{"id":2439,"date":"2009-05-30T16:59:37","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T06:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=2439"},"modified":"2010-10-24T01:52:13","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T15:52:13","slug":"co-opting-the-counter-culture-troy-southgate-and-the-national-revolutionary-faction-by-graham-d-macklin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/?p=2439","title":{"rendered":"‘Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction’ by Graham D. Macklin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction
\nGraham D. Macklin
\nPatterns of Prejudice<\/em>
\nVol.39, No.3, September 2005<\/p>\n

Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a \u2018national-anarchist\u2019 groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist \u2018anarchist\u2019 agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move \u2018beyond left and right\u2019, transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism. Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident \u2018national-revolutionaries\u2019 who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In his monumental A History of Fascism, 1914–1945<\/em> Stanley Payne devotes only two pages to British fascism–\u2018a political oxymoron\u2019–the volume of literature devoted to which is \u2018inversely proportionate to its significance\u2019.[2] Such disdain has all but smothered the study of post-war British fascism, which is characterized merely as an \u2018epilogue\u2019 to the \u2018epochal significance\u2019 of inter-war British fascism, which in itself is only of interest as a benign footnote to the history of fascism and Nazism. Walter Lacquer is similarly scornful in his refusal to study post-war British fascism, \u2018because it has not been very significant or in anyway original\u2019.[3] Although there is an element of truth in this proposition its reductive methodological focus on the traditional canons of ideological core and electoral performance overlooks the extent to which British fascism operates outside neatly quantifiable electoral, national and legal boundaries. This inevitably underestimates the wider impact of fascist politics.<\/p>\n

In this respect Roger Griffin\u2019s recent elaboration of the concept of the fascist \u2018groupuscule\u2019 provides a much-needed corrective to an analytically stunted approach that obscures as much as it reveals. This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism\u2019s cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. While the synthesis of left and right in \u2018third position\u2019 groupuscules makes their classification suitably problematic, this article demonstrates that despite a protean capacity for change \u2018national-revolutionary\u2019 groupuscules retain, at least to the initiated, the recognizable mark of Cain. These origins are equally evident in the synthesis of \u2018anarchism\u2019 with Evolian fascism, which is espoused by NRF founder Troy Southgate whose rapidly evolving political odyssey from (comparatively) orthodox British fascism to the radical, anti-capitalist, \u2018post-third-position\u2019 ideology of \u2018national-anarchism\u2019 represents a highly personalized and idiosyncratic revolt against the modern world<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Origins<\/strong><\/p>\n

The origins of the NRF can be traced to the collapse of the National Front (NF) in 1979. From its formation in 1967 the NF grew rapidly in strength until by 1973 it had approximately 17,500 members, though approximately 64,000 people passed through its ranks during the course of the decade.[4] Following its comparative success in the May 1977 Greater London County Council elections — which masked an overall decline in its political fortunes — many commentators feared the NF was on the verge of a major political breakthrough.[5] Buoyed with hubris the NF fielded 303 candidates in the 1979 general election, more than any insurgent political party since the Labour Party in 1919.[6] However, a resurgent Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, which usurped its anti-immigration platform while taking an equally draconian line on law and order, trounced the NF, which polled a derisory 191,706 votes (1.4 per cent).[7]<\/p>\n

It was G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung<\/em>. The resulting trauma accelerated the decline and fragmentation of the NF and led to the departure of its titular chairman, John Tyndall, who was blamed for its humiliation. Riven by internal dissent and struggling to cope with its failure, the NF entered a period of frenetic ideological radicalization. The catalyst for this development was the arrival in England of approximately forty fugitive Italian fascists belonging to Terza Positione<\/em> and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari<\/em>, several of whom had been involved in the horrific bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980 that killed eighty people.[8] As well as supplying the NF with funds they also introduced its membership to the ideas of Julius Evola, the aristocratic Italian racial theorist who had assumed centre-stage after 1945 as the inspiration for generations of youthful Italian fascists.[9] The radicalization of these younger, educated, ambitious activists created a further rift within the NF, which culminated in the departure in 1983 of Martin Webster, the National Activities Organiser.[10]<\/p>\n

Webster\u2019s departure paved the way for the ascendancy of the \u2018leftwing\u2019 and \u2018anti-capitalist\u2019 tendency within the NF inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite<\/em> and the \u2018anti-Nazi\u2019 writings of Otto Strasser.[11] The absorption of these ideological imports led to the development of a more intellectually sophisticated, internationalist, \u2018third position\u2019 ideology showcased in the NF\u2019s theoretical journal Rising<\/em>. Modelling itself on the esoteric elitist pretensions of Evola and Corneliu Codreanu, the NF sought to transform itself into a \u2018revolutionary\u2019 cadre-based organization and to rid itself of \u2018armchair nationalists, tin-pot dictators or refugees from old political parties\u2019.[12] By January 1985 membership had declined to 1,000.[13] The NF\u2019s ideological inspiration was Derek Holland\u2019s The Political Soldier<\/em> (1984), which envisaged an elite form of racial nationalism led by \u2018a new type of man who will live<\/em> the Nationalist life every day\u2019 while preparing for a \u2018holy war\u2019 against the iniquitous British state.[14] Abandoning electoral politics, the NF extolled grassroots, community-based activism and aspired eventually to replace parliamentary politics with direct democracy or \u2018popular rule\u2019 adapted from Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s Green Book<\/em>, which was eulogized alongside Ayatollah Khomeini\u2019s Iran and Louis Farrakhan\u2019s black separatist Nation of Islam. Not everyone accepted his ideological evolution, however. In 1989 the NF split into two separate groups: the Third Way led by Patrick Harrington, and the International Third Position (ITP) led by Derek Holland, Roberto Fiore and Nick Griffin, currently the British National Party (BNP) chairman.[15]<\/p>\n

