Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Thoughts That Guide Me:
A Personal Reflection

by Keith Preston

I regard the progression of my life over the years and decades to be, first and foremost, a struggle against two things: foolishness and weakness. It has always seemed that no matter where I found myself at any particular moment, no matter the particular demographics involved, there has never been a shortage of the kinds of folks whom Nietzsche described as "untermenschen", that is, mediocrities and inferiors. This is to be expected, of course, given that to be average is to be normal and to be normal is to be mediocre. It has been said of H.L. Mencken that he "held most of mankind in sterling contempt" and this characterization would provide an apt description of my own outlook as well. In short, I am a cynic if not an outright misanthrope, a charge to which I would plead guilty but proud.

I am an individualist, but I am not so much interested in all individuals as much as a particular type of individual. Lawrence Dennis has been described as an "exponent of...the dissenters, the rebels and non-conformists". So am I. Though I am a political anarchist, most so-called anarchists strike me as mush-minded conformists who would likely be less than worthless in a real-world martial struggle with the powers that be. Perhaps what I champion is not so much the anarchist as much as the "anarch", the superior individual who, out of sheer strength of will, rises above the herd in defiance and contempt of both the sheep and their masters. The self-directed individual whom Max Stirner characterized as an "egoist", the one who chooses to be governed only by himself rather than to be governed by religion, morality, law, justice, ideals, ideologies, conformity, respectability, humanity and other false and hollow pieties. It would appear that the type of person that might be characterized as an "egoist" or "anarch" transcends boundaries of culture, ideology or race. I have far more respect for someone whose politics, cultural identity or aesthetic interests are diametrically opposed to my own, but whom I recognize as a superior individual, than I do for someone ostensibly in my own camp who is weak, foolish, cowardly, mealy-mouthed, pious or uninspiring. As Nietzsche said: "The errors of great men are still greater than the truths of lesser men".

The first bit of weakness and foolishness I went to war with was religious superstition. Some have asked me why I eventually renounced my religious upbringing. It wasn't really a matter of choice. I did not "choose" to outgrow ignorance and slavishness anymore than I "chose" to outgrow diapers and training wheels. The light simply went on in my head and that was it, or as Saint Paul ironically put it: "When I was a child I did as children do, but when I became a man I put away childish things." The truly religious have always struck me as the most pathetic and pitiable of creatures, as those who have traded away their birthright of independence and reason for the mess of pottage of superstition and fantasy. My contempt for them is limitless. I probably could have gone into the ministry. Hell, I probably could have been a televangelist. But who wants to be a shepherd of a flock of fools and mediocrities?

The next bit of foolishness I attacked was the state. I became a militant anarchist revolutionary at the age of twenty-one, or at least that's how I liked to perceive of myself at the time. In those days, I was basically an "anarchist" of the bourgeoise-reject leftoid variety, and I now consider that time to be the diapers and training wheels period of my political and intellectual development. Ultimately, there is only one political question: Who has the most power and what are they going to do with it? It was Machiavelli and his disciple, Hobbes, who were the first to boldly proclaim the true nature of politics. Profound though the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Augustine and Aquinas may be, a certain blindness accompanies the ideas of the classical thinkers, for in these we see an irrational fixation on subjective "virtue", whereby the values of the Greco-Roman ruling classes or the later Church authorities are assigned some sort of metaphysical quality, conveniently uplifting the self-interest of existent power-holders into the realm of scientific truth. But it was the geniuses of the later Renaissance period who were the first to fully expose the true nature of human political life.

It is really quite easy to understand how real-world politics actually works. A few simple ideas really summarize the whole game. Individuals are self-interested creatures. They form alliances with other individuals with similar or common interests. These alliances then go to war with other alliances representing different or conflicting sets of individual or collective interests. Clausewitz remarked that war is the continuation of politics by other means. The flipside of this is that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Indeed, we might think of "war" proper as a type of high intensity warfare with politics being a type of low intensity warfare. In all wars, there are winners and losers with the winners simply being those who acquire the greatest capacity for physical force. Upon acquiring power, any sensible group of power-holders recognizes that the first order of business is to buy the loyalty of the subjects through the provision of protection from the insecurity that accompanies chaos or disorder. Security is the primary human instinct. The ordinary human type will trade the universe for it. In this respect, the state works no differently from an extralegal protection racket. The only difference is that the state is more formalized in its structural foundations.

Once the people are pacified through the provision of order, the next step is the inculcation of the "values" (i.e., self interests) of the ruling class into the people. This is done through the creation of an ideological superstructure constructed in such a way as to depict the subjective values of the ruling class as objective "truth". This ideological superstructure is then conveyed to the people through the dissemination of propaganda through established outlets of communication and education controlled by the ruling class (schools, mass media, intermediary institutions connected to the state, etc.) Being a creature of the herd obsessed with security and identity, the average human type quickly absorbs and internalizes such propaganda, however logically flawed and even contrary to one's own rational interests it may be. Rationality is but a mere quaternary feature of the human psyche. The final phase of this process is also the most important one. A scapegoat must be identified and attacked. There must always be some nebulous or demonic force, whether inside or outside the host society (preferably both, from the perspective of the ruling class), that can be held up as the most mortal of enemies against whom the subjects are being protected by the power elites. These can be genuine social ills (like crime or poverty) or mere phantoms (like Jews, drugs or Satan), but the simple truth is that such official Enemies must be eternally attacked for the sake of the continued empowerment of the ruling class and the state. Perpetual war for perpetual peace and all of that.

It is also of the utmost importance to recognize that those who obtain the upper hand in the ongoing power struggle will almost always be the most ruthless, cunning and merciless of the competitors. The wolves will always win out over the sheep. Within this bleak framework of a perpetual war of each against all, there from time to time arises the exceedingly rare individual whom Nietzsche referred to as the "ubermensch". This is the individual of superior will, strength, mind, spirit, discipline, intelligence, intuiton, perceptiveness, shrewdness, wisdom, creativity, inventiveness, generosity and other such characteristics that set the human species a half step above the other animals. It is this individual who becomes the "anarch", the "egoist", the one who rises above the perpetual fog in which both the sheepish people and their vicious masters dwell. Such a person can come from any political camp or even be a common criminal by conventional standards, whatever those may be at any given time. It is persons such as these who carry with them the seeds of cultural and civilizational growth. For any sort of human existence to emerge beyond that of the merely animalistic, this type of individual must thrive. Otherwise, the species would be nothing more than a collection of talking apes with slightly greater mechanical abilities than those of the simian realm. Where would the species be if there had never been a Plato, Confucious, Da Vinci, Newton, Jefferson or Edison? It is the legacy of Promethean spirits such as these alone that elevates the homosapiens above the neanderthals.

The first purpose of any politics or ethics beyond the purely material or defensive must be the protection of the Promethean spirit and the cultivation of socio-political environments where these can thrive. Not because this value is "true" in a metaphsyical sense, but because it embodies the natural expression of the sovereign anarch's will to power. It is apparent enough that the political framework most conducive to the advancement of the anarch is some sort of anarchism. The anarch must be able to thrive free of the shackles of smothering powerlust of the type typically displayed by the wolves who herd the sheep. Against power we might counterpose the will to power, the aspirations of the anarch or what we might call the "wings of civilization". The story of civilization is the story of the struggle against power manifested in the will to power. It might be argued that the only true class struggle is the permanent battle between the disciples of Prometheus and the disciples of Mammon.

