Manual for the Radical Nationalist, part I: Demonstrations and Mass Movements

I witnessed, in the city today, another pointless, Trotskyite-commie demonstration: this time one against the extradition of Assange. It's amazing how, during a working day, people find the time off from their jobs to participate in this nonsense (but do Trotskyite communists work?); it's amazing, too, that they are demonstrating on behalf of the rights of the sleazy Assange. The man is a born con-man. He ran afoul of the Swedish authorities after a) having a fling with a Swedish feminist, who was a sexual harassment counsellor, in her thirties, and b) cheating on her with Swedish women in her twenties. The women met up by chance, compared notes, and realised that Assange had been cheating on them both (doesn't this sound like a soap opera?) and then went to a leading Swedish rape lawyer. The rest is history. Assange managed to convince the Left that he was a victim of a CIA conspiracy, and now has them working on his behalf. But one should be aware: when a man says, 'I love women', as Assange did, in one of his TV interviews - translated, it means, 'I have deep-seated issues with women'. Perhaps he hates them and wants revenge on them - an impulse common among some men, especially unattractive ones like Assange - and, unfortunately, he messed with a woman who, like him, hates the opposite gender and wants revenge on them.

The Assange demonstration, though, got me thinking, not about sexual politics, but about the efficacy of demonstrations in general. Schmitt wrote, in his Constitutional Theory (1928), that almost any mass gathering can present unexpected political opportunities, and may display political elements, and this is what demonstrations, by the Left, are trying to tap into. Demonstrations, in the Middle East right now, are thoroughly political; they represent the mass and are pure, unadulterated political, democratic rage. A million people in Tahrir Square, crowds of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, in Syria or Yemen, being shot at by security forces: these are real demonstrations. Such demonstrations, and the deployment of the new medias of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, end up overwhelming the establishment. Even if the state-controlled media under-counts the numbers, or doesn't report them altogether, word of mouth will spread news of the demonstrations. The demonstration becomes known, becomes attractive, to the people as a visible manifestation of the people's power, its pouvoir constituant, to make or break the constitutional order (I am following Schmitt's thesis here, of course). The Trotskyites and anarchists in the West aim at the same effect, of course, but fail miserably. In Australia, the Trots can't arouse the mass' collective rage and direct it against the prevailing political order; they certainly can't do so with demonstrations on behalf of Assange, or gay marriage, or boat people, or gay Palestinian boat people being allowed to marry one another in detention centres. Demonstrations in Australia, particularly by the Left, tend to be a waste of time.

In the 1920s and 1930s in the West, of course, it was all different. People really did believe in fascism, or communism, and would come out on the streets, in the tens of thousands, in favour of it. Partly that was because of the extremist political climate of the time; part of it was that, before television, the Internet and computer games, people didn't have much in the way of home entertainment, and so, if they wanted a fun evening, they would go to a demonstration or a Mosley rally in a stadium. On top of that, fascism was, and is, a lot of fun all around, and that's why English Defence League demonstrations, for instance, appeal to white working-class Britons. Even though I would draw the line at waving an Israeli flag, I myself - were I to go to England on a trip - to attend an EDL rally; or, if I were in Hungary, a Jobbik rally (no Israeli flags there). But can this be applied to an Australian context, one may ask, and would it have the desired effect.

Putting that to one side: we have seen spontaneous, left-leaning (or at least, anti-capitalist demonstrations) in the West recently: e.g., the Occupy movement, the 'Indignant' movement in Spain, and so forth. These sorts of demonstrations are very much like the ones in the Arab world, insofar as they are not directed, or controlled, by a single political group or ideology (as opposed to demonstrations for fascism and communism, which were tightly controlled by a single party); certainly, the views expressed by the participants in these movements aren't 'scientific', i.e., based on the 'scientific' socialism which is Marxism.

At first sight, then, these movements present an opportunity for the Left. All the commies need do is worm their way into them, preach the truths of the 'science' which is Marxism, and hey presto, instant communist revolution - or the beginnings of one. The commies have been doing this for the past ten years or so, with the environmentalist movement, the anti-globalisation movement, and so forth: they haven't converted, or co-opted, the participants in these, but they have managed to assert themselves at these events, through fear, intimidation, and the sheer size and strength of their presence, with some success. But, in truth, I don't think the commies will have much luck in bringing Occupy, et al., around to communism.

