The Liberal Double-Talk & its Lexical and Legal Consequences

by Tomislav (Tom) Sunic


Language is a potent weapon for legitimizing any political system. In many instances the language in the liberal West is reminiscent of the communist language of the old Soviet Union, although liberal media and politicians use words and phrases that are less abrasive and less value loaded than words used by the old communist officials and their state-run media. In Western academe, media, and public places, a level of communication has been reached which avoids confrontational discourse and which resorts to words devoid of substantive meaning. Generally speaking, the liberal system shuns negative hyperbolas and skirts around heavy-headed qualifiers that the state-run media of the Soviet Union once used in fostering its brand of conformity and its version of political correctness. By contrast, the media in the liberal system, very much in line with its ideology of historical optimism and progress, are enamored with the overkill of morally uplifting adjectives and adverbs, often displaying words and expressions such as "free speech," "human rights," "tolerance," and "diversity." There is a wide spread assumption among modern citizens of the West that the concepts behind these flowery words must be taken as something self-evident.

There appears to be a contradiction. If free speech is something "self- evident" in liberal democracies, then the word "self-evidence" does not need to be repeated all the time; it can be uttered only once, or twice at the most. The very adjective "self-evident," so frequent in the parlance of liberal politicians may in fact hide some uncertainties and even some self-doubt on the part of those who employ it. With constant hammering of these words and expressions, particularly words such as "human rights," and "tolerance", the liberal system may be hiding something; hiding, probably, the absence of genuine free speech. To illustrate this point more clearly it may be advisable for an average citizen living in the liberal system to look at the examples of the communist rhetoric which was once saturated with similar freedom-loving terms while, in reality, there was little of freedom and even less free-speech.

Verbal Mendacity

The postmodern liberal discourse has its own arsenal of words that one can dub with the adjective "Orwellian", or better yet "double-talk", or simply call it verbal mendacity. The French use the word "wooden language" (la langue de bois) and the German "cement" or "concrete" language (Betonsprache) for depicting an arcane bureaucratic and academic lingo that never reflects political reality and whose main purpose is to lead masses to flawed conceptualisation of political reality. Modern authors, however, tend to avoid the pejorative term "liberal double-talk,” preferring instead the arcane label of "the non-cognitive language which is used for manipulative or predictive analyses." (1) Despite its softer and non abrasive version, liberal double-talk, very similar to the communist "wooden language," has a very poor conceptual universe. Similar to the communist vernacular, it is marked by pathos and attempts to avoid the concrete. On the one hand, it tends to be aggressive and judgemental towards its critics yet, on the other, it is full of eulogies, especially regarding its multiracial experiments. It resorts to metaphors which are seldom based on real historical analogies and are often taken out of historical context, notably when depicting its opponents with generic “shut-up” words such as "racists", "anti-Semites", or "fascists".

The choice of grammatical embellishers is consistent with the all-prevailing, liberal free market which, as a rule, must employ superlative adjectives for the free commerce of its goods and services. Ironically, there was some advantage of living under the communist linguistic umbrella. Behind the communist semiotics in Eastern Europe, there always loomed popular doubt which greatly helped ordinary citizens to decipher the political lie, and distinguish between friend and foe. The communist meta-language could best be described as a reflection of a make-belief system in which citizens never really believed and of which everybody, including communist party dignitaries, made fun of in private. Eventually, verbal mendacity spelled the death of communism both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

By contrast, in the liberal system, politicians and scholars, let alone the masses, still believe in every written word of the democratic discourse. (2) There seem to be far less heretics, or for that matter dissidents who dare critically examine the syntax and semantics of the liberal double-talk. Official communication in the West perfectly matches the rule of law and can, therefore, rarely trigger a violent or a negative response among citizens. Surely, the liberal system allows mass protests and public demonstrations; it allows its critics to openly voice their disapproval of some flawed foreign policy decision. Different political and infra-political groups, hostile to the liberal system, often attempt to publicly drum-up public support on behalf or against some issue - be it against American military involvement in the Middle East, or against the fraudulent behavior of a local political representative. But, as an unwritten rule, seldom can one see rallies or mass demonstrations in Australia, America, or in Europe that would challenge the substance of parliamentary democracy and liberalism, let alone discard the ceremonial language of the liberal ruling class. Staging open protests with banners "Down with liberal democracy!, or "Parliamentary democracy sucks"!, would hardly be tolerated by the system. These verbal icons represent a “no entry zone” in liberalism.

The shining examples of the double-talk in liberalism are expressions such as "political correctness", "hate speech," "diversity," "market democracy," "ethnic sensitivity training" among many, many others. It is often forgotten, though, that the coinage of these expressions is relatively recent and that their etymology remains of dubious origin. These expressions appeared in the modern liberal dictionary in the late 70s and early 80s and their architects are widely ignored. Seldom has a question been raised as to who had coined those words and given them their actual meaning. What strikes the eyes is the abstract nature of these expressions. The expression "political correctness" first appeared in the American language and had no explicit political meaning; it was, rather, a fun- related, derogatory expression designed for somebody who was not trendy, such as a person smoking cigarettes or having views considered not to be "in" or "cool." Gradually, and particularly after the fall of communism, the conceptualization of political correctness, acquired a very serious and disciplinary meaning.

Examples of political eulogy and political vilification in liberalism are often couched in sentimentalist vs. animalistic words and syllabi, respectively. When the much vaunted free press in liberalism attempts to glorify some event or some personality that fits into the canons of political rectitude, it will generally use a neutral language with sparse superlatives, with the prime intention not to subvert its readers, such as: "The democratic circles in Ukraine, who have been subject to governmental harassment, are propping up their rank and file to enable them electoral success." Such laudatory statements must be well-hidden behind neutral words. By contrast when attempting to silence critics of the system who challenge the foundation of liberal democracy, the ruling elites and their frequently bankrolled journalists will use more direct words - something in the line of old Soviet stylistics, e.g.: "With their ultranationalist agenda and hate-mongering these rowdy individuals on the street of Sydney or Quebec showed once again their parentage in the monstrosity of the Nazi legacy." Clearly, the goal is to disqualify the opponent by using an all pervasive and hyperreal word "Nazism." "A prominent American conservative author Paul Gottfried writes: "In fact, the European Left, like Canadian and Australian Left, pushes even further the trends adapted from American sources: It insists on criminalizing politically correct speech as an incitement to "fascists excess." (3)


The first conclusion one can draw is that liberalism can better fool the masses than communism. Due to torrents of meaningless idioms, such as "human rights" and "democracy" on the one hand, and "Nazism" and "fascism" on the other, the thought control and intellectual repression in liberalism functions far better. Therefore, in the liberal “soft” system, a motive for a would-be heretic to overthrow the system is virtually excluded. The liberal system is posited on historical finitude simply because there is no longer the communist competitor who could come up with its own real or surreal "freedom narrative." Thus, liberalism gives an impression of being the best system – simply because there are no other competing political narratives on the horizon.

What are the political implications of the liberal double-talk? It must be pointed out that liberal language is the reflection of the overall socio-demographic situation in the West. Over the last twenty years all Western states, including Australia, have undergone profound social and demographic changes; they have become "multicultural" systems. (multicultural being just a euphemism for a"multiracial" state). As a result of growing racial diversity the liberal elites are aware that in order to uphold social consensus and prevent the system from possible balkanization and civil war, new words and new syntax have to be invented. It was to be expected that these new words would soon find their way into modern legislations. More and more countries in the West are adopting laws that criminalize free speech and that make political communication difficult. In fact, liberalism, similar to its communist antecedents, it is an extremely fragile system. It excludes strong political beliefs by calling its critics "radicals," which, as a result, inevitably leads to political conformity and intellectual duplicity. Modern public discourse in the West is teeming with abstract and unclear Soviet-style expressions such as “ethnic sensitivity training”, "affirmative action”, "antifascism", "diversity", and “holocaust studies". In order to disqualify its critics the liberal system is resorting more and more to negative expression such as "anti-Semites", or " "neo-Nazi", etc. This is best observed in Western higher education and the media which, over the last thirty years, have transformed themselves into places of high commissariats of political correctness, having on their board diverse "committees on preventing racial perjuries", "ethnic diversity training programs", and in which foreign racial awareness courses have become mandatory for the faculty staff and employees. No longer are professors required to demonstrate extra skills in their subject matters; instead, they must parade with sentimental and self-deprecatory statements which, as a rule, must denigrate the European cultural heritage.

By constantly resorting to the generic word "Nazism" and by using the prefix "anti", the system actually shows its negative legitimacy. One can conclude that even if all anti-Semites and all fascists were to disappear, most likely the system would invent them by creating and recreating these words. These words have become symbols of absolute evil.

The third point about the liberal discourse that needs to be stressed is its constant recourse to the imagery of hyperreality. By using the referent of "diversity", diverse liberal groups and infra-political tribes prove in fact their sameness, making dispassionate observers easily bored and tired. Nowhere is this sign of verbal hyperreality more visible than in the constant verbal and visual featuring of Jewish Holocaust symbolism which, ironically, is creating the same saturation process among the audience as was once the case with communist victimhood. The rhetoric and imagery of Holocaust no longer function "as a site of annihilation but a medium of dissuasion."(4).

The Legal Trap
 
Other than as a simple part of daily jargon the expression "hate speech" does not exist in any European or American legislation. Once again the distinction needs to be made between the legal field and lexical field, as different penal codes of different Western countries are framed in a far more sophisticated language. For instance, criminal codes in continental Europe have all introduced laws that punish individuals uttering critical remarks against the founding myths of the liberal system. The best example is Germany, a country which often brags itself to be the most eloquent and most democratic Constitution on Earth. This is at least what the German ruling elites say about their judiciary, and which does not depart much from what Stalin himself said about the Soviet Constitution of 1936. The Constitution of Germany is truly superb, yet in order to get the whole idea of freedom of speech in Germany one needs to examine the country's Criminal Code and its numerous agencies that are in charge of its implementation. Thus, Article 5 of the German Constitution (The Basic Law) guarantees "freedom of speech." However, Germany's Criminal Code, Section 130, and Subsection 3, appear to be in stark contradiction to the German Basic Law. Under Section 130, of the German criminal code a German citizen, but also a non-German citizen, may be convicted, if found guilty, of breaching the law of "agitation of the people" (sedition laws). It is a similar case with Austria. It must be emphasized that there is no mention in the Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany of the Holocaust or the Nazi extermination of the Jews. But based on the context of the Criminal Code this Section can arbitrarily be applied when sentencing somebody who belittles or denies National- Socialist crimes or voices critical views of the modern historiography. Moreover a critical examination of the role of the Allies during World War may also bring some ardent historian into legal troubles.

The German language is a highly inflected language as opposed to French and English which are contextual languages and do not allow deliberate tinkering with prefixes or suffixes, or the creation of arbitrary compound words. By contrast, one can always create new words in the German language, a language often awash with a mass of neologisms. Thus, the title of the Article 130 of the German Criminal Code Volksverhetzung is a bizarre neologism and very difficult compound word which is hard to translate into English, and which on top, can be conceptualized in many opposing ways. (Popular taunting, baiting, bullying of the people, public incitement etc..). Its Subsection 3, though is stern and quite explicit and reads in English as follows:

"Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism… shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine."

