Tibet and the Lessons for the West

by Welf Herfurth

What does the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and the resistance of Tibetan nationalists against that occupation, have to do with nationalism here in the West? The answer is: a great deal. This article will use the recent events in Tibet as a starting point, and attempt to break down Left-Right thinking on the subject – that is, it will try and show that the Left does not have an exclusive monopoly on the issue. The intention of this article is to show that it is no exaggeration to say that, ‘We are all Tibetans now’.

Just as during the time of the Burmese repression of the uprising of the monks, the Left in Australia, in particular the communist groups, are trying to seize hold of the issue, and make themselves look good by associating themselves with the Tibetan uprising. They blame the Chinese heavy-handedness on ‘capitalism’ (despite the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for the occupation and repression). Likewise, the liberals are trying to portray it purely as a human rights issue. But the most important element of the Tibetan uprising is the question national identity, national self-assertion in the face of immigration. And that, of course, relates to us in the in the West: we are in the same position as the Tibetans.

The article shall conclude with an example of some of the techniques we nationalists can use to foment Tibetan-style national awakenings in our own countries. Really, we nationalists should be ashamed of ourselves: the Tibetans face a greater danger, and face worse persecution, than we do; yet, we are afraid, and, more often than not, too afraid to come out from behind the keyboard.

1. Forced immigration

The Tibetan uprising is an anti-immigrant protest. As the mainstream media reports:

But an influx of Han Chinese to Tibet, and a growing sense among Tibetans that China is irreparably altering their way of life, produced a backlash when Communist Party leaders most needed stability there, analysts say. China has also encouraged huge numbers of Chinese migrants, whose presence has diluted the Tibetan majority... The state media has tightly controlled its coverage to focus on Tibetans burning Chinese businesses or attacking and killing Chinese merchants. No mention is made of Tibetan grievances or reports that 80 or more Tibetans have died... "That is one of the biggest sources of resentment," Mr. Shakya said of the Chinese migration. He said Tibetans believed Chinese were given more opportunities for jobs, and Tibetan unemployment is high. Beijing surely noticed that the younger generation it hoped to entice was rampaging on the streets of Lhasa. [‘Simmering resentments led to Tibetan backlash’, The New York Times, March 18, 2008].

Immigration here is being used as a weapon. The Chinese, in Tibet, have tried to change the ethnic composition of the Tibetan population by forcing as many immigrants – from China – upon them as possible. Another conspicuous example of the same technique is in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Israel, for decades, has been trying to change the ethnic composition of the Territories by settling as many Jewish-Israelis there (I use the word ‘Jewish-Israelis’ as opposed to ‘Israeli’, because there are one million Arab-Israelis in Israel, and they are not the ones being settled). Recently, the Israeli government announced that it would build 40,000 units (!) for ‘young Jewish couples’ in occupied East Jerusalem, all this while the “Peace Process” is meant to be going on.

(In fact, the State of Israel itself got started using this method – of deliberate ‘over-immigration’. Jewish-Europeans, mainly from Poland and Eastern Europe, settled in Palestine in the hundreds of thousands before, during and after the Second World War. By 1948, the Jewish-Europeans had waged a successful guerrilla war against the British, forcing them out, and had built up enough numbers (and gathered enough material support, i.e., arms from Josef Stalin) to form an army and wage a successful conventional war against Palestine’s Arab neighbours. The remaining parts of Palestine was partitioned between Jordan and Egypt, and 800,000 indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. The new State of Israel was formed, and received diplomatic recognition from both the USSR and USA within hours. The rest, as they say, is history).

Now, the strategy of forced immigration is extremely effective. Why? Because the presence of large numbers of immigrants becomes a fait accompli: it takes cruel, not to say inhuman, measures to get rid of those immigrants once they have arrived, and once they have lived there for a few generations. The Palestinians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, resented, naturally, the huge influx of Jewish-Europeans. But that resentment – which often exploded into riots and acts of violence against the immigrants (similar to what we are seeing in Tibet) – was met with cries of “racism” and “anti-Semitism”, even “Nazism”. It is notable, too, that the Jewish-European immigrants, and the Jewish Diaspora outside Palestine, exploited Palestinian acts of violence against the immigrants to the hilt, using the incidents in their propaganda war against the Palestinians, just as the Chinese government today is using footage of Tibetan violence (against Han Chinese immigrants) in its propaganda war.

