the Russian Communist Party. Right from the beginning, Stalin tells us, Lenin was beset by foes within the Russian socialist movement, who wanted to corrupt Russian socialism and turn the worker's movement away from Lenin's unclouded, pure vision of the eternal truths of Marxism-Leninism. Stalin is with us at every ideological juncture - from Leninism and into deviation - and Stalin, sometimes alone out of all the Bolsheviks, remains faithful to Lenin's original vision and always leads the Bolsheviks back on track. Stalin's dogmatism, unwillingness to compromise, and faithfulness to the original letter of the founding party documents and the principles of Marx's scientific socialism, saves the day, again and again. Deviationists are remonstrated with or  "smashed". The world outside of the Soviet Union is beaten off, again and again. But the difficult circumstances for Bolshevism (only offset by the "dizzying success" of Stalin's collectivisation programme, which, as we know, led to the death by starvation of millions) only increase, and, by the time of the writing, the USSR is the victim of the plots and machinations of a Trotskyist-Japanese-Gestapo clique, who have infiltrated the Bolsheviks, and Soviet society, at the highest levels. (As we know, Stalin, and his brand of purist Marxist-Leninism, came out on top: hundreds of thousands of these rascals were done to death during the purges of the late 1930s, in an orgy of "unmaskings" and "smashings").

It's an illuminating book, and a foundational text for 20th century communism. Phillip Short, in his biography of Pol Pot, reports how Pol, and the Khmer Rouge intellectuals, devoured the book and applied its lessons. By the end of the Khmer Rouge regimé, tens of thousands (?), hundreds of thousands (?), of Cambodian communists were "unmasked" and "smashed", i.e., tortured and put to death, for being in cahoots with the CIA and the rival communist state of Vietnam. (Likewise, Short chronicles how Mao embarked on a series of purges of the Chinese communist party in the 1930s, using torture to reveal the "guilt" of his opponents). It's a sign of the pathology of communism that many of the party faithful in these three countries went to their deaths still believing in the goodness and rightness of communism and the communist leadership. Like a cult, communism brainwashed its members, and, like a cult, communism succeeded in inculcating feelings of deep guilt in the members it shunned and expelled.

Communists are a conspiratorial bunch, of course, and I myself love conspiracy theories about communists: the idea that Obama, for instance, was a secret communist (influenced from his childhood by his communist parents) and radical Black Power activist, on a mission to infiltrate the presidency - like an Afro-American 'Manchurian Candidate' - I found quite thrilling. Disappointingly, though, Obama turned into a centrist Democrat mostly controlled by the liberal Jewish wing of the party; he didn't do anything really radical. One can point to his socialised medicine health insurance scheme, for instance, or his call for higher taxes on the rich, as evidence of a secret Marxist-Leninist agenda, but: liberal democratic politicians, of the non-communist, social democrat variety, endorse the same policies in Europe. But I like the story, because it implies that a person in politics can be of tremendous self-discipline and dedication; furthermore, it implies that that person can succeed in gaining the highest office in the land. Think of the inhumanity of it - concealing one's true beliefs, from the world, infiltrating a leading political party, and then becoming head of state. One would have to be a superman to do that. (As a comparison, suppose that Udo Voigt, of the NPD, had infiltrated, from a young age, the German Social Democratic Party and ended up chancellor).

It's wildly implausible, to be sure. But, in politics, the world is a scary place, and there are people out there to destroy you, and, as Stalin chronicles in his book, the entryists and "wreckers" will try and destroy you by infiltrating your organisation, Trotsky-style (or they will set up a front organisation serving a political purpose which is kept secret from the majority of the members).

Years ago, I formed a nationalist group with a prominent individual on the nationalist scene here in Australia, and developed a close personal and political relationship with him (I in fact authored dozens of articles published under his name, which are now collected in book form). At the time, I thought all of the membership were in sync, ideologically speaking; but, after a while, I noticed some divergences in the line we were pushing. My friend and close collaborator kept on promulgating Troy Southgate's "National Anarchism": symbols and slogans for "National Anarchism" kept on appearing on our site, and my friend would refer to our group as "National Anarchist" at functions held with other nationalists (who were as bemused as we were). Eventually, we had a few demonstrations with "National Anarchist" symbols and slogans on our banners. I was pretty naive back in those days - as naive as Bambi - and didn't realise what was going on, despite all the evidence in front of me. But, after much inner struggle, I realised that the other members and I were being used for the purposes of "National Anarchism" - an ideology we didn't have any sympathy for, and didn't sign up for when we founded the group - and so I left. (I came across an essay by Southgate, on "National Anarchist" entryism, which is a detailed exposition of how "National Anarchist" activists should infiltrate large, well-established groups, Trotsky-entryist style, and bend them to "National Anarchist" purposes, very subtly and over time, with a combination of stacking the deck, manipulation and repeated indoctrination. Whether or not the co-founder of my group was following Southgate's script, I can't say. I still don't know to this day. The insidious thing is that a good entryist must deny, till he is blue in the face, when confronted with the evidence, and one can never really ascertain the truth. But, in all fairness, sometimes we do things in politics which we are perfectly unconscious of).

I decided that, with any future political endeavours - i.e., any new political groups - I would begin with a founding party document, that all members had to subscribe to (like a contract to read and sign before joining). That way, we would all be on the same page ideologically, so to speak, and unfortunate developments like "National Anarchist" entryism would be prevented. One of the problems with my previous group was that it lacked a constitution, a worked-out structure for the day to day management of the group, and a platform which would serve as a founding document. In other words, one needs, in a group, rules for the day-to-day functioning, and one needs a statement of common purpose. Terribly obvious, of course, but not to me at the time.

Previously I had thought, when co-founding the group co-opted by "National Anarchism", it would be good to be part of a collective with an amorphous structure in which things 'just happened'. In hindsight, that approach can work, perhaps, for Situationist and anarchist collectives (but then, even the original Situationist International degenerated, by some accounts, into a hierarchical and dogmatic organisation ruled by Debord). But, in a situation where there is no law, and there is, in fact, a state of pure anarchy, the man with the most resources ends up being the king: he ends up calling the shots. My "National Anarchist" comrade owned the website, and had the most money (and all the connections necessary to get things done, i.e., get shirts, banners, made), and so he ended up being the kingpin. Which is one of the reasons why, in my view, anarchism of any sort doesn't work.

Unfortunately, lightning strikes twice. My second political group - which didn't have a constitution, but at least did have a party platform, authored by myself - has been infiltrated and co-opted by a rival tendency. This time around, it isn't "National Anarchism", but white nationalist, white power, Neo-Nazi skinheadism.

I like to think of my own politics as being 'neofascist' or 'post-Nazi'. I admire Evola and Yockey because they worked with a clean slate: their writings are a brilliant reconstruction of the founding principles of the wartime and pre-war fascist movement; they reworked, revised fascism, and, in some instances, did away with part of it altogether. Evola achieved this with the aid of the occult doctrine of Tradition; Yockey, with the pre-war, 'Conservative Revolutionary' German thinkers Spengler and Schmitt. The result was that Hitler and Mussolini were adapted to the bleak realities of Cold War Europe.

White nationalism really is a weird doctrine - a universalist (i.e., applying equally to everybody) thesis, much like all American political theses - and, as for skinheadism, it is an equally strange combination of Jamaican 'Rude Boy' gang culture, mixed in with Neo-Nazism of the George Lincoln Rockwell, Colin Jordan, Savitri Devi type. It's where reggae and white nationalism intersect. On a personal level, I don't have anything against skinheadism, white nationalism, or Ku Klux Klanism - some of these types are very nice people. But they don't represent me politically, and they do tend to attract some lumpenproletariat types. Liberal popular culture makes great use of this fact, and uses it as a weapon against us.