Troy Southgate<\/strong><\/p>\n

Born in Crystal Palace, South London in 1965, Troy Southgate\u2019s political odyssey began in 1984 when he joined the NF as it was completing its rapid transformation into a \u2018revolutionary organization\u2019. Southgate claims he was attracted by its platform of \u2018popular rule\u2019 and Catholic distributism, rather than its \u2018racial separatism\u2019, which he accepted only later. Of immediate influence was Orthodoxy<\/em> by G. K. Chesterton and I Believed<\/em>, the autobiography of Douglas Hyde, former editor of the Stalinist Daily Worker<\/em> who became a minor cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre<\/em> in the 1950s when he renounced Communism and converted to Catholicism. Southgate followed suit in 1987, joining the ultra-conservative Lefebvrist sect, the Society of St Pius X. It was during this period that Southgate was sentenced to eighteen months\u2019 imprisonment for serious assault during a streetfight. Following his release in 1989 he took over NF operations in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.[16] As the NF disintegrated into rival factions that year Southgate joined the ITP, believing it to be \u2018the legitimate heir to the National Revolutionary Movement in Britain\u2019, acting as its Kent organizer and editor of the Kent Crusader<\/em>, Surrey Action<\/em>, Eastern Legion<\/em> and Catholic Action<\/em>.[17]<\/p>\n

Despite its radical origins the ITP quickly degenerated into an insignificant though fanatically \u2018pro-life\u2019 and homophobic Catholic sect, eulogizing the self-same \u2018reactionary\u2019 figures like General Franco and Mussolini it had previously denounced. Southgate became increasingly dissatisfied with the ITP leadership, particularly Holland and Fiore, whom he believed were far more interested in the possibilities of developing a rural fascist enclave in Northern France (and later in Spain), into which they had invested the group\u2019s finances, than in sustaining the ITP as a cadre-based organization. Accusing them of gross financial impropriety, hypocrisy, racial miscegenation and of practising a \u2018bourgeois\u2019 form of reactionary ultra-Catholic fascism incompatible with the \u2018revolutionary\u2019 nationalism that, he claimed, they had betrayed, Southgate acrimoniously departed from the ITP in late 1992.[18]<\/p>\n

Southgate immediately formed the English Nationalist Movement (ENM), which was intermittently active in Dover, Kent with small cadres in London and Bradford. It had \u2018a small fluctuating hardcore\u2019 of between 25 and 35 committed activists, though anti-fascist estimates put the figure as low as 4.[19] Signalling that the ENM represented the genuine embodiment of \u2018national-revolutionary\u2019 essentials Southgate established the knowingly titled Rising Press and reprinted influential articles from NF magazines like Rising<\/em>, New Nation<\/em> and Nationalism Today<\/em>.[20] Vehemently opposed to the spiritual enslavement emanating from the twin materialistic poles of \u2018Capitalist greed and Marxist servitude\u2019 the ENM sought to define a usable ideological inheritance, untainted by its association with \u2018classic\u2019 fascism. Thus Hitler and Mussolini were denounced as \u2018reactionary charlatans\u2019 and enemies of \u2018genuine\u2019 revolutionary nationalism.[21] Corporate economics was also dismissed as the perpetuation of capitalism \u2018behind a nationalist facade\u2019.[22] The BNP was rejected as a mere \u2018pressure valve\u2019 for closet Tories and \u2018small time drug dealers\u2019.[23]<\/p>\n

In contrast to the increasingly \u2018reactionary\u2019 ITP Southgate paid fulsome tribute to the pantheon of \u2018forgotten\u2019 dissident fascists that had motivated the original third position, including Strasser, Codreanu, Jos\u00e9 Antonio Primo de Rivera and L\u00e9on Degrelle, not to mention the Welsh nationalism of Plaid Cymru. The resulting \u2018patriotic socialism\u2019 was assimilated with the writings of Victorian socialists like William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Robert Owen and William Cobbett to create a native Anglo-Saxon v\u00f6lkisch<\/em> tradition that desired the reclamation of an English pastoral idyll supposedly swept away by the Industrial Revolution.[24]<\/p>\n

This was coupled with Southgate\u2019s desire for a \u2018mono-racial England\u2019, which he claimed was not \u2018racist\u2019. Borrowing his terminology from the Nouvelle Droite<\/em>, Southgate claimed to seek only \u2018ethno-pluralism\u2019 (i.e. racial apartheid) to defend indigenous white culture from the \u2018death\u2019 of multiracial society. Defending \u2018human diversity\u2019 Southgate advocated \u2018humane\u2019 repatriation and the reordering of the globe according to racially segregated colour blocs. Within this framework Southgate advocated a radical policy of economic and political decentralization: England, Alba (Scotland), Cymru (Wales), Ulster, Mannin (Isle of Man) and Kernow (Cornwall). These regions were to be governed according to the economic principles of Catholic distributism and a wealth redistribution scheme modelled on the mediaeval guild system. The ensuing growth of private enterprise and common ownership of the means of production would end \u2018class war\u2019 and, ergo<\/em>, the raison d’\u00eatre<\/em> for Marxism, and would also encourage an organic nationalist economy insulated from \u2018foreign\u2019 intervention.[25] Politically the regions would be governed by the concept of \u2018popular rule\u2019 extolled by Qaddafi. The resulting restoration of economic and political freedom would re-establish the link between \u2018blood and soil\u2019 enabling the people to overcome the \u2018tidal wave of evil and liberal filth now sweeping over our entire continent\u2019. \u2018Natural law\u2019 would be upheld and abortion, race mixing and homosexuality forbidden.[26]<\/p>\n