Now, we in the West are in the same boat as the Tibetans and Palestinians. We have not reached the crisis point, but we are getting there. Britain has received hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, following the election of Tony Blair in 1997 (and this is on top of the immigrants from the Caribbean and the Sub-Continent, who arrived in huge waves in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s). America’s Hispanic population has reached 34 million, and threatens to eclipse the Afro-American population in size (10% of the Mexican population has departed for America). Australia has received tens of thousands of Indian and Chinese immigrants in recent years, under the “conservative” government of John Howard, and at this rate, Sydney will be an all-Chinese city in a few decades, Melbourne all-Indian. One could go on, citing the huge numbers of immigrants into Germany, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand and other Western countries.

Because these immigrants have put down roots, it will be a difficult – some pessimists say, impossible – job to remove them. This is not because of “assimilation”: from my own experience, the non-European immigrants to Australia have not “assimilated” (i.e., magically become Australian in all respects except the racial) even after living here for decades; likewise for the 3 million strong Turkish immigration population in Germany. No, repatriation is difficult because of the dislocation and suffering it inevitably entails. The Chinese government, and the Israeli government, know that. Woe betides the Palestinians if they ever became militarily strong enough to force the Jewish-European settlers in the Territories to leave. The Jewish-Israeli religious fundamentalist settlers in Gaza, for example, put on an Oscar-winning performance of grief and suffering (with some sympathetic media coverage) when they were forced to leave by their own government. And now the Chinese government is stirring up nationalistic fervour among its own people over violence committed against the Han Chinese in Tibet. One can imagine, then, the reaction from the Western mainstream media – which is relentlessly pro-immigrant – were a populist politician to be elected in the Netherlands or Britain and start deporting immigrants who had been there for decades. The media would, in its reporting, would give maximum coverage to the suffering and stress of the deported immigrant families (while overlooking, of course, the suffering and stress decades of immigration has caused to the indigenous Dutch and British populations).

The question is, from a demographic point of view, can the Chinese, and the Jewish-Israelis, win? Can they depopulate Tibet, or the Occupied Territories, through immigration? The answer is, I think, no, at least in the case of the Palestinians. There are 3.6 million Palestinians crammed into the Territories: even tens of thousands of new Jewish-Israeli settlers will not make much of a dent.

As for the West: pessimistic white nationalists seem to believe that the European population in the US, Britain, Sweden, Germany, France, are a dying race – that they are in the same position as some Amazonian Indian tribe, who suffer from poor health, low life-expectancy and a low ‘replacement rate’ (i.e., births replacing deaths). On the contrary, the Western populations are the healthiest and the most long-lived in the world. They will not disappear from the US, or Germany, any time soon. But – and here is the but – they will disappear, in large numbers, from the areas the immigrants are migrating to. The phenomena of ‘white flight’ are very real, and we are seeing it in action all over the West today. In effect, this is an ethnic-cleansing of the cities (which is where almost all immigrants go). Over time, the numerous numbers of indigenous British, French, and Germans will be pushed out of their capital cities, and replaced by immigrants. The population of the Western nations, overall, will increase, to unsustainable levels – unsustainable economically and environmentally.

The question is - why is this going on? What aggrieves people about the Tibetan, and the Palestinian, situation is the malign intent of the occupiers: China and the Jewish-Israelis are prepared to use force, and immigration, in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans and Palestinians respectively, on every level – culturally, economically, and, in the case of the Tibetans, even environmentally. So what of the governments in the West - do they possess that same intent? Yes, they do. But the strange thing is that the pro-immigration politicians – the Merkels, Browns, Bushes, Rudds – are of European descent, and yet, at the same time, do not seem to like their own people very much. At least, they do not want people of European descent to be in the majority. Why is that?