Why is that? Aren't these movements a response to 'the crisis of capitalism'? Indeed, they are. 'Capitalism' means different things to different people, at different points in history, of course: right now it stands for Goldman Sachs, financial profiteering and loansharking, a disproportionate, bloated financial sector which wields undue influence over the governments of Europe (including the present German government); it also stands for mass unemployment in Europe and America; it also stands for monetary chaos; it also stands for Jews, in particular, the Jewish-American Bernanke and the predominantly Jewish-American financial sector, both primarily responsible for bringing about the present crisis. 'Capitalism', these days, also stands for immigration: unlimited, non-white immigration.

The latter is particularly important, especially in today's political, intellectual and media discourse. Every day, we hear a different story as to why immigration is necessary. The first is that white workers are fundamentally lazy, and that we need mass immigration of non-white, unskilled labour to do the jobs whites won't do. The second is that white workers - despite having the highest rates of literacy and education in the world, and leading the world in the development of technology and science - haven't the 'skills' to do their jobs, and so mass immigration of non-white 'skilled' labour (viz, labour from India and China) is a necessity. The third is that white workers are too old - who will pay their pensions, except for immigrants, who will generate enough tax revenue to pay for their pensions and that of the greying white man? The fourth is that white workers are too selfish, and should share their welfare state, with its public health, education, housing, its unemployment benefits, disability benefits and old age pensions, with the entire Third World.

The 'capitalist' economy today suffers from severe defects. The US labour market, and financial markets, are in bad shape - the worst since the early 1990s recession (which brought us the terrible 'grunge' music craze, and goth culture, among other dreadful cultural things). Overall, confidence in the Western political and economic system hasn't been at such a low ebb since the 1970s. Western politicians oscillate between two poles in response to this crisis: there is the 'austerity' of Merkel (higher taxes, and fiscal tightness) and the 'growth' policies of Obama (higher taxes, huge deficits and currency devaluation). Obama's policies, in fact, produce no growth, as we know, and are uncannily like Roosevelt's in the 1930s, which likewise produced no growth. So, if the term 'capitalism' means the prevailing political and economic system - and things like Wal Mart and trash multiplex blockbuster films, and Mitt Romney - then yes, the present spontaneist movements are revolts against capitalism.

The Left - and by that, I mean the anarchists, Trotskyites and small handful of Maoists who make up the modern-day radical Left - can't tap into this, however. When all is said and done, a mass movement needs a solid, unified, strong political party - like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, for instance - because spontaneism, by itself, leads, in the end, to nothing; if anything, it burns itself out, just like the New Left did in the 1970s. And the Far Left today doesn't have such a party. In the West, the communist parties used to perform such a function, and while they are (in countries like France and Italy) still kicking around, they don't attract the support they used to. (Indeed, the once-mighty French Communist Party has steadily been losing ground, in terms of working-class support, to the Front National). More or less, the 'mainline' - that is, pro-Moscow - communist parties took a big hit after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and quite a few didn't survive. As a result, the vacuum was filled by the Trotskyite communist groups. And, as anyone knows, the Trotskyites really attracts the freaks, crazies, dilettantes, of the Left - flakes, adventurers and students going through their radical phase. The Trotskyites are incapable of keeping order, even within their own ranks, and are forever more and more parties and grouplets, each smaller than the last. Given their lack of discipline, organisationally and politically, they aren't bound to make much of an impression on the real, working-class people they encounter at Occupy and other rallies. So a highly volatile, potentially radical European mass isn't going to be led to the truths of 'scientific socialism'. (Half the time, though, I'm not convinced that the Trotskyites really stand, especially these days, for communism at all: are they Marxist?).

What of the rest of the Left? As mentioned before, a proportion of working-class French voters are abandoning the communists for the Front National; likewise, working-class districts in Sweden are voters for the populist Far-Right Swedish Democrats. Why? Well, the colonisation, and ethnic cleansing, of indigenous Europeans - by Indian, Pakistani, Arab and African immigrants - is hurting the European people, especially the working-class Europeans who have to live alongside their conquerors; that segment of the electorate feels abandoned by the traditional bourgeois liberal democratic parties, but also the Far Left as well.

