Towards an Australian National Bolshevism

This article is about National Bolshevism and why Australian nationalists should take it up. Given that National Bolshevism is a controversial topic in the nationalist community, I spend a lot of time here arguing for my case.

To begin with, we should define some terms, seeing as the average nationalist reader doesn't, I think, encounter them every day.

Marxism refers to the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - political, economic, and sociological theories which portend the appearance of class struggle (conflict between the workers and the bourgeoisie) leading up to a class war, culminating in the inevitable transformation of capitalist societies into socialist ones after the collapse of capitalism 'under the weight of its own contradictions'. Marxist-Leninism refers to the development of Marx's ideas by Lenin and their embodiment in a political party (a vanguard party, which is well in advance of everyone else in terms of its thinking) which upholds the principles of 'dictatorship of the proletariat', the abolition of capitalism and liberal democracy through violent revolution, etc. Marxist-Leninism is more or less what we know as communism. There are only five communist states in the world today: Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, China. At least one of them (China) has abandoned much of communism in practice, especially when it comes to the command economy and the abolition of property.

Socialism is another word communists use for Marxist-Leninism; they don't recognise the liberal and parliamentary forms of socialism, e.g., social-democracy (the socialism of the Australian Labor Party or the British Labour Party) as being truly socialist. Bourgeois refers to just about anything that is non-communist: the Australian Labor Party is a bourgeois party, not a true party of the workers. As for the working-classes themselves, this refers to the social class that doesn't own property and has to work for a living. Generally the communist ideology, in practice, only refers to them as working-class if the workers are capable of being recruited and ensnared by the communist movement; chavs, skinheads, conservative Liberal Party voters, anti-communist Catholics - these are not working-class, instead they are bourgeois, perhaps even reactionary and fascist.

National Bolshevism refers to a tendency in the German communist movement which first appeared in the early 1920s. Certain communist intellectuals argued certain sectors of German bourgeois society (especially the Far Right and the German military) should be won over to communism through a change in rhetoric; German patriots could form an alliance with the communists against the Versailles treaty, the French occupation of the Ruhr and Allied finance-capital. An alliance between Germany and Soviet Russia was endorsed; the two of them would stand, in an Eastern coalition, against the Allies in the West.

A good outline of German National Bolshevism can be found here. From this article, we can see that the history of National Bolshevism and the Red-Brown alliance can be divided up into two parts. National Bolshevism first appears in Germany political discourse in the early 1920s, when two prominent communists put forward the idea of a patriotic alliance against the Treaty of Versailles:

Though in pre-war German (unlike in Russia today) the term ‘National Bolshevism’ was not the name of any organised party or group in Germany – it was in Germany that it had its roots, the very terms ‘National Communism’ and ’National Bolshevism’ having first been coined by the German communists Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim (the latter himself Jewish by birth) at the end of the 1st World War. What defined their stance was an appeal to German workers’ councils and soldiers, now freed from the dictates of the Kaiser and his generals, to reject the Versailles Treaty and instead continue the war against the Anglo-French entente - yet this time as a national revolutionary war – conducted in alliance with Soviet Russia against international finance capitalism.

Although their appeal to Lenin to follow this line was rejected, it was his slogan that they used to define ‘National Bolshevism’: “Make the question of the people a question of the nation; then the question of the nation will become the question of the people!”

‘Laufenberg and Wolffheim were expelled from the KPD after they attempted to resist the leadership of Wilhelm Pieck. Radek, after showing initial enthusiasm, soon also denounced Laufenberg’s ‘National Bolshevism’ vehemently. Laufenberg went on to become a founder member of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), joining Wolffheim at the Heidelberg conference establishing the party. By 1920 however he had been expelled from the party, with his national Bolshevism the official reason for his departure. Laufenberg was mourned as a pioneer of National Bolshevism by Ernst Niekisch who wrote that “in 1919 Laufenberg already thought in terms of continents”.’

“Laufenberg … who in pre-war times had already made his name as a historian of the Hamburg workers’ movement, sickened by the dividedness of the working class and the impotent fight of all against all whilst the nation suffered unspeakably under the oppression of the victorious powers, demanded, together with his friend Wolffheim, the building up of a free and cohesive people’s organisation to bring down exploitative international finance capitalism. They sought to win allies from all strata among the freedom-loving people, conspiring also with officers, because only the unity of soldiers and workers could free the nation. The official parties defamed both determined heads as ‘National Bolsheviks’… “

The second phase of National Bolshevism was the attempt of the German Communist Party to lure Far Rightists (including National Socialists) into a united front:

The failure of the ‘National Communism’ of Laufenberg and Wolffheim was by no means the end of the story as regards the story of National Bolshevism in Germany i.e. the principle of uniting factions from both Right and Light, including dissident members of both the Nazi and Communist parties. In 1930 a new step in this direction was initiated under the banner of a new, ‘Social Revolutionary Nationalism’ - this time from associations of the nationalist Right and Nationalist youth. Hence the following press declaration from ‘Die Kommenden’ (‘The Ones to Come’) a weekly journal of the Association of National Revolutionary Youth [Bündisch-Nationalrevolutionären Jugend].

“On Ascension day 1930, what for long had been a loosely connected group of young National Revolutionaries who saw socialism as the essence of true nationalism were called together from different parts of the country to form a ‘Socialist Revolutionary Nationalist Group’ [‘Gruppe social revolutionärer Nationalisten’ or GSRN]. The group does not wish to form a new organisation but to create an umbrella embracing all young people with a similar world-view from diverse nationalistic groupings and associations – including both National Socialists and people from the ‘left’ – under the slogan of ‘Nation and Socialism’ and its realisation in the form of a state based on people’s councils.”

The aim of the Group was not only to build an “Anti-Capitalist Front of youth from both Right and Left” but an Anti-Fascist one – hence also the use of the term ‘Socialist Nationalism’ instead of ‘National Socialism’. And as its founder Karl Otto Paetel points out, the fact that it included in its ranks card-carrying members of Hitler’s National Socialist Party was so that the Nazi party could itself be infiltrated and its leadership ultimately overtaken, and its programme transformed into a thoroughly socialist one free of fascist elements. Indeed a new, more radically socialist manifesto for the National Socialist Party was distributed at a Nurenburg Party Conference. This concluded with the following words:

“Since total control over the whole of German industry lies today in the hands of organs of international finance capitalism, the national revolution is directed unconditionally against international finance capitalism. As a result, any fully realised German revolution will immediately call forth the use of all powers and means by America and its leagues of countries against the German worker’s and peasants’ state. The first task of National Socialist foreign policy is therefore the organisation of a revolutionary defence against the imperialist powers, unity with the Soviet Union and support for revolutionary movements in all countries of the world that oppose international finance capital.”

I will explain in a moment how certain of these ideas can be applied in an Australian context. But it should be noted that unfortunately there's not much in the way of theoretical content for National Bolshevism at the present time - the works of Niekisch, Paetel and others haven't been translated from the German; Otto Strasser's work (or ghost-written work) has been translated into English, hence the popularity of Strasserism, but really doesn't have much in value. Literature for National Bolshevism, National-Anarchism and Third Positionism is thin on the ground, and this leads to problems down the line. Anyone who is an activist of any ideology needs plenty of original content, i.e., content written for that ideology and no other. Because of the lack of original content, a National-Anarchist (for example) must either pass off the work of a nationalist thinker as being 'National-Anarchist' or go back to the old neofascist and racialist ideologies (and their endless preoccupations with Negroes and Jews) once one's stock of National-Anarchism runs out.

This isn't a serious problem so far as National Bolshevism is concerned, though. National Bolshevism is compatible with Marxist socialism, and there is a lot of Marxist-Leninist thought out there. All one has to do is import it into a National Bolshevist context - that can fill out the spaces left by the Niekischs and Paetels. The thing is to adapt the theory - Marxist and National Bolshevist - to the peculiar circumstances of one's country. Those circumstances include the 'revolutionary situation' (i.e., the amenability of that country to an uprising or revolution) the country is in.

Australia in 2014 is a capitalist country, of course, with a liberal democracy; it is, at the same time, in the process of being conquered, economically, demographically, politically, culturally, by Chinese imperialism. This is not what the old Maoists called 'social imperialism' - i.e., one communist power dominating a weaker one - but an imperialism of a new type. China is not fully communist and neither is it fully capitalist and liberal-democratic, but we can say, however, that it gone far down the capitalist road after the death of Mao and has transformed itself into a hybrid of a type which has never been seen before.

What is the response of the Australian patriot to Chinese imperialism? The answer is the same as that of the old Bolsheviks and Maoists: resistance, revolution, struggle. In fact, several old concepts of the Left - including the Maoist Left - can be dusted off and used again in this unprecedented situation. One such concept is Mao's New Democracy - that is, collaboration with the bourgeois (non-communist) elements which are patriotically opposed to the invader (in Mao's time, the Japanese) and who wish to form a resistance movement - what Mao called the national-bourgeoisie. In the present day Australian context, the national-bourgeoisie are the conservative groups (including businessmen), plus the reformist (social democratic and non-communist) trade unions, the right-wing intellectuals and others who are opposed to Chinese expansionism. An appeal to them can be made through patriotism, nationalism and racialism. But implicit in this appeal is the proposition that capitalism helped get us into this mess in the first place, and that the country will need to steer towards 'real socialism' once the invader has been driven from our shores.

As one can see, the National Bolshevist line in the context of Australia and Australia's national struggle in 2014 practically writes itself and tends to determine the tactics (propaganda, the methods of organisation, the attitudes towards other groupings in society, etc.) used. It's not too difficult to arrive at a blending of the most extreme socialism and nationalism which should appeal to some both on the Far Left and the Far Right.