One of the answers is, simply, that it is a generational thing. The parents of the Bush-Brown-Rudd generation were racialist (without thinking about it too much) and opposed Third World immigration (and, in America, desegregation). That generation fought a long war against their parents – a political and cultural war – against race-based immigration policies, against Apartheid in South Africa, against segregation in the American Deep South. They won that war, or at least, they are in power (and their parents’ generation are not any more). And, in their minds, they are still fighting the same struggle today. They dislike their parent’s generation and its values so much that they are willing to see their countries disappear under a flood of non-European immigration.

Which, in fact, is a cause for hope: if the next generation of leaders is more nationalist than the Browns and Bushes, we will see a reduction of immigration and a rejection of the state-sanctioned ideology of multiculturalism. In the meantime, we must contend with the fact that our present leaders do not really care about the indigenous populations of Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, and the European populations of Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada. ‘Anglo’ or ‘European’ culture is boring, too ‘white bread’: we need ‘diversity’, more and more immigrants, and anyone who voices their objections to immigration is a racist and deserves to go to jail. That is the world view of the ‘Generation of 1968’, which now rules the entire Western world – through the parliaments, the universities, the opinion columns of the newspapers, through television drama, through film.

2. The ethics of occupation

As anyone familiar with the left-wing scene in Australia knows, the communist groups here are Trotskyist: they have a fanatical devotion to the ideas of Trotsky, no matter how outdated Trotsky’s positions have become (after all, he died in 1941). Now, these same communists in Australia (and elsewhere in the West) oppose the Chinese occupation of Tibet on communist, left-wing and Trotskyist principles. But they are hypocritical to do so. After all, Russia, in the Leninist-Trotskyist period, incorporated the 14 or so other countries which made up the Soviet Union by force, and then went on to invade the Baltic States and Poland (where they were thrashed by the Germans and the Poles respectively).

Likewise, Chinese communism appears to be anti-imperialist, and, historically, has lent its support to ‘anti-imperialist’ struggles all over the world. The ideology of Chinese communism gives the appearance of being, in principle, opposed to the likes of the Tibetan occupation. But this is only a surface impression. Chinese communism has never opposed imperialism, racism, nationalism on principle: it has only opposed the imperialism, racism and nationalism directed against it – Chinese nationalism, racism and nationalism is fine. This is something that self-proclaimed Maoists in the West have never understood. (Likewise, Vietnamese and Cambodian communism was deeply nationalistic and racialist, while being fervently anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist – i.e., opposed to Western colonialism and Western imperialism).

In the West, there was another form of radical, left-wing socialism which was opposed to foreign imperialism and colonialism while being, at the same time, nationalistic, racialist: German National Socialism. It may surprise people to be reminded that Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ was an anti-occupation text (Now before all my friends from the ANTIFA jumping up and down and call me a NAZI because I dare to mention ‘Mein Kampf, please keep in mind that by just quoting the man doesn’t mean that I agree with the author of the book 100%. Hey, I quoted Mao and Che before and you didn’t call me a Commie as yet). The ire of the book is not directed, on the whole, against Jewish-Europeans, but against the French, who occupied, at the time of writing, the Saar, the Ruhr and the Rhineland. The French used the traditional techniques of occupying powers – suppression of language, culture and existing customs, and the encouragement of local separatist tendencies – as a means of continuing their war after the war against the Germans. Hitler, in ‘Mein Kampf’, champions the rights of an oppressed people – the Germans – against a much stronger occupier. But, like Mao and Lenin, he never took up anti-imperialism as a general principle, and of course, supported the dissolution of Poland, in the 19th century, into Germany and Russia (with all the accompanying suppression of Polish customs, language and culture).

That is how it is in politics: the right or wrong of the matter is relative, depending on one’s perspective. What matters is: do you, or do you not, support the occupation of your own country?

Now, Western Europe has been under Allied – American and British – occupation for sixty years. This is a fact. Even though the US military has wound down its military presence in Germany (because of the end of the Cold War, and requirements in Iraq), it still occupies Germany non-militarily. The same can be said of France, the Netherlands, Italy and the other countries which came under the Allied yoke.