If the Far Left were to adopt an attitude of resistance to the colonisation of Europe - and the colonisation of Australia by Chinese and Indians - then the Far Left would regain a measure of credibility. It would be dealing with a very real problem that affects white working-class people worldwide.

But, the Far Left shuts its eyes; what's more, it regards the Far Right, especially the populists, as its bitterest enemy. This is, to a certain degree, un-Marxist. While it is true that some of the European Far Right groups contain fascist and neofascist elements - and communism is, of course, the hereditary enemy of fascism - the present 'immigration' problem (that is, ethnic cleansing and eventual genocide of white people) is unique in Western, and world, political history. We've never seen anything like it. Consequently, there is nothing, in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest, on it. The USSR, of course, spent a great deal of time ranting on about the rights of poor Negroes in the US (who weren't allowed to drink at whites-only water fountains - you know the drill) and the white supremacist South Africans; but the present avalanche of non-white emigration to the West, and the subsequent remoulding of white racial attitudes, didn't get started until the 1970s, and didn't take full effect until the 2000s. (Non-white immigration in Australia exploded in John Howard's fourth and final term, after 2004; in Britain, after 2001). Consequently, the USSR never survived long enough to see the pernicious effects of present-day Western racial policy.

The Far Left can't change its position on race and immigration, in part, because it is following the lead of the Center Left. A few nationalists have made intriguing observations about the new policy of the traditional social democratic parties in Europe: this is the currying favour with Muslim and other immigrant groups in exchange for votes, e.g., in the recent French presidential election of Hollande, who campaigned for, among other things, illegal immigrants in France to be given the right to vote in elections (following the lead of the former socialist government in Spain) and who used a Jay-Z and Kanye West rap song ('Niggaz in Paris') in one of his campaign advertisements in an attempt to appeal to Afro-French voters. Elsewhere, British nationalists have long held that one impetus behind the extraordinary mass non-white immigration under Blair was the desire, on the part of the Labour Party, to bring in non-white voters (who, being reliant on welfare and council housing, would be more likely to vote Labour). In the US, Democrat Party strategists have been quite open about targeting 'minority' groups - that is, Hispanic immigrants and Afro-Americans - and abandoning the white working-class vote to the Republicans. This is all very cynical and self-destructive, no doubt, but indicative of an entire generation of white Western politicians - the Hollandes and Blairs - who have a real hatred of white people. But why is the Far Left following their lead? Why should they be following the liberals and the social democrats? The answer is nihilism. The Far Left used to believe in the communism of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic (don't laugh); but, after 1991, and the advent of the post-modern, post-communist era, it doesn't believe in anything. So it follows the nihilism of the liberals and socialists of the West, who want to destroy the white Western culture and civilisation, and want to, in Europe, replace it with Islam and Pan-Africanism, and, in Australia, replace the traditional culture of British imperialism with Chinese and Indian imperialism.

Marxism is meant to be a theory which is highly responsive to economic and political developments. Which is to say, the true Marxist activist will divine the fault lines in the society around him and try and ignite class struggle and class war, the war between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, which will bring about the socialist revolution. He must, in this endeavour, take an un-biased, unprejudiced approach. Supposing that he recently came to Earth from Mars, and landed in Paris and London: the first thing he would ask himself is, 'Hm, I'm on Earth, among the Parisians and Londoners: what are the existing fault-lines? How can I lead the way for the working-class? How can I unify the working-class and at the same time turn them against the bourgeoisie?'. If he really were unbiased, he would see that the ethnic cleansing of British working-class whites - in Birmingham, Leicestershire and Bradford - could be used for this purpose. In other words, Marxism is, as a theory, a means of analysis which works with reality, which 'bounces off' reality, and tries to work off the existing patterns, structures, boundaries in reality - as opposed to imposing theory upon it and make reality conform to it. The true Marxist ought to be prepared to accept whatever he finds in the course of his investigations and work with it, unpleasant as it may be (and racialism and racial feelings are extremely unpleasant to many sensitive white, Western intellectuals).