Some sectors of the movement are lumpen-magnets: but this is no bad thing. The advantage of a lumpen-magnet group is that the group will attract bad people, who may attain a position of leadership, power, status and pride in such a (often miniscule) organisation, and keep them away from the established nationalist groups with good, decent ordinary white people. I'm a relativist, and I believe in tolerance and diversity: the skins, white power and Klansmen types can have their groups, and I'll have mine, and never shall the twain meet - except at the odd non-denominational nationalist event.

So how did my group get infiltrated by the white power tendency? Or, moreover, how can one tell if one's group has been infiltrated and co-opted? There is one simple method, which I call the 'attack test'. (It's a method which suits my personality - being a negative, nay-saying individual who likes to attack things).

The reader will recall that I wrote most of the articles for my old, "National Anarchist"-infected group. I was given a lot of freedom to write for that group: had I approached the "National Anarchist" co-founder with a proposal to write an anti-communist article, I would have seen it accepted, and published, at once; likewise, had I proposed an anti-feminist article, or an anti-neoliberal article, or an article denouncing Keynes, Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. But - and here's the crucial test - suppose I had proposed an article with the title, 'Against National Anarchism'. I would have been told that my article could not be published, 'in its present form', and certainly 'not with its present title'. All that nice talk about being a 'collective', which accepts article submissions written from 'many viewpoints', would have gone out the window. (As it is, I wish I had had the sense of mischief, at the time, to propose an article with that title, just to see the look on the co-founder's face).

The 'attack test' could be applied elsewhere on the political spectrum. Suppose I approached a journal for a Trotskyite front group - 'The Australian Federate League for Students and Workers', to use a made-up example - and offered an article attacking Stalin (from a left-perspective), or the Australian Liberal Party, or US foreign policy, or China, or Putin - it would be cheerfully accepted (providing that it was couched in the appropriate Marxist terminology). But had I proposed an article with the title, 'Against Trotsky', or 'Against Leninism' - it would be rejected. The 'attack test' really exposes the founding principles on which a group is based.

What counts, for the 'attack test', is the perspective. Many nationalist sites have articles by the likes of Alex Kurtagic or Colin Liddell attacking the BNP, for instance. These articles are attacks on the Nick Griffin faction of the BNP, or what side of British Far Right nationalism the BNP represents: they aren't criticisms of the BNP from a left-liberal or communist point of view, of course. But, were those same sites to denounce Holocaust Revisionism, or praise Israel and the Jews for their many splendid qualities, or suggest that South Africa's or Britain's whites be exterminated by black people - well, that would be odd. It would be a case of a political organisation contradicting itself. Nationalists don't set up sites to attack nationalism as such; they will only publish articles attacking nationalism if they are making that attack from the viewpoint of another faction. Which is something quite common, as factions of the Far Right, like the factions of the Far Left, are forever attacking one another.

So, as one may gather, an article proposal with the title, 'Against White Nationalism', and criticisms of the ideology of David Duke and Don Black, wouldn't go down well in an organisation with white nationalism as its foundation. (I quite like Duke and Black, but really am critical of white nationalism - considering that white nationalism has been around for forty years and hasn't made any significant political inroads (well, the present neofascist-leaning mayor of Rome does wear a Celtic Cross tie pin, which is something). Being an intellectual, and something of a Cartesian, I trace the failures of white nationalism back to the first principles, the axioms, of the creed: something must have gone intellectually with white nationalism at the start for it to fail in the long run). Likewise, an article attacking skinheads - 'From Rude Boy to White Power' - wouldn't go down well either in a skinhead magazine; nor would 'Against George Lincoln Rockwell' in a white power / self-proclaimed "National Socialist" journal.

Now, a Pierre Krebs-Nouvelle Droite group would accept such submissions, because white power, skinheadism and Neo-Nazism wouldn't form the foundation of such a group (and even the radical white nationalist William Pierce didn't like skinheads, or skinhead music, very much, despite founding the Resistance Records label). Likewise, a "National Anarchist" journal, edited by Southgate, would accept such submissions. But my group - which I started - won't. And, in the group's 'founding document' (which I wrote), Rockwell, "National Socialism", white-power white nationalism, skinheadism, Skrewdriver and Ian Stuart - are mentioned nowhere. But, according to the 'attack test', these are, in fact - without my knowing it - the principles on which my group is based. That is, the principles on which the group is based at present - they weren't there when I started.

With my new group, I began with Stalinist and Leninist intentions: that is, with the intention of maintaining a high degree of organisation, cohesion and agreement ideologically and politically. The founding principles, and 'party line', were expressed in the founding documents (and, really, should have been periodically affirmed, or revised, in formal group gatherings - i.e., communist party-type party congresses). This approach has a number of advantages: one is that members know what they are in for when they join the organisation; members know where their beliefs stand in relation to those of the party; members can amend, revise, any parts of the program in a formal, democratic way; members know that other members are on the same page as them, ideologically; members can determine, by referring to the founding documents, how far (or close) their present efforts and activities are in relation to the goals of the party. And so forth. Obvious stuff, but essential for any organisation, political or non-political.

I was somewhat remiss in holding party congresses and the like, and never did get around to writing a constitution (but then, constitutions of groups, like the constitutions of states, don't always need to be written on paper - Britain has no written constitution). At the time, though, I thought I had done a good job, and didn't see how I could have gone any further. Perhaps I should have had members of the organisation swear a solemn oath to uphold the principles of the organisation; and had them sign declarations in blood. (Evola writes on the importance of oaths, and promises, and notes how oaths are still regarded as being sacred, i.e., having a religious or spiritual dimension, even in today's secular and profane world).

Now, though, I see that I should have gone much further down the path of Stalinist-style ideological purity. One must make a holy grail of it. The most successful communist organisations began life as small bands of intellectuals and activists dedicated, unswervingly, to the dogma that is Marxist-Leninism. (And Hitler, from the other side of the fence, also upholds dogmatism, doctrinal purity and the small but fanatical membership in his Mein Kampf. But then, Hitler had the example of the German communist groups before him - some of the most disciplined organisations the world had ever seen).

As to how, I don't know exactly. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, referred back to the work of Marx and Engels; today's Scientologists, the work of L. Ron Hubbard; today's Mormons, Joseph P. Smith and all the Mormon leaders who came after; Muslims, the Koran and its interpreters. In order to be dogmatic, one must have a fairly large body of written work to be dogmatic about. The question is, can one theorise, and lead, at the same time? The answer is, of course, yes, and the above leaders (Hubbard, the Prophet Muhammad, Smith, Stalin, et al.) were prolific writers. All the same, it helps to have a division of labour, when it comes to theory and practice. It's more convenient to be a leader, and follow an existing body of theoretical (or theological) work, or to write a lot of books, and let someone else lead.

Cultural Productions III: Why I love 'Bold and the Beautiful'

For two years, I worked at a job where my lunch break was scheduled around 4.30 in the afternoon. I'd wander into the cafeteria room, while the TV was playing on the large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, and overhear - overwatch? - the daytime soaps and cooking shows.