The third enemy I came up against was the conceited deceit of modern liberalism. Indeed, one of the reasons I eventually broke with the mainstream of the anarchist movement and went off in my own direction was the realization on my part that most of modern "anarchism" is in reality nothing more than the countercultural wing, or court jester wing, of progressive liberalism. What are the core ideas of liberalism? Egalitarianism, democratism, therapeutism, multiculturalism, materialism, legalism, universalism and humanism. Every one of these is rooted in fundamentally flawed assumptions. Yet each of these delusions is so prevalent that each of the political factions with any access to mainstream society whatsoever exhibit them. Political debate is restricted to the varying factions of liberalism, whether they be right-wing liberals (like the US Republicans), moderate liberals (like the US Democrats) or left-liberals (like the US Greens or the American academic Left). How can so-called "anarchists" expect to lead a "revolution" when they share the fundamental values of the liberal-bourgeoise elite, varying only in questions of detail or degree?

A consistent application of political anarchism, seeking as it does to achieve the reign of the sovereign anarch, requires that the greatest concentrations of political power be the first to be attacked by insurgent forces. The emerging New World Order holds as its ideological foundations a synthesis of bourgeoise-consumerism, egalitarian multiculturalism and therapeutic statism fused together into a general program of totalitarian humanism of the type presciently warned against by the anarchist Aldous Huxley. That the historic Left has either expired its historical utility or been incorporated into the Establishment is obvious enough. If the Left is dead, then a new radicalism is required. From where will opposition to this new totalitarianism come? In the East, the vanguard of the resistance comes from the remnants of the Old Order, the sectors of Islamic civilization least impacted by post-Enlightenment intellectual culture. In the West, a number of intellectual traditions form a type of linear chain leading up to the potential for a new ideological paradigm. Classical Jeffersonian application of Enlightenment radicalism, combining a healthy balance of agrarian populism and aristocratic individualism, blends nicely into the classical anarchism of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, with these in turn foreshadowing the modern critique of the state developed by the libertarian Murray Rothbard. Lastly, there is the cultural critique of modern liberalism developed by the European New Right, with its counterpositioning of particularism against imperialist monoculturalism. Perhaps the appropriate foundation for the new radicalism is a libertarian/third-positionist synthesis (where Rothbard meets Benoist) within a broader framework of Proudhonian-Bakuninist class struggle rooted in the lumpenproletariat, neo-peasantry and petite bourgeoise. No ideology or intellectual paradigm is greater than the spirit that accompanies it. A new radicalism must purge from its consciousness any residual influence of liberalism.

On this question, I can only describe those priniciples that I have found to be a useful guide for my own actions and outlook. The classical Stoic emphasis on indifference to suffering and pain and devaluation of luxury and comfort affords one the mental and emotional discipline required for a persistent commitment to martial struggle. This is obviously a far cry from the pathetic attachment to "sensitivity" exhibited by liberalism is its present ultra-degenerated form. The concept of honor found in medieval chivalry or in the Bushido warrior code of the Samurai likewise offers an inspiring counterpart to the "health and wealth" consumerism and therapeutism that has infected virtually all of the First World, its so-called "radical" elements included. The Bushido rallying cry of "Death before Dishonor", whereby an individual warrior can attain no greater honor than to battle one's enemies to the death, serves as a magnificent counterpart to the pervasive cowardice found among the inhabitants of modernity. While such ideas may serve well as a guide to individual conduct, there remains the question of what outlook best serves to inspire the masses and to energize the shock troops in the struggle against the common enemy. The "conservative revolutionary" figure Carl Schmitt regarded politics in its highest form to be two polarized opposites prepared to battle one another to the death. Such is the attitude we must seek to cultivate among those who would resist the New World Order. This is obviously the diametical opposite from the liberal pieties of "peace", "reconcilitiation", "non-violence", "universal brotherhood", "common humanity" and other abominations which can lead only to crushing defeat. As Victor Anduril so beautifully puts it:

"When a lion catches a gazelle, it exercises the natural authority of a predator over its prey, and no amount of rationalising can overcome the fact - or the consequences, in nature, that might is right. The only reason this principle is not fully active, for the animal Homo sapiens sapiens, is because he has disjoined himself from nature with the imposition of Rule. Anarchists, therefore, as those seeking to abolish this rule, and re-institute the authority of Natural Law, should be the most aware of the implications. As Francis Bacon said: “Nature cannot be commanded except by being obeyed.” The childish and rationalist ideas to be read in most Anarchist publications are no less than an attempt to moralise nature, “the lion shouldn’t kill because it isn’t right; it is an infringement of the gazelle’s liberty”. From a child this is a cute rationalisation, from a self-proclaimed revolutionary, it is quite pathetic."

But the glorification of the childish and the pathetic is the hallmark of liberalism. A century ago, anarchism was an international mass movement, comprised millions upon millions of people, that struck fear in the hearts of the ruling classes and state functionaries everywhere. In a relatively short period around the turn of the last century, anarchists assassinated the heads of state of virtually all major countries. Indeed, anarchists were to that time what the Islamic fundamentalists are to our time. It is time for anarchists to reclaim their historical legacy and heritage, and to position themselves as the perfect Western counterpart to their Islamic revolutionary brethren in the East. The classical anarchists positioned themselves as the most radical wing of the international labor movement, the preeminent struggle of their era. What is the proper orientation for anarchists in the modern world? As Anduril notes:

"The utopian ideals of Marxism have been attractive to weak Anarchists unwilling to face the real implications of having to ensure their own survival and well-being. The Marxist ideal paints the “either/or” fantasy, either there will be rules to protect those incapable of protecting themselves, or the entire globe will become one big Anarchic community with no one taking advantage of another. Such thinking is for Marxist cowards, not Bakuninist Anarchists. A “global community” will never become a reality, and it would never last if by some miracle it did. The truth is, there will always be the “other”, some body which does not accept our views and is therefore a potential enemy. Laws are not over war, war is over laws. Without the limitations of either laws or authority, the “other” will take what you have, rape your women, steal your children for slaves, and so on. That is Anarchy without the natural authority which alone maintains order. Therefore, Anarchists need to get to grips with the dynamics of Natural Law - in fact with all modern science - and only then will the positive aspects of Natural Law enable them to create the Anarchic state they dream of. As was said by the nineteenth-century American Anarchist Benjamin Tucker, editor of Liberty: “The ways of science, however devious and difficult to tread, lead to solid ground at last. Communism belongs to the Age of Faith, Anarchistic Socialism to the Age of Science...

...It is because of the Marxist utopian pipe-dreams which have been continuously injected into Anarchist thought that such a noble ideal as anarchism has not been taken seriously, since World War Two, as a viable alternative. True anarchism, purged of all alien Marxist concepts, requires a realistic recognition and acceptance of science - including Natural Law - which alone gives it the perspective of the powerful Cornerstone of Anarchic philosophy - the social nature of man...Anarchists must therefore cease all the amateurish moralising - fighting against all the concepts this society and Marxism have programmed them to oppose - and stand against those in power. Anarchists need but one state from which to fly the banner of the Noble Cause, and therefore any entity, no matter what its beliefs or doctrines, is a potential ally if it opposes those in power. “My enemy’s enemy can be my greatest ally” is a realpolitik axiom that has come last to Anarchists...

...The entire globe is presently dominated by the most powerful rule-imposer in world history. This degenerate regime will utilise every means at its disposal to maintain its totalitarian “One World Order”. That means not only conventional forces of unimaginable strength, but also blockaded or destroyed food or water supplies, chemical agents, biological serums, and finally - but assuredly - nuclear holocaust. There are hundreds of groups struggling for a piece of autonomy apart from this one-world regime, and plenty of room on the planet for each to have its share. Among all these groups - so diverse and even ideologically opposed - lies the one promise for the future, and that is their mutual desire to destroy those in power. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The state wants to be absolutely the most important beast on earth; and it is believed to be so too!”...