The remnants of the Marxist Left today, of course, take the opposite approach to the one above. To them theory comes before practice, theory is a substitute for reality. This is something that is condemned, in the Marxist literature, as 'dogmatism'. Unfortunately for Marxists, the Marxist school of thought - being based primarily on books written by, and for, bourgeois intellectuals - has always exhibited a strong bias towards 'dogmatism': at times, it just can't help it. Marxist-Leninism always strove to look at reality without prejudice, to take existing biases and tendencies in reality (in particular, the reality of the white working-class) into account; it always strove to present itself as a flexible doctrine, able to respond to new opportunities and changing, ever-changing, political conditions. But, as we know, it failed in this as often as it succeeded, and often lurched towards 'dogmatism', again and again. It is because of the 'dogmatist' tendency in traditional Marxism that the Marxist Far Left can't see today's reality - the dispossession and destruction of the whites of Europe, by the anti-white crazies in power - for what it is. So, while the present anti-white attitudes of the Far Left aren't indicative of historical Marxist theory, the Far Left has accumulated a number of dogmas in recent years and is now imposing them on the present. It sees, for example, the seven million or so Muslims in Europe, not as raiders, colonisers and dispossessors, but as poor little non-whites denied their rights by the evil whites: that is, the equivalent of the Afro-Americans who weren't allowed to drink from whites-only water fountains, or the Africans under Apartheid. In other words, the Far Left is using entirely inappropriate historical analogies, left over from the Soviet, Cold War era.

(Who knows how Marxism, as a body of thought, will fare in the new world of non-white Europe: perhaps Marxist books will be banned, and burned, by the future Muslim rulers of Europe, and Marxist intellectuals will be thrown into jail or killed; or perhaps Marxism will co-exist, side by side, with a non-white liberalism - the kind of liberalism which is taken root, intellectually, right now in the Middle East).

At any rate, we Western intellectuals on the Far Left, or the Far Right, are free to use the existing body of Marxist theory in any way we like. During the 1960s, the Western intellectuals who made up the New Left substantially revised the Marxist theory - much to the chagrin of the Soviets, who published stinging rebuke after rebuke of Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre, Fanon and the rest. No-one in the world knew Marxism-Leninism better than the communist intellectuals of Russia and the Eastern bloc, and so, the mainstream Marxists put up a very good argument that New Leftism and the student movement didn't constitute 'real Marxism', that it was a deviation, just like Maoism. But, since the collapse of the USSR, a kind of intellectual anarchy prevails so far as Marxism, communism and 'scientific socialism' is concerned. Marxism can be used for destructive, nihilistic, anti-white and anti-Western purposes, or for nationalistic purposes. No intellectual authority in Moscow is going to say, 'You can't do that'.

As to why this is important for the nationalist movement: many of us look to Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy as a model, and we need to appreciate the extent to which Bolshevism and Marxism influenced the thought and actions of these men. To politically-conscious men of their generation (my great-grandfather's generation), Bolshevism was unavoidable, ubiquitous, just like Twitter, Facebook and the IPhone today: one couldn't walk out of one's house, and buy a pint of milk, without having communist slogans shouted at you. This is something very hard to understand for my generation of nationalists. One could say, for argument's sake, that Hitler's socialism was a truly German socialism, that is, non-Russian, non-Leninist, representing indigenous German traits as opposed to Slavic, Leninist and Bolshevik ones; but this isn't true for Hitler, or fascism in general. Both Mussolini and Hitler were profoundly influenced by the Russian model.

It's only radical change, revolutionary change, which can allow the white Western man to escape the present morass. That means examining, and using, theoretically, all forms of radicalism, past and present - and that includes the most successful radicalisms of the 20th century, fascism and communism. But, to apply these to the present, means that the doctrines will be transmuted. They will appear in entirely new forms. As Yockey speculates, in Imperium (1948), the future fascism - or 'authoritarian socialism', as he calls it - will take unprecedented forms.

Golden Dawn, Dialectics and Making a Nationalist Revolution

There has been a great deal of jubilation, in nationalist circles, regarding Golden Dawn's electoral success (7% of the vote, translating into 21 seats), and horror from the liberal establishment (no horror, though, regarding the success of the main Greek Communist Party, which won 8%). At the same time, a few comrades have told me that such success for a radical nationalist party - which is unashamed of its fascist, neofascist and right-wing authoritarian roots - wouldn't be possible here in Australia or indeed in any other Western European country (or colony): it's only in the East of Europe that the radical parties - the Jobbiks, the Golden Dawns - can win seats. That is, the sad reality is that a nationalist party has to go down the populist route (i.e., the Breivikist/Wilder-ist route) to achieve electoral success in the Western half of Europe. The electoral schema is, for nationalists in Europe at present: Zio-populism for the West, neofascist radicalism for the East, and for Germany, in the center, nothing at all (no nationalist party of any stripe can make much headway in Germany, at least not at a federal level). So there are certain peculiarities, on the Continent, which prevent a radical Far Right party taking off in the Western half.