I anticipate, contra to this assertion of mine, two responses: a) you don't really want to turn Australia into a Cuban or North Korean (or Venezuelan) economy do you, and b) are you so arrogant that you can really achieve this?

These objections are a case of another question hiding behind the question asked. In his 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Communism, Archie Brown identifies six key fundamental tenets of what he calls 'communist systems', that is, countries run by communist parties. Two of these fundamentals are: i) the abolition of property and ii) the command economy. Now, at first sight, our interlocutor is asking us whether or not a Cuban or North Korean-style economy - where property is more or less abolished and where the economy runs along command lines - is desirable, here in Australia or anywhere else. It's a reasonable question to ask and one easy enough to answer. But any answers would be banal. I.e., one would respond with truisms to the effect that Cuba and North Korea have their good and bad sides, and as to whether or not the good preponderates over the bad, well, that depends on where you stand politically. Perhaps 'the truth lies somewhere in the middle'. I don't think the interlocutor is asking that question: no, what they are asking is, are Cuba and North Korea inevitable? Is the capitalist system heading towards a crash, as Marx and Engels claimed, and will the existing system be 'inevitably' replaced by a socialist one after a revolution of the working-classes?

Any sociologist can use Marx's method of class analysis and view society through the prism of class. One can do this and not be a Marxist. What makes one's analysis of classes truly Marxist is this (from a famous letter Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer:

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

This is related to a third tenet identified by Brown: the doctrine that the 'socialist' (i.e., Communist Party-ruled) states were moving towards communism and the 'withering away of the state'. Khrushchev, in a 1961 speech, made the famous prediction that the USSR would attain communism by 1980. According to Brown, very few communist leaders believed, after 1960 or so, in the 'transition to communism' doctrine, although they continued to state, in public, that they did so. But the 'transition' doctrine is one of the fundamentals of Marxism, and is of a piece with the doctrine of the 'inevitability' of socialism and capitalist collapse. Marxism is built on the idea that history progresses 'inevitably' through economic, social and political stages, and this is something that distinguishes it from the other socialisms out there.

Which is why the events of 1991 were such a blow: given that the capitalist and feudal societies of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., had 'inevitably' given birth to socialism, there was no going back - and yet they did and it was as though Lenin had never existed and one of the decisive turning points in history - the 1917 October revolution - had never occurred.

In Victor Sebestyen's 2009 book, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, we find the East German leader Egon Krenz declaiming, in October 1989 (shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall): ‘We [in the Communist Party] have no other interest than that of the people... Our historical optimism results from the knowledge of the ineluctability of the victory of socialism founded by Marx, Engels, Lenin’.

Krenz was putting a brave face on it, holding fast to the Marxist doctrine in the face of imminent defeat. Perhaps Krenz will be right in the long run: communism will eventually triumph in a hundred or a thousand years from now. But the point of Marx's and Engel's predictions of the 'ineluctable' collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism was that they would come true in the near future. The argument of Marxist-Leninism is that the prediction did come true, in Russia in 1917, a mere 22 years after the death of Engels. But the events of 1989-1991 in Europe and Asia disproved the Marxist hypothesis; they constituted a refutation of Marxism. Quite possibly communism will never recover. National Bolshevism, then, is wrong because it is built, in part, on the false theory of Marxism.

All is not lost, however. We have to look to the example of the Left. In the early 1990s, the communist Left was faced with two choices. One was to give up - and many of the pro-Soviet communist parties (including Australia's) dissolved themselves by 1991 - and the other choice was to soldier on. The Indian Maoist guerrillas - perhaps the last true Maoists in the world - soldier on; the hundreds of Trotskyite, Maoist, Hoxhaist and other communist grouplets in the West continue, in a half-hearted way, and attract little in the way of mass support. One can't say of them that they are a growing movement. But much of this is due to age and weariness. Many of them lived through the time of the Soviet Union and really couldn't conceive of a world without a great power - of the stature of a China or Russia - which was not a 'communist system' and didn't serve as an example to the communist parties struggling to bring about a socialist revolution in the West. After 1991, they lost heart; they couldn't bear to pick up the pieces and start over from scratch - even though Marxist-Leninism preaches that communists should struggle for revolution even in the most difficult conditions and in the most 'reactionary' settings.

This is one of the aspects of Marxist-Leninism which a nationalist should find intriguing: the starting from scratch, the modularity (that is, being able to carried from place to place) of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary doctrine. Marxism doesn't accept things as they are; it is not content to sit still. They have a get up and go attitude, or at least, they did, before 1991. Only the Indian Maoists today have the same spirit.

So, if National Bolshevik ideologists such as Ernst Niekisch or Karl Otto Paetel were alive today, they would counsel National Bolshevists to follow the example of the Indian Maoists and, in the words of Churchill, 'Keep buggering on' - despite the notion that the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the backsliding of China into capitalism, disproves Marxism.

So how do we implement National Bolshevism in the context of (Far Right nationalist) political group? The first thing to do is to change one's propaganda line. Here are a few suggestions.

For starters, a nationalist group can reach out to the Left - towards a particular socialist nation, that is, and not to any particular Trotskyite or Maoist group - by putting a 'Hands off Cuba' or 'Hands off North Korea' icon on the sidebar of one's site. (The really novel thing to do would be for a nationalist group to organise a sight-seeing trip to North Korea and then write an article on it once one gets back to Australia - 'North Korea: Positive Aspects'. If Holocaust Revisionists like Dr Fred Toeben and Dr Robert Faurrison can attend conferences in Tehran, why can't nationalists go to Pyongyang?).

The second thing is to downplay certain elements of Far Rightism: no obvious white nationalism / Whitakerism, WWII or Holocaust Revisionism, anti-Semitism, etc. in one's propaganda - these subjects can be brought up in face to face conversations, but can't be identified publicly with the organisation. Similarly, one's language can be cleaned up - Chinese aren't referred to as 'gooks', 'slants' and 'chinks, and perhaps one can use the old Soviet euphemisms for Jews - 'Zionists' and 'cosmopolitans'. It's all about how one wants to be perceived by other people at the start of one's interaction with them.

Nationalists can adapt their rhetoric in these face to face conversations with non-nationalists. One can alter the thrust of one's conversation, depending on whom one is talking to - a left-winger or a right-winger. To a left-winger, a nationalist can talk about anti-capitalism and the struggle for worker's rights and better conditions, and then slowly shift to the topic of Chinese economic, political, cultural and demographic expansionism (demographics can be left to last) and how openness to the importation of Chinese capital and labour undercuts Australian workers; then talk about how China has changed since 1978 after Deng Xiaoping and how it has deviated from Maoism; then finally, on to the Maoist concepts such as New Democracy and the national bourgeoisie and how they are to be applied in a present-day Australian context. For a right-winger, one has to make the same progression backwards: one condemns the Gina Rinehart comprador class (the comprador class is the section of the capitalist class which benefits economically through a relationship with the foreign imperialist power) and the Chinese capitalist expansion, and then sketch out the difference between the Rinehart comprador bourgeois and the 'patriotic' national bourgeoisie, and how a real worker's revolution here in Australia would overthrow one and then the other.

This strategy has some real merits, which I will go on to argue for in a moment. But the question may be asked: to what extent do should a group publicly identify itself with National Bolshevism? Should it call itself a National Bolshevist party, like Limonov's group in Russia? Should it adopt the 'Nazbol' symbol? I would answer in the negative, because of the risk of sectarianism - that is, alienating the working-classes and the masses from the cause and isolating itself from them. This alienation and isolation comes about when a communist group becomes too overtly radical, and hence frightening, and when it refuses to work with non-communist elements of the Left (and the general population) for a common cause (e.g., nuclear disarmament) because it considers itself to be ideologically pure and believes that it will be tainted by contact with non-communist groups. We know from our own activism that there is a sectarianism of the Far Right as well as the Far Left.

Another reason why any nationalist should hesitate before aligning themselves with the National Bolshevik movement as it is today (Limonov, et al.) simply for the reason that there's not much there. The author of the National People's Party website doesn't seem to have a grasp of Marxist-Leninism - he seems to be more an anti-bankster populist in the C.H. Douglas / Lyndon Larouche vein - and any half-decent Marxist-Leninist who encountered him would be able to tear his ideas to shreds. It's a matter of substance. What's needed are national intellectuals who can apply the ideas of Marx, Lenin, to the Australian revolutionary situation (or lack of it) and to a certain extent simplify the ideas for the Australian patriotic working man.

On top of this, the National Bolshevist groups - Strasserist and non-Strasserist - go out of their way to criticise Hitler, National Socialism and the NSDAP and, on that topic, sound like liberals. I don’t know why they do this: perhaps they are under the mistaken assumption that they will get a free pass from liberals and the Left. At any rate, any of this criticism is sectarian and tends to alienate the traditional Far Right base. (It’s not that Hitler and National Socialism can’t be criticised; it’s that the self-professed National Bolsheviks are trying to make a political point through that criticism. There are plenty of people one can criticise from that era - Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek - why Hitler? It’s because the National Bolsheviks are desperate not to be seen as run-of-the-mill ‘Neo-Nazis’, which is fine, but antagonising the Far Right base is not the way to do it).

My proposed Australian National Bolshevism avoids such a quandary by downplaying WWII, Holocaust Revisionism, Jew-baiting, etc., and it must be admitted that these topics don’t have much relevance to the Australian revolutionary and national struggle today (as a cursory examination of Hitler and the NSDAP’s texts will reveal).