How does America occupy these countries? For starters, the German constitution was written for Germany by the occupiers, and expressly forbids, as we know, any expression of German nationalism or independent foreign policy. And then there is the cultural occupation: the endless flood of anti-German books, films, news coverage, court cases (seeking redress for real or alleged German atrocities committed during WWII), plays, comic books, which seek to “educate” Germans as to how bad they are, and how the American (and Russian) occupiers “saved” them from themselves. Then there is the ritual obeisance paid to the Americans by all German politicians of all mainstream liberal-democratic parties.

The situation is much the same elsewhere in Western Europe – in France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain. Indeed, each of these countries is “judged”, by the mainstream media, the intellectuals and the politicians, on the basis of its conduct during the war: Italy and Spain are “bad” because of Mussolini and Franco; France is highly suspect because of its support for Vichy (and besides which, it threw in the towel too easily after the German invasion of 1940); and so it goes, even though the war ended sixty years ago. This is all the product of an American occupation which influences the way Europeans see themselves: one could call it an occupation of the mind.

And it was all made possible by an American military occupation. Even in the case of the British, the arrival of millions of American troops to the United Kingdom in the Second World War, for preparation for the Normandy invasion, represented an occupation of sorts: their presence there dissuaded the British from cutting a deal with Germany at this point in the war. Francis Parker Yockey, in ‘The Enemy of Europe’ (in the chapter, ‘Three Aspects of the War’), writes that ‘England’s total war-effort was brought ever more under the direction of the Washington regime, and England, likewise its remaining overseas possessions, was occupied by American troops.

Thereby the Washington regime wanted to ensure that England would not attempt to bail out of the War...’.

The problem all this ancient history (and WWII is becoming ancient history) presents for nationalists is simple: once you, as a nationalist, start talking about immigration, and how something needs to be done about the non-European migrants in one’s country (e.g., they need to be repatriated), some liberal or communist will call you “Nazi” or “fascist”. This is despite the fact that, until the 1970s, neither Germany nor Italy suffered from an immigration problem: both countries were net exporters, not importers, of people, until the period of post-war economic prosperity. But the foes of nationalism are not given to logic and consistency, and so the burden of war “guilt”, in Germany, Italy and other Western European countries, weighs heavily, dissuading any nationalist policy of repatriation. This mentality even affects countries which fought against Germany in the war. In a recent news story in the British press, it was revealed that the British government sent mixed-race children (the products of couplings between Afro-American servicemen and indigenous British women) abroad, despite the misgivings that the plan was somewhat “Nazi”.

There is, for the Western nationalist, no way of getting around it. The American occupation of the European mind has very real consequences for nationalists.

The Tibetans (fortunately for them) are not burdened with years of Allied brainwashing (only years of Chinese brainwashing, which seems to have been comparatively less effective). And, to their credit, have made the political choice: they are acting. No doubt there are many Tibetans who do not want to make waves, and want to lead politically passive lives; but there are others who have had enough, and are taking a stand against a superior military and political power, for nationalism and against immigration. This is while we, in the West, who are facing a graver demographic and cultural problem in the long term, prefer to sit back and play with the X-Box.

3. The solution: get rid of fear

Many people in the West agree with the nationalists that immigration is a problem: and many people who are doctors, lawyers, academics, journalists, would speak out against it if they were not afraid. Who is it that scares them? In Australia, it is not multi-culti fanatics in the Labor and Liberal parties; or journalists like Gerard Henderson and Phillip Adams (who are on the mainstream Right and Left respectively, and who both adore immigration). No, it is the communists. Sooner or later in politics, one has to go out, in public, and meet people in one’s community, in order to drum up support. Nationalists need to do that: but they are afraid. Most of the nationalists I know spend half of their lives in fear – fear that a communist will, somewhere, take a photo of them and publish it on a website; or that a communist gang will beat them up; or that communists will disrupt a meeting, a march or a rally. In response to that fear, these nationalists tend to operate like a clandestine secret society – like the Freemasons. Meetings are held in secret, as are conferences with other nationalists from interstate. False names are used when meeting other people and (if things keep going down the Freemason-esque path) secret handshakes will be used as well.