This desire to create a decentralized v\u00f6lkisch<\/em> identity has its roots in the ideological ferment gripping National Front News<\/em> and Nationalism Today<\/em> in the 1980s. Southgate\u2019s continued ideological morphology was stimulated through contact with Perspectives<\/em>, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective formed in 1989 to discuss \u2018European identities, autonomies and initiatives\u2019 and which emerged from the NF\u2019s cultural appendage IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic). IONA organized joint symposia with Michael Walker\u2019s Scorpion<\/em> magazine at which \u2018former British Nationalists\u2019 met to discuss finding a \u2018rooted radicalism\u2019 to challenge the nationalism of the NF that was \u2018out-dated, discredited and overtaken by events\u2019.[27] Despite such ideological innovation Southgate betrayed signs of remaining wedded to older biological fulminations espoused by Nazi racial scientist Hans “Rassen” G\u00fcnther and American racist Lothrop Stoddard.[28] Even his assimilation of Noam Chomsky\u2019s scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/em>.[29]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anarch(y) in Britain: the National Revolutionary Faction<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1998 Southgate disbanded the ENM and founded the National Revolutionary Faction, a new cadre-based groupuscule that embraced a far broader range of dissident fascist positions than the ENM, reflecting Southgate\u2019s increasingly occult and esoteric trajectory following his break with Catholicism in 1997, which he blamed for the \u2018complete stupefaction\u2019 of the ITP.[30] Ironically, many of Southgate\u2019s esoteric ideas were reconstructed from his own reading of the key texts of liberal \u2018fascist studies\u2019 rather than originating with any organic tradition.[31] Through the NRF Southgate pushed \u2018third position\u2019 thought on decentralism and regionalism to its \u2018logical\u2019 conclusion, rejecting the very cornerstone of fascist ideology itself: nationalism. While retaining the \u2018palingenetic\u2019 component of its ideology, the NRF nevertheless rejected the \u2018artificial\u2019 nation-state and the \u2018reactionary\u2019 nationalism emanating from it as the focus for rebirth. Drawing on Evola\u2019s \u2018spiritual racism\u2019 Southgate rejected abstract geography, advocating instead a \u2018tribal and organic\u2019 Indo-European \u2018ethnic heritage\u2019, extending from Europe to Iran, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, which offered an impregnable racial defence against the \u2018quagmire\u2019 of globalization and the faltering security provided by national borders.[32] Added to this \u2018spiritual racism\u2019 was C. G. Jung\u2019s concept of the \u2018collective subconscious\u2019, which provided the NRF with further evidence of the existence of a \u2018primeval Aryan psyche\u2019. In this respect Southgate admired Heinrich Himmler\u2019s activity at Wewelsburg Castle as \u2018one of the most significant developments in modern history\u2019, which had contributed to a \u2018deeper\u2019 occult understanding of race, even though in the same breath Himmler could be derided as a \u2018fascistic pig\u2019 funded by \u2018secret wall street financiers\u2019 who had murdered many of his own ideological heroes.[33]<\/p>\n

The most intriguing ideological innovation, however, was Southgate\u2019s conversion to \u2018anarchism\u2019 and his subsequent formulation of a doctrine of \u2018national-anarchism\u2019. At first glance the \u2018total insanity\u2019 of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism.[34] When put into its wider context, however, \u2018national-anarchism\u2019 appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated.[35]<\/p>\n

Central to \u2018national-anarchism\u2019, however, is a far older paradigm drawn from conservative revolutionary thought, namely, the Anarch, a sovereign individual whose independence allows him to \u2018turn in any direction\u2019, a notion that reinforces Southgate\u2019s belief that \u2018the concept of humanity coming and going in the same direction is a 1960s dead-end\u2019. Redolent of Gabriele D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s Futurist poetry, Nietzsche\u2019s rejection of dogmatism and even Max Stirner\u2019s extreme egoism, the concept of the Anarch finds its fullest expression in Ernst J\u00fcnger\u2019s novel Eumeswil<\/em>. For J\u00fcnger the Anarch differed radically from the anarchist, whose acts of insurrection (\u2018beacons of the impotent\u2019) only brought further state repression. For the Anarch all external poles of power, whatever their relative merits, are both arbitrary and transitory. Having undergone a fortifying process of inner migration the Anarch \u2018adjusts accordingly\u2019 to external authority as a \u2018question of form\u2019 rather than faith. Stoically abjuring from this \u2018ultimate devotion\u2019 the Anarch preserves his autonomy and \u2018metaphysical integrity\u2019. This was also paramount in Evolian thought, which also divined a \u2018spiritual\u2019 basis for genuine authority beyond naked self-glorification.[36]<\/p>\n

By recognizing this inviolability, by gaining the mastery of himself, the Anarch personifies a spiritual, aristocratic elite. The recognition of multilayered realities sees the Anarch \u2018endlessly moving nomadically with mercurial freedom through thought . . . free to explore and synthesize\u2019.[37] In this way the Anarch appropriates authority rather than succumbs to it, thus securing his own salvation and, ergo<\/em>, that of the nation. In essence, J\u00fcnger\u2019s work provides an esoteric reworking of Southgate\u2019s original understanding of the \u2018political soldier\u2019 as a \u2018Godlike figure\u2019 who \u2018can only truly be master of his situation when he is truly master of himself\u2019. Only this \u2018new man\u2019 can save society from the \u2018corruption and decadence\u2019 that has engulfed it.[38] The concept of the Anarch therefore provides sanction for the amorphous ideological shape-shifting and rampant eclecticism of \u2018national-anarchism\u2019, allowing Southgate to claim that he is not \u2018fascist\u2019 but that he has transcended the dichotomy of conventional politics to embrace higher political forms that are \u2018beyond left and right\u2019.<\/p>\n

In order to \u2018change society completely\u2019 the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy, which coincidentally led Southgate to jettison the \u2018socialist trappings\u2019 of Strasserism and \u2018reformist\u2019 distributism as incompatible with his Evolian racial vision. Indeed, Southgate is vehemently opposed to immigration and miscegenation, which he believes have severely disrupted the \u2018organic balance of nature\u2019.[39] The depth of his contempt for those who contravene this \u2018natural order\u2019 can be surmised from his attack on glamour model \u2018Jordan\u2019, whose child was fathered by a black footballer. \u2018She has been rewarded for her racial treason\u2019, jeered Southgate, \u2018her picaninny has been born blind. just [sic<\/em>] like his father, it would appear. still [sic<\/em>], he can always become a Stevie Wonder impersonator when he grows up.\u2019[40]<\/p>\n