A nationalist ought to get involved in trade union struggles as part of a National Bolshevik strategy. But this presents a danger to nationalists and it is one that is often encountered by the radical Left.

Australia has a large social democratic party (the Australian Labor Party) and trade union movement, and while the latter is declining, it is still a powerful force, politically, to be reckoned with. Communists have long sought to infiltrate the union movement world wide, build power bases there, and steer it towards strikes and other manifestations (as they see them of) class struggle leading up to class war and thence revolution. The trouble is that they can get absorbed by the trade union struggle and swallowed by it whole; they end up losing their identity as communist activists and getting dissolved. This is opportunism and has always been a big problem for communists. No doubt nationalists adopting a National Bolshevism will face the same problem and be unprepared for it more than the communists, given their inexperience with working inside mass organisations. The nationalists in the trade union must always keep in mind the three struggles: the trade union struggle (trade unionist), class struggle (socialist) and national struggle (nationalist).

The flip side of opportunism is sectarianism, and again, one has to be careful not to be sectarian. National Bolshevism is an eccentric, unusual doctrine and I know from personal experience how alienating such doctrines can be. I was part of a nationalist group which was gradually infiltrated by a National-Anarchist tendency. I was told, by the National-Anarchist in the group, that the National-Anarchist mixture of ‘left’ and ‘right’ symbols (similar to the Nazbol symbols) was good in that it ‘confused the Left’, who would be unable to identify National-Anarchism as being on the Left or Right, and, furthermore, would be perturbed by an erstwhile Far Right nationalist group’s appropriations of their symbols. (Obviously, this strategy of the National-Anarchists, and the term National-Anarchism itself, was inspired by the National Bolshevist formations). In practice, however, the National-Anarchists weren’t very convincing anarchists and didn’t seem to know what they were talking about on the topic of anarchism; it would have been impossible for them to successfully infiltrate, for example, an anarchist gathering and convince the attendees that they were dyed-in-the-wool anarchists. (A really clever, Machiavellian stunt would have been for Troy Southgate, the founder of National-Anarchism, to publicly renounce Far Right nationalism and ‘racism’ altogether and then attempt to pass himself off as a bona-fide, born again conventional anarchist and libertarian communist. He could have used his newfound position as an anarchist penitent to sow racialist ideas in the Left. But that would have required a discipline and long-term dedication that he didn’t have). The National-Anarchists didn’t make any inroads with the anarchist Left and, over time, ended up isolating themselves from the Far Right nationalist base, which they depend upon still for support (despite, at the same time, disparaging it). There is a lesson there, should they care to learn it, for the National Bolsheviks, Freie Nationalisten and any other Far Right groups which seek to introduce and apply left-wing ideas to the Far Right.

So what are the advantages of National Bolshevism? Let's look at this from a perspective most Far Right nationalists will find unusual - the perspective of someone from the radical Left who may wish to form a Red-Brown alliance. As we have seen, this was one of the strategies of the communist Left back in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. National Bolshevist rhetoric was used, especially by the KPD (German Communist Party), as a means of converting National Socialists to communism. We today in Australia don't find ourselves in a similar situation as the National Socialists and Communists in the early 1930s, of course. Today's Left is weak and fragmented, despite appearances to the contrary, and isn't the slightest bit interested in recruiting Neo-Nazis, neofascists, Far Rightists, right-wing nationalists or in changing their minds, simply because it doesn't see any political advantage in doing so. In the early 1930s, things were different; the NSDAP were stealing millions of working-class votes from the communists. All the same, the Far Right in the West is growing and should be categorised as a 'live' movement, whereas the Far Left is imploding (and has been in decline for at least thirty years) and should be categorised as dying if not dead. A really smart communist would use National Bolshevism in order to appeal to the Far Right and to nationalists.

So what are the benefits? The first is that any appeals to nationalism will make the Far Left cause more attractive. Most of the communist revolutions in the 20th century were national-communist - nationalism of some sort played a role - and often racialist. (We can look at Vietnamese communism, for example; Vietnamese communism was nationalist and anti-Chinese). The Western Left in the 20th century shot itself in the foot by abandoning nationalism. As Gilad Atzmon says, the Left has become deracinated, anti-nationalist and fragmented; its ideological world-view encourages us to see ourselves as atomised individuals with no race or history or nation.

Related to this is that the Far Left has become sectarian and ultra-left, and as a result, has only isolated itself from the working-classes (who tend more often than not to be conservative). The communists have always been for left-liberalism, of course; there has never been a time when they held to a socially conservative line. But in the 21st century they've gone overboard. No real working-class Australian, no blue-collar trade unionist, will have anything to do with the Trotskyite communists in this country simply because they recognise today's Trotskyite groups for what they are - homosexual and lesbian social clubs. The Left will always berate the workers for their racism and homophobia and argue that the fault lies in the workers and that the workers need to be lead away from their natural 'reactionary' beliefs. But there comes a time when one must stop trying to push further and further to the left and for more and more radical social change - to slow down and work with what one has instead of trying to continually adjust it. This is where National Bolshevism comes in. It can slam on the brakes. The Left will be adjusted and adapted to mainstream Australia instead of the other way around.

Another benefit for the Left (and this comes back to recruitment) is that National Bolshevism can get members of the Far Right thinking about anti-capitalism, socialism and Marxism. Most nationalists and Far Rightists are sympathetic to anti-capitalism; the Slovak nationalist platform, for example, calls for social justice (the Slovaks are inspired by the fascist and national-socialist Czech priest and wartime collaborator with the Germans, Father Tiso). A cunning leftist will be able to capitalise upon this. The Trotskyite Victor Serge recounts a speech given by a German communist to an NSDAP audience in 1923:

The three public debates between Fascist speakers and our comrade Hermann Remmele  – at Stuttgart on 2 and 10 August and at Göppingen on 16 August – have, like Radek’s articles, gone right around reactionary Germany, which is on a civil war footing.

Let’s look through the little pamphlet containing Remmele’s speeches to the South German Fascists, and we’ll be looking at what idiots – or dishonest politicians – are calling National Bolshevism. ‘You’re fighting Jewish finance’, says Remmele to the Fascists, ‘Good! But also fight the other finance, that of Thyssen, Krupp, Stinnes, Klöckner and so on!’, and he makes these anti-Semites applaud the class struggle. ‘You are fighting the workers because your masters, the big capitalists, want to divide and rule, want to divide you people from the ruined proletarianised middle classes, from us proletarians!’, and he gets these reactionaries to applaud the united front of all the exploited. ‘Are you patriots?’, he asks, and he shows how big German industry is linked in many profitable deals with French capital, selling it its manufacturing secrets, like the Baden aniline trust, preparing the way for the colonisation of Germany, and getting rich from the falling value of the mark. ‘Which of you wants to get killed for capitalist Germany?’, and he gets the whole hall to shout out: ‘None of us!’

In its positive part, his line of argument is simple:

Hungry Germany cannot be free without first shaking the yoke of its national capitalism.

The Treaty of Versailles cannot be cancelled until there is no longer a capitalist Germany.

One people has already shown you how to liberate yourselves: look at the example of the internationalist Soviets!

Together we are between 16 and 18 million proletarians whose wages have fallen by at least four-fifths; and between nine and 11 million small business people who have been ruined. They used to tell you that Communism would take everything away from you: it’s capitalism which has taken everything away from you. The proletariat will liberate you by liberating itself.

　
I have spoken here of the advantages of National Bolshevism for the Left; now I will list some of the advantages for the Right. The first is that the Marxist-Leninist component will give the Far Right a little more weight and solidity. Much of the Far Right racialist and nationalist ideology doesn't add up to much if you scratch the surface. The white nationalist and Whitakerite discourse is all about identity - 'Who am I? - and how one's identity as a white person is thrown into sharp relief when it is contrasted against the behaviour of non-whites, and in particular, one non-white race - the African race. The denizens of Birmingham, Port-au-Prince, Detroit and Soweto are very non-white indeed and any white person (whether they be from Portugal or Ireland) becomes very aware of his whiteness once he comes into contact with them. It's only in these extreme situations that slogans and phrases such as 'white power' and 'pro-white' have any concrete meaning. Otherwise, one descends into abstraction. As of the time of writing, we are faced with the inability of two very white, subracial groups - the Ukrainians and the Russians - to come to an agreement as to the status of Crimea. What's the 'pro-white' thing to do?

The counterpart of the white nationalist and Whitakerite ideology in the US is the left-wing campaign against ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white skin privilege’ (a term invented by an American Maoist intellectual). See here for a typical example. The Left in Australia allege that the Aboriginals are oppressed by the descendants of the European ‘invaders’ of 1788, but hardly anyone takes this sort of thing seriously. ‘White supremacist’ and ‘white skin privilege’ talk really hasn’t taken root here, mainly because Australia was never what America and South Africa were - segregated societies in which whites lived among a large, potentially hostile population of black people. White nationalism and Whitakerism doesn’t have a place here, whereas some form of national Marxism does.

Another of the advantages of National Bolshevism is that it could potentially broaden the base of the nationalist movement. Partially this is because Marxism is much more respectable than anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, white nationalism / Whitakerism, neofascism; it is, in fact, part of the liberal establishment. Today's Australian communists are not the persecuted communists of the 1950s, forced to live semi-underground and in danger of being banned. They are allowed to flourish and work in the open. Marxist-Leninism is, paradoxically, today conservative. As such, a Marxist-Leninist veneer can give nationalists camouflage. So long as the nationalist activist is able to walk the walk and talk the talk, and gives the impression of really knowing his socialism (and not of being a faker, like the Nationalist-Anarchist), he can find fresh fields for nationalism; he can branch out and reach to the intelligentsia, the trade unionists, the students. Doors which have been traditionally been closed to the Far Right will open.

