THE NASRULLAHS OF NATIONALISM: ASSADISM AND GHADDAFISM IN THE MOVEMENT

by David Ellerton

Since the Arab Spring began, in late 2010, we have seen a flood of commentary from nationalists in the West – commentary not in support of the protestors, but against. This has reached a crescendo with the rebellion in Libya, and subsequent overthrow and murder of Ghaddafi, and the recent violence in Syria. A diverse array of commentators associated with the nationalist and racialist movement – including Final Conflict, David Duke, the Australian Peter Myers, Bill White, Paul Craig Roberts, the site Truthseeker.Co.Uk, Richard Spencer of Alternative Right, among others – have taken a pro-Assad, pro-Ghaddafi stance. Surprisingly, these nationalists join many communists who are in favour of those regimes as well – quite a few Trotskyite groups around the world support Assad – and some conservative newspaper op-ed commentators, who, while not being explicitly pro-Assad, warn that the Arab Spring may lead to ‘Islamism’, and unleash ‘sectarian chaos’.

Assad, Ghaddafi, Saleh, Mubarak and others of their ilk – let’s, for the sake of convenience, call them the Arab conservatives – took a pretty consistent line (which has become the nationalist line) on the Arab Spring revolts from the beginning. The Arab protestors (who, in the case of Libya and Syria, eventually took up arms against their governments), according to the Arab conservative view, were being manipulated by ‘outside forces’: that is, they were being manipulated by, or the agents of, Israel, the CIA and Al-Qaeda, as well as the various pro-liberal NGOs funded by George Soros, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Brookings Institute and others. (Likewise, Putin in Russia today denounces his opponents as being pawns of the Soros-type NGOs and the CIA: in his mind, no real Russian could have a beef against Putin and the United Russia Party (‘The Party of Crooks and Thieves’)). From the Arab conservative perspective, the uprisings are exogenous, not endogenous: which is another way of saying that the uprisings don’t come from within, instead, they are imposed from without. The pro-Assadists make much of the fact that, for instance, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, are lending financial, diplomatic and military support to the Syrian uprising: this is proof, to the Assadists, that the uprising is not only ‘foreign-backed’, it is foreign-directed. (Inconsistency is the rule here: Iran and Russia give the Assadists substantial military and financial support, and China and Russia have shielded Assad’s regime diplomatically).

In the Arab conservative view, the protestors are not self-directed, they are outer-directed: they are puppets on a string. Indeed, the entire Arab Spring is an Arab version of the ‘coloured’ revolutions in Georgia in 2003 and the Ukraine in 2004, which were Western-backed and orchestrated. (The fact that, for instance, the Syrian opposition – a fractured group of Syrian exiles, with very little connection to the Syrian masses – has support among the neoconservatives and NGOs in Washington is held as ‘proof’ that Washington, Tel Aviv, the CIA and the NGOs are the puppet masters. They pull the strings, from afar, and so the Arab masses dance).

As stated, this has become the nationalist line as well, and nationalist commentators are forever regurgitating Russian and Iranian news media reports, or Syrian state news reports, on the topic of the uprising in Syria. They accuse the Western media, and Al-Jazeera, of propagandising on behalf of the Syrian rebels, in the hope of manipulating Western public opinion and bringing about a ‘Libyan-style NATO humanitarian intervention’. Indeed, averting a ‘Libyan-style intervention’ has become a sacred cause, to both Russian and Chinese diplomats, and to the pro-Assad nationalists: it takes priority over liberalism, reform, democracy, human rights. Whatever happens, NATO – or at least the French and British air forces – can’t be allowed to drop their bombs! (The Putin-run Russian state media is forever claiming that tens of thousands of civilians were killed, in Libya, by the NATO bombing, when the real figure is considerably less than that – far less than the number of Libyan civilians killed by Ghaddafi).

Before we go on to examine the nationalist view of the uprising, I may as well state my own view: it is that what we see, on our TV screens every night, regarding Syria, Libya and other Arab nations affected by the Arab Spring, is more or less the truth. The Arab masses were, prior to 2011, fed up with: corruption; high unemployment; lack of housing and decent infrastructure; repression and lack of human rights; vast inequality (Mubarak and Ghaddafi were among the Arab world’s richest men) between themselves and their corrupt leaders; economic, political, cultural and intellectual stagnation, and so forth. Many Arab young men didn’t, and still don’t, have the money, or the opportunity, to buy a house and get married (and there, having a job, and a house, is a requisite for getting married). Possibly, it was the recent global economic downturn – alongside spiralling commodity prices (which led to a rise in the price of staple foods) – which was the last straw for the Arab masses, but any rate, the Arab Spring was not orchestrated by anyone except the Arab masses themselves. As it was, the revolt was a complete surprise, not only to the Arab conservatives, but to Washington and Tel Aviv. (The Far Left in the West, as Gilad Atzmon observes, was completely flummoxed as well).