...How can Anarchists oppose this Beast when they already oppose every “ism” on the planet? When Marxists tried to persuade the anarcho-socialist Jack London to join their crusade against natural borders, he rejected their propaganda as irrelevant to the Cause. When the feminist Emma Goldman tried to gain Kropotkin’s support for “sexual equality”, he rejected her propaganda as irrelevant to the Cause. It was in fact the father of Italian fascism, Benito Mussolini, who translated Kropotkin’s books into Italian in 1904, and Kropotkin once wrote of Mussolini - who did not operate in Kropotkin’s sphere of activity - “I am delighted by his boldness.” When the Russian Anarchist revolutionaries took the position of hostility towards all non-Anarchist groups and ideologies, Kropotkin declared this attitude as impractical, and contended: “We cannot be against it. Our business is not to fight with them, but to bring into existing revolutionary ferment our own ideas, to widen the demands which are made.” And the International Anarchist Congress at Amsterdam in 1907, called on all revolutionaries to oppose the ruling regime in unison:

The Anarchists, the integral emancipation of humanity and the absolute liberty of the individual, are naturally the declared enemies of all armed force in the hands of the state - army, navy, or police. They urge all comrades, according to circumstances and individual temperament, to revolt and refuse to serve (either individually or collectively), to passively and actively disobey, and to join in a military strike for the destruction of all the instruments of domination.They express the hope that the people of all countries affected will reply to a declaration of war by insurrection.

...As third way Anarchists, it is our special duty to serve as a link between all these scattered elements of insurrectional potential with a single cause - to destroy those in power. The true Anarchist can therefore have but one true battle cry: Revolutionaries of the world - unite!"

Amen, brother!! Let the Battle begin!!!

Copyright 2005. Keith Preston. American Revolutionary Vanguard. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Blood and Soil
Revolutionary Nationalism as the Vanguard of Ecological Sanity

By Troy Southgate

WHILST the modern world appears to be in a state of great disarray, the perpetual relevance of Nature both as a guide and a source of inspiration continues to invite our utmost respect and admiration. Sadly, however, the vast majority of people have become alienated from their origins, detached from their racial and cultural heritage, and cut off from their roots.

Even as far back as 1833, Wiliam Cobbett had rightly announced to the world that English folk had become 'deserters from the plough'[1]. As if by magic, the smoking chimneys and windowless factories of the Industrial Revolution had arrived to force people away from the fields and into the expanding towns. Meanwhile, however, as Howard Newby suggests, even today the countryside offers its stubborn resistance to 'reassure us that everything these days is superficial and transitory; that some things remain stable, permanent and enduring'[2]. Indeed, the glory of rural life sanctions the status quo. Not the status quo of the Establishment or the bland sterility of modernism, on the contrary, the great tenacity our our forests, clifftops and dales are a lasting reminder that man can return to his ancestral sanctuary whenever the futile quest for scientific infallibility has run its inevitable course and he has finally begun to withdraw from the hedonistic negativity of the burgeoning metropolis. So what is meant by blood and soil, and why is it so vital in the shift towards a decentralised proliferation of small village communities?

The term originated in Germany during the early-1920s and was first coined by August Winnig, an ex-Social Democrat who had resigned from the centre-left SPD due to its obsession with internationalism. In 1927, the Transylvanian exile, Georg Kenstler, launched his 'Blood and Soil' magazine as a means of safeguarding the 'integral link between the tribe and the land, to be defended by blood, if necessary.'[3] For rural Germans, therefore, blood and soil became 'a code word implying the protection of a real personality. It stressed the kinship element, and the peasant's demographic role. City-dwellers did not breed - peasants did. They were the life-blood of the nation in a literal sense as well as its spiritual and cultural basis.'[4] But the very notion that a race is somehow rooted to a territory which has been drenched in the pioneering blood of its ancestors, is something that goes far beyond the terminological inventiveness of Weimar Germany. In a similar vein, it would be extremely unwise to dismiss blood and soil as a phenomenon which simply accompanied the emergence of National-Socialism, or even to suggest that twentieth-century romantics like the German Youth Movement and various nudist colonies had merely revived the medieval spirit of Aryan yeomanry for their own amusement. Not so! In fact the image of the heroic farmer and his devoted spouse extends far beyond the trappings of Teutonic legend, and blood and soil each represent inextricable components of the natural order and should not be estimated in historical terms alone. To those who aspired to such an ideal, it became a living testimony to the Nordic soul, an 'unwritten history of Europe, a history unconnected with trade, the banditry of the aristocracy, and the infinite duplicity of church and monarchy.'[5] Indeed, throughout the centuries the growth of materialism has become enshrined within a capitalist-marxian axis, leading to an inexhaustible plethora of ideological variants which come and go like empires founded upon sand. Meanwhile, of course, the self-appointed lords of the manor have forcibly extracted their financial dues from the sweating brow of many a broken and bitter serf.

Revolutionary Nationalism, on the other hand, or what in some circles is described as National-Anarchism, is more than a political ideology. It is able to recognise and understand that the relationship between a community and the land is something both immeasurable and spiritual. But, as Dr. Anna Bramwell has explained, blood and soil 'is implicit rather than explicit'[6] and, in practical terms, can often be seen today in 'European nations such as Greece and France, and several states in the United States of America, [where] farm purchase by non-nationals is either forbidden or tangled up with so many booby-traps as to be made extremely difficult. The position in the Third World is much more exclusivist and racialist.'[7] In short, to fully appreciate blood and soil one must come to terms with the fact that it is far more than just a political concept. As long as future attempts to initiate a blood and soil renaissance take this fact into account, however, the process will remain as natural and organic as possible.

Few people would doubt that Hitler's Reichsbauernfuhrer, R. Walther Darre, was primarily a political animal, but he was also intelligent enough to realise that if Germany was to retain her fine rural tradition the incoming National-Socialist government had to ensure that the existence of the peasantry was not in any way undermined. Indeed, Darre did not wish to see the vocational heritage of the country's agricultural backbone reduced to a fleeting plaything of the urban escapist or become the profitable sideline of exploitative fatcats. But Darre was an idealist, and never likely to be taken seriously by an opportunist and a politician like Hitler.

On March 6th, 1930, the National-Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) published its 'Official Party Manifesto on the Position of the NSDAP with Regard to the Farming Population and Agriculture'. This document claimed that the 'Maintenance of an efficient agricultural class, increasing in numbers as the general population increases, is a central plank in the National-Socialist platform'[8]. Furthermore, the Partly rightly acknowledged that the German peasantry was under attack from several quarters, namely 'the Jewish world money market - which really controls parliamentary democracy in Germany . . . the competition of foreign agriculturalists, who work under more favourable conditions . . . the extravagant profits made by the large wholesale middlemen, who thrust themselves in between producer and consumer . . . [and] . . . the oppressive rates the farmer has to pay for electric power and artificial manures to concerns mainly run by Jews.'[9] In place of this exploitation the NSDAP proposed that, amongst other things, land ownership be exclusively available to German citizens, that such land be made inheritable property (enabling peasants to become rooted to the soil), and that large areas be set aside for colonisation by an expanding German population. But whilst such policies were understandably attractive to ordinary peasants and back-to-the-land enthusiasts alike, when the Hitler government finally came to power in 1933 they were never put into practice. In 1940 Otto Strasser attacked the regime's Patrimonial Farm Law for the simple reason that it extended only to a portion of the peasantry and 'created three kinds of agricultural entrepreneur: peasants whose holdings were so small as to be unviable; middle and great peasants who are tenant-farmers; and great landowners who run their estates on purely capitalist lines.'[10]