I'd scorned, like any decent, cultured, intelligent human being, the daytime soaps for years - Bold, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless - since the time of my childhood. (Back in the eighties, the soaps were filmed, as today, in that really weird, gauzy lighting, which makes all the actors seem as if they were filmed through a silk veil - the famous 'Loretta Young' silks of the silver age of Hollywood. This technique doesn't make the actors look better: I suppose, by using it, the studios save money (also, by not filming outdoors most of the time)). Bold, as viewers know (and how many people admit, to me, that they never watch the soap, but, when pressed, can give an instant rundown of all the recent plot developments) is filmed in an economical half-hour format. Stories proceed at a glacial pace, and one can drop it for a few weeks, a few months even, and pick up it again without missing a beat. What's more, it has the advantage (over Days) of being only half an hour. When you add that up - half an hour, five days a week, at the same time slot, almost nothing ever happening - Bold is very easy to assimilate. Which is what happened with me. I'd look at one episode with scorn, the first time I saw it on at the cafeteria, and, after a few days exposure, began to tell one character apart from another, and then pick up on what actually what was happening. At the time I was watching it, Ridge (Ron Moss), the 'hero' and 'alpha male' of the show (who has a horribly sculpted face (sculpted by plastic surgery) and looks, in the words of a female colleague, like a 'plastic Ken doll', and is one of the worst actors in the world) was trying to prevent his daughter, Steffi (the sublimely beautiful Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), from marrying the slimy Rick (the repulsive Kyle Lowder), who is the son of Ridge's father and Ridge's current wife. Rick had previously killed Ridge's other daughter, Phoebe, in a car crash. There was one episode of mourning - in which the entire cast wore designer black outfits - and, in no time, Rick was engaged to Ridge's other daughter. So, after seeing this endless plotline play itself out, every day, on TV, I began to wonder how it'd pan out.

Scriptwriters are (meant to) always ask themselves the question, 'Why should I care?' when it comes to their characters: that is, how to make the audience care about the fate of their characters. This is one of the hardest things a writer can do. Bold succeeds in this spectacularly.

Bold has certain conventions it adheres to: rules which it never, ever breaks.

The first rule is that, in the best daytime soap tradition, the acting must be rubbish. There is what another work colleague called 'back-acting': a character will turn his back on another, walk up to the camera, and pour himself (if he is a male) a scotch. (I also call this 'scotch acting'). Then torrid expressions (only visible, at this angle, to the viewer) will play across the actor's face.

The other convention is the 'stare of death'. Two characters will exchange words, and then lapse into silence. The camera will then close up on to one character's face, who always has a ferocious frown, or a cocked eyebrow. Dramatic music - usually a menacing guitar chord - will play, and the show will cut to the ad break. (Ridge is the master of the cocked eyebrow, while his wife Brooke Logan (Katherine Kelly Lang) is the mistress of the frown. Indeed, she frowns in every episode). Sure enough, the staring match between two female characters, and hair-flicking, huffing and sneering will resume straight after the ad-break. Usually, they start weeping, and actresses in Bold have wept buckets over the years.

Another convention, unique perhaps to Bold is that none of the characters do any work. They are meant to be working in the fashion industry (and, crazily enough, all the male designers are heterosexual - each and every one of them) and running multi-million dollar business empires, but they never do anything. They stand around and gossip about each other's private lives. X male character will develop a romantic relationship with y female; then each of them will be confronted, separately, by a relative, or former (or current) spouse or love interest, warning them off, begging them, even. Before or after these "interventions", characters will meet up and discuss the relationship with characters other than x or y. These endless discussions take place in the office, or in a restaurant, or in the bedroom, and just go on forever. (The way parents in the show meddle, scrutinise and constantly interfere in the sex lives of their children is mind-boggling). Now and then something really dramatic and 'soap-ish' will happen: there will be a kidnapping, or an attempted murder, or attempted rape, or maybe a corporate hostile takeover. But high drama, as such, is few and far between in Bold (compared to it, Days is an all-out action drama).

A good life, one would think. All the characters - including the old ones, the grandparents Stephanie Forrester (Susan Flannery) and Eric (John McCook) - are dressed in the most up-to-the-moment designer fashion, and all have the most cutting edge mobile phones (and sending compromising texts plays a big part in the show). They are all rich, they have the use of private jets, they all live in nice houses and apartments, and, although they don't do much with their wealth, they live dream lives. Their main problems are romantic ones - and how to find happiness in life. In that respect, they are like most Westerners: they live in an opulent, safe society, and don't experience that much in the way of poverty or danger. Possibly, it is this fact that is one reason why the show is such a success. 'Kitchen-sink' dramas, like the British Skins or Shameless, set on council estates, portray grimy, dishevelled people living in welfare housing and living off welfare benefits, in an attempt at "realism" and "holding up a mirror" to the audience: ignoring the fact that the denizens of these council estates are tremendously more wealthy and secure than, say, the average Nigerian or Syrian.

One of the peculiar themes of Bold is incest. As mentioned above, Rick is the son of Ridge's wife, Brooke, by Ridge's father (actually, his stepfather). Brooke has been married to Ridge's stepfather, also, has been married to, or had relationships, with his two half-brothers, Thorne (Winsor Harmon) and Nick (Jack Wagner, who most people know as Dr Peter Burns from the infinitely more classy Melrose Place and who is, at the time of writing, married to Melrose's Heather Locklear). Ridge's other wife - like a Mormon who practices polygamy, he goes back and forth between two wives - Taylor (played by Hunter Tylo, who is notorious for her botoxed lips, which make her one of the instantly recognisable American actresses in the world) - also has had relationships with Ridge's two half-brothers, and also, a one-night stand with Ridge's father. Around ten years ago, there was a subplot where Ridge had an affair with his wife Brooke's daughter (also the offspring of his stepfather), but the fan base - long accustomed to Bold incest - felt that that was going to far. The uproar was such that the story was stopped fairly quickly, and the relationship went down the memory-hole, Stalinist-style: it never happened.

Nevertheless, the theme persists. The villainous magazine publisher, 'Dollar' Bill Spencer (Don Diamont, who strikes many viewer as being a somewhat gay actor, with his open-necked shirts, waxed chest, bangles, rings, medallions, ostentatious belt buckles, tight designer jeans and exquisitely coiffured goatee) has an extra-marital affair with the lovely young Steffi, and then promptly hands her over to his gullible, easily-swayed son Liam, who marries her. The son doesn't mind having his father's ex - such matches are normal on Bold. (Amusingly, when Bill's wife Katie (Heather Tom) discovers Bill's infidelity, with Steffi, she collapses and goes into a coma - nearly dying of nothing more than a broken heart. The three people in this unhappy triangle - Steffi, Katie and quasi-gay Bill - are pictured in the photograph above). Besides which, the sons on Bold have unusually good relations with their fathers - they don't hate each other, like fathers and sons do in other dramas.

All of this sounds comedic, and it is. But the thing about soaps is that they can't be parodied: they already are their own parody, and, what's more, they work, despite the lack of 'realism' and 'believability'. It reminds me of what the American comic book writer, Larry Hama (most famous for his work on Marvel's GI Joe back in the eighties) once said: the most important thing about comics is the fantasy of super-seriousness, the great drama. Which makes sense: superhero comic books are about grown men, wearing capes and underpants on the outside of their (spandex) trousers. Unless the characters aren't portrayed as being ultra-serious, and engaged in matters of life and death, as being part of a great drama - the book won't work. If a character stops at some point, and says, 'Oh my god, this is stupid - Superman is wearing underpants on the outside of his trousers! This is so funny, ha-ha', well, the whole thing falls apart. Comic books - and soaps - are anti-postmodern, which is to say, anti-ironic.

It's for this reason that viewers 'abstract out' the sheer unreality and unbelievability of the soap opera storylines. But art is like that anyway.

In Bold, the children in the show grow up and become young adults in a short amount of time (despite having been born in the 1990s or so - the show has been running since 1987) while the adults stay the same age. What's more, Ridge and Brooke have a young son - less than ten years of age - who is never present, in their house or anywhere else. (Likewise, Brooke's young child with Nick is almost never seen). Bold is not a child-friendly show. So, in short, things take place at an abstract level: the (unwanted) child characters are abstracted out.