One can argue, contra to this, that National Bolshevism will only serve to alienate people, seeing as most Australians (presumably) don't want to live in a North Korea or a Cuba and don't vote for the communists who do bother to run in elections. I think that one has to distinguish between alienation and polarisation. National-Anarchists simply turned droves of people off, that is, it alienated them (which is a bad thing) when it intended to split them down the middle, that is, polarise them (which is a good thing). Bolshevism, in the beginning, was ultra-sectarian; that is, it relentlessly attacked and sought to distinguish itself from its competitors in the socialist movement. It split the Left down the middle and thereby made itself stronger. On top of that, it was not a mainstream, liberal-democratic and parliamentary movement; it positioned itself on the outside of liberal society. It refused to dissolve itself and become absorbed in mainstream political and trade union life. Nationalists can learn from the Bolshevik example. Radicalism and differentiation is a positive, and not a negative, and we know that any attempt by Australian nationalists to make nationalism 'respectable' and therefore appealing to a Liberal Party or mainstream conservative (i.e., Andrew Bolt) electorate has invariably led to failure. 'Mainstreaming' Australian nationalism has not raised its profile; rather, it has obscured it. What's more, it has encouraged dangerous delusions, among nationalists, that somehow the mainstream political parties will get Australia out of its current predicament.

The arguments I have made here can be applied to (what I call) the anti-China line. Chinese imperialism and expansionism serves better as a target for our propaganda than, say, Judaism, Illuminatism, Freemasonry or the American Negro (the obsession of the American Far Right) because it is visible, concrete and tangible. The Australian masses can see it and they understand it. China is not something abstract and it is not (in 2014) something in a far away land: it is right here, right now. What's more, it is not something that happened yesterday in other countries, like WWII and the Holocaust. The anti-China line efers to our present historical situation which is unique. China has never before been the imperialist, capitalist and expansionist power it is now and has never penetrated Australia demographically to the extent that it has now.

The anti-China line and National Bolshevism, then, are an improvement on the old Australian nationalist rhetoric. One of the defects of the nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda of the 1980s was that it continually referred to Asian immigration - i.e., that it used the term 'Asian', which is an abstract, anthropological immigration. It's always better, in propaganda, to use concrete terms. E.g., it's far more efficacious to refer to immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka as 'Indian' even if they don't hail from India. (As a slogan, 'We are against immigration from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka' is rather a mouthful; as for 'We are against immigration from the Sub-Continent', that's a little too anthropological and geographic - one doesn't want to get into a debate as to where and what 'The Sub-Continent' is). The same goes for immigration from Asia. Most of the Asian immigrants into Australia in the past ten years have come from South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and China - the Chinese making up the bulk. Australian nationalists are opposed to all such Asian immigration, of course and want all these immigrants (along with the Indian, Muslim and African immigrants) to be returned to their homelands. But they will find it far more advantageous to make the immigrants from China the main target of their propaganda. For one, 'Chinese' evokes a particular racial and ethnic type; 'China' evokes a nation which most Westerners have a dim view of (Colin Liddell remarks that most in the West see China as a 'totalitarian sweatshop'). Australians can be made to understand, quite easily, the links between Chinese demographic expansionism and Chinese cultural, economic, and political expansionism. In other words, the racial element of Chinese immigration can be linked to the political element, i.e., Chinese immigration as serving the purposes of expanding Beijing's political power.

The Australian mainstream is not (despite what some on the Far Right may think) completely oblivious to the Chinese takeover. Certain of the intelligentsia, the trade union movement, the media, academia and even the political class are discomforted by China's expansion into Australia and the South Pacific. The politically-conscious Australian knows, straight away, what you are talking about when you bring up the topic - he won't understand what the devil you're talking about if you bring up the subject of Masonry, Zionism, Illuminatism. Which is why the anti-China line can help the Far Right reach out to segments of the Australian population which have generally proven indifferent to Australian nationalism.

This is where National Bolshevism comes in. China has its hooks in Australia through the importation of capital and labour and through trade. One can speak of an embedding of China in Australia. 'White power' ideology doesn't provide us with the conceptual tools to explain all this and combat it, whereas Marxism-Leninism - and in particular, the Maoist rhetoric of national liberation - does. 'Comprador bourgeoisie' - this is a useful concept. So are the Marxist concepts of class struggle help illustrate that it is the Australian worker who stands to lose the most out of Chinese expansionism (whereas the Rineharts will do well).

The decline of Western man: can neofascism survive Internet pornography?

One problem that has interested me for a number of years is the decline of masculinity - aggressive, combative, warrior masculinity - in the West.

A decline in that masculinity is evident when we compare the Far Left of today to that of the 1930s and 1940s. The old communists were hard men, husky types, brawlers - we all know the story of William Joyce, whose face was cut open by communists wielding razors. Today, however, communist men in Australia and elsewhere in the West are sissy types; if they are not homosexual (and the vast majority of Trotskyite males in Australia are homosexual), they are sissies, a bunch of pajama boys.

Outside of politics, we see a similar decline, especially when it comes to the men of Generation X and Generation Y: we see an absence of a warrior ethos.

Part of the warrior ethos was not taking things lying down. Both the Athenians and the Spartans were willing to take up arms to defend their city-states from invasion; in the case of Australia and Britain, however, no men have taken up arms - figuratively and literally - to defend their countries from the invading armies of Africa, India, Islam and China. They don't appear to give a stuff. Passivity is the name of the game, especially among the Generation X and Y men of Australia, who tend to be a soft and flabby bunch, both physically and spiritually.

 This flabbiness relates to the growing phenomenon of mainstream nerdism and geekism in the West and the general alienation from the world outside them - including the political sphere and the community - that they exhibit. Alienation can be rudeness and a failure to adhere to society's norms when it comes to the treatment of others. One may think that bad manners, oikishness and rudeness towards women, children and old ladies are 'masculine' and make one a tough guy and thereby aren't nerdish or geekish, but that is not the case. The two - bad manners and geekish introversion - are perfectly compatible. Indeed, paying attention to one's body, hygiene, fitness, nutrition, and to manners, customs and social mores is, in essence, adaptation to the outside world (and the adaptation of it to one). Neglect of politics, community, customs, manners, social mores and neglect of one's appearance go together as a package.

Likewise, political passivity, and a lack of (what the sociobiologists call) reproductive success tend to go together. As a nationalist, I shake my head at the soft young men and feel like saying to them, 'Your country is being invaded by Chinese, and you're not married and you're not having Aussie babies. What are you doing to boost the number of Aussies relative to the Chinese invaders? Nothing. In fact, you're behaving in a way that's repellent to any prospective wife and mother of your children'.

One then has to ask if fascism really is possible in today's West. In the 1920s and 1930s, the nationalists responded to Bolshevist aggression by going out into the streets and walloping commies; they also took up a campaign against Jews and gypsies, both of whom were regarded as being the cause of many social ills. The Golden Dawn is one of the few groups in Europe and the West which shows that same combative and aggressive spirit. That spirit is lacking Australia today, and in America as well. A constant refrain, heard on American Far Right message boards, is that America's young men aren't willing to stand up to criminal African-American predators who assault whites on the streets and in their homes; that white Americans of both sexes have become the Eloi from H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.

Some conspiracy-minded Americans attribute this docility to the introduction of mind-control drugs in the water supply. I believe that these conspiracy-minded people are half-right: there is a mind-control drug which is consumed by a large proportion of the Generation X and Y male population in the West, and that drug wasn't there seventy to eighty years ago; in my view, it contributes a great deal to the passivity and docility of today's young men.

But before I deal with that topic in more detail, I will respond to a preliminary objection: that the absence of 'fascist masculinity' is due to massive political repression and also to the Western liberal establishment's program - which has been running for forty years now - of social engineering and political indoctrination in Culture Marxism. This objection seems plausible at first sight, but if we look a little closer, we will see flaws. For one thing, despite the police state repression and liberal-democratic authoritarianism in the West - which has only increased in the past ten to fifteen years - more people in the West are being exposed to racialist, neofascist and Far Rightist ideas than ever before because of the Internet. I first became involved in nationalism after discovering Doctor William Pierce's Internet radio broadcasts in 2000, and I estimate that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of young men in the West became exposed to similar ideas the same way. But the phenomenon of increased freedom of speech and increased exposure to nationalist and racialist ideas hasn't stopped the slide of Western men into apathy, docility, passivity and softness.

So what is the cause of this decline? The male characters of Mad Men are, for all their faults, more rugged and assertive than today's Australian or American or British young white males - why is this the case? What did the WWII generation, and the Mad Men generation, have that we didn't? Or rather, is it the case that we have something that they (fortunately) didn't? The answer is, in my opinion, addiction to the Internet - in particular, to Internet pornography.

Up until a few months ago, I viewed Internet pornography as a vice - like smoking, alcohol, gambling, drugs, World of Warcraft - which really was an unavoidable part of life, one that would always be with us, and one which should be discouraged, perhaps, but not one worthy of censure (unless it became 'excessive', whatever 'excessive' in this case means). I didn't think that it had long-term effects on the brain, and one's character, at all. In fact, as a racialist, I believed that pornography had a long-term positive effect: it would increase the ardour of white Western man and motivate them to make babies, thereby increasing the population of white Westerners.