Meanwhile, Walther Darre (who did not actually join the Party until 1930) had acquired a reputation as a man of great principle after resigning from his post in the East Prussian Trakhener Stud (Warm Blood Society), an animal breeding centre where he had come into direct conflict with his superiors. In 1926, Darre had writen an article condemning those who were seeking to revive plans for a colonial German empire, regarding the idea as 'inimical and destructive to the concept of a German homeland.'[11] Darre, therefore, seemed an unlikely figure for a Party which unashamedly advocated the forcible colonisation of occupied land for German settlement. Several years later, when Hitler ordered the seizure of Moravia and Bohemia from the Czechs, Darre recorded an entry in his diary claiming that, by creating an empire at the expense of her own national interests, Germany was repeating the errors made by England. Nevertheless, when Hitler had realised that Darre's immense popularity could provide him with the rural vote the NSDAP needed in order to obtain power, the latter rose to the challenge and vowed to use his new position in the government to defend the interests of his beloved peasants.

Modern ecologists would do well to emulate the honesty and integrity of men like Walther Darre. Sadly, however, unlike their National-Socialist predecessor most of them are too frightened to accept that Race has a great part to play in the restoration of the natural order. As far as Darre was concerned, the peasantry constituted 'a homogenous racial group of Nordic antecedents, who formed the racial and cultural core of the German nation.'[12] In 1929 Darre published 'The Peasantry as the Key to Understanding the Nordic Race', in which he concluded that 'kind providence laid a gift in the cradle of the Nordic race out of which grew perhaps its most significant characteristic. It is to the innermost need of the Nordic to place his life at the service of a cause and to develop inner moral principles for himself out of the necessities which determine this work'.[13]

Initially, Darre did little more tha reduce peasant interest rates to a maximum of 2% on farm loans and ensure that rural families retained their ancient right of hereditary ownership. However, once Hitler had made it perfectly clear that he had no real intention of honouring the original agricultural principles outlined in the 'Twenty-Five Points of the NSDAP', Darre realised that he had to use his time as constructively as possible in order to stave off the rising challenge of his closest rival, arch-technocrat and Hitlerian sycophant Herbert Backe. At Goslar, an ancient medieval town in the Harz Mountains, Darre established a 'peasants capital' and launched a series of measures designed to regenerate German agriculture by encouraging organic farming and replanting techniques. His 'dream was to make Goslar the centre of a new peasants' international; a green union of the northern European peoples. Here he made speeches condemning the fuhrer-princip and attacking imperial expansion. Visitors flocked to him. Organic farming enthusiasts from England welcomed Darre's plans and admired the hereditary tenure legislation. Representatives from Norwegian and Danish peasant movements joined the conferences on blood and soil.'[14] But Darre's overall strategy was even more radical, and he intended to abolish industrial society altogether and replace it with a series of purely peasant-based communities. In his view, '[c]apitalism and industry would soon wither away (a view held by many people in the Depression era) and with it the age of mass urbanisation and mechanisation. an urbanised society was incapable of survival. As it collapsed - helped by farmers blockading the cities - it would be replaced by a new society formed from a core of healthy, sound peasants'.[15] Darre realised, therefore, the extent to which cities have to rely upon extracting their sustenance from the rural periphery. He knew, in other words, that by encouraging German peasants to deprive the country's blood-sucking industrial regions of their agrarian lifesource, it was possible to hasten the self-destructive process of capitalism itself.

Needless to say, the leaders of the NSDAP were eager to claim these magnificent achievements for themselves and, by August 1937, Darre became completely disgusted with a statement made by Hermann Goering at the International Dairy Conference, during which the overweight usurper had declared that '[n]o country can withdraw today from the world economic system. No country can ever say again, we decline the world economy and are going to live and produce for ourselves alone.'[16] By April 1939, Goering's Four-Year Plan for the industrialisation of Germany in accordance with a total war economy had taken young people away from the land and into cramped munitions factories in the cities. This led to Darre attacking the Nazi regime for its 'economic imperialism, which makes one anxious for blood and soil ideals'[17]. In 1942, Darre was demoted from his ministerial position and inevitably replaced by the odious and far less dangerous Herbert Backe. From that moment on he had no doubt whatsoever that Hitler had cruelly betrayed the German peasantry. In the words of the aforementioned Dr. Bramwell: 'Hitler found Darre a useful theorist and organiser for a period of crisis, but when he kept faith with his vision he was, like many other revolutionary ideologues, discarded.'[18] More importantly, however, whilst Darre was far too modest to concede the fact, the Fuhrer had deprived Germany of her finest ecological pioneer; a man who is truly the patriarch of the modern Greens.

But Darre was not the only radical in the NSDAP. On the contrary, he was just one of many disaffected anti-capitalists who attempted to make the Party more radical by working from within. In this sense, at least, Darre surpassed most of them because the likes of 'Feder and Strasser did not see their ideas carried into effect.'[19] But, despite his agrarian radicalism, Darre never fully realised the futility of his association with the NSDAP until it was too late. On the other hand, if Darre had not been appointed Agricultural Minister in the first place he would not have been able to implement his blood and soil policies at all. This does not validate the gradualist strategy of those who continue to put their trust in the System, however, it merely demonstrates that - despite the legacy passed down to us by Darre and his closest followers - it is only possible to achieve a certain amount within the context of the existing governmental framework. Indeed, by 1942 Darre would have said the same thing himself, believing, as he did, that only a Green Revolution can sweep away the old Establishment and pave the way for a New Agrarian Order.

Darre's concern for the environment was also shared by Corneliu Codreanu and the Romanian Legionary Movement (Iron Guard), mainly due to the fact that prior to the Second World War the Romanian peasantry made up some 90% of the total population. The defiant streak of anti-urbanism which characterised the green-shirted fighters of Europe's most spiritual bastion of National Revolutionary struggle to date, is epitomised by the slogan 'up above, we will defend the life of the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below [in the towns], we will spread death and mercy.'[20] This view obviously concords with those in contemporary National-Anarchist circles and their commitment to destroy capitalism from within whilst creating a brand new order from without. Codreanu was a man who often sought release from the tortures of self-doubt by wandering into the wilderness, eagerly savouring the comfort and solace offered by the beautiful Romanian mountains. In his moving and emotional autobiography, 'For My Legionaries', Codreanu describes his self-imposed experience of solitude thus: 'It was getting dark. Not one living soul around. Only trees with vultures shrieking around the barren cliffs. I only had with me my heavy coat and a loaf of bread. I ate some bread and drank some water springing from among the rocks.'[21] Codreanu undoubtedly appreciated the spiritual realities of his ancestral homeland. Another example of the vast importance the Iron Guard attributed to the notion of blood and soil can be found in the Legion's symbolic commitment to Romania in terms of the country's physical and spiritual immortality. In 1927, twenty-seven legionaries made a solemn vow to defend their fatherland by distributing between themselves small leather sacks conatining Romanian earth. But whilst some may view this ceremony as a purely theatrical affair, as Codreanu himself rightly notes, such earth was representative of the very soul of the nation, which, in turn, means 'not only all Romanians living in the same territory, sharing the same past and the same future, the same dress, but all Romanians, alive and dead who have lived on this land from the beginning of history and will live here in the future.'[22]