As such sentiments reveal, NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism\u2019s humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as \u2018infected\u2019 with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism.[41] In its place Southgate has propagated a \u2018third position\u2019 anarchism based not on \u2018moral\u2019 rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the \u2018natural order\u2019 from which every group with \u2018insurrectionist potential\u2019 could unite to destroy \u2018One World\u2019 tyranny with a \u2018primal bloodlust\u2019.[42] NRF propaganda revels in this discordant Conradian stereotype of anarchism, glorifying both Bakunin\u2019s \u2018propaganda of the deed\u2019 and Sergei Nechayev\u2019s \u2018science of destruction\u2019.[43]<\/p>\n

Having styled itself as an urban guerrilla group, NRF propaganda pays particular attention to the avoidance of state repression and surveillance by extolling a cellular, cadre-based organization comprising \u2018political soldiers\u2019 with four degrees of membership: the cadre or \u2018active unit\u2019, the trainee or probationary cadre, the supporter, and the outer circle who do little more than receive NRF publications. These four degrees of membership are subordinate to the Revolutionary Command Council, betraying a linguistic nod towards the continued ideological attraction of Qaddafi\u2019s Libya, Jamal \u2018Abd al-Nasir\u2019s Egypt and the Iraqi Ba\u2019athist Party.[44]<\/p>\n

Such political organization reveals the NRF to be closer in inspiration to the Leninist \u2018revolutionary vanguard\u2019 than anarchism, even though it eulogizes the Angry Brigade and recommends Towards a Citizens Militia<\/em>, published by Stuart Christie, one of [the] anarchists who was indicted though subsequently acquitted during the \u2018Stoke Newington 8\u2019 trial.[45] Indeed the NRF appropriates its symbolism from Marxist terror cells like the Red Army Faction, and its publications regularly feature instructions on the manufacture of homemade explosives, rockets, grenades, short-range mortars and napalm. In preparation for the total systemic collapse of capitalist society NRF cells are urged to immerse themselves in survivalist literature, military field manuals and encouraged to join the Territorial Army so that, as the Irish Republican Army discovered in the 1950s, \u2018you can actually be paid and trained by the State in order to deal with its consequences\u2019.[46] The NRF found even greater inspiration in the native terrorist tradition of the American far right and its concept of \u2018leaderless resistance\u2019, which is portrayed as an \u2018anarchist\u2019 alternative to the traditional mass-based organization that is rejected as \u2018self-delusion\u2019.[47] Having abandoned the constitutional\u2019 approach of the British National Party the NRF is free to wage its \u2018war of liberation\u2019 against the British state and \u2018international Zionism\u2019 and in doing so evokes the inspiration of liberation leaders like Ernesto \u2018Che\u2019 Guevara, who are listed as \u2018exemplars for the struggle\u2019.[48] This synthesis leads the NRF to promote a form of \u2018black\u2019 anarchism. These ideas owe a far greater debt, however, to fascism\u2019s own tradition of terrorism and the \u2018active nihilism\u2019 of Julius Evola who in his later life preached that the outright destruction of the state was imperative. Southgate\u2019s concept of \u2018Real Anarchy\u2019 is therefore little more than a repackaging of the esoteric principles of conservative revolutionary and Evolian thought.[49]<\/p>\n

Richard Hunt and Alternative Green<\/strong><\/p>\n

Southgate\u2019s espousal of Evolian Traditionalism underwent further ideological morphology through his contact with the anarcho-primitivist ideas of Richard Hunt, the founding editor of Green Anarchist<\/em> who had been forced to resign over his support for the Gulf War. Southgate was exposed to Hunt\u2019s ideas through the pages of Perspectives<\/em>, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective that eventually merged with his new publication Alternative Green<\/em>.[50] Hunt\u2019s ideas found their fullest expression in his book To End Poverty<\/em> (1997), which argues that poverty in the \u2018periphery\u2019 is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the core\u2019. This \u2018progress\u2019 represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and \u2018biologically unhealthy\u2019 population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards \u2018total social breakdown\u2019. Hunt\u2019s panacea is to return to \u2018the original affluent society\u2019 of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a \u2018peck order\u2019 of \u2018respect and influence\u2019, bound by \u2018kinship\u2019, that would reestablish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism.[51]<\/p>\n

Impressed by Hunt\u2019s \u2018grubby sort of utopia\u2019 Southgate recognized that it could only be implemented following the \u2018complete collapse\u2019 of capitalism. Southgate believed that this eventuality was nearer to hand than was generally imagined, counselling that \u2018national-revolutionaries\u2019 needed to create \u2018alternative revolutionary structures\u2019 and \u2018independent enclaves\u2019 away from Britain\u2019s \u2018Asian infested cities\u2019 in order to hasten capitalism\u2019s demise. Thus the NRF advocated a localized \u2018counter-economy\u2019 based on smallholdings and allotments whose produce and required skills could be bartered through local exchange trading systems (LETS) suffused with a racist imperative to break the \u2018dominating stranglehold\u2019 of Asian shop owners. This racist anti-capitalism had as its end the desire to foment civil and racial strife through \u2018no-go\u2019 areas for ethnic minorities and state power as an essential prelude to racial civil war and the collapse of the capitalist system.[52]<\/p>\n

Key to this is the maintenance of a network of like-minded and ideologically committed individuals, families and groups who have \u2018turned their backs upon the corrosive influence of urbanism and decay\u2019 and might feasibly form racially segregated rural communities and build something \u2018tangible\u2019.[53] Emulating the example of the Wandervogel<\/em>, the British Woodcraft folk and the \u2018legionary spirit\u2019 of Corneliu Codreanu\u2019s Iron Guard, Southgate formed the Greenshirts and a uniformed Iron Youth to re-establish the \u2018eternal\u2019 principles of blood and soil through cross-country hikes and camping.[54] Here can be found Southgate\u2019s attempt to create the archetypal Fascist Man who, in Codreanu\u2019s words, \u2018does not bend, who is inflexible\u2019.[55] These activities represent an integral part of the NRF\u2019s long-term strategy to construct a broad range of viable political, social, cultural and economic alternatives to those of \u2018the Establishment\u2019 through which the children of its activists can emerge as \u2018the true vanguard of our people\u2019s future\u2019.[56] To insulate them from the degenerate Americanized values of their peer group and a national curriculum based on \u2018reading, writing and buggery\u2019, Southgate schools his children from home.[57]<\/p>\n