Then I happened upon this cross-post at the Vikingbitch blog: '10 Reasons to Stop Using Porn'. I scoffed at first, but was intrigued by the testimonials of the men who had stopped using Internet pornography and masturbating and had experienced a real turnaround in their lives. From there I went to Gary Wilson's site on Internet pornography addiction . There's a lot of material there; probably the best place to start is his six-part YouTube clip slide show. The refreshing thing about Gary Wilson's approach is that he views Internet pornography addiction in terms of neurochemicals and neuropsychology - he is bereft of any religious, Christian-fundamentalist moralising on the topic.

The best way to explain it would be to use the following analogy. Suppose you have some marvellous computer program, called World of Ecstason, which allows you to plug electrodes into your brain and induce states of pleasure similar to what one gets from drugs such as Ecstasy, crack-cocaine, heroin and crystal meth. World of Ecstason has different settings: one can increase the intensity of the pleasure and other emotions by turning a dial. After repeated use of the program, the 'low' settings which were once so pleasurable and exciting become less so; fortunately, one can increase the setting from 'low' to 'medium', 'medium-high' and beyond.

If you try World of Ecstason and like it, after a while a few things will happen. You will end up using it more and more, devote more time, money and energy to it, and withdraw a corresponding amount of time and energy from your normal pursuits (including socialising with friends and family); you may become withdrawn, irritable, moody and less responsive and adaptive to the real world; you may pay less and less attention to friends, family, one's hygiene, one's appearance, one's job, one's duties (e.g., housework). Your life, and your character, may end up changing - albeit in a subtle way.

One can predict the results of all this: addiction, which makes one decadent and also a little bit crazy.
In an arc in The Flash comic book in 1979, a convict called Clive Yorkin is experimented upon using a device similar to World of Ecstason (or the pain / pleasure conditioner in A Clockwork Orange (1971)):

The homicidal Clive Yorkin learns to manipulate the pleasure-inducing function of the device and becomes a kind of masturbating, gibbering maniac:

There is also a beautifully-illustrated story in Marvel Comics' adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Kull. An evil wizard gives the barbarian Kull a magic mirror which allows Kull to see magical visions of other worlds. He ends up becoming transfixed by the mirror and neglecting his kingdom, which falls into chaos.

I'm not saying, of course, that Internet addicts will end up like Clive Yorkin or Kull of Atlantis: only that we have to see what these stories are - metaphors for Internet addiction (written long before the invention of high-speed broadband).

So, what does all this have to do with politics? The men in the testimonials mentioned before report that they saw increases in energy, enthusiasm, motivation, optimism, sociability,
assertiveness and confidence. They also became more masculine in physical ways: i.e., their voices became deeper, their facial hair started regrowing more quickly, and more thickly (and even thinning of the hair on one's head stopped altogether). In some cases, the men had suffered from erectile dysfunction - which is completely abnormal for healthy men in their twenties and thirties - and their normal sexual functioning returned after giving up pornography. They experienced a newfound appreciation for women in the real world outside of the Internet; some of them began relationships, while others saw improvements in their existing relationships and marriages.

In other words, they recovered their masculinity and became assertive and adaptive to the outside world. Adaptability and assertiveness - these some of the qualities, I believe, that are necessary for a successful activist for neofascist and nationalist politics.

One may object that 'addiction' here is too strong a word. Surely one can't be addicted to Internet pornography, in the way that one can be addicted cocaine or alcohol? Wilson's definition of addiction is a broad one and I imagine that the vast majority of habitual pornography users are addicted by his criteria. What's more, the number of addicts is growing, given that the number of users in the male population is very large (especially in Generation X and Y (the baby boomer male population is, in my experience, not very confident with computers)) and the increasing availability of high-speed broadband.

Wilson argues that pornography stimulates the same parts of the brain as drugs. What's more, the relationship between pornography and drug addiction is evident in the fact that severe and repeated use of pornography leads to desensitisation, an inability to be aroused by 'normal' pornography. One can only be turned on by harder stuff, by more and more perverse pornography: i.e., white women copulating with BDSM practitioners, negroes, midgets, transsexuals, whatever. Long-term addicts who are otherwise heterosexual admit they have developed a taste for gay and transsexual pornography (Wilson even has a jargon word for this - Homosexual Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), which of course leads them to question their heterosexuality. It's a long slide into perversion, and the end point is (fake) snuff pornography and, of course, child pornography.

What of masturbation without pornography? We are all taught today that masturbation is healthy and that no harm comes of it. In truth, however, it can cause harm. There is a splendid quotation from C.S. Lewis which appears on a thread at the Reddit No-Fap message board, which I will reproduce here:



This is my favourite NoFap material, ever, and has gotten me past 100 days:
By C.S. Lewis:

Masturbation

“For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.
And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.

For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival.

Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.
In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself…After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.”
(Bold emphasis: mine)

Remember Lewis passed in 1963, long before the Internet age gave way to easily accessible pornography and our own harem of imaginary brides (those "special" videos we save to watch especially with that certain "bride"). I suppose timeless truths never die.

http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1v12n0/cs_lewis_on_pornography/


So what is to be done? Politically, nothing should be done. I believe that pornography, and masturbating to pornography (or PMOing, in the jargon - Pornography Masturbation Orgasming) is really a problem for the individual. No government can stamp out vice entirely - whether it be pornography, prostitution, gambling, smoking, drinking, drugs - and it's a matter of individual choice as to whether one does anything about one's vice and what steps one takes to combat it and thereby improve one's life.

There are a number of obstacles standing in the way of a person who wants to beat his pornography addiction. It is tremendously difficult to give up pornography - some claim that it is even more addictive than nicotine or alcohol. A person who sets out to drive pornography, and all the temptations and lusts it brings, out of one's head can end up putting too much pressure on himself and developing unrealistic expectations. As a result, he will eventually snap and revert to his old ways.
Another obstacle is the fact that the anti-pornography movement (including the forums at Reddit) can really be off-putting. Christian evangelism had strong ties to the temperance movement of a hundred years ago and helped bring about, and sustain, the Prohibition in the US. Many in the anti-porn movement are fundamentalist Christians, and even the ones who claim to be secular are reminiscent of temperance evangelicals. That religious side of it is fine for some, but not for all.

On top of all that, the struggle against addiction is just that - a struggle. What's often not mentioned in the message boards is the physical and psychological strain placed on one by abstention. One will experience, after a period of time, swollen testicles (which can be extremely uncomfortable - as though one has just had a vasectomy operation), knotted muscles in one's back and neck... Also, one feels increasingly aggressive. One poster at Reddit wrote:



When I went back to watching porn after 30 days, I felt like complete shit. So I realized that most of my problems were coming from the hardcore porn I was watching. Since then, I've gone 60 days without porn. But sometimes I get to the point where I just want to punch everybody in the face. I'm completely angry for no reason. And it's due to build up sexual energy. A lot of the problems people talk about here are directly related to heavy porn use. So cut that out for sure. But I find it very difficult to function without orgasm for 30+ days, coming from the habits I had before.

http://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/comments/1v93bj/talked_to_a_psychotherapist_about_my_porn_escort/

My argument here has been that increased male aggressiveness and self-assertion in the West is a good thing - and a necessary thing if the Western civilisation is to survive. But there is a trade-off here. Does one really want to become a monster with an excess of testosterone?

I recently saw a documentary on the history of slavery in Brazil. Slavery in South America was especially brutal, and the documentary makers attributed the cruelty of the Brazilian slave-owners to the fact that the newly arrived colonial settlers were single, male and young - not many women from Europe came to live in Brazil and South America. (The European men in the Caribbean and the American South were smart enough to bring plenty of white women with them). The explanation of these documentary makers is somewhat reductionist, but I tend to agree with it; only that I contend that cruelty and aggressiveness of the European adventurers who founded Brazil is what is needed today - in small doses. A fraction of it, combined with a nationalist ideology, would lead to a surging tide among our young men - and the Culture Bolsheviks, and the immigrants they have brought to Western lands - would be swept away.

So, to get down to brass tacks: how does one give up the pornography vice? From reading the observations of others, the first thing one should do is regain control over the content of one's computer. Some people can't bear to delete their precious collection of pornographic links, saved images and videos, so the best thing to do is to save it all on a USB or external hard drive and then store it in a safe place outside of one's home (e.g., in a locker or a desk drawer at one's workplace). The next step is to put up a blocker on one's computer which will prevent the viewing of pornography - K9 is free and probably the best. K9 does have an override password, but again, one can keep that password in a safe place outside one's home which is not easy to access. Once temptation is removed, one's masturbatory urges tend to recede, and the less one masturbates, the faster one gets the 'porn monkey' (the pornography vice) off one's back. One shouldn't look at pornography, or masturbate, at all - well, maybe only a few times a year.

The goal is to drastically reduce one's pornography usage, but one shouldn't have unrealistic expectations. The main thing is: prepare to fail. One will fall off the wagon now and then, but what's important is that one makes progress towards moderation and not towards the continence of a monk or saint.

Initially, one may think that putting a blocker on one's computer and storing one's pornography collection away is a sign of weakness: the afflicted person simply doesn't have the willpower not to look at pornography and give in. But supposing that one wants to quit smoking - one wouldn't associate with smokers, at home or at work, and one would want to avoid passive smoking; certainly, one wouldn't keep cigarette cartons and ashtray filled with cigarette stubs around one's house. It's the same with pornography. Cleaning up one's computer and putting safeguards on it is the first step towards gaining a sense of control.