In Spain, however, the concept of blood and soil was not at all shared by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera's Falange. In fact the Nationalist leader 'stringently attacked the blood and soil gut patriotism typical of Romanian and German National-Socialism, together with Romantic Nationalism and its emphasis on the pull of the land'[23]. According to Hugh Thomas, '[p]atriotism had to be anchored, not in the heart, but in the mind'[24]. But despite the worthy idealism of the Falange prior to its involvement with self-important reactionaries like General Franco in the 1936 Civil War, the Movement's attitude towards agrarian issues was woefully inadequate. Jose Antonio wanted his country to dominate the world stage and, therefore, failed to appreciate the fact that a naturally-rooted peasantry is far from 'backward' or 'anachronistic'. Unfortunately, many of his 'economic and social policies followed the modernising path of Mussolini and the aims of Mosley.'[25] On the other hand, the Spanish leader was extremely critical of those who wallowed in the contaminating decadence of city life: 'Our place is in the fresh air, under the cloudless heavens, weapons in our hands, with the stars above us. Let the others go on with their merrymaking. We outside, in tense, fervent, and certain vigilance, already feel the dawn breaking in the joy of our hearts.'[26]

But whilst capitalism is chiefly responsible for the destruction of the natural world, Marxism does not even take it into consideration. As one of the great modern pioneers of organic farming and self-sufficiency, John Seymour, has explained: 'Karl Marx, who spent most of his life in the reading room of the British Museum Library, probably came as little into contact with nature as it was possible to do and still stay alive. The result was that his philosophy ignored everything not human absolutely completely. He was aware (just) that food came from the country. He was aware that there must be some people out there somewhere who grew it. It was his object to rescue these imaginary people from what he called 'the idiocy of rural life'. What is that to the idiocy of spending all your life in the British Museum Library?'[27]. Since then, of course, the practical implementation of this individual's philosophy in Eastern Europe has proved beyond any doubt that Marxism is opposed to ecological order. One ridiculous consequence of Soviet agrarianism led to Russia - the greatest continuous wheat-growing area in the world - being forced to import its grain from abroad. If this is an example of Marxist state-planning in action, it is hardly surprising, therefore, to learn that Stalin eventually condemned millions of peasants to misery, squalor and mass starvation. The Red dictator's agricultural incompetence was soon hurriedly obscured by diverting the world's attention towards the steady industrialisation of Russia. Marxism, it seems, relies far more upon blood than soil.

Returning to the present, until those involved in ecological struggle can learn to appreciate the spiritual reality which binds man to his environment, reactionaries, liberals and leftists alike will continue to delay the replenishment of the natural order. We revolutionaries can only revitalise and reclaim the natural world from the clutches of capitalism once we have discovered that which lies within ourselves. It is vital for us to come to terms with the fact that, by springing from the very soil of which we have always been a part, we are inevitably destined to return to it at the end of our brief sojourn upon this earth. This is summed up very beautifully by Knut Hamsun, the great Norwegian storyteller who, in a poem entitled 'My Grave', wrote the following emotive words:

Oh Lord, I pray thee do not let me die In a bed with sheets and blankets piled upon And with dripping noses about me. Nay, smite me someday without warning, That headlong I fall into the forest some place Where no one will come around nosing. I well know the forest, I am its son, It will not deny my humble request To die on its cranberry bog. Thus will I give back without word of complaint My mighty cadaver to its creatures all, To the crows, the rats and the flies.[28]

So without a recognition of our inherent racial qualities and the ancestral territory that determines our nationhood, we will remain as much a threatened species as the white rhino, the giant panda and the large blue butterfly. As Europe and North America struggles to cope with the catastrophic results of inner-city habitation and suicidal race-mixing, National Revolutionaries must never forget that we humans are the natural guardians of the soil and our extinction would be possibly the greatest ecological disaster of all. This is why we must seek to re-establish ourselves in the heart of the rural countryside, so that one day we can proudly declare that, in the words of Walther Darre: 'Here is anchored the eternalness of a racial stock of unique character.'[29]

For notes, please visit http://www.rosenoire.org/articles/bloodandsoil.php

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

THE PROS AND CONS OF THE NOUVELLE DROITE

by Welf Herfurth*

I.

Recently, the New Right Australia-New Zealand blog (http://www.newrightausnz.blogspot.com/) published a lengthy criticism of Alain De Benoist's ideas by Michael O'Meara. I thought it would be opportune to write a similar piece, one which will look at the possibility of applying De Benoist's ideas to the Australian nationalist scene and the wider political spectrum in general.

Anyone who has read De Benoist books and articles will know that one of the advantages of De Benoist's work is that it is purely social political. That is, it is political philosophy - it discusses the State and how it works, or how it should work. It is not restricted to rantings against Jews, Muslims and Negroes, or other immigrant groups foreign to the Western societies. This is a refreshing change - to read a nationalist who is an intellectual first and foremost, like Evola or Yockey, and who is not simply some person writing emotive diatribes against people of foreign races.

At the centre of De Benoist's work lies the concept of the organic community. By 'organic community', I mean a community that has sprung up naturally, and developed over a long period of time, with a natural degree of cohesiveness. Each of the members feel a sense of belonging to an organic community, and the community does not contain elements that are radically different from it. The majority of the Western countries, before the mass immigration explosion of the 1970s and 1980s, could be considered organic in this sense (even if their official ideologies were liberal and hence individualist). It is this 'organicism' which has drawn accusations of racism from De Benoist's opponents, although an organic community may not be necessarily based on race - one has to think of Islam, for example (the Muslims consider themselves first and foremost Muslims in a religious sense and racial differences are overlooked as long as they are Muslims).

De Benoist's politics owes a great deal to Evola (at least in his later work), who writes at length on empire and how subject peoples exist in an autonomous relationship to the centre of an empire. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, consisted of a large number of ethnically homogenous, independent communities (including the Serbs, Czechs, Slovenes, et al.) which maintained a sense of identity and separateness despite their being the subjects of the same empire. The parts existed independently of the whole. That system - which could be described as a system of ethnic federalism - is one that De Benoist regards as ideal.

The danger to any ethnic federalism comes from two ideologies. The first is nationalism: paradoxically, De Benoist is anti-nationalist in the traditional Far Right sense. The First World War broke out when one ethnic group - the Serbs – demanded that their community constitute itself as a nation, with a sovereign state, flag, currency, army, and everything that belongs to an independent country, and the right to ethnically purge citizens from that nation's territory. The collapse of the Empire, and Woodrow Wilson's insistence on granting nationhood to those ethnic groups, hastened the swing towards nationalism in Eastern and Central Europe and the destruction of a traditionalist order.

The second danger is multiculturalism. Again, the example of South-Eastern Europe applies. After the Second World War, the various ethnic groups that made up part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire were forcibly amalgamated into an artificial entity called Yugoslavia by the communist Tito. Anyone who continued to identify themselves as Serb, Croat, Slovene, et al., was shot. And this is typical: the feeling of belonging to a long-established, organic community is so strong that only totalitarian violence can repress it. Ethnic structures and their identity are suppressed and destroyed by the might of the gun, with brutal force and/or with unnatural laws.

Again, this is one of the themes of Evola's work. Totalitarianism is the natural outcome of the decline of empires (a good example is the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon). Under totalitarianism, the parts of the whole can no longer exist in an autonomous relationship to the center, the government. Instead, the government must impose itself, by force, upon the parts. Bureaucracy and repression crushes any individuality, and wipes out any autonomy. Along the way, distinguishing characteristics of ethnic groups are removed. Everyone becomes like everyone else, and organic communities are artificially merged into one, giant inorganic and artificial community.

II.

