Franz von Stuck, "Der Krieg"

Black Metal and the Return of Völkisch Thought

How did völkisch ideas resurface in popular culture? By the 1960s Christianity had entered a phase of decline in the West, following a long period of growing skepticism as well as hostility from political ideologies from both Right and Left. As has been the pattern in the West since the fourth century,[1] the decline of the dominant religion coincided with a renewed interest in alternative spiritualities, exotic religions, and the occult.

Much of this interest found expression in modern popular culture, especially modern popular music. Perhaps the most striking example of this confluence is the music of Heavy Metal pioneers Led Zeppelin, whose lyrics blended Aleister Crowley, J. R. R. Tolkien, and pagan Norse and Anglo-Saxon folklore. Artists like Black Sabbath, Black Widow, and Coven also incorporated occult themes and went on to influence subsequent waves of more explicitly Satanic Heavy Metal artists, such as King Diamond and Mercyful Fate.

Influenced by Black Sabbath, Motörhead, and punk rock, Bathory emerged within this milieu. We have already seen how the Satanic themes of Bathory’s early albums were replaced by Nordicist and pagan ones. Bathory’s Thomas Forsberg articulated the view that Christianity was a foreign religion, a form of Judaic spiritual conquest that sought to crush and eradicate indigenous European paganism. During the 1990s, this view became widely influential in the Black Metal subculture, especially in Scandinavia.

Anti-Christian views within the Black Metal scene usually fall into two categories: Nietzschean (often mediated through Anton Lavey’s “Satanism”) and neo-pagan. The Nietzscheans denigrate Christianity as an egalitarian religion of weakness, meekness, repentance, confession, and self-denial. The neo-pagans generally agree with the Nietzscheans, but emphasize the foreignness and deracinating influence of Christianity compared to the more authentic European pagan heritage. This outlook is explicitly völkisch, evoking the unity of blood and soil, of race and nation, and of spirituality and the Volk. The Black Metal scene also tends to be anti-Semitic for the same völkisch reasons they are anti-Christian. Some Black Metal musicians were so militantly anti-Christian that during the early-to-mid 1990s, they embarked on a campaign of church arsons.

In the world of Black Metal, genuine spirituality and depth of artistic expression is all about delving fearlessly into the darkness of the human soul. Hence the unremittingly dark songs filled with hate, fear, melancholy, misery, and depression. Black Metal—“true” Black Metal—seeks to put the greatest possible distance between itself and the mainstream of capitalistic mass society, which it perceives as meaningless, banal, materialist, brainless, conformist, uncreative, and hypocritical.

The Black Metal subculture glorifies war and the martial spirit. Scenes of battle are common on Black Metal album covers, and musicians often photograph themselves wielding axes or swords and wearing bandoliers, spiked arm-bands, and, occasionally, coats of mail. Likewise, lyrics celebrate war and battle, often heroic but always bloody. This militarism is often wrapped in mysticism. Typical titles include “Sunwheel on the Helmet of Steel” in Capricornus’ Alone Against All, “Nine Steps to Eternity” in Thor’s Hammer’s Fidelity Shall Triumph, and “Fire and Snow” in Graveland’s Will Stronger than Death.

Black Metal artists also emphasize nature and landscape, but a morbid and mystical sensibility is evident even here. Whether inspired by völkisch thought or mere Satanic occultism, nature is always conceived in spiritual, mystical, and Romantic terms. The Black Metal aesthetic dictactes that night and winter are eternal. Coniferous forests are preferred to tilled fields and manicured gardens. Where the glorification of war merges with nature mysticism, the emphasis remains on the latter. Viking and Folk Metal bands, in contrast, adopt a more obviously völkisch approach to nature, allowing daylight in their landscapes and generally emphasizing the idyllic as opposed to counter-Enlightenment Sturm und Drang.

The Black Metal sensibility does not reject culture in favor of nature, but instead valorizes culture and nature, both conceived organically, over civilization, which is conceived in mechanistic and materialistic terms. In the Black Metal universe, cities were never built, the Industrial Revolution never occurred, and modernity never arrived. For all its belligerence, Black Metal is inherently nostalgic, a comprehensive negation of modernity.

This negation is apparent even in the Black Metal sound, which would of course be impossible without the techno-industrial society Black Metal rejects. Thus the technological source of the Black Metal sound—that which links it to modernity—is concealed to the same degree that it is flaunted in Techno music: “raw” Black Metal bands favor a heavily under-produced, “necro” sound that deliberately avoids high-fidelity or otherwise seeks to emulate low-fidelity recording media—in contrast to other genres that favor a primitive, under-produced sound, the desired effect is not “street cred” (as in with Punk) but a sense of quasi-occult obscurity; more instrumentally sophisticated bands use layers of synthesizers to generate a volatilized mystical atmosphere that obscures the act of performance, while bands with a vehemently pagan orientation (e.g., Nokturnal Mortum) add traditional folk instruments into their mix musically to evoke an earthy sense of Volkstum.

The desired effect is always for the listener to lose himself in the sound, to go into a semi-trance, raised above the tedium of mundanity; Black Metal music aspires to hypnosis and, in the case of specifically pagan Black Metal, it seeks to create the spiritual union—with the landscape, with the collective unconsciousness, with the lost pagan soul, with the lost heroic spirit of the distant past—that was longed for by völkisch authors a century ago.

The rejection of modernity goes hand in hand with the rejection of progressivism. Like völkisch thinkers, Black Metalers, whether pagan, Satanic, or merely suicidal, are cultural pessimists. Their pessimism is often allied with the explicit adoption of the Indo-European Traditional cyclical view of history, in which history begins with a Golden Age then declines through Silver and Bronze ages to the present Iron or Dark Age (Kali Yuga), which is doomed to perish of its own corruptions or through a cataclysmic final battle, whereupon a new Golden Age will dawn.

References to such culture pessimists as Nietzsche and Spengler and to more mystically inclined authors like Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Miguel Serrano, and H. P. Lovecraft, are common in Black Metal. Hence titles like “Decline of the West (Europe Will Rise)” in Pantheon’s Aryan Rebirth, “Eve of the Kali Yuga” in Arkthos’ Knights of the Eternal Sun, “The Gathering of the Elite to Destroy both the Modern World and Demiurge” in Beyond the North Winds’ Aryan Cult of A-Mor, “Desecration of Our Fatherland” in Darkthule’s Awakening of the Ancient Past, “Melancholy of the Inaccomplished Vengeance” in Sons of North’s Death of the White Race, “Among the Ruins” in SIG:AR:TYR’s Beyond the North Winds, “Son of the Fatherland” in Hordak’s The Last European Wolves, “A Golden Age Turns to Rust” in Drowning the Light’s The Fallen Years, and “Exiles of the Golden Age” in Weltenfeind, a three-way split with Absurd, Grand Belial’s Key, and Sigrblot.

Explicit references to völkisch thought are rare, but they occasionally surface: there is a Finnish band called Armanenschaft; Hate Forest’s Blood and Fire EP contains the song “Aryosophia”; Vril released a demo entitled “Once and Again Thule”; Werewolf’s track “Vrilmacht” appears in their Fidelity of Ideology split EP with Semper Fidelis; there is Apriaxia’s Blood and Soil EP; and Adalruna’s Wer ist der Starke von Oben shows a photograph of Guido von List standing by the Heltentor with members of the Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft in 1911.

References to specifically Nazi mysticism and esotericism are also not infrequent: there is Bilskirnir’s EPs Ahnenerbe and Hyperborea, and the song “Reconquering the Atlantean Supremacy” in the album Wotansvolk, Hakenkreuzzug’s Centurions of Thule EP, the song “Jewel of Atlanteans” in Graveland’s Memory and Destiny, and the song “Hyperborean Ascention” in Contra Ignem Fatuum’s Detritus, among others.

The emergence of explicitly National Socialist Black Metal should not surprise, for the original völkisch current was the incubator of Conservative Revolutionary tendencies, including National Socialism, and by the mid 1990s Black Metal had re-created the same cultural logic that led to National Socialism 80 years earlier. But the readiness with which Black Metal came to embrace an outlook and sensibility so thoroughly stigmatized following the Allied victory in 1945 still needs to be explained.

The answer lies in the nature of Heavy Metal’s genesis following the collapse of the popular music subculture of the 1960s. Deena Weinstein identifies two strands within this genesis, an idealist one and a conservative one, which were fused at the point of Heavy Metal’s inception.[2]

Heavy Metal emerged at a time when its original core demographic—white working-class males—were experiencing a growing social, cultural, economic, political, and demographic displacement, thanks to the rising tide of radical feminism; belligerent black activism; discriminatory legislation in housing, education, and employment favoring minorities; non-white immigration from the Third World; and a serious economic downturn that drove the most marginalized whites to the wall. These developments aided the formation of an implicit white community that was strongly ethnocentric, and which, in a world where whiteness was increasingly de-centered, came to make a badge of honor of its negative marginality: Heavy Metal fans are what Weinstein calls “proud pariahs.”

The Heavy Metal culture was defined by its working class roots, and working class culture is by nature conservative, with well-defined male and female roles, a readiness to express strong emotions, and a distrust of government and corporations. It is a culture that is decidedly out of step with modern mainstream liberalism. Not surprisingly, then, Heavy Metal tended to resist radical changes in its form, celebrated heroic masculinity, and was predicated on an ethos of integrity and authenticity that deplored its own commercialization. Indeed, “[f]or fans, perhaps the worst thing that can be said about a heavy metal band is that it has ‘gone commercial.’”[3] Nevertheless, Heavy Metal gained many fans from the lower middle class, and subsequent offshoots have followed this pattern. The lower middle class is the same demographic that Mosse identified as formulating the völkisch critiques of modernity a century earlier, and indeed the key features of Heavy Metal culture are highly compatible with those critiques.[4]

Even in its rawest forms, Black Metal tends to appeal to a more elitist and culturally sophisticated sensibility than its parent genre, but it has not radically changed the basic anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-commercial, anti-cosmopolitan outlook it inherited from Heavy Metal. It only made it more serious: deepened it ideologically, elaborated it artistically, and radicalized it metapolitically. From the beginning Black Metalers were proud pariahs in the modern world, and, as such, were receptive to anti-establishment ideologies that were compatible with Black Metal’s own constitution.

In sum, a good portion of Black Metal’s intellectual and aesthetic features are völkisch. Crowley, Satanism, and Tolkien also boil in the Black Metal cauldron, to be sure, but these too have been appropriated to the extent that they are consistent with the völkisch worldview. Therefore, one can plausibly characterize Black Metal as a revival of the Conservative Revolution, profoundly transformed in the context of a modern musical subculture, but recognizable nonetheless.

Lessons

My characterization of Black Metal will inevitably lead radical elements within the white nationalist movement to ask, “How do we use Black Metal to start the revolution?” Those asking this question will likely be thinking of how rock music in the 1960s helped to disseminate and popularize among the young the “progressive,” liberal, and anti-Western ideas that had been festering in the catacombs of the academia since the 1930s and even earlier.

I am not convinced that Black Metal has an application in that political sense. The music of the 1960s enjoyed broad appeal, whereas Black Metal seeks and revels in its own marginality and obscurity. Student engagement in radical politics during the late 1960s is only mirrored by the modern Left, and enjoyed, as it does today to a much greater degree, media and institutional support. Fans of Black Metal, on the other hand, detest politics even more than the Conservative Revolutionaries: theirs is a strategy of negation and of escape from mundanity.

The Anti-Geldof Compilation that I sponsored and released through my record label remains to date the sole extant example of engagement with current affairs and everyday politics in the Black Metal scene—and even in this case it was largely an emotional response on the part of the participating artists against the pious hypocrisy of self-indulgent rock stars. This is significant when one considers that the Encyclopedia Metallum currently lists over 17,000 Black Metal bands.[5] Then, again, most of the participating artists were associated with the NSBM scene, and, as we know, one aspect that distinguished the National Socialists from the Conservative Revolutionaries in Germany was their willingness to engage in mass politics.

At best, we can see Black Metal as proof that it is possible for a cultural space to exist, even today, where anti-egalitarian thought can find honest artistic expression and forge an alternative positive identity among whites through the praxis of style. Our task is to understand the mechanisms that enabled significant parts of the Black Metal scene to exist as an explicit white community in the first place. Our task is also to create other such cultural spaces, to expand the constellation of stylized activities, so that we may eventually build a parallel cultural universe wherefrom they can be afforded institutional support and thus gain momentum and consolidate, once the liberal establishment collapses by the weight of its own corruption and ideological bankruptcy.

This is an important task, because inasmuch as Black Metal artists have developed and inspired an evocative style or aesthetic that (implicitly or explicitly) is uniquely white and European and/or celebrates whiteness in all its diversity of history and heritage, Black Metal is a genuine object of study in the context of a cultural war where the opposing faction seeks to suppress, defame, and eradicate whiteness. Humans are sentimental and emotional animals, more readily persuaded by an appealing style than by a rational argument, so winning the cultural war will require more than hard facts and superior logic. It requires that we successfully appeal to sentiment and emotion by becoming masters of style. Black Metal contains important lessons in this respect.

Discography:

Adalruna. Wer ist der Starke von Oben. 2008.

Apraxia. Blood and Soil. Othal Productions. OLP008. 2001.

Arkthos. Knights of the Eternal Sun. Supernal Music. Ferly048CD. 2006.

Bathory. Blood Fire Death. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1989.

Bathory. Hammerheart. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1991.

Bathory. Twilight of the Gods. Black Mark Productions. BMCD666-1. 1992.