Australian Election 2013: Nothing Changes, More Chinese on the Way

Americans and British seem to be under the misconception that Australia has 'tough' immigration laws and a political class that is still interested in maintaining Australia's ethnic homogeneity - see, for instance, Steve Sailer's recent post. This is not the case, as anyone who visits Melbourne or Sydney will see for themselves. Since 2004, governments have lifted legal immigration to 150,000 to 230,000 a year (last year, it was a record 237,000) and most of these immigrants are non-white - Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, Maoris from New Zealand, African "refugees". (There are whites coming in from Britain and South Africa - the former are genuine refugees from British multi-culti, the latter are refugees from a barbarous African regime). The immigrants, like in Singapore and Britain (both countries which have been victims of a massive influx of immigration) are taking the majority of the jobs being created - even though economists assured that this would not happen and that the notion that immigrants take jobs is a "myth".

The Aussie majority are steadily being wiped out in their own cities, and not one politician, media commentator, priest, academic, sportsman, soldier, businessman is willing to comment on the issue. These annual intakes of immigrants are comparable to British levels under Blair and Cameron - but at least in Britain, you will find regular criticism, from dissenting members of the liberal establishment, of the Blair-induced British immigration disaster; here, in Australia, you will find none.

The sole exception is the union movement, which has opposed 457 visas for "skilled" immigrants (similar to the American STEM visa program, which Zuckerberg of Facebook wants to expand as part of the current amnesty-for-illegals bill). They make the argument that these visas are going to undercut wages, conditions, etc., and lead to the hire of non-unionised labour - which of course they will. The unions have been condemned by sectors of the Left, and the Right, for being "racist" and "xenophobic", because, of course, a reduction in "skilled" immigration will mean less Chinese, less Indians. Much has been made by these critics of the nativism of the union movement's past - its support, up to forty years ago, of the White Australia policy. That is to say, they are doing their best to tie the union movement to the past policy of White Australia. (In the US, "conservative" critics of the Democrat Party will point out the historical ties of the party to Southern segregationism).

The majority of non-white immigrants to Australia are legal immigrants - brought here under policies enacted by a "conservative" government in 2004. A little opposition to legal immigration, even on ostensibly non-racist grounds, is better than no opposition at all, and the union movement is the only institution in this country taking a stand against legal immigration (at least some of it); and so, paradoxically, the union movement is the most conservative political force in this country at the moment (despite the fact that union chiefs are liberals and that many unions contain some politically powerful Maoist and Trotskyite communist factions).

This is why, in my opinion, the Australian nationalist movement should align itself more closely with organised labour: there is a patriotic, conservative core there. We need to follow the Bolshevik tactics - as outlined in Philip Selznick's classic work of sociology on the communist movement, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (1952). (You can find an excellent review and summary of this book here).

One may ask, 'Communism failed - so why imitate communists?'. The answer is that, after decades of painstaking work, the American Far Left managed to get one of their own - Barack Obama, a fellow traveller or at least a communist dupe - elected. Obama has been a failure as a liberal president, but a great success as a Marxist and a black nationalist. Recently the US labour force participation rate (i.e., how many people are looking for work or are in work) has dropped to 35-year lows. More and more Americans are becoming dependent on the state for health care, employment, welfare, housing, education, etc., and this is precisely what a Marxist wants... Just imagine what the American Far Right could do, if it organised and got a white version of Obama - with ties to white nationalism and American Neo-Nazism - elected.

It's not as simple, however, as running a candidate for office: the communists in the US (and elsewhere, e.g., in Britain and Australia) have concentrated on changing the institutions of a society more than on winning elections. They have harnessed the "progressive" (i.e., degenerate) movements in society in an attempt to use them to their own advantage, and have succeeded in altering establishment opinion - which is why the establishment media now takes gay marriage, and now "transgender rights" so seriously (these two things would have been a joke two decades ago).

Having said that, following the communist course - i.e., joining a teacher's union and then taking it over from within - is not easy. Trotskyite and Maoist communists are more or less a cult, and it's quite simple for organised and disciplined people, who are part of a cult, to infiltrate an institution if they really put their minds to it - see the success of the Scientologists, for instance, in infiltrating the American Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We nationalists are not like that.

At this stage, we have to look Far Right and racialist politics as being two circles, one within the other: the outer circle consists of Far Rightism, nationalism, racialism, or whatever you want to call it; the inner circle is the actual political organisation (e.g., Golden Dawn, the BNP, Front National, the German NPD). The first priority of the nationalist activist should be to try and convert as many (intelligent, decent, principled) white Western people as possible to the beliefs of the first, outer circle. Then they can go about and try and recruit individuals to nationalist organisations - that is, the right sort of individual (what the Bolsheviks call a cadre man). In other words, emphasis should not be on recruiting people to one's organisation, but on recruiting people to the Far Right subculture - and it is a subculture.

Communism still the the threat? 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010)

I recently managed to see Curt Bowers' documentary, 'Agenda: Grinding America Down' (2010), which I recommend to anyone on the Far Right. While the documentary is deeply flawed, on an intellectual level, and doesn't offer what I see as being the correct solution to America's ills (Christian fundamentalism, conservatism and the values of the Founding Fathers), it will change one's views of communism. One can glean the content of Bowers' research on Cultural Marxism from other sources (e.g., William S. Lind), but it's in this documentary that one can find it all in the one place. What's more, much of the documentary was new to me - I hadn't heard of the 'Cloward-Piven strategy' before seeing it - and I'm sure that a good many others will something new in it too.

So what is it about? Bowers claims to have attended, as a young undergraduate in the University of California in Berkeley in 1992, a Marxist conference held by some respectably-dressed academic greybeards. It was at that conference that these Marxists outlined their strategy for the future and vowed to press on with communism and not be dissuaded by the recent dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe - events which were more devastating to communism than any theoretical refutations of Karl Marx's texts. The strategy was to infiltrate and make use of the burgeoning homosexual and environmentalist movements and mount an assault on capitalism, the traditional heterosexual family, Christian morality, in the name of "social justice", "equality" and the rest. To achieve this end they would make use of the traditional communist method of setting up front groups (with names like 'Centre for Political Progress and Change') which would agitate for environmentalism or illegal immigrant rights, for example, while concealing the communist intentions of their founders.

Communists in America have traditionally practised entryism in trade unions, Christian religious groups, academia, education, organisations such as American Civil Liberties Union and the Democratic Party); also movements such as the Afro-American civil rights movement, the 1960s student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the anti-nuclear weapon movement, feminist movement... It goes without saying that Bowers' thesis isn't that communism brought these movements about: communism didn't invent homosexuality, environmentalism, the anti-war movement, Afro-American civil rights... It's a matter of harnessing the energy of the mass movements and exploiting them for communist purposes.

In 2008, as a legislator in Idaho, Bowers wrote a controversial op-ed article in a newspaper which declared that American communists and their associated 'front groups' and 'fellow travellers' had succeeded in implementing many of the goals outlined at that conference in Berkeley in 1992. The article aroused shock and indignation, but also met with public support. It was after that episode that Bowers turned his attentions to researching the American left-wing radical and Marxist groups which had played such a large role in America's decline. 'Agenda-' is the result.

One of the good things about 'Agenda' is the use of diagram charts. Here's one, showing the drift of the Democrat Party (especially under Obama, Reid and Pelosi) to the Far Left, and the drift of the Republican Party to where the Democrat Party once stood:

 

Here is Bowers' other chart diagram, which traces the progressive lineage from Marx to Obama.

Bowers relies upon many of the classics of American anti-communism, such as Cleon Skousen's 'The Naked Communist' (1963) - and also interviews with leading conservatives, including a few former Republican Party politicians and also the New Zealand Americaphile conservative author, Trevor Loudon. It's for this reason - the reliance on secondary sources - that Bowers' documentary (and the chart above) contains a few errors - errors which wouldn't have been made, perhaps, if Bowers had bothered to read books written by actual communists.

One error is the ascribing of too much importance to Fabianism. The Fabians weren't Marxists and have had little influence except outside the Labour Party of Britain, the Australian Labor Party and perhaps the Indian nationalist Nehru. It's true that the Fabians did provide a few 'useful idiots' - people who were sympathetic to Lenin, and then Stalin: Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Sidney Webb. But one shouldn't confuse a useful idiot with an actual communist.

The other error regards the Frankfurt School. I haven't read much of them - only a little Marcuse - but I know enough of them to question whether the Frankfurt School really did found Cultural Marxism and political correctness - which is what Bowers, William S. Lind and other conservatives assert. The Frankfurt School really were men of the thirties and forties, while political correctness emerged (in the West) in the 1990s. Paul Gottfried wrote a book, 'The Strange Death of Liberal Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium' (2005) which is about the rise of political correctness and goes into the doctrines of the Frankfurt School in detail (he knows enough about the School to be considered an expert), and he doesn't link them together.

Another error is Bowers' assertion that North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, China and the rest are communist states. But what we have in Vietnam, Laos and China is a curious anomaly: authoritarian states which are one-party states with a political system which is ostensibly communist but with market economies. China and Indochina stopped believing in communism a long time ago, although there is no sign that the communist parties in those countries will relinquish power.

This is all mere quibble, however. It's after seeing this documentary that I understood the true character of Obama. I'd previously seen him as a standard centre-left Democrat who wanted - like any other US president - strong economic growth, social harmony, prosperity... Obama and his fiscal and monetary stimulus have been a massive failure, of course, and he and all his supporters know it; but what if he didn't want economic prosperity? It's only after you look at his radical left-wing neo-Marxist background that you begin to understand that maybe Obama wants economic stagnation. He wants the capitalist system to fail - and for government and the welfare state to step in. Everything Obama puts forward is designed to push the communist agenda. He wants illegal immigration and gay marriage because he subscribes to neo-Marxist fantasies of gays and Latinos as being "oppressed" (oppressed by the wicked heterosexual WASP, that is); he wants Obamacare because he wants an America that is dependent on the government for its healthcare (and housing, and employment, and education); he wants to combat global warming because he wants state control over the industries (and the Americans) who produce carbon emissions; he attacks the rich because he wants class war between worker and capitalist; he uses the slogan 'Change' because he believes in dialectical change, that is, the transition from a capitalist society to a socialist one.