On top of that, it is pointed that the Greeks suffered from extremely high levels of non-white immigration prior to the election: according to the liberal German news agency, Deutsche-Welle, 128,000 illegals came to Greece in 2010 alone, and according to the UK tabloid The Daily Mail, a 100,000 illegals entered in the 12 months to February 2012. Greece's geographical position as the gateway to Eastern Europe has led to it being inundated with immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, etc., so much so that the liberal democratic government of Greece, even before the election, began work on erecting a six-mile, 13 feet high, double razor-wire wall along the border. Even so, that was shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, and the presence of hundreds of thousands of non-white immigrants has led to the de facto ethnic cleansing of the majority white Greek population in certain urban areas. This awfulness, combined with Greece's economic straits, has led to a decisive nationalist vote.

In short, then, a 7% vote for a nationalist party 'won't happen here', in Australia, because (what the Marxists call) the 'objective conditions' aren't right: yes, white Australians are being gradually forced into minority status, in the urban and suburban areas, thanks to mass Chinese and Indian immigration; but they aren't in the sorry position of the Greeks, and certainly, economically, they are nowhere as badly off.

Is this fatalism and determinism warranted? Or is it unjustified? In order to arrive at an answer to that question, let's consider a few key theses: we have to get a clear exposition of the problem - the problem faced by nationalism - before we can get around to solving it.

Here are a few defining characteristics of the Golden Dawn:

1.  It has a mainly working-class, proletarian class composition;

2.  It is a radical party;

3.  It has authoritarian, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentarian leanings, and gravitates towards 'extraparliamentary opposition', i.e., activism on the street, demonstrations, and so forth;

4.  It is anti-capitalist, and opposed to the financial hegemony of the international bankers.

This last point is especially important: modern-day liberal democracy in Europe represents, to a certain extent, the 'dictatorship of finance capital'. Banks which have invested heavily in French, Greek, Spanish, Irish, Italian, etc., debt, stand to suffer if the value of this debt plummets (they will be breaking the international banking rules regarding a strict equity-to-asset ratio, which I won't detail here); certainly, they will see a loss on the value of that debt, if the governments miss out on one or two or three of their regular interest payments. Debts, such as mortgages, are assets for a bank, and just the way that the value of a mortgage (for a bank) will fall, if the borrower starts missing out on his payments, so will the value of a French government bond fall if the French government misses on its payments. Such is the power of the banks in Europe, they can compel the EU and Germany to enforce a strict 'austerity' regimen to ensure that all the interest payments from Greece, Italy, France, etc., are promptly paid and in full - even if that austerity regimen means tax hikes, cuts to welfare, etc., which end up destroying those countries economically. (This, of course, leads to a vicious circle: a country with 25% employment and zero economic growth is unlikely to reap in much of tax revenue, and so will be less likely to be able to pay its interest bill). The sensible thing would be, of course, for the Greek and other afflicted governments to default, and skip one or two payments until things improve - as they inevitably will. But it's axiomatic, for the EU and Germany, that the banks have to be insulated from losses, i.e., write-downs on the value of their bond holdings.

It goes without saying that such a policy hurts the Greek working-class: and the peculiar thing about the above defining characteristics of the Golden Dawn is that they are true of the communist parties, and, historically, the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s. What we have, in Golden Dawn, the Greek communist KKE and the splinter-communist Syriza, is a surge towards socialism - radical socialism - if we could define the above 1)-4) as being 'socialist'. The conventional wisdom is that socialists of one stripe or another will do well during a period of economic downturn, and the election results in Greece and France this year bear this out.

There are, of course, real differences between the Far Right socialists, and the socialists of the Far Left. The main difference is on the question of immigration. To explain this, we will have to backtrack a little, and look at some recent social history.