But that's the same with other genres - Westerns, detective shows, and the older, more respectable versions of narrative (the opera, the Elizabethan play, the Japanese Noh play, the ancient Greek plays). Audiences understand, intuitively, that one can't include everything in a drama. They also know that a real Ridge or Brooke, or a real fashion house, or a real household, wouldn't be like the one in the show.

Great art succeeds when it strikes an emotional chord with the audience. And, oddly enough, Bold does this. In a recent subplot, Bold treaded where few dramas have gone before: the sexual feelings of married old men. The weak Eric, patriarch of the Forrester clan, the founder of the fashion house Forrester Creations, and the show's resident grandfather, confesses to his wife Stephanie - who, after a bout of chemotherapy and operations, no longer interested in sex - that he still feels passion: 'I need affection. Is it wrong to want to be touched by someone? That's why I got into fashion. I wanted to touch women, to be near them, and one of doing that was to design beautiful clothes for them'. It's an oddly poignant moment, seeing as how old (and overweight and unattractive) Eric is, and these lines are delivered with great authority by the actor (who has been playing Eric for decades). Another striking scene occurs when Thorne, Ridge's half-brother, heads to the bar after his attempt to take control of Forrester Creations fails, and is dumped by his girlfriend. He knocks back scotch after scotch (all men in soaps are heavy scotch drinkers) while a Halloween party takes place in the background, and broods, with the help of flashback to prior episodes, over all his past humiliations and defeats, heaped upon him by his brother Ridge, and recounts his sorrows and setbacks to the bartender. Thorne is played by an ugly middle-aged actor (ugly compared to Ridge) with a bad haircut, and you can understand perfectly - at that moment - why he feels the way he does. Likewise, the interaction between the aged Stephanie, and her deranged spinster younger sister, the put-down upon Pam (Alley Mills) is just right - they behave exactly the way that two women who are sisters, and of that age, behave. Stephanie slaps her brow in frustration at trying to get through to her sister, and placate her, and you realise the truth of what Stephanie says - that they've been in the same mutally-destructive rut for years, ever since they were girls.

In a recent zany storyline, the chipmunk-faced, virginal young blonde, Hope (Kim Matula), who is another of Brooke's children (by an off-screen character, Deacon Sharpe, who now appears in The Young and the Restless, in an unusual inter-show crossover) embarks on a morals campaign, designed to persuade young women to 'save themselves' for marriage. She is engaged to Liam, who, naturally enough, balks at the idea, even if he agrees with it in principle. He quickly becomes (although this isn't shown explicitly) a masturbatory wreck, while the moral fanatic Hope is portrayed, rather unsympathetically, as a scared young woman who is afraid of sex and of losing control. It's this unusually frank portrayal of male and female sexuality, and sexual problems, which makes Bold, a major US soap, stand out, seeing as North Americans have the reputation for being a prudish people.

On a deep, subconscious level, I think, so many films and TV shows appeal, to Western audience, because they tap into the audience's racial instincts. Would the Star Wars series have been as successful with an all-black, or all-Hispanic, cast? As it is, Bold has token black actors, and because of the limited pool of sexual partners on the show, inevitably, the two male blacks have been paired off, at one stage, with white women. But the black actors get shuffled to the sidelines - they don't have any real emotional resonance. (As a friend of mine shrewdly observed, the producers intuited that the 'race-mixing angle' didn't work, and so paired Marcus (Texas Battle) up with an Afro-American female). Marcus is a nice enough character, but the actor who plays him is stupid and annoying, without depth. In comparison, the Ridges, Nicks and Owens are full of depth - which is saying a lot. It's not the Marcus character isn't likeable; it's just that he isn't liked. The show's only bad guy, 'Dollar' Bill is a cad, and is a bad actor, but he's oddly likeable.

No, the real focus is on the white characters. And what a nordic, American bunch they are! After the departure of Kyle Lowder, Rick is played by Jacob Young - a blonde, blue-eyed, square-jawed, sweater-wearing character, who looks like a young Robert Redford, and who seems almost like he's stepped out of a 1950s-timewarp. He is a decent, WASP, American college boy character. The lovely Steffi has one of those androgynous, tomboyish, nordic-American faces - like Hilary Swank or Mireille Enos (an actress of Mormon background, who appears in Big Love and the American adaptation of the Danish TV series, The Killing). When she is angry, blood rises to her face, and she appears to choke on rage, like Swank or Enos; when she is around a man she likes (e.g., Liam, usually, I think, because she is responding to the actor, not the character) she 'breaks character' and giggles in a flirty, moronic way, which is really redolent of 'American womanhood', chronicled by Henry James and so many other male American authors. Likewise, Brooke will, at odd moments, break into lilting laughter - and it's her laughter, and her accent, that seems almost Germanic-American in these moments, or perhaps Norwegian-American; the same goes for the accents of some of the other female actresses as well. Is this because of a Mid-Western, Scandinavian heritage?

The audience responds, I think, because they see part of themselves, or people they know (including family) in the characters, or people they would like to know. The caustic, sharp-tongued and yet vulnerable Stephanie, the grandmother of the show, reminds me of my own late grandmother. Liam, Oliver, Owen, remind me of the good-tempered, well-mannered, easy going young American international student men I've met at my time at university. This is what people want to see: a reflection of their own families, communities and racial kinship groups. Which is why, as Kevin MacDonald notes in one of his articles, all-black TV shows don't rate so well. The vast majority of TV audiences are still white, and they want to see white actors and white characters who relate to them in a deeply personal, emotional way.

(In that connection, another of the strengths of Bold is that its cast is multi-generational: in contrast to other shows - in which all the main characters are from the one age group - Bold has three generations, grandparents, parents and children. This is also 'true to life', because, in our lives, the older and younger generations just don't disappear; they remain with us and are part of their lives. And, given the deep hatred that the two young women of the show - Steffi and Hope - share for each other (a mutual hatred they have inherited from their mothers, Brooke and Taylor, and which is derived, like theirs, from their competition for the same man), it's possible that the show will continue long after the grandparents have died, and Ridge, Brooke and the others will become the new grandparents).

The show is a real triumph of casting: the Joan Collins wannabe, Jackie (played by Lesley-Anne Down, who seems, incongruously, about the same age as her son Nick), who, with her quavering voice, seems always on the verge of a nervous breakdown; the obsessive Thomas, Ridge and Taylor's son, who is played by the creepy actor Adam Gregory (this actor, unintentionally, really will make your skin crawl, and should have been cast, instead of Matt Damon, in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)); the sad-eyed, doe-eyed, perpetually crying Bridget; also, the doormat Taylor, who is still in love with her ex-husband Ridge, who constantly leads her on, dangling the possibility of a resumption of their relationship (she did resume things with Ridge for a while, but only by offering some very heavy anti-depressant pills in exchange for sex). (I am something of a Taylor fan (despite her botox lips, which are mocked by all who have seen the show), but others are Brooke fans: men are either Brooke or Taylor men).

Sometimes a trashy exterior can hide a real gem: you decide.

Cultural Productions II: Awesome Comic Book Acquisitions of 2011

As many of my friends could tell you, I only like reading old comics these days (and by 'old', whatever is published before 1990): often, when I visit the local comic shop, I'll pick up the latest issue of such-and-such, flip through it (today's comics are to be flipped through, not read from cover to cover), and put it back on the shelf, dismissing it as another plotless book with slapdash artwork. Because I don't like the new, only the old, I stick to reprints.