This racist communitarianism is given an \u2018anarchist\u2019 gloss through Southgate\u2019s reinterpretation (and limitation) of the ideas of free and instinctive association implicit in Kropotkin\u2019s Mutual Aid<\/em> as an expression of \u2018folkish\u2019 identity. Proclaiming that it is \u2018anarchist\u2019 to insist on \u2018our own space\u2019, Southgate excludes from these communities the \u2018unnatural\u2019 presence of ethnic minorities, homosexuals and feminists, not to mention those who support abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, vivisection and genetically modified foods. They would be free to form their own communities.[58] Influenced by Hunt\u2019s anarcho-primitivism Southgate\u2019s view of \u2018Traditional Anarchy\u2019 is suffused with Evola\u2019s advocacy of \u2018self-rule by an elite\u2019 and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by \u2018genetics\u2019 that, despite its alleged \u2018anarchism\u2019, looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial \u2018kingship\u2019.[59] Southgate\u2019s vision also absorbs the ideas of anarchist thinkers like John Zerzan, not to mention the Luddite terrorism of Ted Kaczynski, in order to theorize a \u2018more natural lifestyle\u2019, superficially free of the taint of \u2018fascism\u2019, adding a novel green\/anarchist spin to Evola\u2019s Traditionalism in the process.[60]<\/p>\n

This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of \u2018folk autonomy\u2019 rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization. He was quick to appreciate that the anti-globalization movement was \u2018sectarian\u2019 in its political leanings. Alternative Green<\/em> and its \u2018overriding aversion to the Capitalist system\u2019 was therefore an \u2018ideal platform for formulating practical strategy\u2019 to oppose capitalism.[61] Alternative Green<\/em> was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a \u2018sincere\u2019 alliance of \u2018anti-system\u2019 protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe, though admittedly \u2018there wasn\u2019t much input from the far left\u2019.[62] To push this agenda the Beyond Left and Right<\/em> website was founded, although efforts to convene further events during 2001 proved unsuccessful when Anti-Fascist Action and members of Green Anarchist<\/em> (and their arch-detractor Stewart Home) mobilized to \u2018smash convergence\u2019.[63] Southgate\u2019s aborted attempt to transcend the left\/right dichotomy and open a dialogue with the (now-reviled) \u2018anarcho-dogmatists\u2019 failed utterly.<\/p>\n

Members of the anarchist trade union, the International Workers of the World, founded an anti-nationalist-anarchist e-group to refute the assertions being made by \u2018national-anarchists\u2019. Black Flag<\/em>, the backbone of British anarchism, provided its Internet audience with a vast archive of online texts refuting Southgate\u2019s assertion that racism and nationalism were \u2018anarchist\u2019. Individual members of Anti-Fascist Action have also been particularly active in challenging NRF activity in online newsgroups. The furore led to Hunt\u2019s further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate\u2019s frequent contributions to Alternative Green<\/em>, his views have not permeated further within the far right.[64] Denounced as a \u2018fascist\u2019 Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green<\/em>.[65] Having become ill Hunt finally relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green<\/em> to Southgate; it was, however, suspended after only one issue and replaced with a new publication, untainted by the furore, entitled Terra Firma<\/em>.[66]<\/p>\n

The brief existence of the \u2018Beyond Left and Right\u2019 project hinted at its nebulous potential. Two veteran socialists, Gary Holden and Terry Liddle, both prominent in the Greenwich branch of the London Green Party, its Green Socialist Network and the South London Republican Forum, attended the 2000 Anarchist Heretics Fair. As news of their attendance emerged members of the UK_Left_Network e-group (unsuccessfully) lobbied the London Socialist Alliance and the Republican Communist Network (RCN), with which they were involved, to institute an enquiry. Liddle offered a somewhat unconvincing defence of his actions in both Republican Communist<\/em> and Weekly Worker<\/em>, organ of the minuscule Communist Party of Great Britain, which was closely aligned with the RCN, that stated that he had \u2018no case to answer\u2019. Calls for an enquiry were dismissed as a \u2018witch hunt\u2019 motivated by the \u2018paranoid\u2019 fantasy of Green Anarchist<\/em>, thus sidestepping the actual content of the accusations. A parallel Green Party enquiry ended with Liddle\u2019s resignation, however.[67]<\/p>\n

As these events unfolded it became apparent that the NRF was practising a form of virtual entryism through the eco-anarchy e-group, an arm of the Canadian-based anarcho-green forum, in order to enquire into, among other things, the viability of forging a green\/black bloc. Its moderator Joseph Catron had previously posted a number of messages to \u2018national-revolutionary\u2019 e-groups announcing his opposition to the \u2018multicultural and imperialist nightmare\u2019, and it has been suggested that the eco-anarchy e-group was a \u2018honey trap\u2019 designed to lure genuine and unsuspecting greens and anarchists into its orbit.[68] This thesis was given some credence by the fact that Dave Parks, the Anti-Fascist Action activist who exposed these machinations, was barred from the list rather than those he exposed.[69]<\/p>\n

Mindful of the contemporary success of the red\/brown coalition in Russia, NRF cadres sought to create \u2018a working synthesis\u2019 between anti-capitalists of both the left and right.[70] Indeed, with the collapse of \u2018really existing\u2019 Communism in 1989, the NRF abandoned \u2018third position\u2019 fascism as \u2018irrelevant\u2019. Having immersed himself in the writings of both Hunt and anarchist theorist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), Southgate reconceptualized the coming struggle in terms of a Manichaean division between \u2018those for<\/em> Capitalism and those against<\/em> Capitalism, Centralists versus Decentralists\u2019.[71] In this respect \u2018national-anarchism\u2019 was \u2018transcending the very notion of beyond\u2019 by taking synthesis to its \u2018logical\u2019 extreme and uniting all anti-systemic opposition against a single enemy: global liberal capitalism deemed to operate as a front for the \u2018shadowy financiers\u2019 of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and therefore \u2018International Zionism\u2019.[72]<\/p>\n