Beyond the North Winds’ Aryan Cult of A-Mor. 2004.

Bilskirnir. Ahnenerbe. Nykta Productions. NYKTA06. 2004.

Bilskirnir. Hyperborea. Solistitium Records. SOL052. 2005.

Bilskirnir. Wotansvolk. Wotanstahl Kangschmiende. WKG006. 2007

Capricornus. Alone Against All. Supernal Music. Ferly011CD. 2004.

Celtic Frost. Into the Pandemonium. Noise Records. N-0067. 1987.

Contra Ignem Fatuum. Detritus. Supernal Music. Ferly036MCD. 2005.

Darkthule. Awakening of the Ancient Past. Battlefield Records. 2004.

Graveland. Memory and Destiny. No Colours Records. NC057. 2002.

Graveland. Will Stronger than Death. No Colours Records. NC0118. 2007.

Hakenkreuzzug. Centurions of Thule. Battlefield Records. 2004

Hate Forest. Blood and Fire. Sombre Records. 2001.

Hellhammer. Apocalyptic Raids. Noise Records. N-0008. 1984.

Hordak. The Last European Wolves. Griffin Music. GRIFFIN008CD. 2006.

Pantheon. Aryan Rebirth. Strong Survive Records. SSR025. 2005.

Thor’s Hammer. Fidelity Shall Triumph. Darker Than Black Records. DTB001. 1998.

Semper Fidelis/Werewolf. Fidelity of Ideology. Eastside Records/ Hammerbolt. 2008.

Skyforger. Semigall’s Warchant. FR034. 2004.

SIG:AR:TYR. Beyond the North Winds. Morbid Winter Records. MWR012. 2008.

Various Artists. Anti-Geldof Compilation. Supernal Music. Ferly035CD. 2007.

[2] Weinstein, Heavy Metal.

[3] Weinstein, Heavy Metal, 115.

[4] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 7.

[5] http://www.metal-archives.com/.

Part 3 of 3. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

Franz von Stuck, "Der Krieg"

Völkisch Thought and the Conservative Revolution

Some of the most fascinating aspects of Black Metal are its parallels with the ideas and sensibilities of the Conservative Revolution and the wider völkisch (populist) movement that swept Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These similarities are so striking that Black Metal may well be considered, if not the continuation, then at least the revival of the Conservative Revolution on the plane of modern popular culture.

Black Metal is, moreover, part of a growing subculture of resistance to the anti-white system. This subculture consists of a constellation of interconnected musical genres and subgenres, religious practices, philosophical and political thinkers and schools, websites, booksellers, publications, and cultural activities, such as battle re-enactment. This subculture sustains itself by providing its members with a positive identity that is not dependent on the system of status awards maintained by the present sociocultural and political dispensation. Moreover, if, as Jacques Attali has proposed, the music of the present is the noise of the future, then, in a coded way, Black Metal could well be more symptomatic of things to come than of things as they are.[1]

The Conservative Revolution was entirely different from modern American conservatism, which is merely a form of classical liberalism allied with socially conservative views. American conservatives believe in progress, democracy, equality before the law, and free markets; their ideology derives from the Enlightenment as formulated by John Locke and Adam Smith. They are closely associated with libertarianism. They regard man as a rational, sovereign individual, and they tend to have a linear, progressivist conception of history. The German Conservative Revolutionaries, like other völkisch movements, were reacting against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and, in American terms, have much in common with the Southern Agrarians. Their common enemies were modernity, urbanism, and industrialism.

Völkisch thought is characterized by a romantic focus on the “organic,” German folklore, local history, blood and soil, and nature mysticism. The term derives from the German word Volk, which corresponds to “people,” or “folk,” but with the added connotations of folklore, race, and nation. Among the German romantics, “Volk” “signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental essence,” the fusion of man with nature (particularly his native landscape, following Wilhelm Riehl), mythos, or the cosmos, wherein man found “the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk.”[2] A related concept is “Volkstum,” a term that combines the notions of folklore and ethnicity.

Völkisch thought arose from the Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century, particularly that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who, along with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, “began to conceive of the Volk in heroic terms during the wars of liberation against Napoleon.”[3] Völkisch thought emerged at a time when Germany existed as a collection of semi-feudal principalities. As political unity eluded them for more than half a century, völkisch thinkers were forced to emphasize cultural and spiritual rather than political dimensions of unity. Thus they came to idealize, even mystify, the concept of nationhood. This process attained such momentum that when political unification finally came in 1871, the prosaic nature of Bismarck’s Realpolitik led to a tremendous sense of disappointment.

Völkisch thought also coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the attendant destruction of the German landscape, dislocations of the population, obsolescence of traditional crafts and tools, social alienation, political upheavals (e.g., the revolutions of 1848), and economic crises. These led eventually to disenchantment and finally to the wholesale rejection of industrial society and modernity, which came to be seen as materialistic, soulless, rootless, abstract, mechanical, alienating, cosmopolitan, and irreconcilable with national self-identification. Völkisch thought was a quest for rootedness, for the “inward correspondence between the individual, the native soil, the Volk, and the universe.”[4] Hence the calls for a “‘German revolution’ to liquidate the dangerous new developments and to guide the nation back to its original purpose.” Unsurprisingly, völkisch ideologists saw “traditional politics as exemplifying the worst aspect of the world in which they lived,” and “rejected political parties as artificial,” favoring instead an “elitism that derived from their semi-mystical conceptions of nature and man.”[5]

The völkisch rejection of modernity was sometimes combined with racialist occult and esoteric doctrines exemplified by runologist Guido von List, author of The Secret of the Runes. List’s racialist reading of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy proved influential in occult circles. The Guido von List Society (Guido-von-List-Gesellschaft), which he founded, included among its members the sexo-racialist Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, author of Theozoologie, founder of the esoteric order, Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars), and founder and editor of the magazine Ostara. Lanz glorified the Aryan race as Gottmenschen and advocated the sterilization of the unfit and the inferior races. Lanz’s “theozoology” eventually evolved into “ariosophy”—the study of occult wisdom concerning the Aryans. Other List disciples became involved in the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden, organised by Theodor Fritsch, a prominent activist in the German anti-Semitic movement.

When the Germanenorden split into two schismatic factions (the Germanenorden and the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail), Hermann Pohl, the order’s first leader, was joined by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who was also an admirer of List and Liebenfels. Sebottendorff eventually contacted Walter Nauhaus, leader of the Germanenorden and head of the Thule Society, a Germanic study group. Sebottendorff adopted the name of this study group as a cover name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater, which was run jointly by him and Nauhaus. In time the Thule Society came to organize the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was renamed the Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) in 1920, months after Adolf Hitler, once a reader of Liebenfels’ Ostara magazine, joined the party.

This occult branch of völkisch thought, which during the post-World War II years produced writers like Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, adopted elements from Eastern mythology: a cyclical view of history (mirrored in Oswald Spengler’s metahistory) followed the Hindu model of the four successively degenerative ages, or Yugas; while the swastika, ubiquitous in India and the Far East, was adopted by numerous organizations before the NSDAP, from Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society to Lanz’s Ordo Novi Templi (the first to use the swastika in an Aryan context) to Fritsch’s Germanenorden to Sebottendorf’s Thule Society.

Although dismissed by some völkisch thinkers, the Jewish question acquired added importance during this period. As a people of the desert, Jews came to be “viewed as shallow, arid, ‘dry’ . . . devoid of profundity and totally lacking in creativity.” This contrasted with the Germans, “who, living in the dark, mist-shrouded forests [were deemed] deep, mysterious, [and] profound.”[6] Moreover, because the Jews thrived in the liberal, secular, commercial, urban context, they came to be seen as the incarnation of modernity, and hence a corrupting, conspiring outsider, an insidious agent of dissolution.[7] Indeed, Jews had grown closely connected to the liberals on the road to emancipation and, in particular, to the Revolution of 1848.

Because of its links to Judaism, Christianity also came under scrutiny: “in common with most völkisch thinkers, [Paul de] Lagarde blamed St. Paul for having enveloped untainted Christianity in sterile Hebrew law” and advocated a Germanic religion through which a “realignment of the spiritual forces [could] effect a true unity of the Volk.”[8] Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity as a debilitating agent was influenced by the anti-Jewish, but nevertheless still Christian, Lagarde. By the time Savitri Devi wrote Defiance and Gold in the Furnace, shortly after World War II, however, radical hostility to Christianity was tightly bound to radical anti-Jewish sentiments.[9]

Following World War I, the völkisch ideology “acquired a mass political base,”[10] propelled by the anguish of Germany’s military defeat in a context where völkisch ideas had long been disseminated within German institutions. The Conservative Revolution emerged at this time as a predominantly völkisch movement: it thought organically rather than mechanistically, emphasized quality as opposed to quantity, prized folk-community (Volksgemeinschaft) as opposed to class conflict, believed in the Führerprizip as opposed to ochlocracy and parliamentarism, glorified war as opposed to unheroic economism, and rejected progressive liberalism, egalitarianism, and the banal commercial culture of urban industrial civilization.

The Conservative Revolutionaries were revolutionaries because they realized that culture was threatened not merely by liberalism and Communism, but by the entire political order, which had to be replaced—using revolutionary means if necessary—by a new order based on conservative principles.[11] Although the term existed prior to the end of World War I, it entered general use only after it was popularized by Hugo von Hoffmannstahl and Edgar Julius Jung during the Weimar Republic. Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the phrase “Third Reich”) were representative of this movement. Völkisch ideas enjoyed considerable social prominence and institutional legitimacy long before the National Socialists came to power. They were, however, marginalized and suppressed by the Allied Occupation regime and the new post-war dispensation following Germany’s military defeat in 1945.

Part 2 of 3. Read Part 1 here.

[2] George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).

[3] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 14.

[4] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 6.

[5] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 3.

[6] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[7] Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974).

[8] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 33.

[9] Savitri Devi, Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany, 3rd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2008) and Savitri Devi, Defiance, 2nd ed., ed. R. G. Fowler (Atlanta: The Savitri Devi Archive, 2009).

[10] Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 5.

[11] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair.

There’s a great article in Time magazine by Amanda Ripley (I wrote a review of her great book, The Unthinkable in the City Journal) on one of the most under covered security lessons of 9/11:  that an aware citizenry can defend itself.  It ends with this telling para which depicts the government reasserting its authority to prop up its legitimacy:

After the passengers [heroes] of Flight 253 deplaned in Detroit, they were held in the baggage area for more than five hours until FBI agents interviewed them. They were not allowed to call their loved ones. They were given no food. When one of the pilots tried to use the bathroom before a bomb-sniffing dog had finished checking all the carry-on bags, an officer ordered him to sit down, according to passenger Alain Ghonda, who thought it odd. “He was the pilot. If he wanted to do anything, he could’ve crashed the plane.” It was a metaphor for the rest of the country: Thank you for saving the day. Now go sit down.

The same spirit of being in control, regardless of government inaction/incompetence, should be true for other aspects of our lives under a similar assault by a global system run amok.What am I talking about?  Our economic and societal future.  If it’s not clear to you already after seeing a global economic meltdown caused by the gluttony of financial parasites, it should be.  But it’s worse than that.  The entire system has failed to produce anything resembling improvement in our lives for years:

• Median male incomes today are the same as they were in 1974 in the US (and likely all over the western world).  No progress has been made despite a doubling of productivity and massive top line GDP growth. Worse, given that female incomes aren’t on par with male incomes yet, the typical American family makes much less per hour worked than in 1974.
• All of the requirements for entry into the middle class are now private expenses.  From health care to a college education, if you can’t afford the minimum (let alone high quality versions), you aren’t allowed entry.  Worse, those expenses are spiraling out of control at rates many times the rate of inflation.  Nothing is being done to address this.
• The system is geared to make us fail.  Not only has outsourcing/off-shoring just started (everything that can be moved offshore to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity in wage disparities between western and workers in developing countries will be) we are being laden with un-repayable debt. To wit: there’s been NO job growth in the last decade (despite tens of millions in population growth) and total debt from all sources is still near ALL time historical highs.

To add insult to injury, efforts to correct any of the above through governmental or regulatory reform have failed miserably (the government and both parties have been captured by transnational business interests):   from endless bailouts to industries actually writing the legislation that covers them to guarantee rich profit growth while solving nothing meaningful (as we saw with both the recent health care and finance bills).  We are at a dead end.So, take control.

NOTE:  My solution is to form a tribal layer.  Resilient communities that are connected by a network platform (a darknet).  A decentralized and democratic system that can provide you a better interface with the dominant global economic system than anything else I can think of.  Not only would this tribe protect you from shocks and predation by this impersonal global system, it would provide you with the tools and community support necessary to radically improve how you and your family does across all measures of consequence.  Of course, this may not be the right solution for you, but if it is…

NOTE2:  Seems like the term darknet is confusing people.  Going to need to rethink the branding and terminology.

From Global Guerrillas, January 3, 2010

While White Noise music is explicitly designed to inspire racially or politically motivated violence and is seen as part and parcel of the revolutionary ultra-nationalist subculture, he suggests that ‘metapolitical fascism’ has its own cultural reflection in the domain of sound, namely, apoliteic music [employing a concept from Julius Evola -- TOQ Editor]. This is a type of music whose ideological message contains obvious or veiled references to the core elements of fascism but is simultaneously detached from any practical attempts to realize these elements through political activity. Apoliteic music neither promotes outright violence nor is publicly related to the activities of radical right-wing political organizations or parties. Nor can it be seen as a means of direct recruitment to any political tendency.