If by contrast the plight of German civilians after World War II is openly discussed by a German academic or simply by some free spirit, he may run the risk of being accused of trivializing the official assumption of sole German guilt during World War II. Depending on a local legislation of some federal state in Germany an academic, although not belittling National Socialist crimes may, by inversion, fall under suspicion of "downplaying" or "trivializing" Nazi crimes - and may be fined or, worse, land in prison. Any speech or article, for instance, that may be related to events surrounding World War may have a negative anticipatory value in the eyes of the liberal inquisitors, that is to say in the eyes of the all prevailing Agency for the protection of the German Constitution (Verfassungschutz). Someone's words, as in the old Soviet system, can be easily misconstrued and interpreted as an indirect belittlement of crimes committed by National-Socialists.

Germany is a half-sovereign country still legally at war with the USA, and whose Constitution was written under the auspices of the Allies. Yet unlike other countries in the European Union, Germany has something unprecedented. Both on the state and federal levels it has that special government agency in charge of the surveillance of the Constitution. i.e., and whose sole purpose is to keep track of journalists, academics and right-wing politicians and observe the purity of their parlance and prose. The famed "Office for the Protection of the Constitution" ("Verfassungschutz"), as the German legal scholar Josef Schüsselburner writes, "is basically an internal secret service with seventeen branch agencies (one on the level of the federation and sixteen others for each constituent federal state). In the last analysis, this boils down to saying that only the internal secret service is competent to declare a person an internal enemy of the state." (5)

In terms of free speech, contemporary France is not much better. In 1990 a law was passed on the initiative of the socialist deputy Laurent Fabius and the communist deputy Jean-Claude Gayssot. That law made it a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to 40,000 euros, or one year in prison, or both, to contest the truth of any of the "crimes against humanity" with which the German National Socialist leaders were charged by the London Agreement of 1945, and which was drafted for the Nuremberg Trials. (6) Similar to the German Criminal Code Section 130, there is no reference to the Holocaust or Jews in this portion of the French legislation. But at least the wording of the French so-called Fabius-Gayssot law is more explicit than the fluid German word "Volksverhetzung." It clearly states that any Neo-Nazi activity having as a result the belittling of Nazi crimes is a criminal offence. With France and German, being the main pillars of the European Union these laws have already given extraordinary power to local judges of EU member countries when pronouncing verdicts against anti-liberal heretics.
For fear of being called confrontational or racist, or an anti-Semite, a European politician or academic is more and more forced to exercise self-censorship. The role of intellectual elites in Europe has never been a shining one. However, with the passage of these "hate laws" into the European legislations, the cultural and academic ambiance in Europe has become sterile. Aside from a few individuals, European academics and journalists, let alone politicians, must be the masters of self-censorship and self-delusion, as well as great impresarios of their own postmodern mimicry. As seen in the case of the former communist apparatchiks in Eastern Europe, they are likely to discard their ideas as soon as these cease to be trendy, or when another political double-talk becomes fashionable.

The modern politically-correct language, or liberal double-talk, is often used for separating the ignorant grass-roots masses from the upper level classes; it is the superb path to cultural and social ascension. The censorial intellectual climate in the Western media, so similar to the old Soviet propaganda, bears witness that liberal elites, at the beginning of the third millennium, are increasingly worried about the future identity of the countries in which they rule. For sure, the liberal system doesn’t yet need truncheons or police force in order to enforce its truth. It can remove rebels, heretics, or simply academics, by using smear campaigns, or accusing them of "guilt by association," and by removing them from important places of decision - be it in academia, the political arena, or the media. Once the spirit of the age changes, the high priests of this new postmodern inquisition will likely be the first to dump their current truths and replace them with other voguish "self-evident" truths. This was the case with the communist ruling class, which after the break down of communism quickly recycled itself into fervent apostles of liberalism. This will again be the case with modern liberal elites, who will not hesitate to turn into rabid racists and anti-Semites, as soon as new "self evident" truths appear on the horizon.


DR. TOMISLAV SUNIC
……………………….

This article is based on Dr. Sunic's speech at the Sydney Forum, Sydney, Australia, August 25, 2007. Dr.Tom Sunic is a former US professor in political science and author. His latest book is: Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007).
http://www.amazon.com/Homo-americanus-Child-Postmodern-Age/dp/1419659847

Notes:
1. A. James Gregor, Metascience and Politics (1971 London: Transaction, 2004), p.318.

2. Alan Charles Kors, "Thought Reform: The Orwellian Implications of Today's College Orientation," in Reasononline, (March 2000). See the link: http://reason.com/0003/fe.ak.thought.shtml

3. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005), p.13.

4. Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demons of Images (University of Sydney: The Power Inst. of Fine Arts, 1988), p.24.

5. Josef Schüsslburner, Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik (Lindenblatt Media Verlag. Künzell, 2004), p. p.233

6. See Journal officiel de la République française, 14 juillet 1990 page 8333loi n° 90-615.

THE BATTLE OF APEC

by Peter Middleton

1. Introduction: how to form your own Black Block

For some time now, we had been discussing here at the New Right blog the Freie Nationalisten, the importance of an anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, and above all, ‘social’ ideology. We decided, at the APEC summit at Sydney on the 8th of September, to put words into action. All the planning was done by word of mouth – either by phone or by face to face contact. Because of the lack of the advertisement on the Internet, neither the police nor the left-wing demonstrators at APEC were prepared for our arrival. We insisted on an all black, anarchist dress code, and the use of baseball caps, sunglasses, and masks – either bandannas or half-face masks – like the Black Bloc at Seattle in 1999. Why? We all knew, from bitter experience, that our enemies at the demonstration would use photographs and film – either their own, or the mainstream media’s – to find out who we were. The next step would be to find out addresses, phone numbers, places of employment, etc., and then make threatening phone calls to ourselves and family members, send threatening mail, and do their best to get us fired. The Black Block look, to our minds, seemed to be perfect for protecting our identities. (Indeed, mainstream anarchist literature always claimed that anarchists adopted that look to protect their identities from the State).

As well as that, the outfits, I have to say, looked menacing. They also made us look anonymous – they erased our individuality, and in a liberal society, that is a very frightening thing in itself. Finally, there was a strength in uniformity, which is why armies make all their soldiers dress the same…

Added to all this was the benefit of camouflage, pure and simple. We predicted (and we were wrong, as it turned out) that there would be a large ‘Black Bloc’ of mainstream anarchists in attendance – in particular, two groups, Mutiny and AC/DC. The handful of individual anarchists who were there at the demonstration were mistaken for us throughout the day, much to their chagrin.

The banners we designed ourselves. They contained a positive message: ‘Globalisation in Genocide’, ‘Australia free nation – or sheep station’ and ‘Power to the people – not political parties'– nothing what the traditional left would expect from us so called ‘Right- Wingers’. They were also the product of our own hard work, with members on their hands and knees working on the stencils of one banner the days before. (Six of the bandannas were sewn by a female member of our group). All the money came from our pockets: we did not receive any donations from any political party or any trade union. In general, we pushed ourselves hard, physically and mentally, in the weeks before the demo: what you get is what you invest.

2. The start of the demo

The march was scheduled to start at around 10 o'clock. We had collected all of our number - around 30 to 35 people - and walked through the Sydney CBD to the rally assembly area. We passed plenty of Socialist Alliance members, handing out propaganda and newspapers, on the way. I have to admit that, at this point, I was feeling quite cocky - a little nervous, but sure that our march would proceed peacefully, with minimal interference from the police and the communist and anarchist demonstrators. We were told, by our demo co-ordinators, that the police would see our 'Black Bloc' uniforms and at first think that we were a mainstream 'Black Bloc' anarchist group. Because the police would have briefed, beforehand, that 'Black Bloc' anarchists were one of the groups of trouble-makers at anti-globalisation demonstrations - that is, one of the groups who smashed up Starbucks windows - they would surround us, and stay very close to us, as soon as they saw us. This turned out to be the case. We arrived in the assembly area, in the midst of many other demonstrators and media, and began 'suiting up', putting on our bandannas, hoodies and sunglasses. Straight away, the police began looking at us in a hostile manner: one policeman even sneered, 'People who aren't cowards don't hide their faces'. He then went on to announce, to all the media photographers and cameramen (and possibly a few police photographers in the vicinity), 'Take photos of all these guys - these are the ones we'll arrest when the trouble starts'. Obviously, the police, at this point, believed we were violent anarchist demonstrators.

The media began closing in, pointing cameras at our (covered) faces, and firing off questions. Now, anyone under such circumstances normally feels flattered that the media are paying attention: that's human psychology. The next step is to go and shoot one's mouth off, in the hope that a soundbite will end up on the six o'clock news, where all of one's friends and relatives can see it... After all we were at the demo to represent an idea and not our personality. To paraphrase Descartes: it is not a case of 'I think, therefore I am', but 'I am on the six o'clock news tonight, therefore I am'.

But, for this demonstration, we enforced a strict 'no comment' policy. That is, we were told to say 'No comment' to all questions; and, if the media persisted, we would tell them that all the answers could be found at the New Right websites and pass them a brochure. Our demo co-ordinators upheld this rule most ruthlessly, and reprimanded any of our number who violated it.

The result was that our brochures started circulating in the crowd early. At first, we were taken by the other demonstrators to be mainstream anarchist Black Bloc; one lone Black Bloc demonstrator, waving a black flag, and not part of our group, at first came over and tried to join us. But, after the brochures were handed out, one of the communists there obtained and decided, rather slowly, that we were FRN - Fascist/Racist/Nazi. One young woman walked over, pointed to us, and chanted, 'Racist, racist, these guys are racist' and walked off. That was the first shot fired by the communists - a weak and ineffectual one, perhaps, but the first.

A round of applause went up when the trade unions marched down the road - and by trade unions, I mean the CFMEU and others. Then came the communist ‘red bloc’, with their impressive forest of red flags mounted on high poles (all what was missing was the swastika and one could have thought it was a Nazi parade, just not an organised one). I was quite taken with these flags: as a visual effect, they have the effect multiplying the number of demonstrators. I wondered, though, what the communists would do with them - the police had specified that flagpoles of a certain length (1 metre) could not be carried into a demonstration site, as they could be used as weapons.

By this point, we had attracted the full attention of the communist demonstrators. One thin, impudent little man came up mouthing obscenities, in a jeering way - obscenities of a sexual nature, specifying what he would like to do us. Another man, with spiky blonde hair, came up and asked us if we were the New Right Australia/New Zealand, and if we intended to stay dressed like the Black Block all day. When we told him yes, he shook his head, laughed and said, 'Good luck'. (I was told later, that at the end of the day, he came up and congratulated us for sticking it out). By this point, I knew that we had walked into the lion’s den: we were outnumbered, by an opponent, who would not let us march unmolested.

We were told, by our demo co-ordinators, to get onto the road and unfurl the banners. We had been given a pep talk beforehand to stay disciplined, not respond to provocation and to keep the demonstration peaceful, at all costs. The moment the police saw any sign of violence, they would throw us into a mobile holding cell, and at the least, shut down the demonstration. Given the impending communist assault, however, that discipline may have been difficult for us to maintain. It would have been easy for a communist to provoke a scuffle, which would, in turn, lead to us being thrown into the clink. We were being forced to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, while they were not.