There was little evidence that this \u2018synthesis\u2019 represented anything more than a strategy for infiltration as NRF cadres gradually shifted from low level antisemitic demonstrations against traditional fascist targets to the permeation of ecological and anarchist concerns, like direct action protests against a proposed multiplex cinema in Crystal Palace, the \u2018Stop the City\u2019 protests in 1999 and the May Day protests in 2000.[73] Southgate claims to have been active in the increasingly violent protests surrounding the Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection laboratory in Cambridgeshire during August 2000.[74] He also claims NRF cadres are active in the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the Animal Liberation Front.[75]<\/p>\n

Discord in the Middle East has offered the NRF further scope to enhance its anti-imperialist credentials. Unlike the BNP, which has transformed its virulent Islamophobia into a virtue since 11 September, the NRF supports Islam because \u2018many of its adherents are vigorously opposed to International Zionism\u2019.[76] NRF members often participate in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and, in one symbolic act of support, burned American and Israeli flags outside Downing Street as an \u2018anti-Zionist\u2019 protest against continued attacks on Iraq. Although the NRF opposes organized Islamic groups in Britain like Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun, which seek to establish a \u2018global Caliphate\u2019, NRF publications regularly eulogize groups such as Hamas for the \u2018purity of thought and action\u2019 with which they attack \u2018the obnoxious disease that is World Jewry\u2019.[77] Keen to build bridges with British Muslims the NRF claims a \u2018handful\u2019 of Arab members and has published a faux<\/em> Islamist publication, Semitic Voice<\/em>, which purports to be the work of \u2018a group of young Muslim students\u2019. In an attempt to foster greater enmity against Israel the NRF repackages traditional far-right concerns in an Islamic context, blaming the \u2018holohoax\u2019 for Palestinian dispossession and inciting Islamist militants to violence against the Jews by advocating the formation of \u2018cells of God\u2019 (leaderless resistance).[78]<\/p>\n

This strategy had a limited virtual success through an online bulletin board called Jumeirah Beach: The Society of International Thinkers for Peace, run by Qasim Khan from Karachi in Pakistan, which purports to have a wide audience in the Middle East. Khan, who is linked to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the third largest political party in Pakistan whose activists were recently involved in the wave of sectarian violence in Karachi, describes the NRF as an \u2018international think tank\u2019 and acts as the \u2018national-anarchist\u2019 contact in Pakistan. Through this site Southgate has sought to acquaint Middle Eastern readers with Julius Evola and \u2018lone wolf\u2019 resistance and, in doing so, to transform national-anarchism into a \u2018global idea\u2019, thus hastening the \u2018destruction of international Capitalism\u2019.[79] Another contributor to the site is former BNP organizer for Hull and Lincolnshire, David Michael, who left the BNP because of its \u2018disgraceful\u2019 anti-Islamism after 11 September.[80] Michael views the American-led invasion of Iraq as potentially cathartic and argues:<\/p>\n

All the people of the world who want peace and who fear America must unite now more than ever before, Muslims, anarchists, communists, nationalists, all of us . . . we must join together, put aside philosophical and religious differences, and start to work together against the American murderers and the British pig, Blair. Divided, we will accomplish nothing. Together, we might slowly begin to rid the world of this evil.[81]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an effort to further such an alliance Michael founded Voice of the Resistance<\/em>, which purports to act as a forum for resistance against the \u2018new American Capitalist Empire\u2019.[82] Using rhetoric traditionally associated with left-wing protest Voice of the Resistance<\/em> bills itself as \u2018George W. Bush\u2019s worst nightmare\u2019. Southgate and Michael soon encountered \u2018insurmountable differences\u2019 and ceased their co-operation.[83]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Geopolitics<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the paradoxes of post-war fascism has been the repeated effort to transcend the \u2018narrow\u2019 nationalism of \u2018classic\u2019 fascism by becoming truly international through a series of grand designs for European unity. To compensate for their debilitating numerical deficiency, \u2018national-revolutionary\u2019 groups like the NRF have internationalized both their ideology and their organizational frameworks in order to reach out to similarly isolated groups abroad, globalize their struggle and consolidate their strength. In its attempts to realize this Eurasian ideology Southgate founded the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism (LCRN) in early 1993 to unite the American Front, Canada\u2019s National Liberation Front and Kerry Bolton\u2019s National Destiny in New Zealand. These groups did little more than exchange publications and information, however. In September 1998 the LCRN merged with Christian Bouchet\u2019s Front Europ\u00e9en de Liberation<\/em> (FEL) under the shadow of the Front National\u2019s annual Red-White-Blue festival. The FEL was inspired by the \u2018one vision\u2019 of European \u2018liberation\u2019 espoused by Otto Strasser, Jean Thiriart and Francis Parker Yockey, after whose original organization the FEL was named.[84] Southgate sought to anchor the NRF within this \u2018living tradition\u2019 by reprinting Yockey\u2019s The Proclamation of London<\/em> (1949), \u2018a fully-fledged \u2018\u2018Declaration of War\u2019\u2019\u2019 against the \u2018Zionist, Capitalist New World Order\u2019. By February 1999 despite repeated efforts to organize these disparate \u2018national-revolutionary\u2019 sects the FEL had atrophied, although Southgate continued to \u2018work closely\u2019 with Bouchet.[85]<\/p>\n

Geopolitically Southgate has shifted away from the older paradigms of Europe as a \u2018third way\u2019, gravitating towards the spiritual and esoteric national-Bolshevik solution advocated by Jean Parvulesco and Aleksandr Dugin, ideologue of the Arctogaia think tank, who seek a new Eurasian (and in Dugin\u2019s case Russian-led) geopolitical axis: \u2018Paris-Berlin-Moscow\u2019.[86] Former Jeune Nation<\/em> leader Jean Thiriart provides further inspiration through his more materially orientated idea of an economically insulated European empire stretching \u2018from Galway to Vladivostok\u2019 and acting as a third force between Occident and Orient. Despite having retired from politics in 1969 Thiriart was so enamoured with the FEL that he re-emerged shortly before his death in 1993 to lead a FEL delegation to Moscow for talks with national-Bolshevik ideologues Yegor Ligachev and Aleksandr Dugin.[87]<\/p>\n