Is Obama a Marxist? J. Edgar Hoover made the distinction between five types: the open, 'card-carrying' communist; the undercover communist who conceals his beliefs from view; the potential communist convert; the fellow traveller; and finally, the dupe, or useful idiot. By all accounts, Obama was an avowed Marxist in his youth, either an open or undercover one, or maybe a potential convert. This by itself doesn't mean and could be considered a youthful dalliance; after, all we in Australia recently had a prime minister who, in her undergraduate days, was a Maoist. But the fact is that Obama has always associated with communists and left-radicals, and his appointees seem to be left-over commies and the radicals from the 1980s - the type who supported the Sandinistas and Palestinian nationalism and who made plane trips to Moscow and Cuba. What's more, communists campaigned for his election in 2008 and his re-election in 2012, and various radicals and malcontents (such as Jeremiah Wright and the bisexual former New Left terrorist Bill Ayers) form his milieu. There is his family background - his mother, Stanley Dunham, and his mentor, the hardline Afro-American Stalinist Frank Marshall Davis. One can overestimate the influence of one's family on one's politics - after all, I'm sure quite a few people on the Far Right had Far Left parents, and vice versa. But the point is, when one puts this all together, it seems too much of a coincidence. My estimate is that Obama is at the least a fellow traveller or a dupe.

The documentary raises some interesting questions. One is the extent to which communists wield power in our society and to what extent they have become the masters of contemporary social movements such as environmentalism and homosexualism. (One can easily verify for oneself Bowers' claims regarding the communist and Far Left involvement in both of these). But more than that is the general culture: how did the media, for instance, become so unquestioningly pro-multi culti and pro-immigrant? How did we get a justice system where rapists, murderers and illegal immigrants wander around free and unpunished while the likes of Emma West are locked up for something they said on a train?

Future historians will chart the degeneration of Western society from the 1960s, when left-wing radical baby boomers, with the help of "humanist" conservatives, pushed through an agenda of 'change' and 'progress' which has nearly destroyed Western civilisation, mainly through mass non-white immigration. During the 1960s, Australian communist groups were at the forefront of 'change' - campaigning the loudest for the abolition of White Australia and for indigenous rights, simply because they believed that these would be useful to the Soviet and Chinese communist cause. One has to ask: supposing that the communists in Australia had been locked up in concentration camps (like Hitler did to the German communists) or butchered (like Suharto did to hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists) - would the abolition of White Australia gone ahead? Perhaps, perhaps not. Perhaps the changes of the 1960s couldn't have been stopped that way. But move forward a few decades - it's certainly true that, had prophylactic measures been taken against British and American communists, Obama wouldn't have won election in 2008 and 2012, Emma West wouldn't have gone to jail and the British Labour Party most likely wouldn't have been able to bring in 3.8 million immigrants from 1997 to 2010.

The White Nationalists blame the West's modern ills on 'Jewish-owned MTV'; the EDL and the other anti-Islamics blame it on Islam; Bowers, on communism and lack of prayer in schools. I think Bowers - more than the White Nationalists and the anti-Islamics - is onto something. This is where we Far Rightists, neofascists, Neo-Nazis come in. We don't know much about prayer in schools but we certainly know about fighting communists.

Bowers has shown us the enemy; now it's a question of which tactics we use to defeat them.

Cultural Productions VI: A Photo Essay on 'Dallas' (2012-) and the Texas Race War

1. Introduction

I love Dallas (1978-1991), which, in my opinion, is one of the greatest American TV shows of the 1980s, if not all time. I've watched six seasons of it, and my interest was piqued by the news that a continuation of the series would be shown in 2012. I bought season one and two of the original series, just to see if I liked it, and liked it I did. I zipped through all the episodes which have been released on DVD in Australia very quickly (the show is easy to watch - always the mark of a good series) and became a Dallas fanatic. This article will be about the new series and the old one.


2. The original series

Before I go any further, I should explain - given that Dallas ended a long time ago - what the original show was about.

It concerns a family-owned oil company, Ewing Oil, which is run by two brothers - one impossibly good, the other one evil - Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) and J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) respectively. Bobby is handsome, virtuous, incorruptible, brave, but often hot-tempered and physically violent; he's also blustering and sanctimonious. His brother, J.R., is obsessed by making Ewing Oil 'the biggest of the Texas independents' (i.e., the biggest of the non-conglomerates) and uses that, like a mantra, to justify all of his bad behavior. He thinks that business can be carried out by pimping, thuggery, blackmail, bribery and fraud. He is, of course, widely disliked, and, unlike Bobby, physically cowardly.

In a way, he is an ascetic: it becomes clear that money, women, reputation, mean very little to him in comparison to his grand goal of making Ewing Oil big. This is his obsession, and he lets nothing stand in his way. He frequently comes up with grand schemes, often based on swindles, which always come unstuck in the end.

One of his endearing habits is his loose tongue. He tends to be very blunt and say outright what people don't have the courage to say (mainly because they're too polite, or afraid to hurt another person's feelings). 'So your wife has left you, Bobby? Can't say I'm unhappy - she was a loon' (which merits a punch in the jaw from Bobby).

There is a third brother, Gary (Ted Shackelford), weak-willed, unstable, itinerant, a family outcast who drifts (appropriately enough) in and out of Texas, to make guest appearances on the show: because he dislikes his own family, he never stays for long. He has fathered a child, Lucy (Charlene Tilton) by a waitress, and has left her to be raised by the Ewings. Lucy is a vertically-challenged, intellectually-challenged, over-sexed teenager:

 The Ewing family lives on a ranch, Southfork (which is guarded by thuggish ranch hands wielding rifles) and is really a patriarchal family. The head of the family, Jock Ewing, is a villainous old man, who follows the same methods as J.R. ('I taught that boy everything I know about oil'), is the owner of Ewing Oil and is a bully; he is married to the steely Miss Ellie (Barbara Bel Geddes), who is somewhat naïve about Jock's character. Jock is, on the flip side, generous to those who are loyal to him, and an entrepreneurial man with great vigour. One of the distinctive traits of the series is that the characters often are two-sided: they have good and bad sides.

Every soap opera family needs enemies: in Dallas, the enemy of the Ewing family is the Barnes family, who have been at war with the Ewings for decades. However, just like the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, there is a romance between the two feuding families. Bobby, in the first episode, marries the beautifully voluptuous Pamela Barnes (Victoria Principal):

Her father and her brother, both losers, are out to destroy the Ewings, and won't take Pamela's marriage to Bobby lying down! Pamela's brother, Cliff Barnes (played brilliantly by Ken Kercheval), is a mentally unstable, snide, self-pitying and arrogant lawyer, and becomes J.R.'s principal nemesis in the show. He is easily the most dislikeable character.

Mental pathology is, in actual fact, a recurring theme in Dallas. J.R. is a sociopath who occasionally is prone to morbid, incapacitating depression; both Pamela and her brother are bipolar manic depressives and attempt suicide on more than one occasion; J.R.'s unfortunate, long-suffering wife, Sue-Ellen, is an alcoholic with (what I diagnose as) borderline personality disorder.

Both Sue Ellen and Pamela receive psychiatric treatment a few times in the series.

Another important character is the ranch foreman, Ray Krebbs (Steve Kanaly), an uneducated country bumpkin who has the most insincere grin ever seen on television (something which immediately marks him out as untrustworthy) and has a strange resemblance to the young George W. Bush. Ray is simple, loyal, unpretentious, honest, hard-working, dependable - probably how most rural Texans see themselves.

Something I've noticed in Dallas is that all the characters drink heavily throughout the day: drinking seems to start at ten o'clock in the morning - anyone visiting the offices of Ewing Oil is immediately offered a whiskey. There are drinks for lunch (at the Cattleman's Club), and finally, the entire family gathers around the whiskey trolley in the living room for more drinking before bed. Alcoholism, though, is always lurking around the corner, and not only for Sue Ellen: Bobby, J.R., Ray and Cliff go through alcoholic episodes.

Why was Dallas such a success? The answer is: it was a good show. The casting was excellent - every actor is right for the part - and so was the production, the writing, and the rest. The scenes shot around the ranch and in the city of Dallas itself lent the show an air of verisimilitude. The back story of Dallas was quite extensive, and well-worked out (as can be seen from the first episode). One could believe that this a real, if larger than life, family.

I think that the show really did humanise the South, and Texans, as well. There wasn't any apologizing for what Texans were. In that regard, with its themes - of capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, of the self-made man, of patriarchy and loyalty - the show was right-wing and conservative, on an unconscious level. In fact, it was probably the most pro-business show in the history of television. The businessmen in this show are the go-getters, the drivers of the engine of American capitalism, and are good - despite the fact that a few of their number (such as J.R.) are bad.


3.  Multiple generations in 'Dallas' and 'Bold and the Beautiful'


I've just finished watching the new series, which started in 2012, which includes some of the old actors, but also the new, younger generation of characters, and I enjoyed it a lot. Some interesting themes: the abandonment of Generation Y children by their parents; conflict between white Americans and Hispanic immigrants; but most of all ageing.