The second thing is that I like cheap reprints - I can't justify spending $200 on a hardback reprinted mega-volume of all of Wally Wood or Steve Ditko or Judge Dredd stories from the 1980s. That means, then, I like black and white editions. So, for that purpose, there isn't anything better than the DC Showcase Presents and the Marvel Essential Marvel series, which reprint 500 pages of comic books, in black and white, for $US17 (which, after tariffs and mark-ups are taken into account, retail for $AUD24.95 or so). Some fans complain that the stories are in black and white: my response to that is, the stories were originally drawn in black and white, and the styles of some artists are uniquely suited to black and white anyway. One can buy colourised editions, on glossy paper, of these reprint volumes - Marvel has the Marvel Masterworks series, DC the DC Archives - but these are ridiculously overpriced, and only contain a handful of issues. (Indeed, I find it deeply ironic that fans are buying expensive, deluxe edition collections of comic books which originally only cost a few cents, or a dollar, per issue: comic books are among the cheapest, most disposable pop-cultural productions there are - or, rather, they used to be).

So, for a lightning tour of American superhero comic book history, you can't do better than the Essentials and Showcase series of books. You get to see all the issues in a particular series of Spiderman or Justice League of America - the good and the bad together - sequentially. So you end up having a pretty good idea of the comics year of 1976 or 1968 or 1982. Plus, there's the chance to catch up on all the issues you missed out on your childhood.

Here are some of the best volumes I bought in 2011:

Showcase Presents: Green Lantern, volume 5: This reprints the famous Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil Green Lantern and Green Arrow stories from the late 1960s. As comic fans know, this period of what was a (at the time) fairly moribund series saw a dramatic change. The writer, Denny O'Neil, in a fit of baby-boomer high-mindedness, decided he'd use the series to address every (then current) topic under the sun: the Manson murders; slum lords; overpopulation; environmentalism; the evils of "corporate America"; feminism (with the cover blurb reading 'The Harpies are Coming' (not exactly a positive view of feminism)); and, most controversially, heroin addiction, in the story 'When Snowbirds Fly'.

Beautifully illustrated by Neal Adams - who drew in a realist, flowing and expressive style which transformed comic book art - the two heroes, Green Lantern and Green Arrow, take a sixties road trip across America - to discover America, and themselves. Green Lantern is a conservative who is beginning to question his beliefs, Green Arrow is a self-righteous, moralising caricature of the New Left and the hippie movement. As much as I hate the New Left, and hippies, I admire O'Neil for taking a stand in this book and using popular culture as medium for commenting on what is actually happening in the real world. Comics today just don't do that.

Poor Green Lantern became relegated to a back-up series after this period, frequently appearing in the pages of The Flash. These stories are written by O'Neil, and illustrated either by Dick Dillin or Mike Grell. While not up to the standard of what went before, these stories are underrated, in my view, and are good, wholesome seventies superhero fare. The last story in the volume, 'Fury of the Floronic Man', is a favourite of mine.

Marvel Essential: Captain America, volumes 5 and 6. After a fairly mediocre run by Frank Robbins and Tony Isabella, Jack Kirby returned to Captain America in 1976, a series he'd last worked on in the 1960s. He was allowed to plot and script the book, too. Kirby wasn't the best writer in the world (which is why he had Stan Lee and Joe Simon handle dialogue for him), and the results could have been bad. But his run on Captain America is, in my view, explosive: it's a case of Kirby unleashed. With the inks of Mike Royer, Frank Giacoia, John Verpooten and others, Kirby's art looks more Kirby-esque than ever: thick, craggy, dynamic, block-y, with deep pools of black (which look great in black and white). Gone is inker Vince Coletta, who spoiled Kirby's earlier work in the decade (the New Gods and other books at DC).

Because Kirby is allowed off the hook to write his own stories, the series takes a rather strange turn. Kirby really indulges his riotous imagination, and introduces some strange characters: Arnim Zola, the Swine, Agron, the Night People, the Night Flier, the Man Fish, the Contemplator and a conspiracy of plotters who want, on the eve of America's Bicentennial, to return America to rule by British aristocracy. The most lunatical story in the collection is one that involves a plot, by the Red Skull and the genetic engineer Arnim Zola, to transplant Hitler's brain into Captain America's body. Of course! Doesn't Captain America look like the perfect aryan? (Arnim Zola is a freakish character, who has had his brain transplanted into his chest, and his head replaced by a camera. I first read the 'Hitler transplant' issue as a kid: I wish I could say it gave me nightmares, but I loved it, re-reading it until the issue nearly fell apart).

DC Showcase Presents: Doc Savage, volume one. This series has a strange provenance: originally, it appeared in the black and white Marvel magazine line in the seventies. Then DC bought the comic book rights for the character, some time in the mid-eighties, and has now released the stories (written, drawn and edited by Marvel staffers) under the DC imprint. Which must stick in the craw of Marvel, but...

Doug Moench writes this comic adaptation of the Depression-era pulp hero (using, as I understand it, Doc Savage creator Lester Dent's original plots), and Tony DeZuniga and John Buscema do the pencilling. The artwork, which is gently shaded, is beautiful in this volume, and is representative of the best American art style of that period (the seventies). The asexual, affectless Doc Savage, though, is something of a bland super-character - and so are his sidekicks, who are all super-scientific geniuses and have nothing better to do than hang out in their headquarters (in the Empire State building) and solve mysteries all day. It's a kind of Hardy Boys fantasy. But extremely well-done.

Marvel Essential Amazing Spiderman, volume 10, and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spiderman, volume 4. I love Spiderman in the eighties, and especially the Spiderman of this period: with Spiderman's new black costume, and a host of new characters (Cloak and Dagger, the Black Cat, cyborg-Silvermane, the Answer, the Hobgoblin, Madame Web), what's not to like? Artist John Romita Jr. does his usual competent job on Amazing Spiderman (Frank Miller drops in and does a few issues and covers).

Peter Parker was always a second-rate, spin-off title with shoddy artwork. Marvel decided to exploit the Spiderman phenomenon by introducing a second Spiderman title in the seventies, but, unfortunately, didn't treat it with the same care and consideration that they lavished on Amazing-. Volume four, though, of Peter Parker, breaks the pattern, and has some sturdy artwork (mostly by Al Milgrom) and good plotting by Bill Mantlo. By the next volume, however, the series sank back into its usual mediocrity.

Showcase Presents: The Trial of the Flash. Back in the eighties and seventies, superheroes didn't kill their enemies; they abided by a strict moral code at all times, which didn't include killing. Which was why this story arc - with the Flash (the bland, WASP Barry Allen) murdering his arch-enemy, Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash - was such a shock to assorted fandom. After this fateful event, the Flash is put on trial, and super-heroing becomes mixed with courtroom drama (it was, after all, the decade of LA Law, the popular American TV series about a bunch of lawyers). Cary Bates is the author of a brilliant, sustained piece of comic book writing, which goes for many issues (this particular volume is about as large as a phone book). Carmine Infantino is the artist. Because the same pair are responsible for the entire story arc, the Flash stories here are all of a piece. Ground-breaking at the time, this volume isn't that striking today. But it's an example of how good a comic book series, written for children, can be in terms of quality artwork, plotting and editing. If only today's creators used this book as a kind of manual or template.

(Incidentally, Barry Allen has been retrospectively classified by DC as a Jewish superhero character. But the handsome, blonde, blue-eyed, tall Allen isn't a Jew, as we see from here - he's just a goy like David Irving, who happens to have a Jewish-sounding name).