Southgate\u2019s vision of western culture is saturated with a profound pessimism tempered by the optimistic belief that only by \u2018complete and utter defeat\u2019 can tepid materialism be expunged and replaced by the \u2018golden age\u2019 of Evolian Tradition: a return of the Ghibbelines of the Middle Ages or the \u2018medieval imperium\u2019 of the Holy Roman Empire before it collapsed into the \u2018internecine struggle\u2019 and \u2018imperialistic shenanigans\u2019 of the nation-state.[88] This panacea has been injected into the contemporary Russian national-Bolshevik milieu through Southgate\u2019s analysis of Evola\u2019s Men among the Ruins<\/em> that appeared on the Pravda.ru<\/em> website.[89] The Eurasian geopolitical solution is not conceived by Southgate as a cynical extension of Russian imperial chauvinism, but a \u2018golden opportunity\u2019 to create a \u2018decentralised imperium\u2019. Adopting the slogan of Breton nationalist Yann Fou\u00e9r\u00e9, Southgate advocates a \u2018Europe of One Hundred Flags\u2019 wherein \u2018each historic nation can assert its own political, social and economic freedom within the ancestral boundaries of its racial and cultural heritage\u2019. This Eurasian ethnic \u2018federalism\u2019 is to serve as an impermeable barrier to the culturally enervating forces of MTV \u2018musak\u2019 and \u2018Coca-McDeath\u2019. To liberate Europe from the all-encompassing \u2018blanket cosmopolitanism\u2019 of American-led consumerism, not to mention the \u2018occupying force\u2019 of its military presence in Europe, Southgate advocates relinquishing \u2018the very idea of the West\u2019. Enmeshed in a vortex of materialist society and therefore \u2018deep within enemy lines\u2019, Europeans are encouraged to reach out to the \u2018common struggles\u2019 waged by the heirs of Che Guevara, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Jamal \u2018Abd al-Nasir and Patrice Lumumba, whose revolutions on the \u2018periphery\u2019 should be supported as part of a dual strategy of \u2018encouraging dissent and resistance from within\u2019.[90]<\/p>\n

Paganism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Southgate, who has a degree in theology and religious studies from Canterbury University, rejected Catholicism and moved towards neo-pagan and heathen groups that are \u2018very loyal to the Gods of the Northern Tradition\u2019, including the Odinic Rite, the Tribe of the Wulfings and the Asatru Alliance, a pagan movement concerned with practising rituals and magic and led by Valguard (Mike) Murray, a former member of the American Nazi Party.[91] Further evidence of this transition from Catholicism to paganism emerged in an interview with Wotan<\/em>, the organ of the Charlemagne Hammer Skins.[92] Southgate believed that Wotan<\/em>\u2019s celebration of the heroes of the Norse pantheon represented \u2018the most genuine expression of European spirituality, culture and identity\u2019.[93] Another key expression of this \u2018identity\u2019 is exhibited by Southgate\u2019s interest in the militaristic cult of Mithras and the \u2018pagan spirituality\u2019 of the apostate Roman emperor Julian II.[94]<\/p>\n

This rejection of Christianity has an avowedly antisemitic dimension. Through the figure of Christ, Christianity has Judaic roots and is therefore irredeemably tainted; only the \u2018weak\u2019 continue to worship a \u2018dead Jew\u2019.[95] The emphasis on the Judaic roots of Christianity, however, is regarded as of secondary importance to its usurpation of the rituals, sacraments and hierarchy of the ancient pagan solar religion Mithras, which was introduced into Iran and India by marauding Aryan tribes from the Russian steppes between BCE 2000 and 1500 before spreading to the Roman empire. Although it failed to defeat early Christianity in the battle for religious supremacy during the fourth century, Mithras continues to be viewed by esoteric thinkers (including Evola and Jung) as an alternative path the West could have followed. It retains its appeal as an initiatory cult or aristocratic order akin to the Knights Templar or, latterly, Himmler\u2019s SS which, the NRF claims, had its origins in various \u2018Anarchist droite<\/em>\u2019 circles like the Black Sun and the Thule Society. While Christianity tried to neuter this vital expression of the \u2018Aryan psyche\u2019, the awareness of Europe\u2019s \u2018Faustian\u2019 destiny is currently enjoying a renaissance within the occult milieu. These ideas were also absorbed by thinkers like Evola and Ren\u00e9 Gu\u00e9non who discerned in them the fragments of a \u2018hidden albeit distinct and fundamental truth\u2019.[96] For Southgate, as for Evola, Tradition is an \u2018an underlying current which both permeates and transcends all\u2019.[97]<\/p>\n

Southgate\u2019s discovery of Evolian \u2018Primordial Tradition\u2019 and his consequent rejection of Catholicism as \u2018the sole cosmological truth\u2019 ran in tandem with his immersion in the industrial music scene.[98] This \u2018cultural vanguard\u2019 is spearheaded by a number of Gothic-Industrial, Dark Ambient, Black and \u2018Viking\u2019 Metal bands, including Allerseelen, Blood Axis, Burzum, Current 93, Dark Holler, Death in June, Endura, Mayhem, Ostara, Puissance and Sol Invictus, though it also encompasses more commercial bands like Cradle of Filth.[99] Although it would be an exaggeration to say that these groups conform to a defined political agenda, their music serves to diffuse the ideals of Mithraic paganism and Nordic folk myths within this youthful underground subculture far more effectively than any number of meetings and marches could, thus providing the \u2018perfect antidote\u2019 to the spiritually enervating, multiracial values of a globalizing \u2018system\u2019. Southgate has also noted the potential of the Straight Edge punk movement and its hard core of puritanically intolerant followers, an interesting development given (exaggerated) reports of an emerging \u2018anti-anti-establishment\u2019 pro-Bush right-wing punk movement.[100] Although Southgate realizes that the groupuscular right cannot control music-orientated youth cultures, he believes a minority can be induced \u2018to take a direction basically conducive to our aims\u2019.[101] Southgate seeks to do this through his online magazine Synthesis<\/em>, which features a music section replete with interviews and gig reviews.[102]<\/p>\n