The main problem with this approach is that nationalism is not a conspiratorial movement: it can only survive with the oxygen of publicity. Furthermore, nationalists need to build up their confidence in themselves and their ideas. Third, they need to go out and meet the people. So how can nationalists start doing all this?

Communist groups use posters, fliers and brochures to advertise events: usually rallies or, more often, meetings and educational nights at a function room at a local bar. At these meetings and educational nights, communists deliver speeches, or hold a film night, where they show a DVD of Lenin and Trotsky, or Chavez, or Castro, or the Colombian FARC rebels, or whoever. The communists are, in my experience, completely brazen: they will even include the names and mobile names of the organisers down the bottom of the poster. Communists do not live in fear like we nationalists do: despite their “rebellion” against “capitalism”, the capitalists (who, according to the Marxist analysis, control the entire Australian political system) do not care very much – at least, not enough to try and phone the bar owner to close down the event, or send some capitalist thugs around to beat the communists up.

What we nationalists need to do is follow the same strategy of booking function rooms and advertising them heavily. The difference is that we shall design posters, fliers, etc., and fill them with “Left” images and slogans (avoiding, of course, the hammer and sickle), supporting traditionally “Left” causes (the occupation of Iraq, Palestine, Tibet, for example) and, furthermore, we shall post our advertising in the ‘Red’ quarters of cities like Sydney and Melbourne – that is, the universities, and the bohemian/student parts of town which (in my experience) are targeted heavily by communists in their recruitment drives. All of this is intended to provoke the communists: and it would be a masterful provocation to hold a nationalist educational seminar/DVD night at a function room right in the heart of Red Sydney or Melbourne, so to speak.

What would the communist reaction be? Firstly, shock and disbelief. Secondly, panic: they would tell each other, ‘It’s a capitalist plot – these people aren’t real left-wingers/socialists, they’re Nazis, provocateurs working for the government... Make sure that no-one is fooled by their imposture. We don’t want young, naive student-types to be sucked in...’. Third, the inevitable reaction: ‘Fascist/racist/Nazi scum out. Smash fascism!’. Communists will turn up to the meeting, with the intention of taking as many pictures as possible, and to break it up, through heckling, and then force.

And this is what we have prepared for. Firstly, we shall have a reasonable number of tough, courageous, and physically intimidating nationalists acting as stewards standing by, ready to pounce at the first sign of a Red attack. Secondly, we shall bar all cameras at the door – and anyone caught taking pictures will be thrown out of the meeting and have their camera confiscated before they can flee. (There is always a risk that a communist may take pictures with a hidden camera, but that is a chance we will have to take).

Communists can be expected to exert maximum pressure on the owner of the function room to ‘not rent it to Neo-Nazis’. In response to that, we shall tell the owner: ‘That’s nonsense: we are a left-wing, socialist group, and these commies who are trying to close down our meeting are from a rival left-wing faction’. And, if the owner doesn’t believe that we are left-wing, we shall show him our Left-seeming posters and stickers. ‘Does this look Neo-Nazi to you?’.

Inevitably, the communists will win some of the time, and force us to relocate to a new venue. Possibly, we shall be in a situation where we shall never be able to use the same venue twice. Again, this is another chance we have to take.

The advantage of public meetings is just that: they are public, and interested members of the community are able to attend. Some independent-minded younger people may have heard rumours that the nationalist meetings are “fascist” and “Nazi”, and will come to see what all this “fascism” and “racism” is about, and be surprised to learn that we nationalists do have some good and reasonable ideas. Over time, we will be able to attract more of those kinds of people to nationalism. What is more, we will get into the habit of communicating our ideas to people outside the usual small clique of nationalists.

Some nationalists may reproach me here for ‘giving the game away’, for revealing too much of our plans. My response to that is, firstly, the communist has a complete contempt for our intelligence and abilities; he or she certainly won’t have bothered to read this article in full, much less take it seriously. Secondly, the worst thing the communists can do to us is ignore us – to let us hold our meetings and DVD presentations in their Red neighbourhoods.