Shekhovtsov’s article focuses on this type of music, and the thesis is tested by examining bands and artists that work in such musical genres as Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial, whose roots lie in cultural revolutionary and national folk traditions.

From Traditionalists, December 3, 2009

Chapel at St. Photios National Shrine, St. Augustine, Florida

From The Occidental Observer, November 14, 2009

In “Discovering Implicit White Communities,” Part 1, we reviewed Kevin MacDonald’s article, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” in which he presents the evidence from psychologists for the existence of a struggle in each European American, between our innate preference towards people like us and the need to conform to the multicultural (anti-White) ethic that emerged dominant in the second half of the 20th century. He illustrates his concept of implicit Whiteness with several examples: Republican Party, Country Music, NASCAR, and Evangelical Christianity. With MacDonald’s theoretical framework established we can now pull on a thread that is implied in his article: How do we plot all European American communities somewhere on a continuum between implicit and explicit and use this knowledge to our advantage?

Discovering European American Space

We frequently hear criticism within our ranks that we are little but an Internet virtual movement, that White “activists” will say things on the Internet that they would or could not say in our daily interactions with family, co-workers, neighbors. Take Guillaume Faye, for example, who writes:

Unfortunately for us, this same powerful tool [the Internet] allows people to think that they are advancing or fighting for the cause by simply talking on the Internet. Action, comrades. If talk leads to action, then talk is beneficial. If talk leads to simply a modified version of a Japanese Anime enthusiast Internet community with a different focus for its enthusiasm, then nothing has been done. Worse, the appearance of action has set us back.

Thus, one of the primary tasks set out before European-American activists is politicizing the physical space we inhabit through positive, empirical, systematic transformation. We must bring our ideas into the physical world. MacDonald again: “The first step [in changing this] is a psychological one: Proud and confident explicit assertions of ethnic identity and interests among White people, and the creation of communities where such explicit assertions are considered normal and natural rather than a reason for ostracism.”

Where do we start? How do we move out of the Internet echo chamber ghetto? I believe the answer is standing right in front of us. We need to literally practice what we preach. Just like learning chess or hockey, practice is the only way to build confidence and improve; and it is only sensible to practice expressing ourselves in places that are reasonable friendly environments. To identify the best places to start expressing ourselves we therefore need a heuristic:

1. Is the racial composition of those who visit the place overwhelmingly European American?

2. What is the historical significance of the place for European Americans? Does it have historical continuity and legitimacy?

3. Is it institutionalized by and for European Americans?

4. Is there a confident pro-European American group that has staked a claim or “adopted” the space as ours? . . . Read the rest of the article.

The discussion began with Alex Kurtagic’s “White Noise” (October 19, 2009), which we have already linked on this site.

Followups include:

R. J. Stove, “That’s Professor Ozzy Osbourne to You!” (November 7, 2009)

Devin Reid Saucier’s reply to Stove (November 7, 2009)

Alex Kurtagic’s “Volk the System!” (November 11, 2009)

And finally there is Nina Kouprianova’s “Death (Metal) of the West” (November 12, 2009)

Check out our own Christopher Donovan’s article on his experiences at an AC/DC concert: “Implicit Whiteness, with Pyrotechnics: Or, the Night White People Took over Washington, DC” from The Occidental Observer (November 18, 2008).

Also, the Fall 2009 issue of The Occidental Quarterly will feature a major essay by Alex Kurtagic: “Black Metal: Conservative Revolution in Popular Culture.”

Kevin MacDonald

From The Occidental Observer, November 13, 2009

During the 29 August 2009 episode of James Edwards’ The Political Cesspool radio program, his co-host that evening, Winston Smith, asked Dr. Greg Johnson, editor of The Occidental Quarterly, the following question: “Do our people really not understand that race is everything or do we understand and choose, en masse, to ignore and repress it?”

Dr. Johnson replied by directing the listening audience to read one article in particular, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism” by Professor Kevin MacDonald. “This is a very important issue and it is something I think about all the time,” Johnson responded. “One of the most important things written on . . . White racial consciousness that I have ever seen, I am proud to say was published in The Occidental Quarterly … it is about the whole concept of implicit Whiteness …”

Why is MacDonald’s article on implicit Whiteness so important? Of course the best way to find out is to read it yourself, but short of that, the following summary will provide the reader with the highlights. . . . Read the whole article.

Read Kevin MacDonald’s “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism.”

Many ask themselves, What will it take for White people to finally react and take decisive and effective action to change the status quo? How much worse does it need to get before they finally decide that they have had enough of this politically correct anti-White nonsense?

It is a good question.

And sadly, my answers will induce deep depression.

In my dystopian novel, Mister, I make an excruciatingly grim and detailed exploration of a future where the White race is inexorably sinking, overwhelmed by the uncontrolled growth of a chaotic, multicultural West, riddled with labyrinthine and corrupt bureaucracies, crushed by debt and predatory taxation, choked by regulation and incomprehensible legislation, impoverished by scarcity and hyperinflation, and brutalized by inter-racial hostility and ruthless competition for ever-shrinking space and resources. The world of Mister is a hot, overcrowded world where nothing works, and where the only signs of resistance come from a radical underground of hardcore fanatics (the Esoteric Hitlerists).

While I mock the end product of the liberals’ virtually unopposed pursuit of their utopia, my main target of criticism in the novel is the respectable conservative. Liberals will be liberals, after all, and, because their sensibilities are probably largely inborn, they are beyond persuasion. The respectable conservatives, however, have no excuse: they know better, yet they choose to remain silent out of fear of being called names; they could act for the long-term good of all, but choose to insulate themselves out of fear of experiencing short-term discomfort. It is they who make the liberal dystopia possible.

The main character in the novel is one such respectable conservative: a highly gifted, middle class, middle-aged, White IT consultant, who decided long ago that he, as a mere individual, was powerless to change the course of history. Because he is Everyman and spiritually an empty vessel, the character remains nameless: but readers call him Mister. As a result of his policy of crypsis and avoidance, he eventually gets what he deserves: he is arrested and detained for reasons that are nebulous and spurious, but which are professionally convenient and adaptive to his non-White inquisitors. While in detention, Mister has an epiphany and realizes that it was his efforts to not rock the boat that led him to share a cell with common criminals. Unfortunately, however, when bureaucratic intrigues result in his being freed, he quickly reverts back to his old self. There is no lasting transformation.

In his recent review, Edmund Connelly expressed disappointment at the fact that Mister failed to extend his prison-cell insights into revolutionary action. But this was precisely the point: The White revolution that has been fantasized about in consciously pro-White fiction is highly unlikely to occur; and, certainly, we cannot rely on the respectable conservative to speak up or contribute to any kind of effective oppositional action anytime soon. When the respectable conservative’s life is directly threatened, and when it is obvious beyond doubt that his only immediate options are victory or death, he might consider doing something then. Otherwise: he is too scared. The problem, of course, is that when the establishment — the power clique that dispenses the rewards and the punishments — is liberal and anti-White in character, the respectable conservative needs the respect of the very faction that hates him. Emasculation becomes then the price for social status and personal advancement. . . . Read the rest of the article.

TOQ Online:

Andrew Yeoman: At its heart National Anarchism is a purely political framework, but any group or religious movement can adopt it to advance the aim of establishing an autonomous region or community.  Religion has a special importance for National Anarchism as it is one of the most powerful motivating factors of human society, and it is vital for many religious traditions to form communities where their values are respected and recognized by the territorial administrators of the land they live on.

Forming communities exclusively on the basis of religious conviction is a perfectly acceptable option for National Anarchists.  National Anarchists have been known to advocate for autonomous Christian, Muslim, Pagan, and secular regions according to the values of the National Anarchist in question.  This is how traditional societies have operated for most of human history.

Any particular National Anarchist may advocate for areas to be administered according to certain religious values or even be a strictly secular enterprise, but that the ideal determining factor being the will of the people involved in a given region.

For purely practical reasons, some groups such as BANA take no official position on what religious values participants should have. However, activists are encouraged to have strong beliefs concerning the tradition they follow and tolerance of differences between comrades in the same struggle for national liberation.

TOQ Online: BANA got a lot of attention for protesting a rather large homosexual event in San Francisco. Tell me about that. Obviously it took some courage. What was the rationale for the protest? Are there homosexual National Anarchists?

Andrew Yeoman: The event in question was the Folsom Street Fair, an annual sado-masochist event in San Francisco that has been running for over 25 years. It is essentially a public orgy where any and all acts of sexual deviance take place in full view of the police.  In other words it’s the antithesis of sexual responsibility.

Our protest centers on the fact that children and minors — some as young as babies and three-year-olds dressed up in leather suits and dog collars — and were brought to witness the spectacle. Many are brought by adoptive gay parents who believe that having their children witness these events exposes them to greater diversity.

In our statement on the reasons for this protest, we made it clear that we can’t prevent adults engaging in risky or vile behavior, but we have the shared responsibility to prevent harm coming to children at these events who may be abused at home.  We have been criticized for appearing to be anti-gay or a square “right wing” group tolerating only Christian family values.  If that is the case, then my view is “so be it.”

Our goal is to represent the people in our tribe and the views of the people in our local area.  The overwhelming majority of people who have learned about this event through us have supported our actions 110 percent.  We even have our supporters among adult attendees who don’t like minors at the event, and among queers who believe it gives their community a bad name.

What is most telling is the complete lack of coverage from the mainstream media and government of an event that draws tens of thousands of people from across the country.  By saying nothing, we believe they are encouraging child abuse, recklessly promoting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, and ignoring the complaints of the vast majority of their constituents in San Francisco.

The ideology of National Anarchism makes no requirement on what kind of sexual preferences people take.  Although most National Anarchists hold traditionalist or conservative views of sexual relationships, I know of queer National Anarchists.  National Anarchists who are queer tend to have folkish views on racialism and may support establishing enclaves that are devoted to their lifestyle of choice.  To paraphrase Troy Southgate, the most well-known National Anarchist ideologue, there is every reason to support queer individuals to act as white blood cells in our society rather than pariahs.

The cultural and tribal goals of BANA necessitate the promotion of traditional relationships between men and women and the growth of successful families.  That does not mean we persecute individuals who have alternative lifestyles. On the contrary, alternatives are perfectly acceptable as long as differences of opinion are respected.

TOQ Online: Most nationalist groups are predominantly composed of single men. Is this true of BANA? Are there women, married couples, families with children?

Andrew Yeoman: To date BANA has been most successful with Bay Area youth.  BANA consists mostly of people under 30 and is about 70 percent male/30 percent female. However there is a growing trend of women and families supporting our campaigns.  I am very proud to share that we have been blessed with a pair of comrades becoming engaged, and we also have female members taking leadership roles within the network.  As a tribe it’s essential for us to have a wide cross-section of people at different stages of life and to foster positive and meaningful experiences for the people who become involved.

Although the youth predominate in our street actions, older members are involved in other ways, either as advisers or as advocates.

The website and YouTube channel that we use to share our experiences and events are the public record of BANA. Unfortunately, due to the limits of the technology, this acts as sort of a one-way mirror. There also many activities we do that for one reason or another don’t become publicized.

TOQ Online: What are some concrete skills and practices that BANA is developing in order to be a resilient and flourishing community even as California plunges from the First World into the Third World?

Andrew Yeoman: I divide our training curriculum along three lines: knowledge, skills, and experience.

For knowledge we have a very active book sharing club and discussion groups on European customs and culture.

For skills I stress those disciplines that help individuals become fully realized in the roles they wish to play in the network and their lives as a whole.  This can be anything from writing, public speaking, physical fitness, survival skills, protest organizing, and the art of diplomacy.  We want to share the experiences and skills we have learned so we can mentor new members of the tribe in the ways of community organizing.

The culmination of this work is to prepare activists for the challenges and obstacles they will face while undertaking political struggles. The only way to do this is through the hard work of experience and winning hearts and minds to our cause.  As far as I’m concerning, a person cannot call him or herself a BANA activist without taking public action to win our people over to our cause or create allies in other tribes that respect our differences.

It is my belief that all political movements are defined by what they do and how they are viewed by the community they represent.  If the actions of the movement are inconsistent with the prevailing cultural attitudes of those people, they will be rejected for being incompatible with the people’s desires.

To date National Anarchists are known, significantly in my opinion, for their actions rather than their words.  We are a young movement, and the evolution of the National Anarchist ideas since the year 2000 has been extraordinary.  There are few writers who write objectively in favor of National Anarchism, yet our influence has dominated discussions of Left wing anarchists for the last few years.

It is also significant that the goals of BANA and other National Anarchists are modest in comparison with political movements who have macroscopic world views that pit themselves against a host of large national, racial, or corporate interests.  BANA’s focus is just the opposite, resting exclusively on representing the interests of our people in the nine Bay Area counties and no further.

In practical terms we train our cadre in the arts of self-sufficiency, gardening, self-defense, renewable energy, mutual aid, technology, and provide a support network for people.

As the slide into Third World status accelerates, as it has been, I believe that a community utilizing this model of organizing and training will produce the leaders and support network capable of handling sensitive situations with greater skill and determination than activists who do not continually strive to find, rectify, and eliminate blind spots that could compromise the success of our mission: to represent and defend the interests of our tribe and like-minded people.

TOQ Online: Let’s end on a visionary note. What do you hope BANA will have accomplished in ten years’ time? What form would you like the BANA community to take as it develops?

Andrew Yeoman: In ten years’ time BANA will be one of a number of regional autonomous networks that support each other in providing a social movement of activists who are neither Left nor Right but true to their cultural heritage and act to fully realize the desires of its membership without compromise.

