Who should rule?

Logging on this morning, I see that this has once again become a burning issue among the commentators. So far, I haven’t had much to say about the topic. I don’t aspire to rule over anyone. Becoming a politician isn’t a good fit with my introverted personality type. It is a task that I would prefer to leave to others. We have already had one commentator storm off the site because of a controversial turn in this discussion. It is better to discuss the matter now (in its own definitive blog entry) than to have it continue to spill over into unrelated threads.

Nietzscheans

As everyone here knows by now, NeoNietzsche is a passionate admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche and subscribes to a peculiar interpretation of his theories. He believes in a caste system (warrior, cleric, peasant) and sees himself as part of the elect few who should rule in a White Nationalist ethnostate. Following Nietzsche, NN believes everyone has an essential orientation, master or slave, dominant or submissive, and that different moral systems correspond to this primordial mammalian division. As an advocate of “master morality,” he would abolish liberal democracy and confer elite status upon the “higher types” who are naturally born to rule.

Jeffersonians

In the United States, Jeffersonians are the most numerous in White Nationalist circles. In their view, the best type of government is the one that governs least. These people don’t see anything essentially wrong with the American system. They believe in state and local government and instinctively oppose the consolidation of power in Washington. Jeffersonians like to attribute our racial decline to the corrupting influence of outside forces, namely the Jews, and argue that racial sanity would quickly return to America after the excise of this cancer. Under the Jeffersonian system, elite status would be conferred through local elections and the private accumulation of wealth in a capitalist economy.

Hamiltonians

Like the Jeffersonians, the Hamiltonians still believe in republican self government, but prefer a strong, centralized state to a weak one. Instead of free trade, they want an America First trade policy. Hamiltonians support a strong public sector and a regulated market economy to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth. They believe a few constitutional reforms will be sufficient to reverse our racial decline. In their ideal White ethnostate, elite status would also be conferred through elections and wealth accumulation in the private sphere.

Libertarians

The libertarians are a subset of the Jeffersonians who believe in a minimal state. They believe the only function of the state is to protect individual rights: military, police, courts. The libertarians would scrap the entire ediface of twentieth century progressive reforms in the name of liberty. In a libertarian White ethnostate, elite status would be conferred through participation in the market economy, as government would be hamstrung by a strict constitution.

Fascists

The fascists (this includes National Socialists and related species of fascism) want an authoritarian state headed by a dynamic leader with near absolute power. They would dispense with liberal democracy entirely and replace it with a racialized bureaucracy. This concentration of power would be used to rid the fascist ethnostate of Jews and other undesirable elements. Elite status would be conferred through rising in the party and pleasing its established leaders.

Platonists

For lack of a better word, the “Platonists” are White Nationalists who advocate rule by a Guardian caste or order. These Guardians would be chosen through breeding and merit. Exemplary Whites imbued with an unusual dedication to their race would enjoy rights and privileges that other citizens would not.

Christian Nationalists

The Christian Nationalists believe a strong, rejuvenated Christianity is a necessary component of a White ethnostate. In essence, they want an ethnostate based on Christian moral values. Some Christian Nationalists want a republic; some a monarchy; some a theocratic dictatorship. In all cases, elite status would be strongly connected to religious piety.

Monarchists

The monarchists want a king and hereditary aristocracy. Elite status would be conferred through the possession of royal blood.

Anarchists

The anarchists want to dispense with government entirely. In their proposed ethnostate, as there would be no government, politics would not exist and there would be no mechanism for selecting elites. In theory, everyone would be equal in this classless society.

Where I Stand

So, after all this, what is my answer to this question?

Politically, I stand between the Hamiltonians and Platonists. I think that government can be a force for good and that White Nationalists will need a strong central state to repel invasions by our multitude of enemies. The republican system is a proven model for ensuring continuity and the peaceful transfer of power. I think we would be unwise to dispense with it in pursuit of some of the more outré, untested ideas discussed above.

The worst aspects of republicanism can be dealt with through constitutional reforms. For one, I don’t believe in universal voting rights. In my ideal republic, the franchise would only be extended after certain conditions are met. Voters would be required to demonstrate they are intelligent, competent, and moral enough to enjoy the privilege of selecting our leaders. I also believe that the Guardian caste should have more sway than the average citizen. A real electoral college could be set up in which the Guardians could exercise a veto over bad popular selections.