The precariousness of our situation dawned on all the members of the group. By this point, we knew that arrest by the police, or a beating at the hands of the communists, was a real possibility. The natural human reaction to that is fear. We were starting to feel rather nervous by then. As we crossed from the footpath into the street where the march was to take place, I reached over and clasped the hand of one of the others (who, exactly, I can't remember, as all of us were masked, and almost indistinguishable); I said to him, 'This is it, brother: you stand by me and I'll stand by you'.

We crossed from the gutter to the street and unfurled the banner, taking up our positions. The large banner was rolled out at the front, the other two, smaller banners on the left and right flanks. Unknown to us, the communists had appointed their own informal ‘march security’ stewards – old men wearing reflector vest jackets with ‘security’ written on the back. One approached us straight away, and told that we as the Black Blocks weren’t allowed to march with masks, or start any violence. He went away, and when he returned, told us we had no right to be there, that we would be forbidden from marching. (He told another communist that we were affiliated with the ‘racist, fascist’ Internet forum Stormfront). A tall, intimidating communist walked up to the front of the banner and informed us coldly: ‘You no be here, man – you be gone’, and that we were not allowed to march.

It dawned on me that the communist groups had assumed ownership of the entire anti-APEC/anti-Bush demonstration: they were, in effect, masters of the ‘Stop Bush’ coalition. All the other community groups were there at the communists’ sufferance. That is, indigenous rights groups, environmentalists, trade unionists, liberal Christians and pacifists, ordinary mums, dads and concerned citizens, were only allowed to be present because the communists allowed them to be there. And, clearly, we so-called ‘Fascist racist Neo-Nazis’ were not. They would use verbal intimidation to get rid of us, and take pictures of us – plenty of them had their cameras there. They shoved, and spat, especially at the smaller members of our group, but stopped short of a real physical assault: after all, plenty of CCTV cameras were rolling, and the police were ever-present. And, of course, we were an unknown quantity. Our masks, our black clothes, made us look menacing. We were under strict orders from our co-ordinators not to respond to violence, or verbal provocation; but the communists didn’t know that.

So what were the police doing? It took them a while to realise that we were not mainstream ‘Black Bloc’, and that we were not with the communists. They concluded, then, that we were ‘Far Right’. After that, they said the same thing they always say in these ‘Far Right’ versus ‘Far Left’ situations: they told us that they could not guarantee our physical safety, so we had to leave. Our co-ordinators told the police, in turn, that we were citizens of Australia and thereby constitutionally guaranteed the right to march like anyone else at the demo. We only wanted a peaceful march, and had briefed all members not to respond to violent provocation. That did the trick: the police assented to our presence there.

The police then insisted that it was a regulation – probably a ‘special power’, especially introduced for the APEC summit – that no-one could march masked. Again the co-ordinators told the police that we had families, jobs, and that the Left would do their best to take as many photos of us as possible and work out who were. So we needed the masks to hide our identities to prevent negative repercussions in our private lives. After looking at all the cameras around our group, the media’s cameras in particular, the police officer gave his permission but warned us again that he would pull us out at the first sign of violence.

Surprisingly enough, the police were not the enemy here – they were a neutral third party. They, in all probability, thought little of both us and the communists. Their main concern was to prevent any violence and any damage to property. At the time when we left, the senior police officer present thanked us for our co-operation, our discipline and that we were not giving in on any provocations hurled at us. (One woman communist approached the police claiming, falsely, that we had hit her. The police officer informed her dryly that he watched her for a while abusing us and that she was lucky he didn’t arrest her himself).

3. The battle begins

We were in the middle of a crowd of three to five thousand people. Police snipers, visible in the skyscrapers above, had their sights trained on us. The media were pressing cameras in our faces, taking literally thousands of photos, often from only two or three feet away; one TV camerawoman got behind our banner and started filming the backs of our necks. (We joked later that at last we understood how Paris Hilton and Britney Spears must feel when being confronted by the paparazzi). Dozens of police stood around, watching. We stood there, in the same spot, moving only a little at a time, for hours. And, non-stop, the communists and the so called peace loving liberal democrats would come over, verbally abuse us, screaming obscenities, calling us all sorts of names under the sun. I would shout, whenever one of our number showed signs of becoming abusive in return, ‘Don’t respond, don’t respond – peaceful march!’.

I was told, a few weeks beforehand, that at these rallies, the communists resemble a pack of hungry wolves, or jackals, surrounding a handful of people crowded around a campfire. The jackals, in this instance, were afraid of the fire, and the human beings. But some were so driven by hunger that all fearfulness had been forgotten. So one or two of the more desperate and foolhardy jackals would approach the humans, sniff at them, bark and yap, and then return to the safety of the pack. This is exactly what happened. The ‘jackals’ approached us all day throughout the rally. They would swear, try and ‘psych’ us out by rambling on in a threatening manner, or announce that we had no permission from the rally organisers to be there. They would then return to the safety of the pack and then, incredibly, only a few metres away, set up an informal study group and discuss our ideology, who we were, and what we stood for. Often our pamphlets would be scrutinised. They did this even though we were a short distance away: because we were, for the most part, mute, they assumed we were deaf as well.

The communists were in a complete state of confusion as regards to our ideology and aims. During one ‘study group’ session, one, older communist woman pointed at the picture of Subcomandante Marcos in our brochure, and said to the other communists there, ‘No. No. No!’. (It was not always negative: in another ‘study group’, one communist woman smiled wistfully, looked at our banner and informed her fellow travellers: ‘If only we had a banner like that, and had been dressed like that, we could have gotten all that attention…’). In the end, they concluded that we were ‘Nazis’ – a term they apply to all their opponents they do not understand or do not want to understand. That was the correct communist party line, handed down by the democratic central committee…

Some really bizarre characters approached us. One old man, with a ‘dancing skeleton’ mounted on a pole, walked over and lisped: ‘Where’s your ID? Your police ID? I know you’re police!’ He became more and more hysterical, and sweaty, until even his fellow travellers realised that he was a liability, and hauled back into the crowd.

Some time later, a bearded man with a sign about Osama Bin Laden and George Bush walked over and declared: ‘You’re not anarchists! You can’t be nationalists and anarchists!’, and then, in a pleading tone, ‘I’m an anarchist, I’m an anarchist’. Indeed, he wore all black – his clothes looked at least ten years old and hadn’t been washed for nearly as long. (One of the communists snarled, ‘They can’t be real anarchists – their boots are brand new!’. I chuckled at this, because I had been telling the others beforehand that our clothes did look too clean and new – too clean and new to be mainstream ‘Black Bloc’).

I saw a good many interesting things: in fact, the entire demo was a masterclass in Australian street politics. At one point, a few metres away from my side of the banner, a communist ran into a tall, old CFMEU man, who was wearing a hard hat. They knew each other, and hated each other, on sight, apparently, and had had a long-running enmity. The union man started pushing the communist around, telling them to get out of here.

After our set up, things gradually became more and more intense. We were doing nothing but standing there, rooted to the spot, unable to march, and being approached by ‘jackals’ at every point of the line – on every side of the banners. It was as though we were a bunch of cowboys in a circle of wagons, being surrounded by Indians galloping around on horseback, shooting at us and yelling their war-cries. Things suddenly became more intense when one rather unpleasant looking communist woman, well into her fifties, came up and reprimanded us primly, shaking her head and scolding us, and then mounted the podium after the first two speakers (http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/node/51736/play), and announced, ‘There’s a bunch of people down the back who are impersonating the Black Bloc. We don’t know who they are – they may be Neo-Nazis, they may be agent provocateurs. Their banners are worth thousands of dollars… They’re police! Don’t give in! Don’t give in to provocation!’. All the communists in the street, including the ‘red bloc’ – the Socialist Alliance red-flag wavers at the front of the march – had now been made aware of us. We were in even more trouble now. Orders had come down from the line from our demo co-ordinators, passed from man to man along the chain of men manning the banners, that at the first sign of trouble, we were to abort the mission – no exceptions. We were not there to start any trouble and the co-ordinators' first priority was the safety of our group.

The odd thing was that a few of the speeches were quite good. One, in particular, by a fiery individual who remains unknown to me, sounded excellent: he inveighed against neoliberalism and liberal democracy, and the content reminded me of the essays at the New Right Australia/New Zealand blog. Quite a few of us roared in approval. He could have been a communist himself, for all we knew, but his ideas were sound. And as members of the New Right we are not slaves of one dogmatic ideology and are able to approve with people that are not ‘with us’.

Astonishingly, there were no other large groups of ‘organised’ anarchists, no Black Bloc, except for us. Mutiny and AC/DC were a no-show. There were one or two individuals alone by themselves, dressed in black, who claimed to be anarchists (perhaps individualist anarchists, of the Max Stirner type?). But there was no anarchist group: I was surprised that the mainstream anarchists, with all their belief in community, solidarity and collective action, could not organise enough of their members for a decent presence at a rally.

The scene there was full of political dilettantes. One young, very short young man, in a black jumpsuit-type outfit, came up, grinned and said, ‘I am an anarchist’, and then, that question: ‘How can you be nationalists and anarchists?’. I was in no mood for his taunts. One of our number was passing by my sector of the line with a camera. I asked him, ‘Film him!’ and pointed at the young man. After having the camera shoved in his face, he stuttered, ‘Are you filming me?’. I nodded yes. He mumbled something… I relented, and told one of my comrades to hand the young man a pamphlet. He took it with trembling hands and walked off.

After the speeches had finished, the march advanced on to Hyde Park. But we were pinned. A group of around five protestors had set up a purple banner a metre in front of us, with the intention of blocking us. They were lead by a tall, rather plain and thin-lipped young woman, who had previously been handing out Socialist Alliance literature, and had been annoyed that the media had been photographing and filming us non-stop. ‘That’s right!’, she shrieked sarcastically, ‘Film them! That’s where the politics is! Don’t film this!’, waving a SA pamphlet. The communists behind the purple banner began chanting a ‘stamp out racism now’ chant, against us. (I was curious, myself, as to what was written on the front of the banner – but none of us ever got to look at the front, only the back). One of our number responded to this with the chant: ‘Nazis out! Nazis out! Nazis out!’, pointing at them. Then all of us joined in. The reaction of the communists was remarkable: they literally staggered backwards in surprise. It was the first time that they had been called ‘Nazis’ in their lives.

But they had succeeded in blocking our progress. All was not well for them, however. Another person from the crowd made his way and began screaming at them, accusing them of racism. They squabbled for a while. Then a senior police officer walked over to the purple banner communists and asked them, ‘Are you moving or what?’. They argued with him, and then packed up their banner and rejoined the rest of the march.

We advanced – around 20 metres. And then, because of the jackals, we halted. By this time, the march down to Hyde Park had paused: the marchers were sitting down, listening to speeches, at the end of the street. Policemen stood in our front, at the rear and on the right flank. The jackals stood a safe distance away, and the pressure relieved somewhat.

4. Towards the end

Then a bizarre thing happened – something which goes to show that you can never plan for everything. A crazy but entirely benign old Greek man, waving two flags – one Australian, one Greek – bounded over, and began screaming gibberish. He started with a rendition of the Australian folk ballad, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and then launched into a mad stream of consciousness ramble about Gough Whitlam, Vietnam, how he loved Australia… He told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to go to Long Bay jail! There’s coffee there, ice cream, TV, a nice bed – what more could you want?’. One of our number bawled out, ‘You’re speaking from experience?’. We laughed. Not deterred, he walked over straight to the front banner, leaned over it and shouted at the police and the communists. He sounded so crazy that even one of the stone-faced policemen to the front of us cracked a smile.