Much of this applies to the Australian case. Non-white immigrants, upon arriving in Australia, are told that they must renounce their identity - whether it be Arab, Turks, Vietnamese, Chinese or lately the Sudanese– and 'become Australian'. This sense of 'Australianism' is rather artificial: it is certainly not based on race. The 'old' Australia, before multiculturalism and unrestricted non-white immigration, was Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celt in terms of its ethnicity. Even the immigrants from Europe, especially Eastern and Southern Europe, who came here after the Second World War, did not alter this. But now anyone can become Australian - all one needs is an Australian passport. Australians today are defined by a piece of paper that states what they are and not by ethnicity, culture or race.

The same applies, too, in Britain, where the official State ideology is that Indians and coloured immigrants are 'British' (even though they and their descendants only arrived thirty years ago) as Shakespeare and Dickens. In Germany, Germans are told to consider the Turkish communities as German as Schiller, Goethe and Bach. And if any organisation or political party like the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) refused to accept them as Germans and argue against their inclusion as Germans, they are labelled as racists, Neo-Nazis and misguided haters.

Paradoxically, however, the immigrant groups in the West refuse to 'assimilate', i.e., renounce their cultural heritage and ethnic origins. One only has to take a walk through the Vietnamese or Chinese diaspora communities in Sydney or Melbourne to see that that process of 'Australianisation' is not occurring. These communities stubbornly cling to their sense of identity; they mostly live in their own ghettoes, visit their own restaurants and shops and pray in their own churches or mosques.

And indeed, Vietnam has a great history, as does China. Both were, in their respective distant pasts, traditionalist societies. Australia, on the other hand, has never been traditionalist: it is a product of liberalism, capitalism and British colonialism. So why would anyone want to become 'Australian' and forgo being Vietnamese or Chinese? Why trade your traditional values in and assimilate for being a “Paper Australian”?

But multiculturalism is as much a danger to the immigrant communities as it is to their host populations, as the Muslims in Australia are finding out. Multiculturalism insists that peoples assimilate to an artificial, inorganic type of community. Hence the State campaign in Australia to 'educate' Muslims in 'Australian values', i.e., pro-multiculturalist, and pro-Israel, values.

III.

If one takes a nationalist approach of De Benoist's sense, one will say that Australia is a nation and that that nationhood is based, on the whole, on race, and that anyone not belonging to the Anglo-Celtic or European races should be purged. It may be desirable, to someone of this ideology, for a Balkanisation of Australia to take place, where some parts of Australia which are ethnically homogenous and white cede from the parts that are not, and purge themselves of non-white elements.

Organisations and certain individuals on the Far Right tend to speculate that a scenario like the latter will occur and dream about the coming ‘Race War’. Many of them (including the fans of The Turner Diaries) want to bring it on. And when in December 2005 the people in Cronulla stood up against the Lebanese gangs that terrorised ‘their shire’ the hopes of a full blown ‘Race War’ was high in certain groups like the web based forum “Stormfront”.

And, of course, nationalists in other parts of the Western world envisage the same scenario for their own countries. De Benoist's ideas, which are opposed to this sort of nationalism, may not appeal to too many on the Far Right.

It must be admitted that De Benoist can be accused of shilly-shallying on the immigrant question. In contrast, Guillaume Faye seems to take the standard view. The Faye position, so far as I can make out, is that the North African and Arab communities in France must be expelled and repatriated, or segregated.

Benoist, on the other hand, has no clear cut solution to offer. He, of course, regards the immigrant presence as a blight and a burden, calling immigration a 'disaster'. He recognises that the immigrants are as badly off under the existing multicultural arrangement as the host population. But he seems to think that nothing can be done, or should be done.

Faye's position has the advantage of clarity and firmness - qualities that will always appeal to the Far Right. He names the enemy (Islam), concentrates all his resources on one single enemy, and attacks. He is a philo-Semite, or at least, prefers not to acknowledge the role that the Zionists - and the ideology of the Holocaust - have played in spreading the virus of multiculturalism throughout the West. But he is not evasive like De Benoist, who counsels 'realism' in the face of the immigrant problem, which some may say is a formula for inaction.

What would be a solution which is in keeping with De Benoist's ideas? The answer is, I think, ethnic federalism, or at least the spirit of ethnic federalism. Governments in the West should give the diaspora communities of Asians, Muslims, Black, Indians, Kurds, Turks and others more autonomy, more freedom. They should be given more political power, and not have power taken away from them (which is what the white nationalist, bent on Turner Diaries-style ethnic cleansing, seeks to do). The immigrant communities tend to be self-segregating anyway. It is merely a matter, then, of granting them sovereignty and jurisdiction to make them fully independent. By that means, the system of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire can be recreated on our doorstep.

Now before I will get a barrage of e-mails from people accusing me of giving up Australia as we know it, or want to remember it, I certainly don’t agree fully with this solution. This is just one possible application of De Benoist ideologies and ideas.

IV.

Something that is unique in De Benoist's theory is his approach to democracy. To De Benoist, democracy is to be defined as the participation of the community in the running of its own affairs. (He means, of course, organic communities).

Unlike thinkers such as Evola and Yockey, De Benoist places a high value on democracy. One of his theses is that democracy is compatible with Traditionalism – that parliaments have existed, in one form or another, in traditionalist societies like, for example, in the old Greek or Roman empires. One of the drawbacks of modern liberal democracy is, so De Benoist claims, that it is not democratic enough. That is, it does not allow the community to order and rule its own life but is ruled by a political and business elite. Multiculturalism insists on amalgamating organic communities into inorganic and artificial ones, therefore denying them any meaningful democracy.

De Benoist views freedom as being something more or less the same thing as democracy. Following Aristotle, he defines freedom as the capacity to participate in one's cultural life, in the life of one's community. By participating in the day to day business of the organic community, one transcends one's own individualism - the sphere of one's private life. To De Benoist, the individual's private life, his means of making a living and the rest, is the sphere of necessity. It is only one's actions in the sphere of one's ethnic group, one's race and community that can be said to be free.

De Benoist, naturally enough, has some sympathy for communitarianism. The mainstream of communitarian thought, however, is not nationalist (in the sense of belonging to the traditional Far Right). De Benoist's ideas could be described, then, as 'nationalist' (in our sense) communitarianism.

Such a political philosophy is much more positive than the standard white nationalism/Nutzism/Far Right nationalism, which is geared towards kicking the Negroes, the Hispanics, the Muslims, ect. out of one's country. But you have to ask yourself the question what happens after that goal is achieved? Does ethnic cleansing create a homogenic racial society as some of the Far Right organisations speculate? It seems to me that the white nationalists never seem to have an answer - they think strictly in terms of the short term goals, but forget to see the long term effects of such a move.

Even a thorough-going ethnic cleansing of non-whites will not overcome social alienation. Much of the social pathologies in the West can be traced back to the individual's isolation and alienation from his community. But 'nationalist communitarianism' will give him true democracy, true freedom, i.e., a sense of belonging to his own culture. Once he feels responsibility to his own culture, he will be less inclined to engage in destructive activities against it.

It is true that white nationalism, and Far Right populism, claim to stand for roughly the same things as De Benoist. That is, they want to overcome the individual's social isolation by encouraging to feel a sense of belonging to one's race or nation. But there have been many white societies where individuals still felt that social alienation - one has to look at the all white societies of the West in the 1950s and 1960s. On top of that, the conventional Far Right ideologies seem to attract individuals who are not the most upstanding examples of their race or nation - white nationalism, bluntly, often ends up attracting white trash.