It is my desire that BANA, in line with the demographic reality of California today, develop to not just represent the interests of my tribe but instead represent the interests of hundreds of tribes working in concert on mutually beneficial objectives.

When a million tribes rise up and refuse to acknowledge authorities higher than themselves, the global system will lose the base it depends on for its existence, and the first stage of our goals will be achieved. Then the Tribes will be free to follow their destiny as they see fit, from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs.

"Trail Riders" by Thomas Hart Benton

For three years in a row, between 2006 and 2008, a North American secessionist convention was held where delegates from actual secessionist organizations and interested observers gathered to discuss the possibility of decentralizing the United States into smaller political units. Thus far, it does not appear there will be another convention for 2009. I suspect this is for the better. I only attended the third such convention, but to my knowledge there was no growth in attendance or media coverage of these events over the three years they took place.

In spite of the fact that the secessionist movement in North America seems to have peaked for the time being, there has been a subsequent growth in so-called “state sovereignty” resolutions, i.e, legislation passed or at least introduced in state governmental bodies upholding the federalist principles of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A majority of the fifty states have either considered or enacted such resolutions. The highlight of this movement was Texas Governor Rick Perry’s no doubt insincere comments expressing sympathy for secession.

For the most part, these state sovereignty resolutions are simply matters of partisan political grandstanding initiated by members of the opposition Republican Party in order to embarrass or antagonize the Obama regime. I used to hear a lot about the Tenth Amendment the last time the Republicans were out of power, during the Clinton era, and it was often said in those days that Republican politicians carry copies of the Tenth Amendment in their back pockets but carry capitalist whore money in their front pockets.

During the era of the Bush the Younger, the roles reversed a bit, and it was not uncommon to see individual localities and a few states with liberal leanings issue resolutions denouncing the Iraq War or the Patriot Act. About 300 local governmental bodies did so. Now that the Democrats are back, the tides have turned once again. Only a handful of these recently issued state sovereignty resolutions include any genuinely radical provisions or even hint at secession.

Nevertheless, these resolutions may provide a rhetorical tool that genuine radicals can exploit. But a change in tactics will be necessary for the decentralist movement. Thus far, efforts to promote such actions as secession have involved holding continent-wide conferences attended by only a few dozen people, who in turn represent very small organizations or movements. However, these self-appointed secessionist organizations often claim to speak for entire regions containing millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of people. This would seem to be a case of putting the cart ahead of the horse.

Of course, this is not to say that the secessionist movement thus far has achieved nothing. Past efforts have brought a certain amount of publicity, and the Zogby poll commissioned by the Middlebury Institute indicates the raw materials do indeed exist for the development of a large scale secessionist effort at some point in the future. Yet, to continue to move such efforts along, it needs to be understood that before we can run, we have to crawl.

It is highly unlikely that secession by individual states or regions of any size will be viable for the forseeable future. For instance, the League of the South is the largest single secessionist organization with membership in the thousands. The southern nationalists do indeed raise legitimate and serious issues concerning the hysterical prejudice often displayed by liberal elites against white working class Southerners, and their history, culture, religion, language, and so forth. Yet, it is also true that sympathy for what used to be known as the “Lost Cause” (i.e., the Confederate secession) is at an all time low among Southerners. This is because quite a few people can be found in the South today who have no historical connections to the Confederate era, e.g., transplanted Northerners and their offspring, European immigrants and their offspring, more recent immigrants from Latin America, and, of course, a large African-American population that is alienated from Confederate heritage for obvious reasons, and many liberal, cosmopolitan, urban whites who resent the South’s conservative image. In other words, the prospect for a unified secession by the former Confederate states under the Stars and Bars is just about zero.

This is not to say that instances of a full-blown, secessionist fervor by certain states are not possible. It is imaginable that Texas and Vermont, both of which were once independent nations, could actually secede at some point. The same could be said concerning Alaska and Hawaii, neither of which are connected to the American mainland and both of which have their own indigenous cultures that have been subject to colonial subjugation by the United States. The indigenous people of the American mainland itself are another possibility for secession.

For the most part, however, it is far too soon in the game to begin thinking of secession by entire regions, such as Cascadia, New England, Novocadia, the former Confederate States, or California. Instead, it is better to begin with something a little less grandiose, and start agitating for secession by towns, cities, neighborhoods, counties or communities.

This is not to say that we should not have a long-term vision. In my view, the only way we will win in the long run is if we have numbers on our side. For instance, the majority of the population of the United States will need to either recognize the right of secession or not actively oppose it. Right now, the numbers are only at about twenty percent. Also, it is likely we will need for there to be a secession by at least a majority of the territory of the United States, and at least the majority of the residents of the seceded territories will need to hold pro-secessionist sympathies. This does not mean than an individual secessionist tendency cannot be very small. For instance, a single county or small town. But such a secession will need to be part of a much larger pan-secessionist alliance, or at least under the umbrella of such an alliance. Otherwise, the secessionists will end up like the Branch Davidians.

It would seem that the best course of action at present would be to begin promoting the decentralist idea in local communities. This gives us a great deal of leeway in terms of how to proceed. For instance, we can simply stick with the idea of secession or independence as an end unto itself and do so in a non-ideological manner, or we can advocate secession for a broader ideological purpose. If one wishes to pursue the former approach, then our local propaganda should simply emphasize the common benefits of independence: “Wouldn’t it be better if our tax dollars stayed in our community without going to the parasites in Washington?”; “Did you know that our locality gets less in services than what we pay in taxes?”; “Wouldn’t it be better if we could simply make our own laws here in our community rather than suffer the dictates of the feds or the state capital?”; “Look at Liechtenstein! If they can do it, why can’t we?”

The other approach would be to agitate for a more specific ideological program, the way that the Free Staters are doing in New Hampshire, or the Christian Exodus has attempted in South Carolina and elsewhere. If this approach is what one prefers, then it is essential to pick an actual locality where the local culture is conducive to one’s wider agenda. There are also options as to how radical one wants to make one’s secessionist platform. In certain communities, it may at present be a bit of an overload to advocate full-blown secession from the United States itself, even if that is the overall goal. Instead, it might be better to advocate secession by regions (for instance, turning northern California into a separate state within the U.S.), or by cities (turning New York City into the 51st state), or by municipality (turning Long Island into an independent city from NYC). This more moderate approach does not mean that we cannot maintain the dissolution of the present state-capitalist regime as an ultimate goal, and there may be at present certain regions or localities where agitation for full-blown secession from the U.S. is the proper route.

At this point in the game, the cultivation of effective propaganda is obviously a primary task. Hans Hermann Hoppe has remarked that answering the question of “How to Win?” means asking the question of “How to win the sympathy of the youth?”  The reasons for this should be obvious enough. If and when the pan-secessionist movement becomes a mass movement, those who are currently older will most likely be deceased. Youth are the future. So our propaganda should primarily be directed at younger audiences. Also, it is the younger people who have demonstrated the greatest proclivity towards secessionist sympathies, and who have the weakest degree of sympathy for the present regime. For instance, the writer Tom Wolfe once remarked that the incidents of September 11, 2001 did little to inspire long-term patriotic sentiments among young Americans, as much as it was just another event they saw on television. Likewise, it has been said that while the older members of the current “post-paleo” movement who came out of the Ron Paul campaign adhere to older paleoconservative ideas, many of the younger members adhere to more radical libertarian, anarchist or anarcho-capitalist positions. And we have seen the rapid growth of national-anarchism in North America in recent times as well.

Our propaganda campaigns should include three indispensable elements.

First, the principle of “peace through separatism” should be upheld to the letter. It makes little sense to advocate secession only by those sharing a uniform ideological stance if one of our objectives to maintain and respect genuine cultural diversity and if achieving civil and political peace is one of the reasons for separatism.

Second, the “good riddance” argument must be emphasized. We should say to conservatives: “Don’t you want to be rid of all those godless atheists, ungrateful minorities, bitchy feminists, perverted homosexual deviants, tree-hugging eco-freaks, gun-grabbers and smelly, drug-addled, tofu-munching, lice-infested hippies?” Likewise, we should say to liberals: “Don’t you want to be rid of all those Bible-banging, flag-waving, share-cropping, inbred, gun nut, gay-bashing, fetus-hugging, cross-burning, goose-stepping, trailer trash?” In other words, we should exploit and capitalize on the hatred that the dominant factions of the mainstream “culture wars” have for one another.

Lastly, we should ignore the forces of political correctness when they attack, as they inevitably will. There should be no capitulation, accommodation, apology, rebuttal, attempted clarification, recognition or respect given to the forces of PC. To give an inch of ground is to play into the hands of the enemy. PC is not only the ideological superstructure of the ruling class, but its primary rhetorical and propaganda weapon. We should disarm our enemies by openly defying them.

I have in the past mentioned the possibility of infiltration into larger organizations by those holding pan-secessionist and related sympathies. For instance, the minor political parties, local units of the major parties, and single-issue pressure groups. Mr. Larry Kilgore, a conservative Christian activist, ran for the Senate in the Republican primary for Texas on an explicitly secessionist platform and won 225, 000 votes. That’s quite an achievement. I would suggest the use of local symbolic electoral campaigns as a propaganda tool. The goal would not so much be to win as much as to publicize the separatist cause. Let’s say that in a few years a wide network emerges of young people running for mayor, city council, or state representative positions in local elections, and doing so explicitly as anarchists, national-anarchists, pluralists, tribalists, decentralists, and avowed secessionists. The uniqueness of such an action, e.g., a large number of such campaigns occurring simultaneously and the radical nature of the ideas of the campaigners, will likely be enough by itself to generate a fair amount of media attention. Likewise, a wider participation in ordinary, mainstream community activities and community activism by those holding such views, for example, “adopt-a-highway” campaigns, volunteering for shelters and homeless feeding programs, setting up neighborhood watch and copwatch programs, will naturally enhance our credibility. In the process of building up the classical Spanish anarchist movement prior to the Civil War, it was not uncommon for some villages and towns to have anarchist mayors, and anarchists were among the ranks of prominent community leaders, and not just fringe figures as they are today. So we have a historical model to draw on. It need only to be adapted to contemporary circumstances.

From Attack the System, August 22, 2009

TOQ Online:

Andrew Yeoman: In my opinion anarchism is most easily understood in terms of the Greek origin of the word: anarch.  An anarch is defined as a sovereign individual.  Ernst Jünger used a famous analogy, “the Anarch is to the anarchist, what the monarch is to the monarchist,” to describe this idea. So anarchism is about the pursuit of sovereignty, individual and collective.

Classical anarchism has evolved into anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-capitalism, green anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, etc.  All of these tendencies hold that government and capitalism do more harm to people than good. Thus anarchists are united in attempting to envision an organic form of society without the state. Note also that nearly all of these form of anarchism focus on alternative ways of organizing the economy.

TOQ Online: In what sense is National Anarchism nationalist?

Andrew Yeoman: While ideologically a National Anarchist agrees with the anarchist criticism of government and capitalism, what makes us different is that economic concerns are of secondary importance to the individual’s primary loyalty to his or her cultural, ethnic, and ethical identity.  In the context of the vast social pathologies of global capitalism National Anarchism provides tactics and strategies to foster autonomy amidst adversity.

Another way of think of National Anarchism is in terms of a tribal society.  A tribal society upholds certain values, ways of life, and territorial integrity that are inviolable.  The community bonds of a tribal society are stronger than capitalism due to the fact that the primary activity of society is not solely based on buying and selling commodities but realizing the higher value of religious, traditional, or political aims.

There are certain principles however that must be held to promote the National Anarchist path of ethnic survivalism: demanding a decentralization of political power, refusing to support government mandated multiculturalism, advocating the autonomy of all nationalities, and morally supporting freedom of association for all people that do not act to harm other people.

This cultural imperative makes National Anarchism different from both anarchism and nationalism yet brings both traditions together in a way designed to genuinely respect other tribes, embrace one’s own, and provide the community necessary to help individuals rediscover a lost cultural heritage.

TOQ Online: When and where did National Anarchism first appear? Who are its creators?

Andrew Yeoman: National Anarchism developed in the late 1990s, and the term was used simultaneously by Troy Southgate (England), Peter Töpfer (Germany), and Hans Cany (France).  Richard Hunt is also an early influence on what was to be called National Anarchism in the 1980s.

The most well-known ideologist of National Anarchism is Troy Southgate, who had a long career in the National Front in the 1980s and other organizations including a role with the Third Positionist movement. Southgate was the first to take the ideas of the French New Right developed by Alain de Benoist and others and apply them to creating a vision of a society that does not rely on capitalism or traditional nationalism (which is primarily motivated by loyalty to the nation-state) to achieve the goal of ethnic and cultural survival.

National Anarchist ideas also came to fruition in the atmosphere of intense persecution for racialist beliefs in Europe, and an important side benefit of the ideology was to provide a solution to the extremely restrictive debate allowed on issues of race in European countries.  Besides developing the means of avoiding government prosecution, the ideology encourages a more positive or diplomatic approach with other nationalities on common goals.

The National Anarchist movement existed mostly online, except for a small group in England called the National Revolutionary Faction which disbanded in 2000.  National Anarchists were involved in street demos in London in 1999, which took the form of a protest against a proposed cinema multiplex in Crystal Palace, where the National Anarchists infiltrated a group of radical greens.

The most influential National Anarchist street protest was led by Welf Herfurth in Australia in 2007 at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) demonstration in Sydney.  For the first time in 30 years a nationalist contingent made a presence at a street protest in Australia which has been dominated by Left wing organizations for as long as anyone can remember.