What was the reaction of the general public to our presence? One of the human rights observers came up to each and every one of us and presented with a free legal aid hotline number business card. We thanked him sincerely. A communist woman stopped him and told him, ‘Don’t give those cards to the Nazis’. He shrugged, told her, ‘They have as much right to demonstrate as you do’, and walked off.

One of our demo co-ordinators was approached by a woman from the crowd who told him, ‘Good on you’, and handed him a $50 note. Others came up and offered us their support: they told us that not all the anti-globalist demonstrators in attendance were communists - that quite a few were from other political spectrums as well. The communists didn’t believe in the cause, they had hijacked the event and put it in the service of their ideology. They, the non-communists anti-globalists, wanted to march with us, but were afraid that they and their families would be attacked.

Ironically, from a corner, I saw a man lurking by the newsstand, wearing a cap and sunglasses, watching us. He was a Sydney based activist who I had tried to convince a few weeks before to join us all at the rally. He refused, and made his excuses. Now he had turned up – to watch from a safe distance. Near the end of our demonstration, he walked up, and said, ‘Hey fellas, how are you? How did it go?’. Our reply to him was not fit to print here.

The truth was that we were desperately short of men at the demo: we had expected at least ten more. Instead, those ten had pulled out at the last minute. And many other activists we had invited had refused to come – even though we had offered to drive them. Some of these activists claimed to be tough men, telling us stories of how good they were in fights, how brave they were, and showing us all the clever punches and kicks they had used on people. But now, when it came to the punch, they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, their place at the barricades – and our banners were a barricade – had been taken by some women, teenage boys who had never been to a demo before, and elderly people aged around 70. The communists knew, despite our disguises, who the women were in the group, and picked on them mercilessly. These women found it hard going, more hard going than the males who were there, and should not have been at the front line. In an ideal situation we would not have put them there. But we did not have enough men and these women took their place without hesitation and a courage that had to be admired. And they knew that all of the men in the group would defend them and all the others who were not able to defend themselves.

All of us there were anxious: our hearts were beating, our stomachs churning, our guts twisting, our shirts soaked in sweat. Anyone who was there on that day of September the 8th and who says they were not anxious, is lying. But: no-one wavered; no-one turned on their heels and ran home. Not all of us there were rough types, used to the threat of physical confrontation: some of us were highly-educated, intellectual types who were physically slight. But we stood our ground. I learned the lesson that fear is not shameful: it is giving into fear, running away, and leaving your comrades in the lurch, which is.

From the start, my field of consciousness had been restricted: the events had been so intense that I was only aware of myself, the comrade to the left of me at my place on the banner, and the comrade to the right. The co-ordinators were the ones who kept the group together, spoke encouragement and rushed to potential hot spots to stop any trouble. They made sure that everybody had enough water and when one of us needed a rest they made sure they got it. In all these sea of hate they were the ones who keep us calm and made us feel safe.

But now I heard a noise from the rear. I looked around, and saw the water-cannon – the legendary APEC water-cannon, which had been so hyped in the media weeks beforehand – had pulled up; so had a van which disgorged black-suited SWAT types. I also heard the sound of attack dogs yapping; meanwhile, a police helicopter flew menacingly close. One communist, watching, crowed to the other: ‘Their anarchist strategy has backfired!’. Evidently, he believed that the water-cannoners were there to deal with us.

The police to the front of us looked to the rear, equally surprised as I was. This gave me encouragement: surely the police in our rear wouldn’t water-cannon their own? Word got around our group, from our demo co-ordinators: a scuffle had developed in the crowd at the head of the march, and the water-cannon crew had driven up this direction to be on standby.

Then a senior police office walked up and said to one of the co-ordinators: ‘Your part in the march is over: masks off, banners down’. After analysing the situation and thinking about what we had achieved the co-ordinator told us to get ready in 2 minutes and move out in a disciplined and organised group. We walked away, and folded up our banners ceremoniously – again with the cameras being jammed in our faces. Word got around again, from the demo co-ordinators, as to why we were leaving. The senior officer had told us that he had received intelligence that the communists, ahead in the march, were arranging an ambush for us. So he felt it best to avoid a confrontation which would result in violence, and for us to leave.

We walked, at a very brisk pace, in an elongated formation away from the march, past the police and the cameras, and into what seemed another world: the world of everyday Sydney, away from APEC. I was flooded with feelings of relief: no arrests, no assaults, no nothing. Could it have all been that easy?

I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, two communist men, in their fifties, walking alongside us. I wondered, idly, how far they would follow us– our rendezvous point was quite a distance away. I expected them to lose heart by then.

Suddenly, the train of ‘Black Blockers’ came to a halt. We stood there, as a group, as one of us announced, ‘We’re being followed’ and pointed to the two men. At that moment, I saw that all the blood drained from their faces: it had occurred to them that they two were now alone with around 30 men and women who they had been abusing for hours, and now they had no police standing by – nothing. They thought we were going to do a Franco or a Pinochet on them. Then one of the co-ordinators announced: ‘Split up’. We split up, and walked off in groups of two, three or four.

With three other comrades, I walked into a shopping mall. We caught our breaths, changed into our ‘civilian’ clothes, and made our way back to the rendezvous point. During this time, we relaxed: chatting, eating snacks, smoking. The first SMS messages started coming in, from friends who were following events on the news: it was reported at the site nine-msn.com, for instance, that ‘our leader’, whoever he was, had been arrested. That amused us no end.

Suddenly, a blonde, curly-haired man appeared, sat down near us, and got out his phone. One of our group said, ‘He’s a commie – I saw him at the march’. We concluded, at once, that the communist was calling for his comrades, and telling us where we were. Our co-ordinators ordered us to pack up and move on, straight away, which we did. The last thing we wanted to end the day in a street brawl with some communists that wanted to brag to their comrades that they beat some ‘Nazis’ so they could safe some face. Eventually we arrived safely home.

The battle of APEC was over.

5. Conclusions

We were tremendously pleased, afterwards, that no arrests had occurred and that none of us had been physically assaulted. We had avoided identification, too.

The most common response among our fellow activists was, ‘I wish I could have been there – I would have stood by you’. Well, they were offered every opportunity – cars to be driven in, places to stay, but they refused. I was told weeks beforehand, by one person who jabbed his finger in my chest to prove his point, that no-one in the general public would approve of the ‘Black Bloc’ look, that he himself was a working-class man and knew what other working-class thought. So his place at the march was taken by teenagers, the elderly and women.

As for the communists: we received hate mail in the e-mail accounts listed on the pamphlet. They also made outraged comments on the communist forums. Here is a sample from RevLeft.com:

SpikeyRed writes:
I was there with the Socialist party and saw them too!
We automatically got talking about who they were and where they were from, becuase, they had about $4000 worth of banners (estimated off the cost our our own similar sort of banner) and they were all wearing brand new shiny black boots! Not cheap at all! So they have some major financial backing from someone. We thought some of them might of been police provacteurs or have had some kind of high level government or corporate sponsoring. Also discussed was the possibility of American Fash sponsorship.
We got a few copies of their brochure, and those fuckers had the audacity to use IWW cartoons including the wildcat strike symbols. They also used a statement from the Zappatista's that was taken out of context, and two picture of Marcos, one where he was waving to the people in a way that these fuckers were able to stretch it so he looked like he was giving the Sig Heil salute.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that their brochures where just that, expensive, glossy nicely folded brochures, not printed and photocopies paper like everyone else.
Very suspicious.
Word is alot were up from Melbourne, so the Melbourne reds and (real) blacks will be watching...
Spartan writes:
we have got to watch out though as groups like the national anarchists and national bolsheviks are successfully bridging the gap between nationalism and anti capitalism which confuses many young anti capitalists. thus they can attract quite a bit of support unless of course we strangle this movement in its cradle.

GuerillaE writes:
These guys most likely have backing, as mentioned before, because their set up and their resources (the speed of it alone) is a bit much for just a backyard nazi group.
Their anarchist idealogy is most likely a trick to get more members onto their side, we all know how the nationalists play these 'snag em while they're angsty' games.

[end]

And we received plenty of new enquiries from members of the public, and donations. The New Right websites are doing more traffic than they have before. And all from one demo…

6. The way forward

The day of September the 8th drove home some hard political truths to me. Who were the ones stopping us from marching? The police? The Liberal Party? The Labor Party? The Greens? ASIO or any of the other intelligence services? The anarchists (they couldn’t get out of bed in time)? The Antifa (they were nowhere in sight)? The Muslims? No: it was the communists. They constitute a massive extra-parliamentary opposition, which is unelected, and which prevents anyone from using the liberal rights of freedom of speech and assembly, which we are all supposed to have, through the use of physical and psychological intimidation.

These are standard communist tactics. One only has to look at two recent examples. After Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, he was besieged – literally – whenever he spoke in public. Student communists, led by the likes of then student communist activist Jack Straw, used all the tactics mentioned here to prevent him from speaking and to intimidate members of the audience. Powell’s speeches at the time take a rather dark, anti-student tone, speaking of a mob rule which is invading British political life… More recently there was the case of Pauline Hanson in Australia. A friend of mine told me that Hanson had scheduled a meeting at a hall which had been booked for the purpose. But the communists were everywhere: they had even climbed up on the roof and were drumming on it. The meeting was cancelled – either because the owner was afraid of bad publicity, or property damage, or both. I asked my friend, who was there, if Hanson had any substantial security. My friend shrugged and said no. And that is typical: liberal democratic parliamentarians like Hanson and Powell were not used to the communist game. They did not understand the concept of an unelected parliamentary opposition which was not interested in the gentlemanly, civil debate of parliament and academic seminars. This unelected parliamentary opposition believed in one thing: force. What’s more, the professed moral superiority of the communists justified any amount of intimidation…

At one point in the rally at APEC, a woman approached one of my comrades and asked for a pamphlet. He gave her one. ‘Give me another’, she said. He gave her another. ‘Give me a third’, she said. After he had given her three pamphlets, she threw them at his feet. (Luckily, we had foreseen this contingency, and had printed up over a thousand). Now, such conduct is unacceptable in any form of life – so is shouting, spitting, threatening, especially so to women. But communists do such things in a state of high moral dudgeon.

In this connection, I was surprised by the calibre of the communists I saw on that day: they were not average people; often, they seemed freakish, socially abnormal types. Thinking it over, I was inclined to classify communism as a refuge for social outcasts – or perhaps the political equivalent of a lunatic asylum. But mad people can be dangerous.

Which is not to say that the communists were physically intimidating types: many of the communist men were soft and effeminate, lisping, ‘Nazith, you guyth are all Nazith… That’th a Nazi thymbol on your banner’. I asked myself, whatever happened to the standards of Australian Leftism? Where were the communists who ate glass for breakfast, the thugs who beat up Labor leader Arthur Calwell, for example?