Since the 1960s, Europe - and the West - has been ruled by a dominating clique, which has manifested itself in politics, journalism, academia, entertainment. The intent of that clique has been to eradicate the majority white population of every white, European country and replace it with non-whites drawn from the Third World. Liberalisation of immigration from the Third World, mass indoctrination of the white populace with the virtues of 'multiculturalism', 'diversity', being nice to minorities, etc., have been put to use for that purpose. The end result of mass immigration is that whites, in cities from Oslo to London to Athens, are slowly being pushed out of the lands they have lived in for hundreds, if not thousands, of years: and this is the goal of the anti-white clique. They want, for instance, for a country like Sweden to be a wonderful smorgasbord of diversity: Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis, Kurds, Chinese, Pakistanis, will occupy Sweden from coast to coast, while the Swedes themselves will be reduced to a minority, living in the forests and mountains of the far-flung rural areas (until the cities, bulging to the brim with immigrants, expand and reach those areas too). It is a process of replacing one race by another. Non-white countries such as Kenya, Japan, Guatemala, of course, aren't expected to undergo the same process: 'diversity' is a unique gift - or punishment - reserved by the white man, to pay him back for centuries of colonialism and exploitation of the Third World. The colonies of Europe - Canada, South Africa, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the USA - are especially deserving of punishment, because, to the anti-white clique, their existence represents an obscenity: these countries were founded on the enslavement, rape, despoliation and dispossession of the natives, who were at a far higher level of moral and spiritual attainment than the white settlers.

Of course, the anti-white clique won't achieve the 'maximalist' (to borrow a Trotskyite term) program of wiping the white race out altogether. But they will manage to increase the non-white populations of the cities of Europe (and the European colonies) to bursting point, and thus, proportionally, reduce the white populations to a minority there. This is already happening in the traditionally white working-class towns of Bradford, Birmingham and Leicester. (Ideally, the whites should be ethnically cleansed at gunpoint: just as what happened to the Germans of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, the Palestinians in Palestine in 1948, the various Balkans ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavian provinces of the early 1990s. But that can't happen, of course, so the anti-white clique resorts to other means).

It's a grim scenario, of course, especially given that none of the élites in the West (who are the custodians of the destiny of their countries) will or can do anything about it. The mainstream liberal media is beginning to acknowledge, of course, that this process is taking place, and is cautiously suggesting that the policy should be stopped for the time being; but acknowledgements and suggestions are no substitutes for doing, i.e., none of these conservative critics are willing to fight to have their views enforced, and none of them can even suggest voting for the parties (such as the BNP) who make opposition to immigration a priority. It's become clear that conservatism just doesn't have the strength, morally, intellectually, physically, to 'defend the West' at this crucial juncture. This is shown by their policies: the conservative government of the Tory David Cameron was elected, in part, on his pledge to cut British immigration to the 'tens of thousands', but immigration into Britain is even higher than when he took office.

Amazingly, conservatives turn into mush liberals when it comes to immigration. While American conservatives are prepared to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, drop bombs on Libya, water-board Arabs, cut welfare spending to 'balance the budget', they just won't countenance the deportation of illegal Mexican immigrants (it would 'break up families') or even cut off all the public housing, health care, education and other benefits which, in part, serve to induce illegals to stay in America.

As for the Left, well, they are completely out of the loop. The truth is that while the present-day ideology of the anti-white clique seems, on the surface of it, to be left-wing - with all its ranting and raving over the 'crimes of colonialism', its declarations that the 'white race is the cancer of history', and so forth - it is something totally new in the annals of the Left: we don't find a hint of it in Lenin, Bakunin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, the Fabian socialists, Samuel Gompers and so forth. Conservatives like to blame modern-day multiculturalism and multiracialism on the 'Cultural Marxism' of the 'Frankfurt School', but one really can't find an endorsement of ethnic cleansing (of whites), any rationale, in the works of Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm, Walter Benjamin (one does find the standard-issue liberal bilge, regarding the rights of oppressed Negroes in the American South, of course, but that's another thing entirely). Likewise, where, in the offical Soviet communist manual, The Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism (1963), is the suggestion of such a policy? There is the demand, by the communists, for 'revolutionary violence' in that manual (and in Soviet and Maoist propaganda from that time), but no demand for the disappearance of the French from France, or the British from Britain.