This is not simply cynical manipulation. Southgate appears genuinely interested in the counter culture he seeks to target. His fanzine, Tribal Resonance<\/em>, \u2018the voice of the racial avant-garde\u2019, reveals Southgate\u2019s strategy of linking his ideas to \u2018the common language and the big ideas of our culture\u2019.[103] Through the medium of musical subcultures and the creation of alternatives \u2018from without\u2019, Southgate hopes to permeate existing political subcultures transversally, as the Nazis did, through a process of \u2018cultural osmosis\u2019 that aims to recode the \u2018social symbology\u2019 of the host culture so that its ideas can metastasize throughout the body politic, recalibrating its genetic inheritance. By creating \u2018cultural hegemony\u2019 the groupuscular right believes it can forge the \u2018political space\u2019 necessary for political and racial hegemony.[104]<\/p>\n

The struggle for cultural hegemony is greatly enhanced by the Internet, with the NRF establishing its own website in July 2001. As its name suggests, Synthesis<\/em>, the online Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire<\/em>, seeks a fusion of \u2018Anarchy\u2019, \u2018Occulture\u2019 and \u2018Metapolitics\u2019 with the contemporary concerns of the ecological and global justice movements. It provides a huge, counter-cultural resource (‘a junction box for esoteric, third positionism on the web’) including a vast archive of articles, essays, interviews, music and book reviews not to mention providing opportunities for its readership to showcase their art, photography, poetry and fiction. This is accompanied by a profusion of interlocking e-groups acting as a forum for ideological exchange for the more esoterically and intellectually inclined.[105]<\/p>\n

Synthesis<\/em> was originally envisaged as a forum for the NRF, Evolians and members of the defunct White Order of Thule (Michael Lujan, former WOT secretary, is the Synthesis webmaster). However, borrowing the \u2018template\u2019 of Action Fran\u00e7aise<\/em>\u2019s \u2018study groups\u2019 Synthesis<\/em> projects itself far beyond the confines of rigid definitional taxonomy to attract, so it claims, \u2018Crowleyites, communists, anarchists, greens, libertarians, fascists and separatists\u2019 who can use its facilities and e-groups to engage in debate and ideological refinement. This online convergence has the benefit of being insulated from the failure of the \u2018Beyond Left and Right\u2019 project. With a global reach, it \u2018is far more useful than putting a few stickers on lamp posts\u2019.[106]<\/p>\n

This extensive Internet presence masks the weakness of the groupuscular right. Obsessed by the importance of its long-term, counter-cultural projects the NRF disengaged from \u2018political\u2019 activities and retreated into the realm of ideas.[107] Such was Southgate\u2019s alienation from the groupuscule as an organizational form that on 29 January 2003 the NRF was disbanded altogether as Southgate concentrated on reorganizing as a \u2018political think tank\u2019 to promote and develop \u2018national-anarchism\u2019 as a philosophical concept that he hoped would come to exert a \u2018formidable influence\u2019 on the \u2018anti-Capitalist struggle\u2019.[108]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The significance of the NRF<\/strong><\/p>\n

In itself the NRF is completely irrelevant as a political force. Its importance lies in the case study it supplies of fascism as an amorphous and continually metamorphosing phenomenon. It is symptomatic of the transient nature of far-right groupuscules that by the time this article was completed the NRF had been disbanded. Southgate\u2019s latest activities have shifted almost entirely to the Internet, which is seen as offering the best opportunity of turning \u2018national-anarchism\u2019 into a \u2018global idea\u2019. Although these developments are taking place on the farther shores of the cultural and political fringe, this miniature struggle for cultural hegemony should not be ignored. The Anti- Defamation League (ADL) recently argued that, with the increased use of traditional anarchist symbolism by white supremacists in the United States, the circle-A should be listed as a hate symbol. The ridiculous nature of this assertion ignores the fact that it has been precisely those left-wing and anarchist subcultures maligned by the ADL who have actively fought back against the genesis of \u2018national-anarchism\u2019, disrupting and exposing it both on the street and in cyberspace. Indeed, anarchists and the radical left in Britain appear alive to the validity of Charles Peguy\u2019s observation made over a century ago: \u2018Qui dit “ni droite ni gauche” dit de droite\u2019. It was this hostility to Southgate\u2019s calls for \u2018convergence\u2019 that forced him to relocate his activities to the Internet where a wider audience can be reached, \u2018particularly abroad where the left\/right spectrum is far more blurred and open to interpretation\u2019.[109] As the antipathy for Green Anarchist<\/em> reveals, this resistance has not always been generated by a sophisticated analysis of Southgate\u2019s own activities but rather because it fell within the framework of pre-existing antipathy.<\/p>\n

Although Southgate\u2019s impact on left-wing counter-cultural concerns has been completely negligible, this case study of the NRF\u2019s wanton intellectual cannibalism shows that groupuscular fascism poses a clear danger, particularly for ecological subcultures whose values are profoundly different from the ecological agenda mooted by the far right. The increasing ability of groupuscules like the NRF to absorb and mirror left-wing and environmental causes, effortlessly refracting their concerns about globalization and liberal democracy through their own antisemitic and racist framework, creates a dangerous conflation between ecology and anti-immigration as a way of restoring the \u2018organic balance\u2019 of nature. If this article is anything to go by, then anarchist, ecological and global justice movements need to remain on their guard in order to ensure that the revolution will not be national-Bolshevized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction Graham D. Macklin Patterns of Prejudice Vol.39, No.3, September 2005 Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a \u2018national-anarchist\u2019 groupuscule. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4,6,13,15],"tags":[884,885,45],"class_list":["post-2439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anarchism","category-anti-fascism","category-history","category-trot-guide","category-war-on-terror","tag-co-opting-the-counter-culture-troy-southgate-and-the-national-revolutionary-faction","tag-graham-d-macklin","tag-national-anarchism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6AyE-Dl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2439"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21538,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2439\/revisions\/21538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/slackbastard.anarchobase.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}