Many of the Far Right populist politicians in Europe, the USA and Australia seem to want a return to the bourgeois, halycon days of the 1950s, which were whiter, cleaner and safer, but hardly communitarian. After all, if Britain or West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s did possess a real sense of communal identity and purpose, they wouldn't have let in all the immigrants in the first place.

So it could be that De Benoist's ideas are superior to the conventional Far Right ideologies existing in present. It cannot be said that De Benoist-ism has been tried and found wanting. Perhaps 'ethnic federalism' will attract more people to the Far Right in the West - the right sort of people, too.

The unique thing about De Benoist's philosophy is that it is neither white nationalist nor multiculturalists – it stands in between. As such, it represents a third position. Certainly, the enemies of the Far Right will not be ready to deal with such a stance; the old white nationalism is very familiar to them, but De Benoist is something new.

That is another reason why he is to be recommended.


*Welf Herfurth is a political activist who lives in Sydney / Australia. He was born and raised in Germany. He can be contacted on herfurth@iinet.net.au

Friday, April 07, 2006

Leaderless Resistance

by L. R. Beam

The concept of leaderless resistance was proposed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, who was the founder of International Service of Information Incorporated, located in Baltimore, Maryland. Col. Amoss died more than 15 years ago, but during his life he was a tireless opponent of Communism, as well as a skilled intelligence officer. Col. Amoss first wrote of leaderless resistance on April 17, 1962. His theories of organization were primarily directed against the threat of eventual Communist takeover in the United States. The present writer, with the benefit of having lived many years beyond Col. Amoss, has taken his theories and expounded on them. Col. Amoss feared the Communists. This author fears the federal government. Communism now represents a threat to no one in the United States, while federal tyranny represents a threat to EVERYONE. The writer has joyfully lived long enough to see the dying breaths of Communism, but may unhappily remain long enough to see the last dying gasps of freedom in America. In the hope that, somehow, America can still produce the brave sons and daughters necessary to fight off ever-increasing persecution and oppression, this essay is offered. Frankly, it is too close to call at this point. Those who love liberty, and believe in freedom enough to fight for it, are rare today; but within the bosom of every once great nation, there remains secreted the pearls of former greatness. They are there. I have looked into their sparkling eyes; sharing a brief moment in time with them as I passed through this life. Relished their friendship, endured their pain, and they mine. We are a band of brothers native to the soil, gaining strength one from another as we have rushed headlong into battle that all the weaker, timid men say we can not win. Perhaps not... but then again, perhaps we can. It's not over till the last freedom fighter is buried or imprisoned, or the same happens to those who would destroy their liberty. Barring any cataclysmic events, the struggle will yet go on for years. The passage of time will make it clear to even the more slow among us that the government is the foremost threat to the life and liberty of the folk. The government will no doubt make today's oppressiveness look like grade school work compared to what they have planned in the future. Meanwhile, there are those of us who continue to hope that somehow the few can do what the many have not.

We are cognizant that before things get better they will certainly get worse as government shows a willingness to use ever more severe police state measures against dissidents. This changing situation makes it clear that those who oppose state repression must be prepared to alter, adapt, and modify their behavior, strategy, and tactics as circumstances warrant. Failure to consider new methods and implement them as necessary will make the government's efforts at suppression uncomplicated. It is the duty of every patriot to make the tyrant's life miserable. When one fails to do so he not only fails himself, but his people. With this in mind, current methods of resistance to tyranny employed by those who love our race, culture, and heritage must pass a litmus test of soundness. Methods must be objectively measured as to their effectiveness, as well as to whether they make the government's intention of repression more possible or more difficult. Those not working to aid our objectives must be discarded, or the government benefits from our failure to do so.

As honest men who have banded together into groups or associations of a political or religious nature are falsely labeled "domestic terrorists" or "cultists" and suppressed, it will become necessary to consider other methods of organization, or as the case may very well call for: non- organization. One should keep in mind that it is not in the government's interest to eliminate all groups. Some few must remain in order to perpetuate the smoke and mirrors for the masses that America is a "free democratic country" where dissent is allowed. Most organizations, however, that possess the potential for effective resistance will not be allowed to continue. Anyone who is so naive as to believe the most powerful government on earth will not crush any who pose a real threat to that power, should not be active, but rather at home studying political history. The question as to who is to be left alone and who is not, will be answered by how groups and individuals deal with several factors such as: avoidance of conspiracy plots, rejection of feebleminded malcontents, insistence upon quality of the participants, avoidance of all contact with the front men for the federals - the news media - and, finally, camouflage (which can be defined as the ability to blend in the public's eye the more committed groups of resistance with mainstream "kosher" associations that are generally seen as harmless). Primarily though, whether any organization is allowed to continue in the future will be a matter of how big a threat a group represents. Not a threat in terms of armed might or political ability, for there is none of either for the present, but rather, threat in terms of potentiality. It is potential the federals fear most. Whether that potential exists in an individual or group is incidental. The federals measure potential threat in terms of what might happen given a situation conducive to action on the part of a resistive organization or individual. Accurate intelligence gathering allows them to assess the potential. Showing one's hand before the bets are made is a sure way to lose.

The movement for freedom is rapidly approaching the point where, for many people, the option of belonging to a group will be non-existent. For others, group membership will be a viable option for only the immediate future. Eventually, and perhaps much sooner than most believe possible, the price paid for membership will exceed any perceived benefit. But for now, some of the groups that do exist often serve a useful purpose either for the newcomer who can be indoctrinated into the ideology of the struggle, or for generating positive propaganda to reach potential freedom fighters. It is sure that, for the most part, this struggle is rapidly becoming a matter of individual action, each of its participants making a private decision in the quietness of his heart to resist: to resist by any means necessary. It is hard to know what others will do, for no man truly knows another man's heart. It is enough to know what one himself will do. A great teacher once said "know thyself." Few men really do, but let each of us promise ourselves not to go quietly to the fate our would-be masters have planned.

The concept of leaderless resistance is nothing less than a fundamental departure in theories of organization. The orthodox scheme of organization is diagrammatically represented by the pyramid, with the mass at the bottom and the leader at the top. This fundamental of organization is to be seen not only in armies, which are, of course, the best illustration of the pyramid structure, with the mass of soldiery (the privates) at the bottom responsible to corporals; who are in turn responsible to sergeants, and so on up the entire chain of command to the generals at the top. But the same structure is seen in corporations, ladies' garden clubs, and in our political system itself. This orthodox "pyramid" scheme of organization is to be seen basically in all existing political, social, and religious structures in the world today, from the Federal government to the Roman Catholic Church. The Constitution of the United States, in the wisdom of the Founders, tried to sublimate the essential dictatorial nature pyramidal organization by dividing authority into three: executive, legislative, and judicial. But the pyramid remains essentially untouched. This scheme of organization, the pyramid, is not only useless, but extremely dangerous for the participants when it is utilized in a resistance movement against state tyranny. Especially is this so in technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure, thus revealing its chain of command. Experience has revealed over and over again that anti-state political organizations utilizing this method of command and control are easy prey for government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved. This has been seen repeatedly in the United States where pro-government infiltrators or agent provocateurs weasel their way into patriotic groups and destroy them from within. In the pyramid form of organization, an infiltrator can destroy anything which is beneath his level of infiltration, and often those above him as well. If the traitor has infiltrated at the top, then the entire organization from the top down is compromised and may be traduced at will.