Starting in 2007, the Bay Area National Anarchists began street protests in California in support of anti-war campaigns, against child endangerment, illegal immigration, Israel, and other issues.  Although there was an initial wave of interest in National Anarchism in the late 1990s up until 2001, it was not until BANA began a sustained campaign of street protests that the movement came to exist in North America beyond the internet.

In 2008 Troy Southgate agreed with my proposition that “Tribal Anarchism” is a slightly more accurate description of the goals of the movement. However the term National Anarchism continues to be the most common way of describing the movement.

TOQ Online: For more than a century now, the left has had both statist and anarchist tendencies. It strikes me that the primary focus of left anarchists has been the creation of new forms of community while the focus of the statists has been the seizure of state power, either through overthrowing the state through revolution or by gaining representation through electoral means. For the statists, all forms of social organization under the present system are subordinated to the goals of acquiring state power.

Within nationalist circles, the main focus is certainly on the acquisition of state power, by election or revolution. How do National Anarchists respond to the idea that the primary focus should be the acquisition of state power, and that creating new forms of community within the present system is a waste of time unless it is all directed toward the goal of acquiring state power?

Andrew Yeoman: There are a number of important points to consider about power and state power in particular.  For the purpose of this question will assume Lenin’s view that the state is a weapon of collective will.

The important thing to remember that state power is not the only weapon available.  Since state power is not the only form of power, other forms of community organizing must be understood and acquired.  There are, for example, cultural power, economic power, and institutional power. Traditionally these have been more powerful than the state, if only because they are more effective at achieving social cohesion.

For the ideology of National Anarchism the short answer is that the power of the state is less important to us than other forms of power, and the acquisition of state power is essentially unimportant to the success of turning the tide of forces arranged to enslave our people. National Anarchists believe that the current system is corrupt beyond hope of salvation.

On the basis of this belief it is clear that the focus should not be representation in the state but strengthening the communities of like-minded people who believe in these ideas and who see their survival as incompatible with the existence of the current forms of government representation.

National Anarchists see no evidence that the previous 40 to 60 years of nationalist positions on political issues will be achieved within the current liberal democratic system.  For someone with a political agenda to say they want state power, yet they have no means of achieving that power, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how political processes work.

For us in the Bay Area the choice is clear: if we want to achieve any success among a rapidly declining demographic group we must seize the initiative on the cultural front, which means creating a social movement in which achieving power outside official government channels. Building a social movement is the necessary precondition to any sort of influence in the communities we live in.

With this strategy we disregard the state in all our affairs, except for those policies which we criticize in order to subvert the support for the state in our area.  We work to establish zones of influence, so-called National Autonomous Zones, that create the time and space where our ideals are put into practice with the people with whom we consider kinsmen. When enough people organize themselves with a will to act collectively without the approval of the state, government power becomes essentially meaningless.

The goal of National Anarchist community work is to inspire our people to act in a constructive, meaningful, and social manner that gets the consent of our people to legitimately speak on behalf of the communities we represent.  This is where old school nationalists, for a variety of reasons, have failed to make their cause appeal to a wider audience.

There are also fundamentally deeper reasons to not care about seizing government power based on recent trends of metapolitical warfare.  The reasons for this are the proliferation of non-state actors in a globalized world socio-economic system.

Different thinkers have come to recommend different strategies in order to respond to these contingencies.  People like Troy Southgate in England advocate that individuals quietly develop invisible or black economies and networks of influence in local communities.  In America the Bay Area National Anarchists have made a name for ourselves through noisy protests.

Seeking political power through election or revolution this is actually the path of failure. As intelligence analyst John Robb recently commented on Maoist insurgencies:

Stay on the twentieth-century path of insurgency that demands: political cohesion, control of land, replacement of the government with another government, and you will eventually fail. Go commercial, black market, open source, focus on disruption, etc. and you will thrive.

I believe this is the correct strategy.  Make the objective to disrupt the status quo through an increasing number of campaigns and demonstrations of militancy while at the same time building our own cultural, economic, and institutional power, until the policies of the system can be reversed locally, either openly or discretely, to our folk’s benefit.

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/collapse/ http://www.toqonline.com/blog/collapse/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 04:01:45 +0000 Hunter Wallace http://www.toqonline.com/?p=3391 Editor’s Note: The following discussion by Prozium of Michael O’Meara’s recent review of Dimitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse is from the Occidental Dissent blog. Be sure to scroll down and read the sharp comments by Tanstaafl of the Age of Treason as well.

Michael O’Meara has a long review of Dimitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. As the title suggests, the book (which I haven’t read) explores the likely future trajectory of the United States in the wake of a Soviet Union style collapse of the global economy. The culprit of this doomsday scenario is Peak Oil.

Although O’Meara fails to mention him by name, the Mad Max Dark Age described in his review owes much to the vivid imagination of James Howard Kunstler, whom longtime readers of this blog are undoubtedly familar with. Kunstler uses the term Long Emergency to describe this future period of national breakdown. In World Made By Hand (2008), he provided a fictional portrait of everyday life in upstate New York under these conditions.

A year ago, I spent a lot of time writing about these issues. In retrospect, the stock market did collapse as predicted; the NYSE lost over half its value. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Wachovia went under. The other major big banks and brokerages survived (so far) as a result of taxpayer welfare and massive government intervention in the private sector. GM finally went bankrupt. Chrysler was bought out by Fiat. The official unemployment rate now hovers around 10%. The consensus is that we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression.

In the Spring of 2008, it looked like we were headed towards revolutionary conditions. The price of a barrel of oil (artificially driven up by speculators) was approaching $150. The airlines were going bankrupt, cutting flights, raising prices. Truckers were going on strike in protest of high fuel prices. The economy was clearly tanking as consumers reigned in their discretionary spending. In the Third World, there was famine and food riots. Haitians were eating dirt and overthrowing their government.

If the price of oil had risen, say, another $100 to $150 … what would have happened? It is easy to imagine a massive die off in the Third World; refugees flooding into the West; the just-in-time system breaking down; all kinds of shortages; massive political unrest.

Ultimately, the U.S. economy couldn’t handle $150 per barrel oil and cracked last summer. The price of oil collapsed to around $30 per barrel as the speculators flooded out of the commodites market. The conditions associated with high oil prices were ameliorated, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The rate of oil depletion ensures that it is a problem we will have to face again someday.

In the wake of our economic collapse, Kunstler and his associates have often made an important point: weaning America off its oil addiction isn’t going to be as easy as some have suggested. The havoc in the capital markets and the collapse of oil prices has cut the knees out of alternative energy and future oil development projects.

T. Boone Pickens was on television last fall touting the massive wind farms he planned to build to wean America off foreign oil. His efforts have since come to naught. The volatility of the market continues to stiffle any sort of long term planning for our energy needs. This flaw could one day prove fatal for the capitalist system.

If anything is true, the 2007-2009 recession has proved that the government’s cures for our economic ailments are often worse than the disease. Alan Greenspan’s meddling with interest rates following the collapse of the New Economy/Dot.Com bubble only created a new and even bigger bubble in the housing market. I won’t hazard to predict the consequences of the massive expansion of the money supply under Bush/Obama in response to this latest economic crisis.

The possibility of collapse gives us hope that one day the awful system we live under will one day meet its demise. If Barack Obama’s America is indicitive of our future, that is a fantasy worth clinging to.

Note: Before anyone points out the obvious, I stopped linking to Kunstler months ago over his Zionism and warnings of “cornpone Nazism.”

7 Responses to “Collapse”

1. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:22 pm1notuswind

   What the hell is “cornpone Nazism”?

2. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:34 pm2Tanstaafl

   Before anyone points out the obvious, I stopped linking to Kunstler months ago over his Zionism and warnings of “cornpone Nazism.”

   I don’t follow Kunstler, so it wasn’t obvious to me, though it hardly comes as a surprise to hear it.

   From the bits you cited last year it seemed clear enough that his cornpone jewish distaste for suburbia springs largely from a distaste for Whites. Kuntsler puts too much effort into ridiculing and finding fault with ordinary people trying to make the best of a situation they had no part in creating, and not enough effort into identifying and criticizing the rich and powerful machers at the top.

   It’s no wonder why.

3. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:35 pm3Tanstaafl

   cornpone = countrified

4. on 16 Jul 2009 at 11:42 pm4Prozium

   He believes White Southerners are a heartbeat away from Nazism. They will call for an authoritarian dictatorship in the wake of Peak Oil.

5. on 17 Jul 2009 at 12:11 am5Tanstaafl

   I believe rootless cosmopolitan anti-anti-semites are a heartbeat away from recreating the NKVD and their gulags. They will call for an authoritarian dictatorship in the wake of any upheaval they can.

   I think my belief is more grounded in reality. The bolshevist “hate” legislation passing through congress right now is not supported by even one Nazi senator.

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.

Reinventing Collapse:
The Soviet Example and American Prospects
by Dimitry Orlov
Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publications, 2008

“A time of crisis is a great opportunity.”
–Barack Hussein Obama

Despairing of my people’s passivity, I have often thought that the collapse of the United States might be the one thing to turn them against the system that seeks their destruction.

This “catastrophist” perspective is, admittedly, a strategy of desperation.  For collapse (what Joseph Tainter calls a “recurrent feature of human societies”) (The Collapse of Complex Societies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 5) may delegitimize the existing system and make whites more receptive to their racial/national interests, but, in a worst-case scenario, it could pose problems even more threatening than those of the last sixty years.

The literature of collapse is consequently of the utmost relevance, especially now that the “American Century” seems to be nearing its inglorious end.

Of the numerous works on fallen civilizations, perhaps the most pertinent are those related to the Soviet collapse of 1991.  Hence the propitiousness of Orlov’s recently published work.

A computer engineer by training, Orlov and his Russian Jewish family moved to the US in the 1970s.  He has since maintained ties with the land of his birth, having returned during those periods leading up to, traversing, and following the Soviet collapse.  Writing from a radical ecological perspective critical of industrial civilization, Orlov relates what collapse entailed in the SU and why the US is no less a candidate for collapse.

His book, though, is not a work of scholarship.

“I am not,” he writes, “an expert or a scholar or an activist.  I am more of an eyewitness.  I watched the Soviet Union collapse and this has given me the necessary insight to describe what the American collapse will look like” (p. vii).

Accordingly, he spends little time sketching the big picture — the structural forces driving the collapse — and, instead, concentrates on its “micro-scale” processes and experiences.  This makes his book a “personal” work, without claim to scientific authority, but nevertheless one that is very readable, full of wit and humor, and informed by the all-important “human” dimension of collapse.

Despite their different methods and styles, Orlov sees the two twentieth-century superpowers as “antipodes” of the same technoeconomic civilization committed to social management, economic growth, material accumulation, world domination, and the realization of the Enlightenment vision of a totally rationalized world.

As such, Orlov argues that the US and the SU both sought a better life through science, approaching every human problem in terms of a technical fix.  They both were militaristic, imperialistic powers who, through direct or proxy wars, made a mess of the international arena and, though Orlov doesn’t mention it, introduced reforms in the Third World that has caused it to grow out of control; they both devoted endless fanfare to celebrating their democratic, egalitarian institutions, however fraudulent; both assaulted popular beliefs and values in the name of a higher rationality, discouraged traditional social relationships, created meaningless, uncreative forms of work, exalted materialist values over others, repressed dissent, recruited corrupt, venal elites — and, most seriously, cared little or nothing about the white, or European, race.  It might be added that the US and the SU both were social experiments that favored Jews, making them, and their values, dominant.

The list of similarities is extendable.  But the basic point — that the US and the SU were technoeconomic civilizations devoted to roughly analogous world views at odds with nature and the nature of ourselves — seems rather indisputable.  As such, one civilizational model collapsed and the other, for roughly similar reasons, now faces the prospect of collapse.

Orlov gives no credence to the Reaganesque bombast that the United States defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War.  He argues that its collapse had little to do with ideology and even less with American influence.  Instead, he attributes it to the SU’s “chronic underperforming economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit and foreign debt” (p. 8).  These economic problems made it increasingly difficult for “average Russians” to get by.

When Soviet reformers under Mikhail Gorbachev at last attempted to fix the centrally-planned stagnation, they couldn’t.  This failure, combined with military humiliation in Afghanistan and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, so discredited the Soviet state that it imploded.

Given that Orlov’s book appeared before the meltdown of September 2008, he looks mainly at those structural weaknesses in the US economy that resemble those of the former SU — rather than at that institutionalized system of fraud responsible for pulling off one of the great financial swindles in history.

Stressing the inherent flaws in the US economy and noting that it has taken a couple of decades for the US to catch up to the SU, he suggests that the US may soon face a similar fate.

Like many ecologists, he rejects the facile conviction that modern society is exempt from the rise and fall cycles characteristic of pre-industrial societies or that present rates of economic and population growth can continue indefinitely.  The United States, he sees, is especially vulnerable to collapse, due to the petroleum basis of its economy. (The foundational work for this view is the ecological classic: Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits of Growth [New York: Universe Books, 1972].) He points out that the US, with its “energy-intensive model of empire,” is more dependent on cheap oil than any other industrial economy, that its crude oil production “peaked” in 1970, and that three-quarters of its energy is now imported.

Any rise in oil prices will consequently be paid for in declining economic growth and higher food prices (agriculture being petroleum-intensive).  Once the era of cheap energy comes to an end, world economies will then be forced to undergo changes as significant as those that accompanied the onset of industrialization.  This will lead to further decline and ultimately to collapse — which Orlov, citing the archdruid John Michael Greer, defines as that condition whereby “production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital” (p.2). That is, when the declining economic system starts “consuming” its infrastructure (feeding off itself, in effect) to compensate for declining incomes, it will simply hasten the inevitability of its demise.