Morally, Alasdair MacIntyre has been the major influence on my views. Like MacIntyre, I believe that morality is only logical within the context of established traditions. There are a number of moral traditions out there, each of them with their own history, each of them having different premisses as their starting point. It is impossible to properly reason across these incommensurate traditions.

I believe our moral discourse has been the victim of the catastrophe described by MacIntyre in the Preface of After Virtue: we only possess fragments of a coherent moral framework, terms which have lost the context which once made them plausible, and that rational people are diverted into nihilism by this disarray. There are no universal, objective moral principles analogous to the laws of science. Instead, moral philosophy is a practical science like Aristotle always claimed it was: it is a how-to guide for actualizing some given ideal. In other words, I believe that morality (at some level) is reducible to aesthetics. That’s a topic for another day.

These are only my answers. What are yours?

From Occidental Dissent, October 20, 2009

Carlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911)

“Blood, Rage, and History: The World’s First Terrorists”
by Johann Hari
The Independent, October 12, 2009

Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world’s leaders one by one. They have killed the American President, the Russian head of state, the French President, the Austrian head of state, and the Spanish Prime Minister.

Bomb attacks are ripping through the world’s richest cities: explosions devastate Wall Street, the London Underground, a theatre in Barcelona, cafés in Paris, parades in Moscow. The police profile of a typical bomber warns: “He walks to his death with courage and no regrets.” There is panic, and governments launch programmes of torture and deportation targeted at immigrant communities. Yet still the radicals wash defiantly across the world, killing as they go. They say they have “only one aim, one science: destruction.”

It sounds like a feverish novel about al-Qa’ida, set 30 years from now. But it has already happened. It is a story from our past. In the late 19th and early 20th century, anarchist bombers did all this. They were prepared to die for their beliefs. They lived in the same places as today’s Islamists – such as Whitechapel, in east London – and they struck the same targets, like lower Manhattan on a clear September morning.

In a new documentary – The Enemy Within, by Joe Bullman – young Islamists read the words of yesterday’s Jewish anarchists, from their writings and trial transcripts. While the societies they dream of building after the bombs are very different, their rage, their alienation, and their tactics are almost identical. The words fit so easily into their mouths that the Islamists say it is “creepy”.

Mark Twain said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Are there lessons buried in this ripple of rage spreading across a century? For decades, anarchist radicals seemed like an ineradicable force that would bleed Western societies forever. Within a generation, they were gone. So can the anarchists show us what makes young men attack their own societies – and what makes them stop? Can it tell us what tactics defeat an amorphous underground movement, and what only makes them stronger? From the nitroglycerine of the 19th century, is there a fuse that ends with the jihadists of 2009? . . . Read the whole article.

Wouldn't it be nice if THEY would seceede from us?

For any movement or system of thought to remain relevant or dynamic, it must possess the internal capability of periodically reassessing its present course and shifting its focus and direction. Thus far, political anarchism has experienced two distinct stages. The first of these was the era of “classical” anarchism. Roughly defined, this was the period between the Marx/Bakunin split in the 1870s and the defeat of the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s. The second stage began during the 1960s with the emergence of a brand of anarchism that internalized the ideological framework of the New Left, and it is this framework that still prevails at the present time.

The classical anarchist movement was primarily oriented towards proletarian revolution and the historic labor movement. This was appropriate as the “labor question” was the principal political struggle of the time. The New Left-influenced anarchist movement (“neo-anarchism”) oriented itself towards the movements that emerged during its own era. These included “anti-racism” (for instance, the movement against American and South African racial apartheid systems), “anti-colonialism” (opposition to the Vietnam War and other manifestations of imperialist aggression), “the womens’ movement” (second wave feminism), “gay liberation” (homosexuals were previously regarded as criminals, deviants or mentally ill by the wider society), the ecology movement, a variety of tendencies collectively known as “counterculturalism”  and other comparable but lesser known movements, all of which had the purpose of challenging traditional institutions, systems of authority, social practices, cultural norms and so forth. The overwhelming majority of contemporary anarchists continue to function within this particular paradigm.