An alternative to the pyramid form of organization is the cell system. In the past, many political groups (both left and right) have used the cell system to further their objectives. Two examples will suffice. During the American Revolution, "committees of correspondence" were formed throughout the Thirteen Colonies. Their purpose was to subvert the government and thereby aid the cause of independence. The "Sons of Liberty," who made a name for themselves by dumping government taxed tea into the harbor at Boston, were the action arm of the committees of correspondence. Each committee was a secret cell that operated totally independently of the other cells. Information on the government was passed from committee to committee, from colony to colony, and then acted upon on a local basis. Yet even in those bygone days of poor communication, of weeks to months for a letter to be delivered, the committees, without any central direction whatsoever, were remarkably similar in tactics employed to resist government tyranny. It was, as the first American Patriots knew, totally unnecessary for anyone to give an order for anything. Information was made available to each committee, and each committee acted as it saw fit.

A recent example of the cell system taken from the left wing of politics are the Communists. The Communists, in order to get around the obvious problems involved in pyramidal organization, developed to an art the cell system. They had numerous independent cells which operated completely isolated from one another and particularly with no knowledge of each other, but were orchestrated together by a central headquarters. For instance, during WWII, in Washington, it is known that there were at least six secret Communist cells operating at high levels in the United States government (plus all the open Communists who were protected and promoted by President Roosevelt), however, only one of the cells was rooted out and destroyed. How many more actually were operating, no one can say for sure. The Communist cells which operated in the U.S. until late 1991 under Soviet control could have at their command a leader who held a social position which appeared to be very lowly. He could be, for example, a busboy in a restaurant, but in reality a colonel or a general in the Soviet Secret Service, the KGB. Under him could be a number of cells, and a person active in one cell would almost never have knowledge of individuals who were active in other cells; in fact, the members of the other cells would be supporting that cell which was under attack and ordinarily would lend very strong support to it in many ways. This is at least part of the reason, no doubt, that whenever in the past Communists were attacked in this country, support for them sprang up in many unexpected places. The effective and efficient operation of a cell system after the Communist model is, of course, dependent upon central direction, which means impressive organization, funding from the top, and outside support, all of which the Communists had. Obviously, American patriots have none of these things at the top or anywhere else, and so an effective cell organization based upon the Soviet system of operation is impossible.

Two things become clear from the above discussion. First, that the pyramid form of organization can be penetrated quite easily and it thus is not a sound method of organization in situations where the government has the resources and desire to penetrate the structure, which is the situation in this country. Secondly, that the normal qualifications for the cell structure based upon the Red model does not exist in the U.S. for patriots. This understood, the question arises "What method is left for those resisting state tyranny?" The answer comes from Col. Amoss who proposed the "Phantom Cell" mode of organization which he described as Leaderless Resistance. A system of organization that is based upon the cell organization, but does not have any central control or direction, that is in fact almost identical to the methods used by the committees of correspondence during the American Revolution. Utilizing the Leaderless Resistance concept, all individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central head-quarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization. At first glance, such a form of organization seems unrealistic, primarily because there appears to be no organization.

The natural question thus arises as to how are the "Phantom Cells" and individuals to cooperate with each other when there is no inter-communication or central direction? The answer to this question is that participants in a program of leaderless resistance through "Phantom Cell" or individual action must know exactly what they are doing and how to do it. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information as to what is to be done. This is by no means as impractical as it appears, because it is certainly true that in any movement all persons involved have the same general outlook, are acquainted with the same philosophy, and generally react to given situations in similar ways. The previous history of the committees of correspondence during the American Revolution shows this to be true. Since the entire purpose of leaderless resistance is to defeat state tyranny (at least in so far as this essay is concerned), all members of phantom cells or individuals will tend to react to objective events in the same way through usual tactics of resistance. Organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations. No one need issue an order to anyone. Those idealists truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe, or will take their cue from others who precede them.

While it is true that much could be said against this kind of structure as a method of resistance, it must be kept in mind that leaderless resistance is a child of necessity. The alternatives to it have been shown to be unworkable or impractical. Leaderless resistance has worked before in the American Revolution, and if the truly committed put it to use themselves, it will work now. It goes almost without saying that Leaderless Resistance leads to very small or even one-man cells of resistance. Those who join organizations to play "let's pretend" or who are "groupies" will quickly be weeded out. While for those who are serious about their opposition to federal despotism, this is exactly what is desired. From the point of view of tyrants and would-be potentates in the federal bureaucracy and police agencies, nothing is more desirable than that those who oppose them be UNIFIED in their command structure, and that EVERY person who opposes them belong to a pyramid style group. Such groups and organizations are easy to kill. Especially in light of the fact that the Justice (sic) Department promised in 1987 that there would never be another group to oppose them that they did not have at least one informer in! These federal "friends of government" are ZOG or ADL intelligence agents. They gather information that can be used at the whim of a federal D.A. to prosecute. The line of battle has been drawn. Patriots are REQUIRED, therefore, to make a conscious decision to either aid the government in its illegal spying (by continuing with old methods of organization and resistance), or to make the enemy's job more difficult by implementing effective countermeasures.

Now there will, no doubt, be mentally handicapped people out there who will state emphatically in their best red, white, and blue voice, while standing at a podium with an American flag draped in the background and a lone eagle soaring in the sky above, that, "So what if the government is spying? We are not violating any laws." Such crippled thinking by any serious person is the best example that there is a need for special education classes. The person making such a statement is totally out of contact with political reality in this country, and unfit for leadership of anything more than a dog sled in the Alaskan wilderness. The old "Born on the Fourth of July" mentality that has influenced so much of the Aryan-American Patriot's thinking in the past will not save him from the government in the future. "Reeducation" for non-thinkers of this kind will take place in the federal prison system where there are no flags or eagles, but an abundance of men who were "not violating any laws." Most groups who "unify" their disparate associates into a single structure have short political lives. Therefore, those movement leaders constantly calling for unity of organization, rather than the desirable Unity of Purpose, usually fall into one of three categories:

1. They may not be sound political tacticians, but rather, just committed men who feel unity would help their cause, while not realizing that the government would greatly benefit from such efforts. The Federal objective, to imprison or destroy all who oppose them, is made easier in pyramid organizations.

2. Or, perhaps, they do not fully understand the struggle they are involved in, and that the government they oppose has declared a state of war against those fighting for faith, folk, freedom, property and constitutional liberty. Those in power will use any means to rid themselves of opposition.

3. The third class calling for unity, and let us hope this is the minority of the three, are men more desirous of the supposed power that a large organization would bestow, than of actually achieving their stated purpose.

Conversely, the LAST thing federal snoops want, if they had any choice in the matter, is a thousand different small phantom cells opposing them. It is easy to see why. Such a situation is an intelligence nightmare for a government intent upon knowing everything they possibly can about those who oppose them. The Federals, able to amass overwhelming strength of numbers, manpower, resources, intelligence gathering, and capability at any given time, need only a focal point to direct their anger [ie Waco]. A single penetration of a pyramid style organization can lead to the destruction of the whole. Whereas, leaderless resistance presents no single opportunity for the Federals to destroy a significant portion of the resistance. With the announcement of the Department of Justice (sic) that 300 FBI agents formerly assigned to watching Soviet spies in the U.S. (domestic counter-intelligence) are now to be used to "combat crime," the federal government is preparing the way for a major assault upon those persons opposed to their policies. Those dedicated to the preservation of the America of our Forefathers can expect shortly to feel the brunt of a new federal assault upon liberty. It is clear, therefore, that it is time to rethink traditional strategy and tactics when it comes to opposing state tyranny, where the rights now accepted by most as being inalienable will disappear. Let the coming night be filled with a thousand points of resistance. Like the fog which forms when conditions are right, and disappears when they are not, so must the resistance to tyranny be.