But however central, energy is only one of the problems that Orlov considers.

Because the US has outsourced most of it manufacture overseas, no longer produces the high tech on which it depends, and relies on imports for most of its basic needs, it has incurred an enormous trade imbalance, sustained by massive borrowing in foreign money markets.  (For different reasons the SU also acquired massive trade imbalances and debt in the 1980s.)

The problems created by America’s increased energy costs and the financialization of its economy have been compounded by a runaway military budget, a debt pyramid that grows at an exponential rate, and the decline of its overseas empire and “tribute economy.”  Combined with imperial disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, a growing international reputation for incompetence and corruption, violent changes in weather patterns (which produce killer hurricanes, like Katrina, that have a system-disrupting potential), and the impending breakdown of neglected infrastructure (bridges, levies, poisoned water tables, etc.), these factors suggest that the US is about to follow the SU into the dustbin of history.

The federal government and “the self-enriching political elites” that feed off it have, moreover, a vested interest in “perpetual growth” and imperial overreach, which means they can’t be expected to do anything constructive to stave off the impending collapse.  But as the economy begins to disintegrate, tax revenues will decline and public debt will grow.  The only solution the elites have come up with thus far to address the state’s impending fiscal crisis is to crank up the printing presses and introduce more worthless paper into the market, adding inflation to their other worries.

Orlov’s explanation of the Soviet failure and his prediction of an impending American collapse, given the impressionistic nature of his work, should, of course, be taken as merely suggestive, though economic contraction, declining energy availability, and increased political turmoil are already looming on the horizon.

His work, moreover, is short on the specifics of collapse, he neglects any consideration of collapse as “a political process,” and he ignores important questions as to how and in what manner collapse occurred (in the SU) and will occur (in the US).  It’s also not evident if an American economic collapse will mirror the suddenness of the Soviet collapse (which was historically unprecedented) or if, like more traditional cases, it will be stretched out over decades.

Qualitatively more persuasive is Orlov’s claim that the Soviet Union was better situated than the United States to endure and recover from a political-economic breakdown.

In his view, Americans see their “spendthrift debtor nation” as a “land of free ice cream and perpetual sunshine” (p. 16).  Never having experienced invasion, world war, famine, or bloody dictatorship, it’s hard for them to imagine a future unlike their past.  More than Russians, Americans have been severed from their past and redesigned as gratification-oriented consumers whose defining character is materialist rather than ethnic, historical, or cultural.  They also lack the psychology of resilience “bred” into the long-suffering Russians.  Finally, they are more ideologically deluded by the system’s pretenses, just as they are more integrated into its increasingly dysfunctional institutions.

Born of a less happy, but more bona fide nation, Soviet Russians put greater emphasis on individual achievement and recognition rather than on economic success.  Money and materialist designations didn’t play quite the same role in their lives as it does in the US, for their primary needs — work, housing, basic services — were essentially provided by their collectivized economy and the life-style consumption native to the American economy wasn’t an option.  When the political system stopped functioning and the formal economy suffered its knock-out blow, there simply wasn’t the moral and social devastation that is likely to affect Americans.

The SU was also favored in terms of food and shelter.  Most Soviet housing was owned by the state.  Though “drab and soulless,” it was well-built, insulated, and designed to last.  Almost all housing was surrounded by public lands on which people kept kitchen gardens.  Prior to the collapse, nearly 90 percent of the country’s domestic food supply came from these kitchen gardens and other individual plots, for Communism had turned Russian agriculture, once Europe’s bread basket, into a basket case.

The Soviet regime also had a phobia of food riots and virtually every city stored large grain surpluses for emergencies.  This made the Soviet-style food system almost immune to breakdown.  After the collapse, most people were thus able to keep a roof over their head and to provide themselves with food.  All Soviet utilities, such as heat, running water, electricity, and garbage removal, were also public and could be counted on even after the dissolution of the central state.  Above all, Russian housing was overwhelmingly urban, situated near the country’s extensive public transportation network, which continued to operate.

This will not be the case in the US, whether it undergoes a sudden Soviet-style collapse or if it should, as is more likely, experience an extended period of decline.  Most Americans, who don’t own their homes, will in either case face foreclosure, eviction, and homelessness.  They will also have trouble feeding themselves, once the shelves of their suburban supermarkets, stocked by just-in-time deliveries, are emptied.

Because the entire country is built around the auto — housing, shopping, work are virtually inaccessible without it — when the economy bottoms up and energy costs become prohibitive, this car dependency will prove catastrophic.  Even in the oil-rich Soviet Union, there were gasoline shortages and severe rationing.  Without significant domestic supplies of gas and without spare parts for their foreign-built autos, suburban Americans will find themselves stranded.  Orlov suspects there will be a mass exodus from distant suburbs, as people are forced to relocate to centers whose supply and distribution networks remain operative.  If this should occur, the world will shrink to areas that can be covered on foot or bike, long-distance and global trade will be drastically curtailed, and the key principles of globalization will become totally untenable.  More generally, “the world” will become “the local” and self-sufficiency the supreme virtue.

Though the Soviet economy was notorious in its neglect of consumer goods, it nevertheless made things, with some conspicuous exceptions, to last.  American goods, by contrast, are produced with artificial short replacement cycles and often in plastic, which means that once the container ships stop arriving at US ports many of the consumer items that have become essential will disappear, not to be replaced.  The greater prosperity and materialism of American life also means that things most of the world considers luxuries — cars, central heating, refrigeration, flush toilets, cell phones, packaged and processed foods, etc. — have become necessities; their disappearance will be felt more intensely than in the Soviet system of socialized poverty.

An American collapse (or decline) is likely, then, to entail shortages of food, fuel, and countless consumer items, combined with outages of electricity, gas, and water; breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, including public health; widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs; all accompanied by confusion, despair, and perhaps violence.

Society as a whole will then be forced back to a less complex mode of operation; centralized forms of control will wane; things will suddenly become “smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated”; regions and communities will assume a greater centrality of tasks.  Whether there will ensue a Hobbesian “war of all against all” is anyone’s guess.

Then, as the old economy begins to disintegrate, old forms of capital (cash, stocks, bonds) will progressively lose their value.  Trucking and airplane fleets deprived of fuel will end up as scrap.  Scientific and industrial equipment may be exported as forms of exchange, along with antiques, jewelry, and art objects.  Numerous jobs — cable installers, lawyers, sales representatives, plastic surgeons, store clerks, stock brokers — will become superfluous.  Given both the social and economic dislocation this will set off, law enforcement will probably be overwhelmed, replaced in part by private security and neighborhood defense units.  Many laws will be ignored.  Established authorities, no longer able to ensure the security of its citizens, will almost certainly cease commanding respect and new power structures may arise.  Organized criminals, gangs, former cops, and military contractors will find new employment or self-employment.  (This will be a good time to be in a Private Military Company.)

As the established market breaks down, an informal economy will likely replace it — an economy that largely revolves around the liquidation and recycling of the old economy and is based on “direct access to needed resources or the threat of force, rather than on actual ownership or legal authority” (p. 61).

As in Russia, we’ll probably see old people in open air flea markets selling off their treasured possessions, middle-class people rummaging through trash, the few remaining stores under heavy security.

All this will happen to a people not only psychologically unprepared for social upheaval, but ill-suited to the harsh realities it will bring.  Americans, in fact, have lived so long with a radical disconnect between their “culturally acceptable beliefs” and their personal experiences that they are already afflicted with various mental diseases, evident in the tens of millions of anti-depressant and mood-altering drugs they daily consume.  Collapse will send a great many of them over the edge — into new fantasied stages of denial or, perhaps, into a millennial “end times” revival.

The good news is that whites will also become increasingly unsupportive of a regime that no longer delivers the goods.  Indeed, because the legitimacy of America’s managerial/therapeutic regime is so closely linked to economic well-being, the latter’s breakdown will likely also either bring down the state or “hollow” it out.  But whatever happens, the fall of the American system, based on a highly controlled system of “communications” and programmed consumption (i.e., on packaged goods and packaged lives), is going to lead not to the rapture, but to a very rude awakening.

This is worrisome to the degree that the most vulnerable to collapse, besides the “couch potatoes” spawned by our “prosthetic society,” are whites.  For they are the most integrated into the existing system, they are the most deluded by the ideology of the American Dream (which holds that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will succeed), they are the most shorn of their former identities, culture, and communities (which assume a primary importance in times of crisis), and they lack any consciousness of being a people, based on a specific stock with a specific culture, and thus lack any consciousness of why they should act cohesively as a people.

Once whites cease being sheltered in the bubbles of their cars or in their cubicle jobs, they will then be forced to deal face-to-face with blacks, Mexicans, turbaned Sikhs, and the other exotic fauna that now cover their land.  At this point, they may discover that a nation is not a “racial rag bag,” but a community based on a “consciousness of kind” — i.e., on a consciousness of being related in blood and spirit to a people with a shared ancestry and a common culture.  The ensuing anarchy might also provoke conflict along ethnoracial lines, exacerbated by high gun ownership on both sides, that could conceivably lead to violent clashes and perhaps forms of ethnic cleansing.

Such conflict will have a far greater role to play here than it did in ethnically homogeneous Russia, where communal relations remained civil, if not amicable (except in respects to Jews and certain non-Russian minorities).

If American whites should remain unconscious of who they are as a people, they will almost certainly be victimized by the higher cohesion and consciousness of nonwhites, whose ethnic identity, family ties, and cultural motivations are both more primitive and more powerful than theirs.  The big question, then, is whether whites will passively succumb to black/brown predators, like sheep before the slaughter, or if, in an awakening, they’ll join with other whites to fight back.  (I’m betting it won’t take long before they realize that it’s a matter of “us or them.”)

Relatedly, successful, middle-aged white men will be especially prone to nervous breakdown and depression — as the career, savings, and property they spent a life time pursuing suddenly go down the drain.  Suicide, emotional paralysis, drink and drugs will strike them at higher rates than other sectors of the population.  Their fragility will be further compounded by the fact that their work experiences leave them totally unqualified for employment in a collapsed economy.  Concentrated more in business, management, communications, law, sales, and information processing, they will find that immigrants with practical skills as carpenters, mechanics, and general laborers will be better situated to take advantage of the remaining job opportunities.

At the same time, as single households and nuclear families prove to be nonviable, whites will find that extended families and friends are their most valuable asset.

The Russian family wasn’t much healthier than the American family, but economic conditions and housing shortages before the collapse helped keep marriages together, with three generations often sharing the same dwelling.  And like most people worldwide, Russians also tended to live in the same locale all their lives.  As a result, they had extended family ties and knew the people among whom they lived, both of which enhanced their survivability.

American whites lack these extended networks, and this is going to affect their adaptability in a broken world.  To survive, they will have to rediscover the meaning of community and revive those organizations and activities that were once a mainstay of American civil society.  In making the transition to a Third World lifestyle, whites then will either have to rediscover their own traditions or else revert to the sort of practices common to nonwhites.

It took Russia only a decade to recover from its collapse and regain pre-collapse economic levels.  This relatively speedy recovery was due to the individual Russian’s ability to adapt to crisis conditions and to the country’s vast oil reserves, which enabled their economy to bounce back relatively quickly, once world gas prices revived.  The US is not so well situated.  It will take longer to recover from whatever collapse brings and it’s likely there will be no “recovery” from the decline of its technoeconomic civilization (given the inevitable rise of energy costs and the infeasibility of a globalized economy based on cheap energy).  There’s also no single figure in the US governing elite capable of emulating Vladimir Putin, who prevented the oligarchs from turning post-collapse Russia into a colony of the world’s financial system.

But all’s not doom and gloom in this scenario.  The crash will help whites shed their liberal illusions, perhaps discover what is most important in life, and, in the best of all possible worlds, prompt them to reestablish the racial-national bonds that once made them a great, enterprising people.

Of course, it would have been better if they hadn’t screwed around for sixty years, leaving it until the very last possible moment to recoup the Aryan qualities that will enable them to overcome the coming dark age, but better at 11:59 PM than never at all.

In this pre-collapse interlude, before the fall, the fact nevertheless remains that nothing can be done to halt the inevitable or mitigate the unmitigable.  We are facing not a solvable problem, but an unavoidable predicament that promises to rip apart the illusions that have animated American life for at least the last two generations — especially the illusion that unlimited growth and limitless consumption are possible in a world of finite resources.  We have, then, absolutely no control over what is about to happen: all our efforts would be like “wiggling our toes at a tsunami.”  The only certainty now is that the process of decline has begun.

Worse, there are no oppositional parties, political formations, or extraparliamentary forces representing white interests to lead us, once the smoke clears.  The impending crisis — this make or break time — comes thus at a relatively inopportune moment.

A civilization rarely collapses all at once, as survivalists fantasize, but rather gradually disintegrates, often over the stretch of decades. Thus, as individuals and, more importantly, as European Americans concerned with our people’s fate, we still have time to turn inward to prepare ourselves mentally for the looming economic breakdown and, as we do, to start also turning outward to develop those “resilient communities” of friends, family, and fellow tribesmen, who, when the moment strikes, might not only help us survive, but — ideally — to prompt us to start thinking about what should succeed the failed United States.