Marvel Essential Doctor Strange, volume 4. Interested in astral projection, Jung, the I Ching, psychedelic drugs, self-actualisation and Eastern spirituality? Then Doctor Strange is the superhero for you. He lives in a Greenwich Village in New York (in a spooky brownstone mansion which is bigger on the inside than on the outside), surrounded by strange occult artifacts, and living with his Oriental manservant Wong and his girlfriend and disciple Clea. I love this series, not the least because of its sumptuous artwork (Tom Sutton, Paul Neary, Marshall Rogers, Gene Colan and the great Michael Golden do the art here). It was one of the best illustrated books in the Marvel canon, and the artwork always matched the 'mind-blowing' subject matter. All the preceding volumes of Doctor Strange are good, but this one in particular has an all-star line-up of artists.

Showcase Presents World's Finest, volume 3. Most of this volume is drawn by Curt Swan, whose clean lines and firm composition evoke stability, reassurance, and conservatism. A hundred years before World's Finest, Nietzsche sums the Swan art style up best, speaking of 'The joy that arises at the sight of all that is regular and symmetrical in lines, points, and rhythms... For by a certain analogy is awakened the feeling for all that is orderly and regularly in life, which one has to thank alone for all well-being... So in the cult of symmetry we unconsciously do homage to rule and proportion as the source of our previous happiness, and the joy in this case is a kind of hymn of thanksgiving' [Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 119]. It's visual conservatism.

As one commentator observed, World's Finest - along with many Superman and Batman books from the sixties - reflects the world view of the prepubescent male (in other words, boys). Women are looked at with suspicion of distrust (unless they are maternal figures), and more or less behave like sisters or that pesky girl from next door. Child characters figure prominently here: either Superman and Batman as boys, or their male progeny (in the 'imaginary' stories, Superman and Batman have sons). If you want to understand the mentality of dim-witted boys like Bobby or Glen in the sixties-era TV series Mad Men, this is the book.

Unfortunately, comics writers today can't write this sort of material. For one, they don't seem to be able to write for a child readership any more (and so are out of practice) and construct a simple story within the confines of the strictures of the Comics Code Authority; but, more than that, they don't have the innocence any more.

Marvel Essential Rawhide Kid, volume 1. Written by Kirby and Lee, this volume is explosive (again, one has to use that adjective to describe Kirby's artwork); this is some of the best work he did for Marvel. Mostly inked by Dick Ayers, it reminds one, once again, how good Kirby's early Marvel work was (without inking by Vince Coletta) and how good Kirby was at even drawing non-superhero comics.

The Rawhide Kid only shoots to wound, never to kill (like the redeemed Arnold Schwarznegger at the end of the movie Terminator 2), improbably enough. But he (and the Westerns) of this period represent humanism, the masculine virtues (and the 'frontiersman virtues', so beloved by the likes of Dr William Pierce) and moralism. Like Curt Swan's artwork, Stan Lee's writing is deeply conservative, and Jack Kirby's artwork is (subconsciously) racialist and Anglophile.

This is the deeply masculine world of hombres, owlhoots, varmints and rannies, which inculcates boys (who love cowboys) with the goodness and rightness of hard work, honesty, doing the right thing, standing up to bullies who are bigger than you (the Rawhide Kid is only 5'2"), and being such a good shot that you can shoot off the buttons of a man's shirt. A world gone today, alas.

Showcase Presents Batman, volume 5. I have been waiting for about ten years for this book to come out, and nearly jumped for joy when I saw it. This volume collects the (start of) legendary Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil run - the same team that transformed the moribund Green Lantern series.

According to received notions (held by many fans, and historians of comic books), the Batman series was moribund by the late sixties, being too influenced by the campy Adam West TV show. Then Adams and O'Neil returned the Batman series to its 'grim and gritty roots'. This is not quite true, because (surprisingly enough), as this volume shows, Adams and O'Neil don't do the majority of stories in this period - traditional Bat-artists like Irv Novick and Bob Brown do the art chores, and Bat-scribe Frank Robbins does much of the writing. What has changed, I think, is the editorial direction. The Batman titles, for most of the sixties (collected in the volumes preceding this one), were mostly awful, and the Adam West TV show drew its inspiration from the comic books, not the other way around. But, by around 1969, this all changed. Bruce Wayne leaves Wayne Manor in the outskirts of Gotham, and moves into a penthouse on top of the Wayne Foundation skyscraper (he has a replica Batcave underground), and trades in the Batmobile for a non-descript Corvette. (Dick Grayson leaves home and goes to college, embarking on a career as a groovy seventies-era superhero college student who drives around in a van). I call this period the 'penthouse' era of Batman, and he'd stay in the penthouse for the next fifteen years. (Rest assured, he didn't indulge in playboy antics: as always, Bruce Wayne is friendless, a teetotaler and celibate). We see a change in the tone of the series as well. Hardly any costumed supervillains appear in this volume, and certainly none from his rogue's gallery; what's more, this Batman is streetwise philanthropist and humanist who cares very much about the people in Gotham's slums, and victims of crime.

Unlike today's Batman, seventies-era Batman is physically vulnerable, frequently getting knocked out from behind, or overwhelmed (on a bad day) by hordes of turtle-necked hoodlums. And he is, true to form, a detective and an escape artist foremost - this is a superhero version of Murder She Wrote and MacGyver. Today's Batman writers just don't understand this, and just don't get the character - they portray him as a kind of brooding, psychopathic ninja-emo, who just isn't very clever or resourceful. It's a far cry from the character's roots, which lie in Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe.

This period, we see a venture into occult themes (which is very suited to Batman's character), plus the first appearances of the League of Assassins and Man-Bat (with his distinctive 'Skree! Skree!' cry); also a story on the supposed death of Beatle Paul McCartney (during the height of the 'Is Paul Dead?' rumour) - definitely a product of its times.

A vast improvement upon preceding volumes, this is the beginning of the modern, Bronze-Age (1970s to 1980s) Batman that I love. I'm almost inclined to think that the Batman editors in this period were inspired by the likes of The French Connection and Dirty Harry - but these films came out in 1971, after the stories in this volume.

Thank goodness, DC now will be publishing all the seventies-era Batman. We are due for ten years of turtlenecks, brown slacks, jackets with leather elbow patches and intellectually-challenging mysteries. Can't wait.

Merkel's National Socialism and 'The Wave' (1981)

This is a codicil to my recent article, Nine Turks Good, Ten Turks Bad. I am finding, in the press commentary, people who agree with the article's main thesis on Germany's national (but not nationalist) resurgence. The title of this article says it all: 'Europe, facing abyss, embraces German might as the only way to save its way of life' (Associated Press, 2/12/2011).

Here are a few choice quotations from that article:

BERLIN (AP) -- For more than half a century, the legacy of World War II has meant that the mere mention of a new rise of German power sent shudders through European nations. Now, Germany is increasingly calling the shots for the entire continent — and few seem to mind.

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski — whose nation lost millions of people in the Nazi invasion and occupation — shocked many this week when he made a dramatic appeal for greater German influence.

"You know full well that nobody else can do it," he told a largely German audience in Berlin. "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity."

And:

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, whose nation often lives in the shadow of its giant northern neighbor, dismissed out of hand any worries about renewed German dominance.

"I'm really happy," he said of Merkel's initiatives for saving Europe.

Some Europeans have also contemplated with horror what would happen if Germany got fed up with Europe's debt shambles and simply walked away.

"What is left of the euro if Germany says goodbye? A house of cards," Lennart Sacredeus, a lawmaker with the Christian Democrats in Sweden's governing coalition, wrote in the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

Further:

Finance Minister Francois Baroin this week talked about a "Franco-German political impulse" to save the euro. He noted Germany's economic successes compare favorably to France's debt difficulties, and concluded in a radio interview: "Germany is a model that interests us."

France's political opposition, meanwhile, has attacked Sarkozy for letting Merkel call the shots.