The Left, today, could be expected (given its ideology) to defend the interests of the white-working classes in the West and elsewhere: undoubtedly, the policies of the anti-white clique have caused great suffering to the traditional constituency of the Left (statistics show that 9/10ths of British jobs created in the Blair-Brown years went to immigrants, for example). But this isn't the case: the Left simply refuses to see any suffering. The Left believes that there is an infinite font of resources in the West - jobs, housing, education, health care, etc. - which should be shared, gratis, with the entire Third World; there's an infinite capacity which should be given to everybody. What's more, if we in the West take in immigrants and put them up in public housing, and on welfare benefits, we'll be giving them a better life - and protecting them from becoming child soldiers, or, if they are female children, from having their genitals mutilated. Those on the Right, who say that there aren't enough resources to go around, or that the immigrant groups will continue to practice female genital mutilation and honour killings (no matter what country they are living in), are just mean, nasty and horrid people.

In addition to all that, both the Left and Right are aesthetically blind. They don't see, they don't perceive, they don't understand, the concept of human degradation. There is something tremendously ugly, and sad, about immigrants sneaking into Britain, from across the Channel, by clinging to the undersides of lorries, by hiding themselves in garbage containers in trucks, or trucks carrying vats of chocolate; there is something tremendously ugly about immigrants (of a certain ethnic group I won't name, due to political correctness) of going about Melbourne, wearing ill-fitting, shabby clothes (which look as though they were stolen from the back of a barrow), sleeping, 20 people to a house, five people to a single bed, cheating utility and phone companies by not paying their bills, shopping, with their arranged marriage (and possibly co-sanguinary) wives, in the junk shops and haggling over the smallest dollars and cents... To a certain extent, life, when it gets to that level, is not worth living: these people degrade the quality of life in the West, and they are degrading to the human spirit. 'What, "spirit"?', say our establishment politicians: 'The only "spirit" I believe in is that of the Anglican Church, or the Catholic Church, which accepts all races equally, especially brown ones: your "spirit" sounds to me quite fascist'.

And so we are, in the West in 2012, at an impasse.

All of the above explains why, despite their turn towards socialism in the recent elections, the French and the Greeks didn't give complete victory to the socialist Left. As Gilad Atzmon shrewdly points out, it's strange how the Left embraces Palestinians expressing Palestinian nationalism, but can't abide by a Frenchwoman who expresses French nationalism - Marine Le Pen. But this is because, I argue, that the Left now accepts, along with the Right, all the presuppositions of the anti-white clique.

Given all this, it has become clear, to me, at least, that the West needs to adopt the most uncompromising and radical measures to save itself in its current predicament. I mean this well and truly: 'radical' comes from the Latin word radix, meaning 'from the root', and we need pull up the existing political, economic and social structures from the roots. In practical terms, this means - for Britain - the suspension (perhaps permanent) of parliament and democratic elections, the ascent to power of a new, nationalist-minded élite, and the conversion of the existing British constitutional system away from constitutional monarchy and towards a republic. In turn, the power of the City of London - Britain's financial hub - will have to be curtailed, for the future nationalist politicians simply can't be subject to the whims of the global bond and stock markets.

In any real 'dialectical' change, or evolution, the Marxists argue, the new order has to contain traces of the old: it is, in short, a 'sublation' - the present order contains the seeds of the future, within itself, and so revolution is a matter of bringing out the possibilities and making the new order sprout and grow. There is a clean break, but, at the same time, it is not the case of an old order (e.g., constitutional monarchy, liberal democracy, capitalism) being swapped for something unrelated and arbitrary. The white British simply won't convert, en masse, to fundamentalist Islam and ditch liberal democracy for Islamic theocracy: the tendencies, cultural and historical, towards radical Islam simply aren't there in the British people (whereas, in the case of the Egyptian people, they are). Whereas what I am advocating for the British is there. Britain was a republic, for ten years, under Cromwell, and parliament was suspended during his reign. But, aside from the historical precedent, the British soul, British history, British culture, contains within it radical socialism - a socialism which could form the basis of the new constitutional order. And it must, because radical ideologies such as Islam aren't an option.

The same goes for Australia: 'white man's socialism', the socialism of the old Labor Party, and the old Australian 'bush' nationalists, is still there within us, deep below the surface. But, in order to implement it, it needs to be Europeanised: not only does it need to be Marxianised, it needs to be fascist-ised. In other words, it needs to take into account recent (and by recent, in this case, I mean within the last hundred years) political and intellectual developments on the Continent.