The last - ageing - is really noticeable. It sticks out like a sore thumb, unfortunately, and throws things some off-kilter. Members of the original cast who appear on the show, who weren't spring chickens when their fictional children were born, look pretty old now, and in fact look like the grandparents, not parents, of characters in their thirties.
  
As an example of aged members of the original Dallas: here's Sue-Ellen (Linda Gray, born 1940):

 

And here's Cliff Barnes (Ken Kercheval, born 1935):

And here's J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman, 1931-2012), with his on-screen son with Sue-Ellen, John Ross Ewing (Josh Henderson, born 1981): J.R. here looks old enough to be John Ross' grandfather:

And Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy, born 1949) with his on-screen son Christopher Ewing (Jesse Metcalfe, born 1978). Bobby, here played by a 63-year-old, doesn't look too bad, but then, he was always one of the youngest people on the original show:

In actual fact, the dates all match up: John Ross Ewing first appeared, as a baby, on the original TV show in 1978, while Christopher in 1981. John Ross' parents J.R. and Sue Ellen were 47 and 38 at the time of his birth - so were old parents. Still, it just seems incongruous having such old people on the show (both J.R. and Cliff are roughly the same age as Warren Buffett, and have the same vitality - they are aged billionaires who zip around the world on jet planes, still making deals and still buying people with their money) without an intervening generation.

The American soap The Bold and the Beautiful (1987-), which is not of the same quality as Dallas, does multi-generations far better, far more realistically. Here are the 'old' members of the show, Eric and Stephanie Forrester (John McCook and Susan Flannery). They were born in 1944 and 1939 respectively, and so are roughly the same age as most of the original Dallas cast:

And here is the (now somewhat aged) 'middle' generation: Taylor Forrester, Ridge Forrester and Brooke Logan (Hunter Tylo, Ronn Moss, Kelly Hunter Lang):

And here is Ridge with his son, Thomas Forrester (Adam Gregory):

Ridge and Taylor's daughter, Steffi Forrester (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), with her grandmother:

Hope Logan (Kim Matula) with her mother, Brooke:

And finally, Liam Spencer (Scott Clifton) with his father, Bill Spencer (Don Diamont):

Both the above characters are William Spencer III and II respectively. The evil magazine publishing tycoon, William Spencer I, was this guy (Jim Storm) and was on the show about ten years ago. He had an unrequited love for grandmother Stephanie:

I think that, from looking at all the above photographs, Bold- appears to be a fresher, 'younger' show, somehow, than Dallas. Bold-, unlike the new Dallas, is not a case of old codgers and very young folks; rather, the generations are skillfully blended in. Really, this couldn't be helped, because Dallas started in 1978 - when Bobby and his wife Pamela (Victoria Principal, born 1950) were considered the 'young' couple; Bold-, on the other hand, started in 1987.

As to how important this age is: in the case of Dallas, I say, very. Larry Hagman died suddenly in 2012, midway through shooting season two. Hagman had already been sick with cancer before the new series, and although he delivers a fine performance in the new series, he is quite peripheral, perhaps owing to his age and illness (we see that J.R. starts the show in a nursing home, suffering from depression).

Despite all that, the new Dallas is a marvelously up to date show: mobile phones, the Internet, lap tops, USBs, hidden miniature cameras, DVDs and online gambling are featured prominently. J.R. struggles to adapt to the new technology at first (after coming out of the nursing home), but ends up doing wonderfully. I think the producers made a conscious choice to emphasise 21st century technology as much as possible, given how antiquated the 1980s TV series was.


4.  Clean energy, Mexicans

The original cast members tend to take a back seat in the new series, which focuses on the younger generation of the Ewing family: Christopher (Bobby's adopted son) and J.R.'s son, John Ross. Both the cousins are gullible, if not downright stupid, easily manipulated, hot-headed and impulsive. The main difference is that Christopher, being Bobby's son, is pretty, while John Ross is weaselly-looking.

In the original series, development of natural resources versus conservation and 'the ecology' (it was called 'the ecology' back then, not 'the environment') was a recurring theme. Here it comes back: but it's more a case of alternative energy versus oil. Christopher Ewing is a champion of methane gas energy extraction, whereas his cousin John Ross wants to drill the substantial oil reserves on the family ranch, Southfork. I think that the question of 'alternative energy' makes the show a little dated. America, in particular the South and the Mid-West, has gone through a big commodity boom, with the exploitation of natural gas and oil, in the 2000s, which is almost comparable to the boom of the 1970s (both had the same cause: an abnormally weak US dollar, which drove up the price of gold, oil, land and other commodities). With the recent strengthening of the US dollar, the boom might tail off (just as it has in Australia), but for the time being, oil is relevant. Alternative energy, on the other hand, is not, because it has been shown, I think, that it isn't up to the task of replacing fossil fuels. Because alternative energy hasn't been able to pay its way, the government has had to subsidise it, and as a result, levy taxes to pay for those subsidies. That, along with the fact that the interest in combatting "global warming" has waned, has taken the sheen off "clean energy". (The show does reflect this somewhat: the shortcomings of Christopher's methane energy become evident early on).

The thing is, the show needs to make the two cousins - Christopher and John Ross (who are, really, more brothers than cousins) - enemies, and so this conflict (between capitalism and environmentalism) must come into play. The producers and writers, however, needed to include another source of conflict. Both of them are competitors for the same hand - Elena Ramos (the Panamanian actress Jordana Brewster). Which is totally irrational, given that the gaunt, skeletal Mestizo actress (who probably, in my opinion, suffers from an eating disorder), is rather plain:

It's a sign of politically-correct casting that the TV producers had to include a prominent Mexican character who is, in the series, the daughter of a Mexican housemaid at the Southfork ranch. (In the old series, there were two Mexican servants working at the ranch, but these were seen and not heard - they weren't given speaking parts).

It's a shame that the producers couldn't have found a prettier Mestizo actress to play Elena, like these two, who appear in the show (Leonor Varela, a Chilean, and Leanna Pareja, a Colombian):

Then the fierce rivalry between the two cousins would have made much more sense. (On that note, the actress who plays Rebecca Sutter, Christopher's other love interest, is really lovely. She is a tall, blue-eyed Argentinean, Julie Gonzalo, who, ironically, is Latin American like the three cast members above, but not a Mestizo. I was in love with her soft, gentle, vulnerable character after a few episodes):

In the original series, most of the action took place within the state of Texas. We only saw Latin Americans a few times - e.g., in the episode when J.R. concocts a bizarre scheme to sell oil to the Castro regime in Cuba - and overall, the casting for the show was 99% white. Just about every character, no matter how minor, was played by a white American. Here, though, politically-correct casting (as I mentioned before) has caught up with Dallas, and non-white actors (Afro-Americans, Mestizos, and other unidentifiable ethnic types, are inserted at every opportunity: there are black doctors, black sheriffs, even black ranch owners, which seems somewhat incongruous even by television standards). One has to ask if there's some affirmative-action law in place for US films and TV shows, which specifies that such-and-such a quota of unemployed Afro-American and Mestizo actors have to be given jobs.

Most interestingly, it's the Mestizo and Latin American characters in the new Dallas who are the bad guys. This reflects how much the politics, culture and racial demography has changed in Texas since the original. While the show isn't anywhere near the level of Breaking Bad (2008-), which is (almost to a pathological degree) anti-Mexican and anti-Mestizo, it's up there. John Ross gets beaten up by what Sue Ellen calls a 'Latino gang' (bite your tongue, Sue Ellen - you racist!). The chief bad guy, Vicente Cano, is a Venezuelan oil baron, who is played by the rather suave, Castilian-looking (i.e., white) Carlos Bernard:

Too bad they couldn't have gotten a really horrible, Mestizo actor to play him, like Raymond Cruz, who plays the despicable Tuco Salamanca in Breaking Bad:

But then, you can't have everything.

This is a big issue in Texas, as we know that the whites there are presently undergoing demographic replacement by Mestizos from across the border. Prominent Texan "conservatives" such as Rick Perry and the Bush siblings - George Jr. and Jeb - back this, as do the liberal media. Dire predictions are made by demographers to the effect that whites will be a minority in Texas within a few decades, but the media treats this as a cause for celebration, not concern.

Because of this demographic avalanche, and because it is part of the South, Texans are right-wing, anti-Obama and anti-amnesty. The idea of secession from the Union - promulgated by Southern nationalists such as Hunter Wallace - is popular in Texas.

In an interesting plot twist, Sue Ellen, in the new series, runs for office as governor - and is modeled, to my mind, on the formidable governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer. It would be interesting to see if Sue Ellen, as a politician, becomes anti-inmigración. Probably not: my guess is that the show will keep up an anti-Mestizo racialism on an entirely subliminal level.

5.   In conclusion

Will the new Dallas turn out to be as good as the new one? There are a number of differences between the old and new, the chief one being the pace. The old series was - being a 1970s-1980s era show - tightly written, edited, directed: not one shot, and not one line, was wasted. The stories were very much bang-bang-bang. The entire plot of season one of the new series would have taken up, tops, around three to four episodes of the old one. I think that this is because, decades ago, writers, directors and producers were used to working in theatre more than television: we see this in, for example, the use of sets in those times. Acting, directing, was very structured and compressed. In comparison, today's TV shows are rather loose.

I'm not sure that the Christopher versus John Ross conflict can be made the basis of an entire series. The original show wasn't just about Bobby versus J.R., but a whole range of sub-plots (which were interwoven with the arc of that week's particular episode). On the other hand, Dallas has such a rich backstory - thirteen seasons worth! - which should really give the writers of the new series some inspiration.

The antics of this white American, Texan family are fascinating to watch.