However, the question needs to be asked as to whether this paradigm is really appropriate in the early 21st century. If it were found to be inappropriate, what might the alternative be? In more recent times, an number of tendencies have emerged within the anarchist milieu that have challenged the dominant New Left-derived paradigm. These include primitivists, eco-anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-monarchists, national-anarchists, tribal anarchists, anarcho-pluralists, a variety of ideologies that might be collectively labeled “free-market anti-capitalists”, post-left anarchists, Christian anarchists, and a number of other perspectives. While there are significant differences between these tendencies, and each of these rejects the dominant New Left paradigm with varying degrees of consistency or fervor, collectively they compromise a dissident force within anarchism that seeks to move past the current second stage in the history of anarchism and into a new era.

The two most serious weaknesses of contemporary anarchism are illustrated by the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on anarchism:

Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state (anarchy.)Specific anarchists may have additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism, and they often disagree with each other on what these criteria are. According to The Oxford Companion to Philosophy “there is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance.”

Among many contemporary anarchists, there is an observable tendency to ignore the struggle against the state, or the treat the battle against the state as only one matter on a laundry list of preferred causes, usually those of a conventionally leftist or countercultural nature. This is the first weakness. The other is the matter of sectarianism, i.e., setting an amount of “additional criteria for what constitutes anarchism” that is so large that it becomes self-defeating when it comes to the matter of building an actual movement that can wield political influence.

There needs to be a revolution within the anarchist movement itself. This should be a revolution that re-orients the anarchist movement towards the primary anarchist objective of state abolitionism. Second, there needs to be a shift in contemporary anarchist thought and action that involves a retreat from the current tunnel-visioned focus on ultra-leftism and counterculturalism. A new focus that is broader and that speaks to a wider variety of issues and population groups is necessary. Third, there needs to be an evaluation of tactics, and the adoption of new tactics that are relevant to current political realities.

An interesting list of historic anarchist communities can be viewed here. One thing that is immediately noticeable about these anarchist polities from the past is how different many of them were from one another. Consequently, it is probable that in a civilization where anarchist communities became widespread there would be wide variation in the specific ideological, cultural or structural content of these communities. This automatically means that the sectarian differences between competing strands within anarchism are irrelevant. Different kinds of anarchists will form different kinds of communities in those geographical regions where their own tendencies are prevalent. For instance, anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists, anarcho-futurists and primitivists, gay anarchists and Christian anarchists, anarcha-feminists and anarcho-monarchists, may not even consider one another to be “true” anarchists, but these battles simply do not matter if different kinds of anarchists are simply “doing their own thing” within the context of their own communities, institutions and organizations.

How, in a nation-state like the United States, could an anarchist movement become large enough, or influential or powerful enough, to actually carry out a revolution rivaling that of, for instance, the Spanish anarchists of the 1930s? Clearly the anarchist movement in North America could never do such a thing, given its small size and narrow focus. But what about a much larger popular movement, in which anarchists assume leadership roles, and with a much broader focus than what is found in the anarchist milieu at present?

Read this essay by the military historian Martin Van Creveld on the present decline of the state as an institution. Now, read this series of articles on the possible scenarios that will bring about the downfall of the American regime itself. Then read this review of a book that describes how Americans are in the process of sorting themselves out into communities specifically oriented towards their own political, cultural or lifestyle interests. Now, take a look at this opinion poll showing the amount of support for secessionist movements in the U.S., and the surprising nature of these numbers. Then take a look at two books (here and here) which offer us an alternative economic paradigm beyond the standard “big business vs big government” false dichotomy.

My friends, these works contain the ideas and information necessary to develop a popular revolutionary movement in North America. This essay is an attempt to synthesize these ideas and develop a comprehensive strategy for their application. No single reader is likely to agree with every argument or position taken in that essay, but its purpose is to “get the ball rolling” concerning the debate as to how anarchist revolution in North America will actually be carried out. And this essay is a discussion of considerations concerning time frames.