No: the communists were a threat because of their numbers – once we had the numbers on our side, we would win. And this gets to the heart of the matter. Okay, some nationalists are divided on certain points: should nationalism be anti-Islamist or anti-Zionist? Should we have a movement or a party? But, in the real world, these concerns are irrelevant so long as the major problem is not dealt with. I say to the party-political party types: your party will need to do a march at some time – when, where and how will you march when communists are blocking you, physically, in the street? How are we going to hold meetings, when communists are interfering with them and putting pressure on the hall owner to shut them down? How are you going to hold fund-raising dinners? How are you going to keep a political party office open when it gets the windows smashed in, or worse, firebombed? (The communists will not attack the office of the local Labor or Liberal MP – they will attack yours). And it will all be justified in the name of ‘smashing fascism’. (One of the comrades at the march complained to me afterwards, ‘Why do they call me a Neo-Nazi? I’m not a Neo-Nazi!’. I told him, ‘That’s what they’ll always call you – you had better get used to it).

I would like to see marches by nationalists, and I would like to attend gentlemanly seminars by nationalists, and gentlemanly debates between opposing nationalist factions. But, in order to hear Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist debate their respective points of view, we would have to smuggle them into Australia like rats. We have to do that already with visiting nationalists from overseas, lest they suffer the fate of de Benoist, who once had his glasses broken by an Antifa on a trip to Canada.

The bottom line is: at some point, nationalists will have to get out from behind the Internet keyboard and connect with the community. But how can they get their ideas across to the community when the communists are blocking them?

When I turned on the TV news after the APEC summit, I saw the leaders of the Stop Bush campaign – many, if not all, card-carrying members of communist parties who tried to crush us – hobnobbing with mainstream liberal democratic politicians and having their soundbites quoted respectfully by the mainstream media. They were expressing their outrage at the police treatment of some of the people at the rally, and demanding their free and unfettered right to freedom of expression, free of coercion. They talked about how their right to demonstrate was trampled on and that excessive force was used by the authorities.

I will leave the reader to draw his own conclusions on their moral posturing.

So how do we move forward? Well, we have to have more of the same as we had at the APEC demo: except we need more people. If half the macho bigmouths of nationalism, half of the activists we had begged to come weeks before the rally, had shown up, our numbers would have been greater than what they were. We could have physically intimidated the communist enemy, simply by our presence, and without breaking the law (we at New Right do not endorse anyone breaking the law). Think of what a difference a hundred nationalist men in balaclavas, guarding a One Nation meeting hall in 1997, would have made. The same goes for Powell in 1968… Certainly, men dressed like that may look menacing, and may alienate some sections of the general public. But we are not playing a civilised game here. After the APEC demo, I was reminded of an old Oswald Mosley post-war interview. The interviewer harangued him for the ‘thuggish’ tactics of the British Union of Fascists in the pre-war era. Mosley replied simply, ‘We adopted those tactics in response to those of the Left’. Before APEC, I didn’t understand what Mosley meant; after APEC, I do. (And keep in mind that the communists of the 1930s were much more violent and forceful than those of today).

A hundred, two hundred, NA activists men and women at APEC would have lead to the complete paralysis and demoralisation of the communist forces. We would have been able to appoint our own ‘March security’ men and decide who can, and who cannot, attend the march. We could approach the communist ‘red bloc’ and say, ‘Commies, hey? Tsk, tsk, tsk… You no march here, man. You be gone’.

And why can’t a ‘Stop Bush’ spokesman be a nationalist? Why does he have to be a communist, at each and every one of these events – ‘Stop Bush’, ‘Stop the war in Iraq/Iran/Lebanon’, ‘Stop globalisation’, ‘Stop poverty’…

Instead of a sea of red flags, we could have a sea of black – National-Anarchist – flags. It is possible: we only need more numbers, and more effort. But many nationalists are too stuck in the mud, ideologically, and too afraid of mixing with other nationalists, and not to mention the community (at rallies and other public events) to do it. A European statesman once remarked that pacifism was a fallacious philosophy because everything worth having had to be fought for. We nationalists can have the freedom to express our ideas to the community, and to debate positions among ourselves and with the mainstream public, only by fighting for that freedom. We have the numbers – we have enough men and women around Australia – but what we need is the will. The battle of APEC shows that.

The battle of APEC might be over, but others will follow.............

NEW RIGHT AUSTRALIA MANIFESTO

1. Introduction

This press release has been written with a view to answering the various queries about New Right Australia/New Zealand, its beliefs, organisation, goals, and so forth. I will be going over some of the core beliefs of New Right, and its relation to other Western nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere: the Nouvelle Droit on the Continent, National-Anarchism, Radical Traditionalism and the Freie Nationalisten/Freie Kameradschaften in Germany. As well as that, I will be explaining the pertinence of New Right in the anti-globalist/anti-capitalist struggle, as manifested in the APEC counter-demonstrations, the struggle against US imperialism and the quest for social justice and a true socialism in the post-communist, post-Cold War era. This will hopefully answer a few of the questions from those on either side of the mainstream political Left-Right divide in Australia.

2. The Nouvelle Droit

The 'Nouvelle Droit' was a label applied by the French media to a grouping of Continental intellectuals in 1979. The 'leader' of the group (if there is a leader) is the French intellectual Alain de Benoist; other prominent members include Robert Steuckers, Armin Mohler, Tomislav Sunic, Charles Champetier, and Michael O'Meara. The only complete collection of essays and manifestoes of the Nouvelle Droit on the Internet is at http://foster.20megsfree.com/index_en.htm . Unfortunately, the phrase 'Nouvelle Droit' translates into English as New Right; and, as many readers know, the term New Right in the English-speaking world refers to the ideology of free-market conservatism of Hayek, Friedman, Mises and others, which reached its zenith in the 1980s. The confusion between the two 'New Rights' is unfortunate, especially so because the two movements are, by definition, opposed to one another. To avoid confusion, for the remainder of the essay, I will refer to de Benoist's 'Nouvelle Droit' as the European New Right, and the free-market New Right as the Anglo New Right.
The European New Right is a collection of ideas; it is not a party, and not even a mass movement. There is no copyright on the name, so to speak. As well as that, it is not restricted, as a tendency, to the Continent. For these reasons, Troy Southgate, the musician and founder of National Anarchism in Britain, organised a series of European New Right conferences in Britain, starting in 2005. Some of the speakers at these conferences are affiliated with the New Right on the Continent; others are intellectuals who may be of interest to activists in the United Kingdom. Mr Southgate also moderates a popular Yahoo mailing group, New-Right-Online, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/new-right-online/ . In 2005, some activists decided to found an informal European New Right grouping in Australia, called New Right Australia/New Zealand. This group started off as a purely intellectual one, but, at this point in time, is branching out into a street-based activist one as well - which means, probably, that the group is exceeding the parameters of the term 'New Right'. And this is where National-Anarchism comes into play: as will be explained later, National-Anarchism represents the political embodiment of the European New Right - it is the political wing. The ideas, in New Right Australia/New Zealand, are the same as the European New Right; but individual activists in Australia want to apply them in the real world of practical, street-based politics.

So what are the ideas of the European New Right? The main theme of New Right thought can be summed as decentralised, libertarian communitarianism. The European New Right champions the rights of small, ethnically-homogenous communities against governments which want to break them, by force, or incorporate them into a larger 'nation' which is an artificial construct. The prime example of the latter is Tito's communist Yugoslavia, which sought to remove the unique ethnic characteristics of the homogenous Serb, Croat, Slovenian and Bosnian communities and merge them into the artificial entity of 'Yugoslavia', where there are no natural ethnic differences, only the 'working classes' who occupy the same land. The European New Right's primary foe is a state-imposed multiculturalism which ends up wiping out the differences between peoples; and capitalist globalisation which ends up doing the same thing, replacing Islamic Man, or Serbian Man, or Vietnamese man, with faceless Starbucks Man.

The homogeneity the New Right speaks of is not necessarily racial: after all, Islamic communities, whether they are in the Middle East or Sydney, are homogenous, but not always racially so: there are African Muslims, Arab Muslims, Muslims from the Sub-Continent, Muslims from Iran and Afghanistan, Muslims from Turkey. Likewise, in Britain, there are the Welsh, the Scots and the English. All of these ethnic identities are formed gradually and naturally, over time: they happened by themselves, and were not imposed, by force and from the top-down. One of the central themes of European New Right thought is that ethnically-homogenous communities have a certain 'glue' which attracts their fellow members to one another and holds them together as a group. This 'glue' tends to persist, despite the statist attempts of the Titoes and other multiculturalists to eradicate it, to wipe it out. Such efforts - to impose multiculturalism from the top down - always meet with resistance: which is why Tito, for instance, had to kill 200,000 Serb, Croat, Slovene, and Bosnian nationalists after the war in order to bring communist, multiculturalist Yugoslavia into being. And, just as in Yugoslavia, the Western multiculturalist States will eventually need to resort to more and more force, more and more State repression, in order to coerce the Welsh, Scots and English, for instance, into renouncing their unique ethnic identity. Britain, in the last ten years, has seen immigration - more immigration than at any other time in its history - of Kurds, Africans, Poles, Arabs; at the same time, the British government is desperately trying to persuade the indigenous British ethnic groups, and the immigrants themselves, that they are all 'British' as Shakespeare, Dickens and Queen Elizabeth. Because the British government, like Tito's, sees any expression of unique ethnic identity in the face of multiculturalism as a crime which ought to be punished, eventually it will use state-based coercion.

At bottom, the debate gets down to two distinct notions of equality. The European New Right believes in an equality that exists between members of an ethnically-homogenous community - say, Islam - which goes no further than that, i.e., the New Right is not suggesting that all members of that community are alike in every way, merely that they share the same property of being Muslim. The multi-cultists, on the other hand, believe in absolute equality - the equality of faceless machines working, under capitalism, to produce consumer goods. The member of the global capitalist community is equal to every other member in that both are consumers of the same capitalist goods: Starbucks coffee, Nike shoes, McDonald's junk food. The sight of Global Man in our cities - sipping on his slurpee from Hungry Jack's, wearing his Nike's, and listening to the same corporate punk bands on his I-Pod, on his way to see the latest trash Hollywood multiplex blockbuster - is a recurring one. The point is, Global Man could either be Australian, for instance, in an Australian city, or Vietnamese, or Arab, or African - he has no roots in anything and owes no allegiance to anyone. In the end, the globalisation of peoples means the death of peoples - their spiritual and cultural deaths, even if, in the long run, globalisation makes people more 'economically prosperous'.

2. National-Anarchism

So where does National-Anarchism fit in? National-Anarchism could be described as European New Right-ism without the theory: that is, it is the European New Right in practice, not theory. Traditionally, anarchism has meant the abolition of the State, and property: workers are to control the modes of production, without the intermediary of management, and own them. They are to expropriate, from their capitalist owners, the sources of wealth, of profits, interest and rent, and run businesses, farms, etc., along democratic lines. The State, in this scenario, is to wither away, and as such, the State only exists today to uphold the interests of the capitalist ruling class, to enforce their property rights and maintain a society and an economic system run along inegalitarian lines. Perhaps this is a highly anarcho-syndicalist interpretation of anarchism given here; nevertheless it is one many anarchists would agree with.

