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.