The single idea of state abolitionism will never be popular enough to become a mass movement. Most people simply are not that averse to political authority. However, the idea of secession has its roots in American history, culture and tradition. Therefore, anarchists should simply work to develop their own independent enclaves reflecting the value systems of their particular sect of anarchism, encourage other secession movements, and work to popularize the idea of secession. An effort should be made to appeal to those demographic groups most under attack by the state, those with single issues that put them in conflict with the state, and those who have the least to lose and most to gain by rejecting the state.

Further, anarchists should position themselves as the upholders of the economic interests of ordinary people. This opinion poll indicates that the issues of most concern to the public at large at present are unemployment, government spending and healthcare. What, if anything, do anarchists plan to do about these matters? How many individual anarchists have even given any thought to such topics? There are some ideas on these here, here, and here. If you do not like these, then come up with something of your own.

Particularly problematic is the question of people and groups with polar opposite views on many issues participating in the same movement. For instance, the conflicts between the various anarchist sects (Anarchist People of Color and Crimethinc come immediately to mind), or the conflict between secessionists holding opposing cultural or ideological perspectives. No doubt, there are some people who will not enter into a movement that includes others with whom they strongly disagree on certain questions no matter what. These individuals will simply have to fall by the wayside. The proper response to such questions is the “good riddance” argument.  In a decentralized political system, with voluntary association and community autonomy, leftist anti-racist anarchists and national-anarchists need not have any association with one another, nor anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-communists, nor gays and religious conservatives, nor racists and racial minorities, nor snobby rich people and slummy poor people, nor druggies and straight edges, nor feminists and male chauvinist pigs. Nor Crimethinc and Anarchist People of Color. Everyone wins but the state, the ruling class, and the empire.

From Attack the System, August 11, 2009]]> http://www.toqonline.com/blog/the-revolution-within-anarchism/feed/ 0 http://www.toqonline.com/blog/forty-years-in-the-wilderness/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/forty-years-in-the-wilderness/#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:49:32 +0000 Attack the System http://www.toqonline.com/?p=3591 From Attack the System, July 24, 2009

For some years  now, I have advocated for the anarchist movement in North America a change in direction from the course it has followed since the 1960s. Essentially, the general flavor of the anarchist milieu is one that expresses the same set of primary values as Marxists, social democrats and left-liberal Democratic Party activists, with the added qualification of “by the way, we’re also against the state as well.” A principal problem with such an approach is that it fails to distinguish political anarchism from run of the mill leftism. Furthermore, anarchism exists primarily as a kind of youth culture/subculture which focuses on a very narrow ultra-leftism and hyper-counterculturalism that inevitably has the effect of relegating political anarchism into a fringe ideological ghetto.

This is a situation that I have sought to change. I have done so by advocating a broader, more expansive approach for political anarchism than what the current mainstream of the movement will allow for. This effort has won me many highly sympathetic friends within the anarchist milieu, and many bitter enemies as well. In a recent and highly controversial essay, I argued for a “revolution within anarchism.” What I was calling for is the future advent of a “non-leftoidal” anarchist movement, meaning one that is more substantive, comprehensive and original in its approach, rather than simply championing the run-of-the-mill causes and issues favored by leftists and post-60s counterculturalists.

If one surveys most of the contemporary anarchist websites and publications, one typically sees persistent and predictable references to things like the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia, the villainy of pollution and cutting down trees, the need to be kinder to animals, the championing of unions and worker-related causes, the need for better health care and other things that any little old lady at a Democratic Party precinct meeting, liberal Methodist pastor or high school social studies teacher might be interested in. Added to this might be standard countercultural causes like publishing “zines,” alternative media projects, squatting, “Food Not Bombs,” vegetarianism or veganism, neo-pagan or New Age religions, transsexualism, hippie communes,  or punk music. Many of these are no doubt good causes or perfectly harmless activities, but it is questionable as to how much they really do to subvert “the System.” After all, the radicals from the 60s have for the most part been victorious on most of the issues that emerged during that time. But what has been the result? The military-industrial complex is larger and more expansive than ever before, and the empire more far-reaching and more overtly aggressive. The state is more expansive and repressive, and the police state and prison-industrial complex have emerged as major growth industries. The plutocracy has become ever more exploitive, and the socio-economic classes ever more polarized. And the “culture wars” have degenerated into battles within the middle class over symbolic issues like same-sex marriage.