Marx's Kapital doesn't contain the blueprint of a future communist order, as readers of it know: it attempts to describe the existing state of affairs and portends a clean break from them - the ruptures which will lead to the birth of a new order. But it doesn't describe how things ought to be, and this is one of the problems faced by the new rulers of communist regimés: where were the prescriptions, in Marx, for the new order, how would we know what socialism looks like? Engels, it is true, predicted the disappearance of money, etc., under socialism and communism, but, in general, communist theory always hedged its bets when it came to the future. It was 'dialectical', which is to say, the changes would come about organically and develop out of the old. In contrast, the so-called Utopian socialists devised detailed schemes, and drew up blueprints, for the future socialist order and how the communities in that order would live. Henceforth, the schemes would be imposed without taking circumstances and limitations into account. It was the flexibility of Marx's 'scientific' socialism, in contrast to the apriorism and inflexibility of his scheme-making 'utopian' socialist forebears, which gave it a main advantage. And this is something we nationalists, in 2012, ought to imitate.

In short: in politics, we are like painters and sculptors, who have to work with the materials we are given. We can't go beyond the given. At the same time, as revolutionaries, we recognise the need for a clean and decisive break. Revolutions make use of the existing material - the cultural, historical, economic and political tendencies - to hand. At the same time, they are brought about by élites, minorities, standing on the outside of the prevailing order. No politician, no matter what ideology, accepts the existing facts 'as they are', otherwise, he wouldn't be in politics. So, revolutions are made, they are brought about. It is our task, as revolutionary nationalists, to manufacture the conditions for revolution.

That doesn't mean that we can ignore the 'objective conditions'. One only has to recall the case of Che Guevera, who went about 'making revolution', half-cocked, in Congo and Bolivia, and failing miserably because he out-and-out ignored the 'objective conditions', didn't bother to investigate what the working-classes and peasantry in those countries were about, and so forth. A more recent example of (what the Marxists call) 'left-adventurism' is the anti-globalisation riots - the black bloc anarchists who go around assaulting police and smashing the windows of Starbucks and McDonalds - and the Occupy movement. (One really can't blame the anarchists or the Occupiers for their spontaneous disorders, given that conventional Marxism has failed the Left so dramatically). In other words, we mustn't think that inducing riot, rebellion and insurrection, leading to armed conflict - just as see in the Arab world right now - automatically adds up to revolution, although such things can, of course, occur naturally in the midst of a revolution.

The good news is that the white peoples of the West are gradually waking up to the fact that they are being shafted by the anti-white clique. They are being told, around the clock, by the establishment media, intellectuals and politicians, to pay no heed to their ethnic dispossession, but, as recent electoral events in Europe show, they are no longer listening. But they are a long way from revolting. Mainly this is because the nationalists and the Far Right have to get their house in order.

Part of the problem is that we, in our economic thinking, gravitate, by force of habit, to ideas which show a petit-bourgeois propensity. How many times do we hear a nationalist say, 'Oh, I agree with you, companies like Goldman-Sachs are bad, globalisation is bad, all the companies listed on the DJIA or the All Ordinaries Index are bad - big business, corporations, global conglomerates, are all bad. But the small proprietor, the white middle-class, the subsidised EU-farmer - we mustn't hurt them! We must go back to small business: artisans is what we need. We must have more handicrafts...'. Such thinking is reflective of traditional anarchism and socialism (the pre-Marxist 'utopian' socialism), and the petit-bourgeois class origins of such thinking, and it still holds an enormous allure for the Far Right today. It's something to be avoided, an alternative is needed. Really, such splendid experiments in socialism such as Herman Goering's Four-Year-Plan, and his Hermann Goering Steelworks, would never have gotten off the ground with such thinking.

I myself don't have an economic plan, and don't think nationalists need one. At the same time, we must have a complete break from the existing political, social and economic order, and that entails a rejection, or revision, of the existing capitalist system. The success of Golden Dawn is a step in that direction: despite their stated economic platform, they are a symptom of the ruptures and upsets predicted by Marx in Kapital. Perhaps they are a sign of the new socialist order as well.

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.