On that last point – Israel’s surprise over the uprising – let us keep in mind that we are living in an era of decline of Israeli and US hegemony. Israel’s military was beaten, by Arabs, in 2006 and 2009, in Lebanon and Gaza respectively (despite taking Lebanon, easily, once before, in 1982, and Gaza twice, in 1956 and 1967); the US lost, or is in the process of losing, the Afghan and Iraq wars. But both Washington and Tel Aviv have a vested interest in making themselves out to be more powerful, militarily and geopolitically, than they are actually are. Perhaps the Israeli and the US militaries would be able to roll in to Syria, and smash up Assad’s army: but to have and to hold are two different things, as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown. In the meantime – ruling out any military action by the US and Israel – they will try to portray themselves as puppet masters: they ‘planned’ the Arab Spring ‘all along’. Shadowy Syrian opposition groups, with connections to John McCain, the neocons and the NGOs, will be paraded before the media to show that the anti-Assad uprising is American and Israeli controlled.

But as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Perhaps most significant for the future of the uprising is the growing animosity between the exiled dissidents who have monopolised the narrative of the revolution internationally and the activists who have risked their lives to remain in Syria. ”The voice of the inside is being ignored while everyone is speaking on behalf of the revolutionaries,” said Shami, the Damascus activist. ['Syrian Uprising Reaches a Crossroads', The Los Angeles Times, 23/07/2012].

 As to the veracity of the Syrian state media, the Washington Times has this to say about its methods:

While the regime tries to downplay gains made by the Free Syrian Army, the defection of TV host Ola Abbas certainly will not go unnoticed by the Syrian public.“ [The regime] fears that a host or anchor would defect more than someone in the military because [that would mean] a year ago the host said one thing, and now they’re saying something different,” she said. “Everyone knows the state media is lying and remembers the faces of hosts.”

Speaking in Beirut before leaving for France, Ms. Abbas said in her first interview with foreign media that several security branches oversee the Syrian media and that instructions are dictated from regime officials by phone to managers who execute their orders.

“Never say the word, ‘protest’; say ‘gathering,’” said Ms. Abbas, describing the rules that governed any reports on the uprising. “Never say ‘revolution.’ Ever. Say, ‘crisis.’”

During the 17-month-old uprising, the regime has consistently tried to downplay the scale and violence of the revolt through its media, broadcasting purportedly live images of calm, empty streets even as citizen-generated video from the same locations showed huge protests. ['Syrian Regime Losing on the Media Front, Too', The Washington Times, 22/07/2012].

The Assad regime, of course, has become adept at exploiting the (fairly few) exaggerations and fabrications in the anti-Assad reportage:

Since the start of the uprising, the regime has had to counter alternative narratives to those it approves for the state-controlled media. Activists and citizen journalists have risked their lives to disseminate images of the regime’s brutal attacks on peaceful protesters, and some report that security forces have more vengefully punished activists caught with recording equipment than those carrying weapons.

Analysts point out that both sides have been guilty of spreading disinformation in the propaganda war. The government has been adept at publicizing examples of the opposition falsifying reports or making sectarian comments.

“The regime exploited the mistakes made by the revolutionaries and would show people on camera who would say that they want to kill Alawites, for example,” Ms. Abbas said.

However, many Syrians have seen firsthand the graphic evidence of regime brutality through attacks on their own towns and villages, neighbors and families. Many observers say more than 19,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the uprising.

Analysts say that defections from public officials further erode any trust that the citizens might have had in official sources of information, as has been shown elsewhere since the start of the Arab Spring. [Ibid].

Something that is interesting are the differences in the manner in which different Arab conservatives handled the uprising. In Egypt, hundreds died before Mubarak was forced to resign, and the treatment elsewhere – e.g., in Yemen – by the security forces was brutal as well. In Morocco, however, King Muhammad VI managed to bend like a reed, and introduce some major constitutional changes, in order to accommodate the protests. But in Syria and Libya, Assad and Ghaddafi responded with horrific violence. The military – not the police, the military – was sent in to contain protests. Civilian protestors were attacked with machine guns, mortars, tanks, artillery and the air force. Protestors and their family members were kidnapped, tortured and killed, by security forces, and their bodies dumped on the street, in order to spread terror in the population. Snipers were put on rooftops to shoot civilians dead. Perfectly peaceable and ordinary Syrian and Libyan protestors, with genuine grievances against their governments, were labelled ‘terrorist gangs’ and ‘foreign backed fighters’, in the pay of Soros, Mossad, Al-Qaeda, and the rest, and thereby worthy of extermination. Eventually, in Libya and Syria, the prophecy became self-fulfilling: the opponents of Ghaddafi and Assad took up arms against their governments, engaged in terrorism (like the recent bombing of Assad government members), fomented civil war and sought foreign help.