Peter Lamborn Wilson, a.k.a. Hakim Bey

The subject of creating, discovering, or reestablishing spaces outside the domination of the State and capitalism has led authors like Hakim Bey to promote the concept of “autonomous zones.” In their beginning, Bey describes “temporary autonomous zones” as the meeting of a group to partake in a non hierarchical social activity for the benefit of its participants without authorization by the government or condoned by the capitalist system of economic mechanics.

Under certain conditions Bey writes that these zones can turn into “permanent autonomous zones” beyond the control of those forces and are for all intensive purposes, liberated. To Bey, this is the highest development of anarchist social organization. Bey has at different times promoted (to various degrees of success) examples of ravers, Burners, Caribbean pirates, Chinese Tongs, Islamic “Assassins,” and Indian Thuggee, as anti-authoritarians archetypes.

In this essay I will argue that creating a national autonomous zone (NAZ) is not just possible but the most likely path of development for communities that either 1) quickly find themselves in a vacuum of State authority structures, or 2) as a community takes it upon themselves the responsibility of living as self-reliantly as possible.

Without a State authority governing its existence the national autonomous zone functions like a castle without walls.

A “castle without walls” is not to say “without” laws or regulations concerning behavior. Or that a NAZ is equal to feudalism in form and function. Its similarity to feudalism is in respects to its pledge of loyalty directly to individuals to whom they serve with (not merely, “for”), and the service that members obligate each other to perform for community survival. That is where the similarities end. Read the rest of the article

The politically correct responses to this question are, of course, the mock-offended “I wouldn’t mind at all!”; the pious “I would respect her choice”; or the emphatically masochistic and joyfully suicidal “I would say, ‘Good on you!’” A progressive, enlightened White person, as defined by the politico-academico-media complex today, is, by definition, placidly tolerant, solicitously non-racist, adamantly anti-racist, completely unaware of his race, and, most importantly, instantly baffled by the idea that Whiteness may have any value whatsoever, except for a few Third Reich lunatics and those pitchfork-wielding, gun-toting, pickup-driving, Bible-thumping, oligophrenic, periodontitic, slack-jawed, baseball-capped, bare-chested, jug-eared rednecks we occasionally see on film and television, living in dilapidated cabins in the mountains of the American South. Those who do not conform to this definition are acutely aware of the fact that this is the yardstick by which their level of social acceptability and employability are measured, and that any sign of non-conformity will result in their being lumped with the above-mentioned types, with the consequent loss of friends, loss of employment, loss of family, and maybe even loss of life.

Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that a racially conscious White person will hesitate to give a straight answer to The Question, for the innate human need for self-preservation, acceptance, belonging, and socially-legitimized self-esteem will automatically trigger inhibitory biochemical secretions in this White person’s brain. Only a proud pariah, or a person secure within an alternative support network, is likely to be able to provide a true and honest answer without flinching.

Were it not because The Question is a tactic of intimidation in a racist war waged against the White man by radical Marxist utopians and self-serving ethnic activists, it would otherwise be amazing that we should be expected to justify ourselves over the matter of our own existence and continuity as a subspecies of human. Why should we have to justify the choices upon which our very existence depends? And why should we even care that people who already hate the fact that we exist, or who see us as an obstacle to their utopian dreams of totalitarian biological homogeneity, may have a problem?

Mr. and Mrs. Tiger Woods

I argued in a previous article that, because we are dealing with infra-rational processes, one of the main challenges for us in the enemy’s war against Whiteness is that this is not a war that can be won by logical argument alone. It is necessary to appeal to the aforementioned innate human needs using means that operate at an infra-rational level. Style was one means — specifically style that is informed by ideology. Knowledge is another.

This might appear a contradiction, since we equate knowledge with rational processes, but the apparent contradiction vanishes when we consider that knowledge can operate at an infra-rational level by the mere fact of its possession. When one has the sense that one knows one’s subject, that one’s choices and attitudes are well informed by, and consistent with, empirical data and serious science, and that, therefore, one will be able to acquit oneself well when challenged in a debate, one tends to feel confident and relaxed and generally good about oneself. And this self-confidence is perhaps even more important than being right, as the sad reality is that observers of a debate are more likely to be convinced by a confidently and calmly delivered bad argument than by a diffidently and nervously delivered good one. This is why The Question is asked: the enemy knows that, however difficult to rebut the morality and the science supporting our position, because political incorrectness can have disastrous consequences for the heretic, deployment of The Question is likely to cause the kind of stammering circumlocutions, contradictory qualifications, and unconvincing platitudes that will subconsciously but immediately discredit the heretic, and thereby his position. Observers notice the discomfort and think, “Hm. He’s cacking himself. It must be because he knows he’s talking nonsense.”

Mr. and Mrs. Seal

Therefore, if it is important that we possess the body of knowledge that will enable us to successfully refute the enemy’s arguments, it is not because we will ever turn them into apostates, nor because our data and our logic will convince observers of a debate on the value of Whiteness of the correctness of our position; but because observers will be more receptive to the side that looks better to them. The enemy is extremist, heavily indoctrinated, and / or selfishly motivated, so they are beyond convincing; and few observers are ever likely to have the patience to independently verify abstruse scientific data, which they have been told by the enemy are all immorally biased, deviously contrived, and methodologically flawed anyway. Moreover, whatever the data, apparently sound arguments and interpretations can be contrived to support any imaginable position. Hence, the deciding factor for observers when choosing sides in a debate is often much more basic than we would like to think, for they will first and foremost look at (a) which party looks the most confident, and (b) whether association with that party is likely to enhance their self-esteem.

This is because choosing sides in an issue of this nature means choosing a group identity, and a group identity entails a wide- and far-ranging series of consequences, affecting many vital aspects of a person’s life. It is not a minor decision, and, therefore, the pay-off for adopting one group identity versus another has to be obvious, immediate, and/or vastly superior. What is more, the choice is often made subconsciously, on the basis of temperament, pre-existing biases and proclivities, and the need for self-preservation, rather than through conscious reasoning and research. This is why, unless one is not already pre-disposed to be an obnoxious contrarian or a proud pariah, becoming a politically incorrect heretic involves voluminous reading and long periods of reflection. This is also why humans have a tendency to jump on bandwagons, however irrational, banal, or deleterious to the jumper’s long-term interests: power and success are always appealing, and people tend to want to be a part of a powerful and successful phenomenon.

People will sooner commit suicide than die of embarrassment!

If European man is to survive as a population and as a subspecies of human, then; if he is not to be diluted into a uniform mass of generic brown humans — all identical, all replaceable, none better or worse than the other; if he is not to be crunched by the wheels of the Marxist machine that exists to create a totalitarian society of minimum variation and maximum conformity; our strategies and tactics must be in accord with the often infra-rational ways in which humans operate. And this means knowing how to use rational tools and processes to make our proposition more appealing to the infra-rational mind — the instinctive part of the mind that causes people to quickly choose sides in an issue and believe one person rather than another. Conversely, this means knowing know how they are used by the enemy to achieve the results that work for them. Mass movements of the past understood this well, and the soft totalitarians in power today, those who maintain the “dictatorship of well-being,” understand it too.

Miscegenation's crowning achievement: the new idol of the racial suicide cult

Thus, when asked, “Would you mind if one day your daughter brought home a Black boyfriend,” do not attempt to appease the enemy with platitudes — no one will buy them; do not regurgitate statistics from textbooks of cognitive psychology and physical anthropology — these data only serves to advance science and guide public policy and is otherwise too abstract for the venal public to be bothered with; do not circumbilivaginate — equivocation is tantamount to admitting that you are wrong and that you know it; and do not feel you have to explain your preference — it is your daughter, your family, your life, and your future, not theirs; and if they — people who hate you and whom you do not hold in high esteem anyway — require an explanation for something as basic and as primal as the fact that you would rather recognize yourself in your parents and in your children; that you feel more comfortable among people who are physiognomically, intellectually, and temperamentally similar to you; and that you derive a greater sense of belonging when you see that you and your relatives are all part of the same family, there are plenty of textbooks out there explaining why this is so.

Perhaps, we should ask, instead, why are some Whites so full of pathological self-hatred, so eager to believe their racist detractors, so contemptuous of their own value, that they are not satisfied with signing up for a voluntary extinction movement, but they also want everyone else who looks like them to join them inside a glass display unit in a 22nd century Paleontological museum. Are they mentally ill?

Unity Mitford, Munich, 1937

. . . Effectively combating the anti-White mental poison will require us to mirror our enemy’s tactics through the development of a semiotic strategy our own — not for the enemy’s consumption, but for the emotional benefit of the “respectable” Whites whom the enemy have so thoroughly terrorized. Only then will the positive pay-off of pro-White dissidence become apparent to this self-effacing constituency. The data and the arguments already exist, and they are quite substantive; what is missing is the shiny packaging.

In the current cultural climate, in a society where power has its basis on money, it might seem impossible to elaborate a convincing semiotic strategy with which to sell pro-White dissidence to “respectable” Whites. When the masters of discourse have the power to frustrate the achievement of academic, professional, social, and economic status (i.e., the usual sources of social legitimization upon which self-esteem largely depends), attempting to suggest that incurring the wrath of these masters is likely to pay off might justifiably appear unrealistic and naïve. Few have the stomach to be martyrs or impecunious revolutionaries.

Yet, the fact is that Whites still possess a considerable demographic advantage, they still concentrate an enormous amount of talent, and they still control most of the wealth within their own traditional homelands: Enough opportunities exist within alternative networks, therefore, to remain economically active, and even enjoy material security, without subservience to the present political, academic, and media establishment.

Moreover, there are plenty of alternative networks — call them subcultures — that have successfully grown in demographic presence, economic power, and cultural influence, despite being defined, in some cases, by radically anti-establishment ideologies. The Black Metal music subculture, wherein I operate a record label, is an excellent example. The Neo-Folk music subculture is another. And the Martial Industrial music subculture is yet another. All, it should be noted, possess well-defined and highly stylized semiotic systems. . . . Read the whole article

The cover of Laibach's "Volk"

Volk
Laibach
London: Mute Records, 2006

Kunst Der Fuge
Laibach
Ljubljana: Dallas Records, 2008

Laibach is a Slovenian music group founded in 1980 in Communist Yugoslavia. Although Laibach’s music is often classified as “industrial,” that term does not begin to capture the band’s musical and conceptual versatility. Laibach’s releases run the gamut from a Beatles cover album (Let It Be[1]), to a heavy metal concept album on God (Jesus Christ Superstars[2]), to a “techno” concept album on war, globalization, and Western imperialism in the Balkans (NATO[3]), to the two albums under review here: Volk, a concept album about nationalism, and Kunst der Fuge, an electronic realization of J. S. Bach’s The Art of the Fugue.

“Laibach” is the German name for the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. The name first appeared in the twelfth century and became “official” after Rudolf von Hapsburg conquered the town in 1278. The name remained in use until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. From 1943 to 1945, the name was revived when Slovenia was occupied by the Germans. The Germans found many Slovenian collaborators, who combined Slovenian nationalism, anti-Communism, and pro-German sentiments. After the war, thousands of collaborators were murdered by the Communists, and the very name Laibach was banned. Thus from the beginning Laibach the band was as much about politics as music. Its very name was a challenge to the Yugoslav political order, and beyond that to all universalist ideologies and homogenizing political and economic systems.

Laibach’s flirtation with nationalism does not stop with its name. Laibach posters and album covers feature National Socialist propaganda images.

In the video of “Das Spiel ist aus” (“The Game is Up”–the video is available on the compilation Laibach – The Videos, the song on the compilation Laibach, Anthems), the members of Laibach appear in Nazi uniforms–on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and pushing a shopping cart through a mall, surrounded by shocked onlookers.[4] (The effect is hilarious.)

After the Yugoslav government banned the group from using the name “Laibach,” they adopted a simple seal: a cross with four equal arms surrounded by a toothed wheel. Is this an ironic juxtaposition of Christian and Communist motifs? Is a cross in a circle meant to resemble a swastika in a circle? Quite a few of Laibach’s songs are sung in German too-although a good many are sung in English, which is perhaps the group’s only concession to the international pop market.

Vlad the Impaler

But Laibach cannot be accused of an anachronistic adherence to German National Socialism, if only because of the ambiguous and contingent connection between National Socialism and Slovenian nationalism. Beyond that, Laibach’s work also contains currents of a broader Eastern European nationalism. For example, lead vocalist Milan Fras appears in headgear that makes him resemble the famous Vienna portrait of Vlad the Impaler, a Wallachian nationalist who resisted the power of both Turkish armies and German burghers. Laibach’s 1994 NATO album clearly rejects American and Western European imperialism in the name of the “Eastern Nation,” which I understand as a broad Eastern European nationalism. In light of subsequent events in Serbia and Kosovo, the album now seems prophetic.

In 1994, Laibach added an additional twist to their engagement with nationalism by creating their own virtual nation, NSK, which stands for Neue Slowenische Kunst, German (!) for New Slovenian Art. NSK was founded as an artist’s collective with music, painting, video, graphics, theatre, and theory divisions. It issues passports and postage stamps and conducts foreign exhibitions as diplomatic events.

Thus Laibach’s overriding theme seems to be nationalism as such. To borrow a phrase from Savitri Devi, they are “nationalists of every nation.” The Volk album certainly supports this thesis. The album’s fourteen songs are interpretations and transformations of the national anthems of fifteen nations in which fragments of the original words and melodies are embedded in new songs with additional words.

Track 1, “Germania,” is based on “Deutschland über Alles,” the melody of which was composed by Joseph Haydn. The meaning of “Germany before All” (or “Germany First”) is simply that for Germans, Germany should come first in their hearts before all other countries. It does not mean that for non-Germans, Germany should come first as well. (Of course the fact that the song appears first on the CD may indicate that for Laibach too Germany really does come first.)