Nationalism will wither and die without the oxygen of publicity. But a communist ignoring a so-called “fascist”, “racist” and “Nazi” presence in his midst? Impossible: such a thing has never occurred in the history of communism. Communists can always be trusted to use the same tactics, and react the same way, over and over. They are, in essence, machines, their brains computers programmed with the dogmas of Lenin, Trotsky, Marx and Engels.

The essential thing is that once the communists see that we are not discouraged by their attacks on our meetings, that we can stand up to them, physically if need be, and that we are not afraid – then they will give up. They will simply stop trying. Nationalism will be accepted as another fact of political life.

4. In conclusion

Now, I admit that this seems quite a leap – going from talking about the Tibetan struggle to communism. But the fact of the matter is that our situation in the West has not reached critical mass in the way that the Tibetan has: indigenous French, British, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, and European Australians, Americans and Canadians are not rioting in the street, smashing immigrant shop windows, overturning cars, setting fires, attacking policemen. In order to oppose immigration and globalisation, we in the West need to organise politically. And, as soon as one does that, one comes up against the same problem again and again: organised Red bullying which prevents nationalists from exercising their political rights – communist groups which (to make no bones about it) use terror to achieve their objectives. It is not the liberal establishment – the politicians, academics, trade unions, church groups – which are opposing us, using threats, intimidation and force: it is the communists. (Perhaps, if our government was communist – like the one in China – we would be facing rows of policemen, beating our brains out with truncheons and shooting us).

What is holding us back is fear: a fear, which, to my mind, is unreasonable. Yes, there is a danger that we may get photographed, and have our names and addresses posted on the Internet. But that is not the worst that can happen. For one thing, the communists of today are not like those of the thirties: if they come to our meetings to heckle us, and try and break them up, they will not (like in Stalin’s day) be bringing coshes, razors, knuckle-dusters, vials of acid and even handguns. We do not risk injury to life and limb. Extreme politics, of any kind, has always carried grave danger to its exponents in the past. Nothing deterred the anarchist Emma Goldman from touring the world and making speeches in halls (to packed capacity), despite the tremendous repression she faced: one has to admire her courage in the face of adversity, an adversity greater than that faced by any Western nationalist c. 2008. So what if a photo of one of us appears on an Antifa website? So what if a newspaper, in some article buried in page 42, calls one of us a “Nazi”, a “racist” and a “fascist”? Compared to Emma Goldman, or any Brownshirt or Blackshirt from the 1920s and 1930s, we nationalists have it easy. And compared to the Tibetans, or Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC in the former Rhodesia, we have it easy.

No doubt, in some charter of human rights (guaranteed by international law), it says that indigenous populations have the right to resist colonisation and immigration. So the Tibetans are justified – legally – in doing what they do. So are we in the West: after all, we are being colonised: the massive flood of immigration in Europe, North America, Australia, is neo-colonialism.

The problem is that, living in a liberal democracy, we have come to expect that certain rights are a given. In truth, they are not: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and the right of national, ethnic self-determination for all peoples, are rights that have to be fought for, that have to be won by the fist. No-one recognises your rights unless you are prepared to fight for them.

White nationalists, on the white nationalist message boards, like to praise the white race for its courage, its daring. But the truth is that we Celts, Teutons, Latins, Norse, Anglo-Saxons have not displayed that supposed courage for a long time. Indeed, the very thought of speaking nationalist, and racialist, ideas in public frightens us.

In that regard, I want nationalists here in the West to look at the Tibetan example and feel shame. Here are a people (derided as ‘yellows’ by our supposedly brave, stalwart white nationalists) who are defending their heritage, their culture, their uniqueness, in the face of awesome repression. They are sticking up for themselves, whereas we are not.

Nationalists in the West need to find the courage in themselves to emulate the Tibetans in their courage, their determination, their sacrifice.

*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

EXTINGUISH THE FLAME

As part of showing our solidarity with the Tibetan struggle, we call on all people to be part of the demonstrations against the torch relay in Canberra on the 24th of April. The National Anarchists will be attending in force. For further information, please contact the New Right in your state. For security reasons we can’t give out too much information, but we can tell you that we will have a lot of fun.