I submit that anarchists in North America should strive to break the grip that the “60s model” of radicalism has on their own milieu and begin looking for new directions. In my previous writings, I have called for the development of an anarchist-led pan-secessionist movement with a strong populist orientation, and oriented towards the lower socio-economic orders, e.g., the lumpenproletariat, neo-peasantry, declasse’ sectors, lower petite bourgeoisie, respectable poor, sinking middle and so forth. Such a movement would champion “third way” economic tendencies beyond socialism or capitalism, with an emphasis on decentralization and the voluntary sector. There would be an across-the-board defense of civil liberties (defending both drug decriminalization and the right to bear arms, for instance) and irreconcilable cultural differences would be handled according to the model of “peace through separatism,” meaning groups like the feminist/gay Left or the Religious Right would have their own separate institutions, associations, communities, and, if necessary, entirely separate regions, with explosive cultural matters like the definition of marriage, abortion, capital punishment, the rights of children against their parents, educational practices, and immigration being determined according to local community standards. The emergence of such a movement would involve a situation where the independent Left, populist Right, radical Middle, underclass, lumpenproletariat, declasse’ sectors, radical ecologists, and racial-nationalists among the minority groups would naturally bend towards one another against the neoconservative/left-liberal establishment. . . . Read the rest of the article.

John Robb

In 1946, George Kennan keyed the famous “Long Telegram,” which identified the Soviet Union as an enemy of the United States. In 1947, the original telegram was reworked and published in Foreign Policy magazine as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Together, these documents formed the codex for the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment, and thereby the basis of the eventual U.S. victory in that conflict. Here’s what a “Kennan” might have written for the 21st century.

The Nature of the Threat Posed by Globalization

We are now engaged in a conflict that will dictate whether we succeed or fail in the 21st century. Our adversary in this conflict is, in short, the threat posed by globalization.

This threat is completely alien to our mode of thought. It is unlike previous threats we have faced since there isn’t a single source of ideological opposition: no collective mind or body of thought to contest with, no single enemy that can be named with clarity across all venues. It is, instead, a systemic threat, one posed by the very function of a system we have created for our mutual benefit: a morally neutral, global supernetwork that spans all salient features of modern life, from communications to economics.

The threat posed by the emergence of this global supernetwork comes in three forms. Let’s examine them in detail.

Extreme and Chaotic Behavior

News in the age of the global supernetwork is often startling. It features an endless procession of crushing financial panics, unexpected food shortages, sharp commodity price spikes, brazen terrorist attacks that have shut down major cities from New York to Sao Paulo to Mumbai, and much more. These extreme events form a pattern of behavior that should serve as an alarm. They are an indication that the system we have come to rely upon, the global supernetwork that connects us to each other and all manner of goods and services is entering a period of extreme turbulence, where we careen from crisis to crisis at an increasing rate and incremental severity. At worst, it may even be an indication of a looming catastrophic failure of indeterminable duration.

From the standpoint of systemic analysis, our global supernetwork is what is called a dynamically unstable system, or one so responsive and interconnected (i.e., tightly coupled), that it is prone to operating in an uncontrolled manner. That, unfortunately, is the way we made it. Through an organic growth process that emphasized business needs and economic efficiency, we have built a complex web of instantaneous communications, just-in-time computer systems, daily multi-trillion-dollar financial flows, and much more. Even more, we have geared up the system with extreme levels of debt and energy-use to reach the limits of potential performance.

All of this amped-up connectivity provides our global system with an ability to rapidly shift from task to task as the conditions warrant. However, it also makes the system prone to over-reaction and self-reinforcing feedback loops, such that even small changes in the right conditions can cause the system to careen to extreme behavior. Typically, we build systems like this only when we are sure we can control them. For example, high-performance aircraft are dynamically unstable systems. They are designed to want to maneuver, rather than fly straight and level. However, if they aren’t precisely managed — down to the millisecond — by computerized control systems, they will quickly careen into uncontrolled maneuvers that generate forces exceeding the structural capacity of their airframe. In short, one of these planes will wind up a smoking crater if the computer system fails to control its operation for even a couple of seconds. . . . Read the whole article.