National-Anarchism has little in common with this form of anarchism: it has more in common with the later thought of the anarchist Murray Bookchin, who, in the course of his career, abandoned anarchism proper for a philosophy he called 'communalism'. In his 1992 essay, The ghost of anarcho-syndicalism, Bookchin wrote that:

To its credit, Spanish anarchism- - like anarchist movements elsewhere- -never completely focused on the factory as the locus classicus of libertarian practice. Quite often throughout the last century and well into the civil war period, villages, towns, and the neighbourhoods of large cities, as well popular cultural centers, were major loci of anarchist activities. In these essentially civic arenas, women no less than men, peasants no less than workers, the elderly no less than the young, intellectuals no less than workers déclassé elements no less than definable members of oppressed classes- - in short, a wide range of people concerned not only with their own oppressions but with various ideals of social justice and communal freedom--attracted anarchist propagandists and proved to be highly receptive to libertarian ideas. The social concerns of these people often transcended strictly proletarian ones and were not necessarily focused on syndicalist forms of organization. Their organizations, in fact, were rooted in the very communities in which they lived. [Murray Bookchin, 'The ghost of anarcho-syndicalism' (1992), at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/ghost2.html ]
National-Anarchism aims at a government of small communities - in the towns, in the neighbourhoods; it strives for what Bookchin calls 'municipalism'. As such, it is inclined to federalism, i.e., it believes in decentralisation and devolution of responsibilities from the State, autonomy from the State. Ironically, however, mainstream anarchism believes in the break-up of ethnically homogenous, naturally-formed communities: that is, most anarchists today would like to see communities which are not entirely, or mostly Muslim, but a mixture of everything: Vietnamese, African, Hindu, Kurd, and a smattering of 'indigenous' Anglo-Saxon or whatever. A small Serbian or Islamic community, which by definition, excludes people who are not of the majority ethnic group, is 'racist' in the mainstream anarchist view, and something to be abhorred - and crushed, if necessary. In short, mainstream anarchism wants community, but community without roots - which is no community at all.

To put it this way, many heavily-populated urban areas in the West are constructs of capitalism: that is, they contain 'indigenous' populations of European descent who have lived there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and large, ever-growing quantities of immigrants from the Third World, who are attracted to those countries because of better work opportunities, or because of generous welfare provisions, or because of war and misery in their home countries, or all three. In all Western States, the government encourages immigration from the Third World out of ideology - either these immigrants are 'good for the economy' (the neoliberal point of view) or out of liberal humanitarianism. But, by allowing this immigration, those governments are trampling on the rights of the small, ethnically-homogenous communities. Hence the anti-Statism of National-Anarchism.

Ideally, the National-Anarchist wants a decentralised, federal, autonomous set of ethnically-homogenous communities to take the place of the current neoliberal/social democratic State system which rules the West today. Such communities would be 'organic': that is, they would have developed, naturally, over a period of time, and not thrown together by the forces of market capitalism or a liberal/social democratic immigration policy.

Mainstream anarchism does not consider such things, mainly because the locus of classical anarchist theory is in the 19th century - before the great Third World immigration boom took place. That is, the Paris Commune, the Soviets, the anarchist communes of the Spanish Civil War, were ethnically homogenous. Were they alive today, the anarchists from those periods would have resisted, bitterly, the encroachment of immigrants from the Third World - and have been denounced by today's mainstream anarchists as being 'fascist' and 'racist' and, somehow, 'pawns of capitalism and the State'. The classical anarchist theorists viewed everything through the prism of class and class warfare; and classes, as such, are devoid of ethnic characteristics. Today's mainstream anarchists, and today's Left, have carried over this strand of anarchist and socialist thought into today, with unfortunate results. That is, anyone who opposes immigration, for instance, is an enemy of 'the workers' because the immigrants are 'workers' and that is all that matters.

3. German nationalism/Free Nationalism

One of themes of European New Right and National-Anarchist thought is the State use of repression to impose the compulsory acceptance of multiculturalism and mass immigration. Possibly the most repressive State in the West, to this end, is Germany, which, at present, holds 18,000 people in jail for political crimes (most of them 'right-wing' or 'nationalist' political crimes, and most of them non-violent), burns 5000 books and CDs a year for their political content, and employs a vast State apparatus to monitor the German media for any signs of incipient German nationalism, paying particular attention to the language used. For that reason, German nationalism, which labours under enormous State pressure, displays a National-Anarchist and libertarian tinge. One recent tendency in German nationalism is the Freie Nationalist or Freie Kameradschaft group. The ideological basis, and the workings of these groups, has been described fully elsewhere at the New Right Australia/New Zealand blog, and I will not repeat what has been written there here. Suffice to say, because of their repression at the hands of the State, German nationalists have been forced to pay attention to the question of how to avoid State surveillance, how to free oneself from State repression, and how to preserve one's anonymity and individual rights in the face of that repression. For these reasons, German nationalists have resorted to organising in small, decentralised groups in order to get under the radar of the German State, and even adopting anarchist modes of dress in order to protect their identities.

As a whole, German nationalism preaches the virtues of communitarianism, and community-based activism; it also, unlike many other nationalist movements in Europe, takes a militant socialist and anti-capitalist line. German nationalism correctly identifies globalist, consumerist capitalism as the source of many of Western ills, including State-imposed multiculturalism. At the same time, it upholds the rights of Germans without property - which is most of them - in the face of abuses by capitalism and a ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest liberal capitalist economic order. The German nationalist groups have succeeded in winning over some measure of support from the German electorate which, in the view of many, has been abandoned and betrayed by the traditional German Left: the German Social Democrats, in their time in office, cut unemployment benefits and other social services, for example, and has neglected the peoples of the economically-depressed areas of the German East.

German nationalism, in that regard, is different from the reactionary populism of the British National Party or Pauline Hanson, for example. Such populism tends to preach a vulgar racialism which blames the person and not the policy: that is, they attack the immigrants themselves and not the governmental policies which brought them to the West. As well as that, Far Right populism often neglects the social question, failing to see that even without immigration from the Third World, globalist, consumerist capitalism, and the rootlessness and anomie it brings, leads to the spiritual death, and cultural death, of the peoples of the West. On an economic level, it fails to pay attention to all the social ills wrought by the present economic order: casualisation of the labour market and the consequent insecurity of employment, the high levels of underemployment, the high numbers of people living on welfare benefits who are not classified as 'unemployed' in the official statistics, not to mention high interest rates and inflation, and high levels of personal debt borne by the middle-classes. Then there are the wider social problems: anti-social behaviour on the part of youth, and the squalid environments of our cities. The reactionary populists would rather not contemplate such problems, or propose constructive solutions to them; instead, they would rather attack immigration, and in particular, Islamic immigration (because denunciation of Islam is acceptable, to a certain extent, in the mainstream conservative press).

Insofar as there are solutions to these problems, they do not lie in party politics and mainstream liberal democracy. The problems are structural, and endogenous, i.e., part of, the liberal democratic system. Germany is one of the richest countries in the world, as is France, as is Australia; but for 17 years - since the recession of the early 1990s - none of these countries have been able to solve the high unemployment problem, for instance (disguising it, in the case of Australia, using dodgy statistics). Likewise, the liberal political system, while persecuting nationalism and any resistance to multiculturalism, demands, paradoxically enough, that individuals be left alone to 'do their thing'; which is why we see anti-social behaviour among our youth, and urban squalor. Liberalism would oppose the State channelling the energies of youth into a socially-beneficial, constructive direction, because that would be a violation of individual freedom. It would also oppose the removal of businesses which are eyesores - like McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hungry Jack's - from urban centres because that would be a violation of the rights of the individual capitalist investor, and moreover, 'bad for the economy'. Which is why many nationalist activists who are influenced by the ideas of the European New Right believe that nothing can be achieved without the gradual loss of intellectual confidence in the ideology of liberal democracy. That is, liberalism itself, and not Islamic or African or Asian immigration, has to be recognised by the intellectuals as the problem, and has to be solved.

4. Activism

The sympathetic reader, at this point, will ask the question: what can be done? We at the New Right believe in a number of key tenets which, it so happens, we share with anarchism: decentralised organisation; absence of hierarchical leadership within those organisations; mass, popular activism which is separate from the political party and participation in the liberal democratic-system; the forming of networks among activists, based on face-to-face contact; and an 'inclusive, not exclusive' approach to organisation, which ties in with our belief in decentralisation, autonomy, plurality and equality among members of the organisation. (This latter point needs to be explained more. There are many different factions of nationalism in the West, and those differences manifest themselves in different lifestyles and personal tastes. Anyone of any different faction - skinheads, Christian Identity or whatever - is welcome within New Right. As well as that, New Right is tolerant of local, particular differences among activists: what works in Queensland, for instance, would not work in Victoria, particularly Melbourne, and vice versa; what would work in Bavaria would not work in Berlin. The motto of the New Right is, each to his own, so long as all the parts can work together smoothly).

In addition, there is the question of aesthetics. Something that has been neglected in Western nationalist thought has been the aesthetics of politics: how a political group or party looks and behaves is as important, if not more important, than its actual party platform and party ideology. Currently, Western nationalism is, in terms of its aesthetics (as it manifests itself in its pamphlets, posters and other visual propaganda) antiquated and behind the times: it is not in touch with today's avant-garde and progressive youth culture. The mainstream Left, in particular the anti-globalist movement, are on top of things in that regard; nationalism, however, is not. Thankfully, German nationalism - in particular, the Freie Nationalisten/Freie Kameradschaften movements - are leading the way; their propaganda shows how nationalism can be youthful, progressive, avant-garde, by adopting some of the imagery of today's anti-globalist Left.

More about the doctrines of the European New Right, and approaches to activism taken up by the Australian/New Zealand New Right, can be learned elsewhere at the New Right website. Suffice to say, those who are involved as activists for the New Right believe that it is the only option, today, for an alternative to the existing neoliberal, globalist, consumerist ideology and for the foundation of a new order, based on the preservation of the indigenous Western peoples. For that reason, we ask any like-minded Western nationalist, and any mainstream Leftism capable of looking beyond the dogmas of today's Marxism and mainstream anarchism, to join us.

THE TRADITIONAL LEFT FAILED

by Welf Herfurth
















As we all know, the anti-globalisation movement, including the Black Bloc, the assorted strands of communists, anarchists and trade unionists, have failed to stop globalisation. If one reads the postings on left-wing (anarchist and communist) message boards on the Internet, the fragmentation of the Left, and the dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the anti-globalist struggle, is apparent.

On top of that, Marx's theory - that the capitalist states are inevitably heading towards Marxist socialism, that the capitalist historical epoch is on the way out and that we stand on the threshold of a new communist era - has been disproved by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the slide of communist states like China and Vietnam towards a free-market capitalism (or at least, social democracy). According to Marx's historical prediction, the collapse of Soviet and Eastern Bloc communism should not have happened, and the decline of communism in Vietnam and China, should not be happening. I know, from my own experience, that the tentacles of globalisation have reached even into Vietnam and Laos - one can see Coca-Cola billboards everywhere. Western foreign investment in Indochina may be 'good for the economy' (whatever that phrase means) but, at the same time, its appearance is a depressing reflection of a replacement of a unique Indochinese culture and way of life with a faceless (and raceless) Western, global 'Starbucks' one.