"For months, it's been Madame Merkel who decides and Nicolas Sarkozy who follows," Socialist presidential candidate Francois Hollande said this week.

But Europeans seem increasingly inclined to support Germany's leadership — or at least to go along with it.

"This government is not afraid of Germany," Italian political analyst Sergio Romano said of Rome's new regime of technocrats tasked with solving the nation's debt crisis.

"It hasn't said so explicitly, but would say the same thing Sikorski did: We are more afraid of a powerless Germany than a powerful Germany."

While former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi bristled at German interference, new Prime Minister Mario Monti has called the German culture of stability one of its "better exports."

"I have always been considered to be the most German among Italian economists, which I always received as a compliment, but which was rarely meant to be a compliment," Monti said at a recent event.

Does the Bundesrepublik itself like this new state of affairs? Of course not:

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has acknowledged the dilemma, telling foreign correspondents this week in Berlin that the government feels like it's being pulled in opposite directions: criticized by some for not being aggressive enough, and by others for pushing its agenda too strongly.

"I feel like the firefighter," Schaeuble said, "who is being attacked by the arsonist."

This isn't to say that the hapless, bungling Merkel's policies aren't disastrous: they are. It isn't to say, either, that Germany is now a "nationalist" country, which other white nations should emulate: it isn't. What it does prove is that politics is not static. Sovereign countries which were strong once, and then fell into a period of weakness (like Germany and Turkey) can become strong again; countries which were, for a long time, under a period of foreign domination (Tunisia and Egypt) can, of their own accord, throw off the yoke; countries which were, for a long time, pursuing an independent course can, all of a sudden, tilt towards a sovereign foreign power, and then fall into its orbit entirely (Libya after 2003).

All countries have certain geopolitical situations which are peculiar to it, and can't be removed - no matter the dominant ideology. Hungary and Romania, for instance, remained traditional enemies, even after their turn towards communism following the Soviet invasion of 1944-45. There is a kind of DNA, geopolitically speaking, at work here. Hitler, in his Secret Book, goes into great detail regarding the 'geopolitical DNA' of nations such as Germany, France, Russia and Britain. French governments may come and go, he tells us, but French foreign policy ambitions remain the same. Ditto Russia...

One part of the German 'geopolitical DNA' is strength, and a dominating power - that is, a power which tends to dominate the Continent (especially the eastern half). Where does that strength, in the case of Germany, come from? From the 'national virtues', Hitler would say (although he would not use that term), which, in turn, stem from Germany's racial characteristics.

In the post-war period, the Allies, and the Soviets, attempted to brainwash the Germans - and succeeded. They managed to implant a great many false ideas into the heads of Germans (and just about everyone else). One false idea was that the German 'national virtues' never existed, and that Germany's supposed strength - in the military, political and economic realms - was phoney. Hitler and the National Socialists sold the German people (and the world) a false bill of goods. Hitler taught the Germans (what we would today call) 'positive thinking' - but that positive thinking wasn't based on reality. It was all lies. The classic made-for-TV American movie, The Wave (1981), shows that: the teacher in the film, as a classroom experiment, imbues his students with the old "Nazi" virtues - strength, discipline, respect for authority, punctuality, neatness, saluting, uniforms, a willingness to (in Nietzsche's words) 'command and obey'. The students' enthusiasm for their school work improves, as so does the enthusiasm of the school's football team, which becomes dedicated to improving its performance. But, in the end, it's all shown up to be bunk. The football team performs badly, despite all the motivational psychology pumped into its heads, and loses the big game. In the novel, by Morton Rhue, one character explains that all that positive thinking on the part of the football team was fine, but didn't substitute for experience and skills. (Obviously, this lost football game is a metaphor for Germany's military performance in WWII. Similarly, the 2003 German film, The Miracle of Bern, uses a sporting analogy for war. The Germans can't believe that they'll win the World Cup in 1954, because of their defeat in the last war). Naturally, the film The Wave is a liberal anti-fascist classic, which is shown in schools in Germany as an illustration in the evils of fascism. (The film is so useful for that purpose that a German remake appeared in 2008).

Leftists, for as long as leftism has been around, have always been attracted to the idea that man is determined by his material circumstances - i.e., his environment. Change the material circumstances, and you change the man. Hence, certain laws of economics and agriculture are suspended under socialism: workers can produce miraculous results, simply because they are now labouring under a socialist state of affairs (as opposed to a capitalist one); hence the tremendous results, in terms of production, expected by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, from their 'five-year plans'. Man is infinitely malleable... All one needs is socialism and relentlessly positive thinking. And Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin were relentless optimists, who hated "defeatists" so much that they had them shot.

To return to the German example. The Left (German and non-German) has always viewed the Germans, particularly under Prussian and National Socialist rule, as a vicious, depraved people: hence its desire to change the German people through a program of indoctrination and "re-education". The German people could be remoulded into a decent, peacable, liberal democratic citizen of Europe, which no longer sought to bully other, smaller European nations - or conquer the world.

So, it was drummed into the heads of the German people, again and again, that Hitler's ideas - regarding the German 'national virtues' were just motivational psychology, 'master race' bunk and self-deception. The Germans were never as strong, or talented, or resourceful, or hard-working, as Hitler said they were. But the Germans, in the 1930s, believed Hitler, and so became swollen with pride. When a nation like Germany becomes convinced that it can run Czechoslovakia or Poland better than the Czechs or Poles can - well, it's a slippery slope to invasion, annexation and war. (The same goes for the swell-headed Italians, who had the temerity to believe that Italians could run Ethopia better than the Ethiopians). Obviously, decent nations have to unite and knock the stuffing out of Germany, and then re-educate it.

It's a simple narrative, this one, and it has a million holes in it. But, for decades, it was believed, and for one reason only: Germany lost the war. The proof is in the pudding, and the undeniable fact that Germany lost shows that Germany wasn't good enough. Germany's early successes were flukes, but, in the end, it was ground down by Allied military and industrial might. This is despite all the German military's undoubted skill, tenacity, bravery (and even liberal, anti-German commentators state that the German military possessed these qualities).

In Germany and Europe since the war, there have been two ideas: one is that Germany doesn't deserve to lead Europe (or at least, the Continent); the other is that Germany is weak and can't lead. The latter idea has now, in 2011, been blown out of the water.

To understand why, we have to take a detour into the history of left-wing theory.

Stalin's collectivisation of the Ukraine and southern Russia, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot's plan to boost Cambodian rice output to extraordinary levels, all failed, because, in the main, they ignored the realities of human nature. Which is to say, the Left has long been used to ignoring reality, shutting out facts which don't fit their theses, and suppressing those who happen to think differently. Indeed, critics are castigated as doomsayers, reactionaries and pawns of capitalism - or agents in the pay of foreign powers. (One can see, of course, the similarities between the communists and today's Left, in how they treat dissenters. In one era, they repressed, violently, the critics of collectivisation; in today's era, the critics of multiculturalism).

The Left ignores the reality of race, and 'national virtues', all the time, of course. Racialists may allege that x, certain ethnic group (which I won't name here), has certain racial characteristics: a tendency to violent crime; alcoholism; drug abuse; mendacity and welfare dependency; having children out of wedlock; low levels of educational and professional attainment; living in filthy and squalid surroundings (which they make filthy and squalid); etc. Leftists will angrily reject such negative characterisations, and put them down to white supremacist propaganda: in effect, whites, and "capitalism", put out lies, regarding this particular x ethnic group, in order to oppress and exploit them. In other words, it's a case of whites attempting to brainwash x ethnic group - and attempting to brainwash themselves, Hitler-style, by telling themselves that they are somehow a racially superior group, another "master race". (The Left tells us that these stories of race-supremacy are "capitalism". Race-supremacy fills whites with a false pride and sense of superiority, and so legitimates the oppression and subjugation of x ethnic group. This is a swindle, which prevents working-class whites from overthrowing their oppressors, the capitalists).