Laibach’s lyrics ask whether “Deutschland über Alles” will continue to be sung, and, more importantly, will it mean anything in the future: “And in times of misfortune/ and in times of mistrust / shall this song  continue / from generation to generation, / from present to past, / shall this song continue / more than ever / in this time of mistrust?” This question is poignant because Germans today are punished by their Allied Occupation regime for openly putting Germany first in their hearts, and for expressing nostalgia for the Third Reich, the last time when Germans put Germany first.

The Third Reich, the War, and the Occupation together constitute a historical “fall” from which Germans must find redemption: “After the unspeakable, /after you have fallen as only angels can fall, /go and find your peace again, /get back home and grow your tree.” The trauma of the fall has, however, induced a kind of collective amnesia: “No victory, /no defeat, /no shame, and Fatherland no more . . .” All these are replaced with “only Unity, Justice, and Freedom for all.” I take this to mean a universalist credo that will erase Germany in the hearts of Germans-as a prelude to erasing Germany from the world entirely. Laibach’s words conclude “There will be no memory / or there will be no home.” The grammar is a little off, but I take this to mean that unless Germany remembers itself, it will be dismembered; it will perish; there will be no home. This is “the lesson you have to learn / now and in the future. / Do you think you can make it, Deutschland?”

Track 2, “America,” begins with the album’s only assault of loud, ugly “industrial” noise-a singularly appropriate gesture-followed by a montage of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the preamble to the US constitution, the blaring sirens of urban hellholes, the fire and brimstone rantings of televangelists, and Laibach’s own accusatory lyrics.

If the Third Reich is Laibach’s model of ethno-nationalism, the United States is their model of anti-nationalism. The United States was born with an identity crisis. Culturally and genetically European, the different strands of the American populace could have formed a new European nation with a unified national self-consciousness.

Cover of Laibach's "Kunst der Fuge"

But our founding stock was selected for rootlessness and a penchant for universalistic ideological fixations, religious and secular. This provided fertile soil for an abstract, universalistic, creedal conception of identity, which became more and more useful with the immigration of ever-more heterogeneous and unassimilable populations. America is now no longer a people, but merely a system: a technological, capitalistic plutocracy at war with its founding stock. Beyond that, the American system is at war with every distinct and independent people, with every culture but pop culture, with every ideal but self-indulgence.

The triumph of this “universal homogeneous state” is what Francis Fukuyama proclaimed “the end of history.” History ended first in America, and America’s mission is to end it everywhere else. It is not a civilizing mission, but a barbarizing one, spread under the banner of emancipation. Laibach ask “O the land of the free / and the home of the brave, / are you heaven on Earth, / or the gloom of the grave?” The answer is both, for the heaven of liberal democracy is the graveyard of all nations, cultures, and ideals. America is “the end of history, / the end of time, / the end of family, /the end of crime.”

Accordingly, Laibach prays (while mocking the American tendency to inject religion into politics):

NSK passport

Praise the Lord
And praise the Holy Spirit
To save us from your freedom,
Justice, peace . . .
from arrogance and pride,
from violence and conflusion . . .

Your great despair
And great depression
satanic verses of your superstition,
the land of plenty.

Your Bill of Rights, free enterprise,
the free will and the unbroken one,
your self-esteem and self-desire,
your trust in God and the religious fire.

Track 3, “Anglia,” is based on “God Save the Queen.” If the United States is the Mighty Fortress of the Universal Homogeneous State, the United Kingdom is its “Airstrip One,” from which American airpower can depart to rain death upon any nationalist upstarts in Europe or the Near East. Amazingly, this utterly degraded and subordinate role in the process of global denationalization co-exists with a sturdy nationalism-really more a nostalgia for England’s past imperial greatness. (Americans should not laugh, because we exist in the same position vis-à-vis Israel.) Hence Laibach begins: “So you still believe you are ruling the World, / using all your tricks to keep the picture blurred, / scatter your enemies, /confound their politics, /so you still believe you are ruling the world. . . . So you still believe you are superior, / and all other nations are inferior, / any sedition-hushed, / rebellious Scots-crushed, / so you still believe you are superior!” Unfortunately, British nationalism, like American, has been channeled into the destruction of its own people. Hence Laibach adds a single line to the first verse of “God Save the Queen,” which functions as the chorus of “Anglia”: “God save you all.”

Camp mit Laibach?

If Laibach think that National Socialist Germany represents the past of nationalism, track 4, “Rossiya” indicates that they think its future lies in Russia. Furthermore, the band seems to share the surprising fusion of Russian nationalism and Communism in the minds of many Russian nationalists today. “Rossiya” combines the Communist anthem “The Internationale” with the current “State Anthem of the Russian Federation,” which is based on the 1944 Soviet national anthem. Although the current Russian anthem removes the phrase “an unbreakable union” from the old Soviet anthem, Laibach quietly restores it, speaking of “an unbreakable union of fraternal states, united forever in Great Russia’s embrace.”

After the fall of Communism and the integration of Russia into the global capitalist marketplace, Russians learned that, for all its faults, Communism at least did not hand the resources of the nation over to international robber barons based in New York, London, and Tel Aviv. To Russians condemned to cold, hunger, and hopelessness by the transition to capitalism, there was a new poignancy to “The Internationale”: “Arise, the prisoners of starvation, /arise, the damned of the earth.” To this, Laibach adds: “let’s gather together, / let’s break us free, / the world is changing at its core!” Communism, like nationalism, is collectivist in spirit. And in practice, Soviet Communism was nationalistic. Thus the move from national Communism to international capitalism was seen as a step in the wrong direction.

And what of Communism’s decades of terror, its tens of millions of victims? These seem to be minimized or forgotten. Or perhaps they have merely been assimilated to the harsh environment, the Mongol hordes, and the cruel autocrats who made the Russians the toughest nation in Europe. Laibach’s opening verse captures this fiery, frozen crucible of the Russian character: “United forever in vast, endless space, / created in struggle by unhappy race, / where sunrays of freedom / are frozen in ice, / united forever in Great Russia’s embrace.” Ironically, by alleviating such conditions, liberal democracy and consumer society might prove a greater threat to the survival of the Russian nation than Communism ever was.

Laibach cover incorporating National Socialist image

This connection between Communism and Slavic nationalism[5] is underscored in track 12, “Slovania” (“Slovenia”), which is based on “Hey Slavs,” the unofficial pan-Slavic anthem which later became the anthem of Communist Yugoslavia. Laibach’s own contribution consists in dedications of “Hey Slavs”: “These words are for those who died, / these words are for those left behind. / These words are for you, Poland, / and these ones for my homeland.” The other dedicatees are “the spirit of our fathers,” “the glory of our sons,” “the power of the Spectre” (Communism?), “the Holy Alliance” (the 1815 alliance between the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Kingdom of Prussia against the ideals of the French Revolution), “lovers,” “warriors,” and “all communists.” The final lines are cryptic, but they hint at a modern, Russian-oriented pan-Slavism: “Out of the feudal darkness, / away from the Nameless One / we stand alone in history, / facing East in sacrifice.” The references to Communism and the Holy Alliance indicate that the spirit of this pan-Slavism will be collectivist, anti-liberal, and Christian.

Track 13, “Vaticanae,” is a suitably ethereal arrangement of the “Papal Anthem and March,” which indicates that for Laibach, Slovenia’s western-looking Catholicism, like their eastern-looking pan-Slavism, is an important aspect of the nation’s identity.[6] Track 14, “NSK,” is the anthem of Laibach’s own state Neue Slowenische Kunst. Over a march that sounds like it is being played on a scratchy vinyl record from the 1940s, an electronic voice reads the stirring concluding words of Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech of June 4, 1940. In light of “Anglia,” the irony is delicious.

Tracks 5 through 7 deal with France (“Francia”), Italy (“Italia”), and Spain (“España”). “Francia” is based “La Marseillaise,” but Laibach rallies the “children of the fatherland” not against French monarchists, but against “foreign hordes” of African invaders transforming France into an African (and Muslim) nation stretching from the Congo to Calais. “Italia,” based on “Il Canto degli Italiani” (“The Song of the Italians”) also called “Fratelli d’Italia” (“Brothers of Italy”), is Volk‘s most straightforward (and beautiful) adaptation of an anthem. Yet it adds two cryptic and sinister verses describing Italy as “the slave of Rome” and asking Italy if she will die for her freedom or forget her past and its ties. “España” is a melodic, martial, and triumphant fusion of the music of Spain’s wordless national anthem “La Marcha Real” (“The Royal March”) and the words of “El Himno de Riego” (“The Song of Riego”) the anthem of the Spanish Republic, which was banned under Franco. It is hard to see how the Communist Republic has anything to do with a healthy Spanish nationalism, but “El Himno de Riego” is truly a stirring call to arms. Laibach’s interpolations, moreover, have nothing to do with Communism, invoking instead the masculine and heroic Christianity of Spanish tradition: “Brave is your Jesus-El Toreador!” and “Brave is your Jesus-El Conquistador!”

Tracks 8 through 11 deal with non-European nations. Track 8, “Yisra’el” (“Israel”) is an ironic blending of the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah” (“The Hope”) with the martial Palestinian national anthem “Biladi” (“My Country”). Track 9, “Türkiye” (“Turkey”) is based on the Turkish national anthem “İstiklâl Marşı” (“Independence March”). Track 10, “Zhoughuá” (“China”) blends “The Internationale” with the Chinese anthem “Yìyǒngjūn Jìnxíngqǔ” (“March of the Volunteers”), for in China too, Communism has fused with nationalism. The hauntingly beautiful track 11, “Nippon” (“Japan”), is based on the Japanese anthem “Kimi ga Yo” (“May Your Reign Last Forever”).

If you are encountering Laibach for the first time, Volk is definitely the place to begin. Musically, it is Laibach’s most melodic and accessible recording, yet all the group’s distinct sonic trademarks are present. Conceptually, it is the group’s most ambitious and thought-provoking project so far, yet it is also rich with humor and irony (but only at the expense of their enemies).

Poster for Laibach/Bach "Kunst der Fuge" concert

Laibach’s latest release, Kunst der Fuge, is a Laibachian electronic realization of Bach’s last, unfinished work The Art of the Fugue. I found this choice surprising, but I shouldn’t have, since Laibach’s earlier works demonstrate a wide knowledge of classical music, including Baroque counterpoint. (This is used to droll effect when combined with a monotonous, thumping techno bass line on NATO‘s cover of the Swedish glam-metal band Europe’s “The Final Countdown.”)

“Original instruments” purists, of course, would dismiss such electronic performances without a listening. But Bach himself did not write The Art of the Fugue for a particular instrument. And for those of us who first heard Bach played by Walter/Wendy Carlos, synthesizers are original instruments anyway. I have a number of performances of The Art of the Fugue in various arrangements–piano, organ, string quartet, and chamber orchestra–and Laibach’s has taken its place among them as a legitimate and sometimes revelatory interpretation. Like all of Laibach’s works, there are playful and ironic moments. But the core is deeply serious, even spiritual. At the brink of death, Bach was writing pure, Platonic Gedankenmusik, and it is Laibach’s electronic realization, precisely because of its iciness and inhumanity–its cold interstellar vastness–that brings this listener right to eternity’s edge.

Is Laibach mystical then as well as militant, in the tradition of the Christian warrior-monks like the Templars and Teutonic Knights? The closing words of “Das Spiel ist aus” certainly seem to view European man’s struggle for survival from the aspect of eternity:

Was erstanden ist, das muss vergehen.
Was vergangen ist, muss auferstehen!
Wir der Böse sind, und wir sind Gott.
Wir sind zeitlos. Und du bist tot!
Raus! Das Spiel ist aus!

What has risen must pass away.
What has passed must rise again!
We are the Devil, and we are God.[7]
We are timeless. And you are dead!
Out! The game is up!

Forthcoming in TOQ vol. 9, no.1, Spring 2009

[2] Laibach, Jesus Christ Superstars (London: Mute Records, 1996).

[3] Laibach, NATO (London: Mute Records, 1994).

[4] The video of “Das Spiel ist aus” is available on Laibach-The Videos (Mute DVD, 2004). The version of “Das Spiel is aus” accompanying the video is available on the compilation Laibach, Anthems (London: Mute Records, 2004). Another version of “Das Spiel ist aus” originally appeared on Laibach, WAT (London: Mute Records, 2003).

[5] A similar connection is drawn in “National Reservation” on NATO, Laibach’s anti-war, anti-Western imperialism CD. A remake of “Indian Reservation,” a Cherokee lament that became a US number one single for Paul Revere and the Raiders in 1971, “National Reservation” substitutes “Eastern” (i.e., Eastern European) for “Cherokee” and leaves the rest of the song pretty much unaltered, including the lines “Though we wear shirts and ties, / we’re still the red men [i.e., Communists] deep inside.”

[6] Consider the imagery of Also sprach Johann Paul II, by the Laibach side project 300.000 V.K. (= 300,000 Verschiedene Krawalle, 300,000 Assorted Riots) (A.M.D.G., 1996). On the back cover, the Polish pope is depicted as Vlad the Impaler, as portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula. On the CD itself, John Paul’s voice is mixed with Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra over a throbbing, martial techno beat. The CD evokes the muscular, heroic, crusading Christianity of those who resisted the Muslim invasions of Europe, not today’s decadent Christianity that has thrown open the gates.

[7] This is Gnostic or Vedantic non-dualism, of course, not orthodox Christianity.