So what went wrong? Here, in this essay, I will be explaining that communism, even before Marx, was flawed from the outset on the basis of its principles. I will also argue that socialism is something distinct from communism, and that socialism, and a socialist revolution (not a communist one) in the West is still possible. I will here be quoting extensively from a classic work by a German socialist historian, The history of the social movement in France, 1789-1850, by Lorenz von Stein, originally published in 1850. Stein was a Hegelian and a proto-Marxist of sorts, and a big influence on Marx. I will be using him as a touchstone because his understanding of communism and socialism predates Marx, and is in much the same language as Marx's, while at the same containing none of Marx's errors. For that reason, he gives a valuable insight into capitalist society, the class relations which exist under capitalism, and the socialist alternative which exists to it.

2. Babeufism

What is communism? The reader will say: 'Obviously, what's contained in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest'. Not quite: communism, as a concept, precedes Marx. The first communist theorists and activists appeared in France around the time of the French revolution. The first communist, in modern times at least, was a man called François-Noël Babeuf, who was executed by the French government in 1797. It is in connection with Babeuf's movement that the word communism first appears.

So what is it? Firstly, it is the belief that all men are equal - egalitarianism. Secondly, the belief is that the main source of those inequalities is the possession of capital, which economists define as wealth being available for the production of goods and services. Ownership of this wealth, or rather, wealth tied up in means of producing goods and services (means such as land, or factories, or shops, for example) is property. Some - a minority - possess property, others do not. Bill Gates, James Packer, Warren Buffet, Rupert Murdoch and other capitalists possess large amounts of property; others possess only a little (the small businessman, or farmer); while most people possess none at all. The social gulf between the property owners and the non-possessing class is vast: so, in order to bring about true equality, we need to abolish property. The land will be owned (and Babeuf's ideas were intended mainly for agrarian societies) by the people who work on it - all the people.

This is the first stipulation for a communist order. The second is: the equal distribution of goods. Suppose that someone works for x collective farm, and earns an enormous amount of money through his labours? (Or, if it is a barter economy, an enormous amount of goods?). Or, suppose that he does not consume as much as his fellow workers, and thereby accumulates a large amount of money. After that individual has paid his taxes, and paid for his living expenses, he may still have an enormous amount of savings - after-tax income, capital, wealth. That would make him richer than other people in his commune; and it would no longer be an equal society. Therefore, his wealth has to be distributed, equally, to all other members of the commune; he should only be allowed to keep enough to feed himself, and meet his other expenses, and no more.

Likewise, suppose that a farm, in our communist model, experiences a very large demand for its products in comparison to the other communal farms. That farm would require more labourers than the others; perhaps the labourers on that farm would gain higher status compared to other labourers on other farms. Therefore, in order to enforce equality, labourers have to be discouraged from working on that farm; or consumption of that farm's products has to be discouraged; or both.

The reader will now see the main problem of communism. In order to ensure that everyone gets the same amount of goods for differing amounts of work, a higher authority will have to intervene to enforce equality; likewise, a higher authority will need to intervene in order to allocate resources, like labour, to each farm, to ensure that some farms or individuals do not become 'more equal' than others. So, in order to enforce extreme equality, we wind up with extreme inequality. And this is the fallacy of communism, which has made itself felt in every communist society, without exception. Early critics of Babeuf and communism saw this straight away - even before the revolution in Russia in 1917.

The early communist program was quite explicit about the levels of control needed to maintain it. In the communist doctrine, individual economic interactions are be strictly regulated and directed:

Three basic rules for any communistic society are necessary to give public authority the monopoly of the distribution of goods: all private exchange among members of the communistic community has to be abolished;... all products have to be delivered to a public warehouse in order to separate the individual from his labor; and each individual's share of the goods produced must be obtained exclusively from these warehouses by public authorisation. These are the necessary prerequisites of a communistic economic order. The fourth rule, the compulsion to work in order to increase the amount of goods to be distributed, is a consequence of the demand for affluence. It may be emphasised or omitted, depending on what type of communism is desired, one of wealth or one of poverty... [Lorenz von Stein, History of the social movement in France, 1789-1850, p.167].
All the elements of a Leninist or Stalinist economic system were in place (as I shall explain later) in Babeuf's ideas. Indeed, Babeuf seems to anticipate Pol Pot, who made everyone in communist Cambodia dress the same, took children from their parents and raised them in communal creches, executed any Cambodian who showed signs of any higher learning, and developed an agrarian militia. Stein writes:

Although the citizens shall be well off, they shall live and dress simply and uniformly. Why have different colours of clothes or different furniture? Why have a well tailored dress for one and a shabby one for another? 'It is essential for the happiness of all individuals that the citizen never experiences the slightest degree of even apparent superiority'. Here communism is already lost in the particulars of clothing regulations...

Even with this complete process of levelling all differences there was one serious danger for absolute equality, namely, the difference in mental ability which manifests itself in the arts and sciences. Here also radical measures were proposed... Lest the unalterable nature of things would reassert the dreaded inequality in the children, education, of course was under no condition to be left in private hands. Only the state was to have the right to educate the children. 'The more domestic education there was the greater would paternal power become'. All children will be placed in a huge institution, and here, without regard to intellectual qualifications, all will receive a simple and absolutely equal education... The whole press was to be kept within the narrow limits of republican principles: any violation was to be severely punished... The economy of early communism was concerned with war and agriculture. Babeuf's doctrine is one of Spartan virtues... [Stein, op. cit., pp. 165-167, p. 169].
It is no wonder, then, that Proudhon wrote: 'Communism is oppression and slavery' (in What is property?).

Oddly enough, however, many anarchists today are Babeufists, that is to say, communist, by the definition above. The anarchist wants the abolition of property, and power to be given to 'the workers' - or at least, to the employees of private enterprise (including private enterprise on the land). The State, which exists only to uphold the unequal power relations of capitalism, will be abolished, and a mass of decentralised communes, libertarian, sovereign and without property, will take its place. But the question is: how far will each of these anarchistic communes go to enforce equality? One of the enterprises in the anarchist-run towns and villages may be more profitable than another enterprise; one worker may earn more, or consume less, than the others and so accumulate more wealth. The really successful, worker-controlled enterprise may turn into a new Microsoft or General Motors; the really successful worker, a new Warren Buffet. At some point, then, the community will have to intervene and enforce equality. The same goes for achievements in the arts and sciences and the rest - with the really successful scientist or artist earning more prizes and honours, and more money, than the others...

And all of this has nothing to do with The State. That is, the negative side-effects of communism can occur without a State, even though, in anarchist mythology, the bad, 'Statist' communists Lenin and Trotsky perverted the cause of true communism and socialism when they crushed the Soviets, which were, in anarchist hagiography, proto-anarchist communes worthy of emulation. Even without the State, the communist idea entails that people must be crushed to fit the communist ideal of equality, thus bringing about an order which is even more repressive and coercive than capitalism.

3. Marxist communism

The traits of Babeuf's communism carry over into Marx's, as we can see. But, in Marxist theory, the Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba and all the other communist countries were not truly communist. As anyone who is acquainted with Marx's theories knows, history, in the Marxist view, progresses in historical phases. At the time of Marx's writing, mankind was standing on the threshold of the end of the capitalist phase; the next phase was to be followed by a period of 'socialism', which would then be followed by a period of perfect communism, where all men would be equal, everything would be owned by everyone, etc.

Certainly, the Soviet Union and other communist countries were not perfectly communist in that sense; but they were more communist, and more Babeufist, than anything else. Take Stalinism as an example. Some concessions, under Stalinism, were made to individual acquisitiveness - in other words, the individual's desire to accumulate large amounts of money for himself and not to share it with others. As the Australian economist Ian Ward writes:

In Stalinism, material rewards were designed to induce individuals to act in accordance with goals and targets determined by higher authority. Among the distinct characteristics of the reward system was: a heavy reliance on piece rather than time rates [in other words, payments per good produced, rather than payments by hour worked]; extremely wide differentials which reflected not only one's status but the industry or sector in which one worked; the payment of bonuses for overfulfilment of one's target; the payment of high rewards, together with special privileges, such as restricted shops, to members of the party; and an emphasis on the individual member rather than the group as a whole in determining the rewards. By contrast, a more collective form of material incentive was practised in the group form. Failure to perform was often associated with a negative form of incentive. [Ian Ward, The Soviet struggle for socialism, VCTA Publishing, 1992, p. 25].

Having said that, equality, and collective ownership, reigned in Stalin's Russia. For instance: all State-owned enterprises were forbidden to sell goods to one another (a tire factory could only exchange tires with a machine parts factory, for instance). The enterprises used profit as an accounting measure - that is, the enterprises did make profits - but all of these were redistributed back to the State. The collective farms were not owned by the State, but run by the workers on them, who were in turn monitored and directed by State officials. The farms, after producing their agricultural goods for the State, were allowed to keep the leftovers, which were then distributed among their workers (but there was often little left to distribute).

In a previous quotation from Lorenz von Stein, it was mentioned that, under Babeufist communism, four conditions had to be met for a communist society to exist: 1), all private exchange has to be abolished; 2) all products have to be delivered to a communal warehouse; 3) all goods in these warehouses can only be obtained through public authorisation; 4) all are compelled to work in order to produce a greater amount of goods, which are then to be distributed to everybody. Every communist State - whether it be Stalin's, or Mao's, or Pol Pot's, or Castro's - works according to these principles. For instance, take 4): the mobilisation of the masses to produce more for the community was one of the distinguishing traits of Stalinism:

[Under Stalinism] a whole range of symbols of social approval and disapproval, as well as mobilisation and emulation techniques, were employed. For example, individuals and groups were made model workers or awarded badges, and banners as external symbols of good performance. In addition, all citizens were mobilised either directly through the bringing together of large numbers of people to achieve some specific target or indirectly through massive advertising in the form of slogans on buildings, pictures of successes in public parks or through a media campaign.; 'Catch up with the West' and 'Forward to Communism' were commonly-used slogans. More specifically, emulation campaigns were used to encourage workers to learn by the example of others and work harder. [Ian Ward, op. cit., p. 25.]

Both Marxist communism, and Babeuvist communism, are the one and same thing in practice: communism. And that communism can be reproduced at the decentralised level of the anarcho-communist: we can have a mini-Maoism, or mini-Juchism (Juche being the official North Korean ideology), which is what anarchist-communism and its offshoots are. The anarcho-communists may deny it, but, by necessity, they will be led down the same path, and be forced to abandon anarchism in favour of communism.

From my comments here, it may seem that I believe that communism is entirely a bad thing. But it is not, at least, from the nationalist perspective. After all, recall Stein's phrase: 'The economy of early communism was concerned with war and agriculture. Babeuf's doctrine is one of Spartan virtues'. Such a description reminds me, at least, of certain elements of the German National Socialist, or Italian Fascist ideology, or Evola's Traditionalism. And I must confess that I as a nationalist look at a country like North Korea, or Cuba, with some degree of envy: there, the respective populaces are disciplined, and led, by a political leadership which is anti-US and which, despite all its faults, acts in the national interest as represented by the State - above all classes, all special interests, which exist in our own liberal democratic societies. There are no business lobbies there calling for policies which are harmful to the general well-being as there are here, for instance, and no trade unions doing the same. There is no degenerate phenomena along the lines of 'Chavism' in Britain, and one can be sure that social pathologies are dealt with firmly by the law. At the same time, no-one doubts that Cuba and North Korea are dead and repressive countries, and that their standard of living is far below that of the Western States. The challenge for any theorist of Western nationalism is to isolate the good from the bad.