The realities of race, however, are quite different. Common sense tells us that whites, and x, are very different, in the aggregate. One doesn't need statistics on brain and skull size, or IQs, or even crime and educational attainment, to show this: everyday life shows it. One merely has to go to a country where whites and x racial group live together. The true nature of x as a racial group 'bursts through'.

The post-war indoctrination of Germany was very much a left-wing project: the fact that Americans took part in it so enthusiastically shows us to the extent to which Americans, and communists, are alike (as Alex Kurtagic says, Americans have always been liberals, and America's "conservatives", who idolise George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, idolise liberals). But, just as in my hypothetical example of racial minority x, the true nature of Germans, as a racial and national group, bursts through. It turns out that Germany is a strong nation, and a leader, after all.

A global call for the use of German power was not what anybody thought they would ever hear again. And Germans themselves are only slowly waking up to the fact that they are now seen as Europe’s “indispensable power,” as the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote. So grave is the crisis of the common currency that it now represents the third moment in 100 years when Germany has unilaterally determined the fate of Europe — after 1914 and 1939. It’s that history that weighs on German action or inaction.

['Why isn't Germany stepping up to save the euro zone?', The Washington Post, 2/12/11]

The Germany they are speaking of here isn't Turkish, or Muslim, Germany, of course. So maybe Hitler - who had an enduring faith in the German people, right to the end of the war - wasn't so wrong after all. Maybe Germans do possess strength, despite their appalling political leaders. Facts will out, reality will out, and no amount of leftist indoctrination and double-talk will change that.

But, one may say, isn't this just economics? The victors of WWII - America and Britain - are economically weak. But, supposing that the American economy picks up again? Won't Germany be relegated (again) to second-class status? Won't Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, drift back into the American-Israeli sphere of influence?

This is a good question. It's true that the Americans (in the 20th century) seemed to have nine lives. America went through a catastrophic period of weakness following its defeat in Indochina in the 1970s. Then Reagan was elected and steered the country to greatness again. Half of Germany, and all of Eastern Europe, fell into the American sphere without a shot being fired. American, and Israeli, power soared to undreamed-of heights in the late 1990s (as did the American stock market - this is no coincidence). America, by the late 1990s, built a global 'co-prosperity' sphere. The American example showed that, if you wanted to succeed, you had to become part of the American economic system. Even Russia and China had to become part of that system. The only alternative was mass impoverishment and starvation along North Korean lines.

It's clear that many American "conservatives" (and many Americans, full stop) are hoping for a Reagan moment - that is, for a new national saviour to appear. (The eighties, in the West, were a time for messianic politicians: Reagan, Thatcher, Hawke, viewed themselves as national saviours, redeeming their countries from ruin). Economic and geopolitical power are intertwined, and it's possible that another US president may cut taxes (especially capital gains taxes) and trigger off another huge economic boom, like Reagan and Clinton in the 1980s and late 1990s respectively. That is, Americans are very good at making money (this is one of their 'national virtues') and may, in this scenario, get on top again. Reagan and Clinton understood, intuitively, that tax barriers stood in the way of Americans trading and investing; so the answer was to lower those barriers. They also understood that strong economic growth was the best propaganda for the American political (and economic) system. Obama, of course, doesn't understand this, which is why he's been such a dismal failure.

As to whether Obama will be replaced by a new Reagan or Clinton is another story. I myself am divided as to the merits of an American economic revival. On the one hand, I don't like to see my fellow whites in America suffer from growing impoverishment and unemployment; I also happen to have an (intellectual) dislike of the Keynesian and monetarist schools of economics which Obama represents; on the other hand, I don't want to see a strong America, or Israel.

(Will a revived America, a new American ascendancy, hurt nationalism? There is an old, left-wing myth (one which liberals have adopted) that the nationalist vote goes down in periods of prosperity, and up in periods of recession. The media repeats this cliché again and again, but is it true? Surely the vote for the German NPD, or the British National Party, was better years ago - when their respective countries were doing better, economically?).

What is at stake here are two competing economic systems: an American 'co-prosperity sphere' and a European (that is, German, or Franco-German). The American sphere dominates the world, and when the American-Tel Aviv axis is politically strong, opting out of the American 'co-prosperity sphere' seems insane. Which is why, among other reasons, European nationalist parties such as the NPD appear to the average European as being quite out of touch with reality. That is, the idea that Europe could turn back to the wartime, Hitlerian economic system, during 1940-1945, seems ludicrous. This is even though the German-led system, at the time, was quite successful (the liberal, communist and Jewish coalition of anti-German propagandists will insist that that economic system was all built on slave labour and the pilfering of gold teeth from the mouths of gassed Jews; but we can take these stories with a grain of salt). Now, though, a German-led system doesn't seem like such a crazy idea: in fact, it is becoming a reality (and the inception of the EU, and the euro, laid the foundation for that reality). This is not because the German economy is so strong (and Merkel's policies are poison, economically speaking); it's just that it is strong relative to the rest of Europe right now. And this is without any swastikas, jackboots, invasions of Poland and the rest. Germany has reached this position by default. Germany always was a strong country, Germans always were a hard-working, disciplined, conscientious, productive and technologically-innovative people; the old realities have reasserted themselves.

We can see the UK's predicament. The UK, of course, always has had a strong aversion to the idea of one country dominating the Continent. In the 1920s, it was France; in the 1930s and 1940s, Germany. Which is why certain segments of the British political class (including the British Far Right, e.g., Enoch Powell) were extremely hostile to the EU from the beginning. They realised that Europe, over time, become a centralised power under Belgian, French and German rule; then French and German rule; then German rule. And, following that, an alternative economic system - an alternative to the dominant 'Atlanticist' one - would appear.

Australia's problem, of course, is not Germany and the Continent, but Asia: that is, fear of either Chinese or Japanese domination, either through Chinese labour, Japanese capital or (now in 2011) Chinese labour and capital. But, assuming that all nations revert to their geopolitical DNA, so to speak, Australia will eventually revert to type - and adopt economic and political policies towards Asia in accord with those of the past. There is hope.

But what of America (and Israel's) prospects? It is impossible to predict the future in politics with any degree of accuracy, but... My guess is that America, and Israel, right now, are down for the count and down for good. Either Obama will be re-elected, and America will continue its decline; or some 'consensus' Republican candidate, such as Romney, will be elected and continue the same anti-growth economic policies as Obama. (Romney's economic platform really is mediocre, and is derided by many right-wing economic commentators). It is true that the American electorate is intolerant of failure, and tends to take chances on untested candidates during times of uncertainty (which is why Obama was elected). There is a possibility that a new Reagan or Clinton may spring out of the woodwork. On the other hand, perhaps natural justice is asserting itself... American economic and military strength, which won the war for them (and dominance over Western Europe and most of Asia), was based on the Anglo-Saxon virtues and the gold standard; once it abandoned both (and it now has definitely abandoned both), it fell into decline.

Possibly, America will be Brazilianised in the future. That is, it will become a pyramidal society with a Hispanic majority, a Black and (native American) Indian underclass, and a small white minority (with Jewish-Americans at the top); there will be favelas (Brazilian shanty towns, full of Hispanics, poverty, crime, gangs, and squalor) everywhere.

The question then becomes: does Europe (and the West) want what America stands for now - Wal-Mart and Zionism? Or is there something else? The question then becomes one of a choice, not between two economic systems (Anglo-Saxon capitalism or 'European style' socialism) but between two contrasting ways of life...