4. Socialism

So, what is socialism? Stein defines it this way:

All those systems, and all those ideas, which aim at establishing labor's control over capital... and making labor the guiding principle of society, may be called socialist. Socialism is the second blueprint for a social system based on the social idea of equality. Socialism in all its variations is infinitely superior to communism. Its basis is labor, and thereby, individuality, this fountainhead of all true wealth and of all diversification. Socialism does not desire to realise the abstract of equality of men, any more than it desires to eliminate a person's individuality... Socialism does not desire, as communism does, to abolish differentiations among individuals and therewith society and the order of the whole; it aims to build society on the principle of labor independent of property. [Stein, op. cit., p. 85.]

Stein, elsewhere, goes on to outline what he means by social reform, and how it can be achieved:

The major concern of a social movement is not the problem of poverty. The social problem which social reform tries to solve is the result of the laws which determine the relationship between capital and labor and thus also govern society, the constitution and the development of each individual personality... We have shown that the contradiction in the situation of the proletarian consists in his dependence on the property-owner because he owns only labor and no capital... As long as the inherent nature of capital and labor remains unchanged... differentiation and dependence are inevitable. It would be a complete misinterpretation of the nature of social life to consider the abolition of differentiation as the aim of social reform... The abolition of this differentiation is not at all the aim of the proletariat... The proletariat wants to acquire capital. Here is the core of the problem. [Stein, op. cit., p. 92.]

So the solution is, says Stein:

Personal independence in this [acquisitive] society rests on the ability of even the meanest worker to acquire capital. This provides an opportunity for everybody to break through the traditional pattern of social classes and of the ensuing dependence.... As long as this opportunity exists in the form of a rule also extending to the worker, no contradiction is apparent, and the social order is stable, no matter how great are the dependence and the differences between the two classes. The essence of the social question and of social reform in our present society is therefore clearly indicated. The problem is whether it is at all possible, in this acquisitive society, to provide labor with the necessary opportunities and corresponding institutions for the acquisition of property commensurate with the accomplishments and standards of labor. The social reform movement consists of the work, the activities, the suggestions, the attempts, the laws, and the institutions which aim to create these opportunities for the working class. [Ibid.]

5. Socialism and its applications to Nationalism

I think, after the exposition above, that the reader can understand what socialism is and how social democracy, and the social democratic parties (like the German SPD, the British Labour Party, and the Australian Labor Party) are socialist or at least contain socialist elements and aim at social reform. But there is one important change which has occurred since the socialist doctrine was first propounded in the early 18th century. That is what I call the 'blue-collarisation' of socialism. 'The workers' in socialist doctrine are, theoretically, anyone without property, i.e., anyone who has to work for a living as opposed to living off rents and dividends. A call centre worker in a phone company like Telstra is a worker, perhaps even a proletarian; the investor who lives off Telstra dividends, or capital gains on sold Telstra shares, is a capitalist. (And, in theory, the CEO whose job it is to manage Telstra on behalf of the shareholders is a very rich worker). But somewhere along the line of the history of socialism, the worker or the proletarian became 'working-class' as we know it today: i.e., a blue-collar. The CEO, or even the white-collar worker, are not 'workers'.

The difference, I think, between white collars and blue collars is as follows. In economist's jargon, the blue-collar menial labourer possesses a great deal of 'physical capital'. That is capital - the wealth available for the production of goods and services - is the blue-collar's muscle power, which is used to produce goods and services in the sectors of industry he works in. Whereas the white-collar worker relies on 'intellectual capital', i.e., skills which stem less from muscle-power and more from some skill which comes from higher education and training.

It has been stated here at the New Right blog, and indeed, in many other places, that German National Socialism, Italian Fascism and their variants in other countries (Mosley's Fascism, for instance), were socialist, all right - but socialism for the workers with more 'intellectual' than 'physical' capital (students and academics fit into that category). Which is not to say that blue-collar workers did not support fascism - they did - but that the white-collars were overepresented and were its primary support base.

As well as that, small business - the petit bourgeoisie - formed another pillar of the fascist support base. The petit bourgeoisie work for a living; but they own a little more capital than the average salaryman or salarywoman, but much less than a big capitalist.

So the NSDAP was a party of the German worker, all right, but of the worker who had more intellectual than physical capital, or who had possession of comparatively small amounts of capital. (On top of that, the NSDAP appealed to small farmers, in particular, the peasantry). There is plenty of evidence for this in the literature. Martin Broszat, for instance, recounts that the NSDAP appealed to youth, and to the German mittelstand (middle classes):

The share of young voters who found the NSDAP most appealing was particularly high. What attracted them was the Nazi image as a party of youth. There was also the pressure of youth unemployment with its demoralising impact. In this way young people became politicised at an early age and in turn began markedly to shape the public style of the NSDAP and the SA.... It was in particular young people of traditional liberal-bourgeois or conservative family background who dissociated themselves from their parents' political and joined the NSDAP.

The main social basis of the Nazi mass movement was therefore the broad spectrum of the Protestant middle class in town and country. As early as 1930, the sociologist Theodor Geiger explained the political landslide of the September elections in terms of a 'panic among the Mittelstand'. He argued that fear of proletarianisation was an even stronger motive among large parts of the old and the new Mittelstand than their actual degree of material deprivation. Although objectively, these groups were becoming proletarianised, their anti-proletarian and anti-socialist consciousness which had been moulded by their education and social background held them back from voting for the left-wing parties. Instead they began to search for a third way between socialism and capitalism, and it was the Nazis who promised it with their emotionally very effective propaganda extolling the Volksgemeinschaft. Only a few people in the socialist movement recognised at the time that the massive successes of the NSDAP among peasant and the impoverished lower middle classes were partly a consequence of a dogmatic Marxism; for all this type of Marxism was able to offer the panic-stricken 'petty bourgeoisie' and peasants was a 'proletarian class consciousness' against which they had developed a psychological block. [Martin Broszat, Hitler and the collapse of Weimar Germany, 1984, pp. 86-87.]
The above quotation should be made compulsory for every nationalist in the West - not to mention every Marxist. The fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, whether they be in the Netherlands, Germany, Britain, Rumania, Italy, gathered their mass support simply because they paid attention to the social classes which were in need of help but had been neglected by Marxism. Nationalists can likewise fill the gap in the West today - especially now, considering that Marxism and communism are spent forces. If we are to advocate socialism, it will be much more appealing than communism, for, as Stein says, socialism, unlike communism, does not aim at a society where no-one earns more, and has more, than anyone else and where everyone is perfectly equal.

6. Objections

The first objection anyone could make is that, at present, in Australia, at least, we are experiencing great economic success, and that, in good economic conditions, the propertyless classes are much less prepared to abandon the 'acquisitive society' and capitalist order. While economic conditions in the West in the 1930s were uniformly terrible, they are not so today. One only has to look at Australian unemployment, for instance, which was 4.3 % in the June quarter - the lowest in over thirty years.

It has been stated here before that the unemployment figures, in Australia, and elsewhere in the West, are kept artificially low using statistical trickery. The opinion columnist Ross Gittins estimates that, once the underemployed and 'discouraged jobseekers' are factored in, the current Australian unemployment rate stands at 9 or 10 percent - hardly the best in Australian economic history. (Ross Gittins, 'Credit where it's due on unemployment', Sydney Morning Herald, February 14 2007). Elsewhere in the West - France and Germany, for example - unemployment is much worse: the official unemployment rates, which underestimate the true extent of unemployment, are much higher than Australia's.

Secondly, there are pockets of deprivation in Australia, even among the workers who possess 'intellectual' capital - for instance, the students. The article 'Extent of student poverty highlighted' (August 8 2007, at http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22208668-29277,00.html ) makes the claim that many Australian undergraduate and postgraduate students are struggling on less than $A10,000 a year, and are studying with a very high level of personal debt.

As well as that, inflation, as manifested in the rising prices of commodities like oil, is very high at the time of writing; and central banks in the Eurozone, America, the United Kingdom and Australia have hiked interest rates to high levels - in Australia interest rates are the highest in ten years. The results have not been catastrophic, but have caused some economic hardship, especially to the heavily indebted petit bourgeoisie. It is, then, a time for the electorate to turn leftward, not rightward.

The other objection is, 'What's to stop, then, Australian voters, for example, from going over to the mainstream, social-democratic Labor Party? Why should they go over to your brand of socialism?'.

Again, I will point to precedents in 20th century history. In Weimar Germany, for instance, the socialist vote was split three ways - between the NSDAP, the German Communist Party, and the social democratic SPD. The NSDAP, in terms of bringing about social reform for its constituency, proved to be a much better party than the SPD, which had been running Germany federally, and at the state level, for years. Likewise, social democratic parties regularly come into office on the Continent and accomplish little. I do not think, either, that the Australian Labor Party will accomplish much in alleviating unemployment after it wins the federal elections this year (if it does win) - although it is conceivable that interest rates and inflation may come down over time.

7. Conclusion

One of the reasons why communists do so well in recruiting students is that hardly any other political group (and that includes nationalists) pays attention to student needs. A recent communist poster around Australian university campuses, for instance, reads 'Abolish student poverty/Abolish HECs [student] debt/No more fee increases'. In the view of the average student, these policies are good policies. The student, on the basis of that, will be more inclined to support the group whether it be communist or not. For the most part, other mainstream parties hardly seem to give a damn.

As Stein would say, all political parties have a class basis. A political idea only makes the transition from theory to practice when it appeals to the needs of a certain economic and social class. And that is the difference between a socialist group and a nationalist one (or at least, nationalism as it exists in Australia). A racist slogan like 'Pakis go home' is not the expression of a social movement; it is an expression of animus, of resentment. But, on the other hand, propaganda which explains why Subcontinental immigration is bad because, among other reasons, it affects the economic well-being of a certain economic class - it is social theory.

Fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, had a huge mass base in Europe. After the war, neofascism did not. This cannot be explained wholly by persecution at the hands of Allied-imposed State sanctions against neofascism. The reason why neofascism failed to make headway was that economic conditions were too good in Europe in 1960 or even in 1970. Secondly, the theorists of neofascism (men like Yockey and Evola) failed to ground their politics in a class base, unlike the canny fascist demagogues Hitler and Mussolini. They could not find a socioeconomic group to align themselves to, or at least, had no wish to align themselves to any such group.

Admittedly, economic conditions today in the West are not at the catastrophic level of the 1930s. It is far better, materially, to be one of the propertyless-classes - even one of the lumpenproletariat - in the West than it is in, for instance, Africa or India (which is why so many Africans and Indians are emigrating here). But we should not allow white guilt over our privileges stand in the way of socialism. In the 1930s, Germany, Italy and Japan portrayed themselves as 'proletarian nations' - that is, countries which, even though they had a very high level of industrialisation and wealth, were in an inferior position compared to France, Britain and the United States, and were deserving of better treatment in the sphere of international affairs. Nationalists in the West need to adopt the same mentality. We may be members of wealthy nations, and members of the white race, the most privileged in the world; but, at the same time, we deserve social reform, and the system which can deliver it, socialism. And that means reclaiming the word socialism from the Left.

*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