The Ghaddafite and Assadist violence has been particularly gruesome and wanton: one need only recall the example of the Syrian boy who was castrated, tortured with an electric drill, and then killed, by the Syrian security forces. (According to the ridiculous state Syrian media propaganda line, any violence against Syrian civilians is perpetrated by ‘armed gangs’ and ‘foreign fighters’ who, being shape-shifting chameleons, dress up as Syrian army soldiers and kill Syrian civilians with tanks, helicopter gunships, artillery. But, in truth, the Syrian rebels are lightly armed – with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades – and haven’t even, to this date, managed to appropriate government tanks, unlike the Libyan rebels). Both Ghaddafi and Assad treated their own people in the same way that Israel treats the Palestinians: there is a ferocious hatred, a real contempt, there.

Many mainstream media commentators attribute this, in Syria, to sectarian differences: Assad’s soldiers are Alawite, and want to exterminate the Sunni majority. I myself don’t believe this. Muslims don’t have a tendency to attack one another over sectarian differences (with the exception of Pakistan, of course, but the Islamists in Pakistan are a crazy bunch, a breed apart), and I subscribe to the theory (a conspiracy theory) that most of the ‘sectarian violence’ we have seen in post-Saddam Iraq was the work of the CIA and the Mossad, who planted bombs to bring about that tripartite republic – Sunni, Shia and Kurd – that the Israelis and the Washington neocons always wanted, as outlined sinister documents such as Project for a New American Century. (I don’t discount all conspiracy theories, merely Russian and Arab conservative ones). So I really don’t have an explanation for the ferocity of the Arab conservatives, and Ghaddafi and Assad, in particular. One can explain the Israeli on Arab violence and attribute it to religious and ethnic differences, but as for the Arab on Arab violence…

The British nationalist site Final Conflict denounced the Syrian opposition for killing members of the Assad government with a terrorist bomb (in an incident similar to the bombing of Yemen’s Saleh). But Assad’s government, like Ghaddafi’s, played a hardball game, and has killed many, many innocent Syrians through explosives of all sorts. The liberal revolution, in Syria and Libya, became violent because the Arab conservatives made it so. As one Syrian said, on television, ‘We tried peaceful means, but they didn’t work’. So, in Syria and Libya, the Arab Spring has become like the violent anti-monarchist revolutions which convulsed Europe in 1848.

So, what of the West, and NATO? Let’s do something we nationalists don’t do and put ourselves in the shoes of the NATO ‘humanitarian interventionists’ for a moment. We’ll see, from this vantage point, that it’s hard being a liberal. Take, for instance, the Rwandan genocide, or the Srebrenica massacre, in the early 1990s: the Western establishment stood back and did nothing (most likely because it was logistically impossible for it to do anything) in both cases, and for that, it was relentlessly chastised, by the media, for years afterwards. One can say that the establishment was haunted, for years afterwards, by Rwanda and Bosnia. To flash forward to Libya in March 2011, during the Libyan civil war, Ghaddafi’s forces, by this point, had gotten the upper hand against the rebels, and were driving on Benghazi – with the intention of, no doubt, massacring every man, woman and child in that rebel enclave. It was then that Cameron and Sarkozy declared that they were going to ‘do something’ and so, the NATO bombing campaign commenced. But, supposing they didn’t bomb: the Western liberals would have been shown up for frauds and mealy-mouthed hypocrites. One has to applaud them for their consistency, at least, in this regard (and it’s a shame they can’t be as consistent on the Palestinian issue).

Israel, of course, would prefer that all the Arab conservatives remain in power. Early on during the Syrian uprising, Israeli newspaper headlines screamed, ‘Bashir don’t go!’; Israel proclaimed that it was ‘nervous’, indeed, ‘sceptical’, regarding the entire Arab Spring. In truth, Israel had, over the years, built up a comfortable working relationship with the Arab conservatives. Jordan and Egypt were firmly in the pocket of Washington and Tel Aviv (and are the recipient of huge American subsidies, paid in exchange for their ‘peace deals’ with Israel) in 2011, but even Syria and Libya were useful insofar as that they helped guarantee ‘stability’. Assad, it is true, did fund and equip Hezbollah, but even so, he was, by himself, not a huge problem. Besides which, prior to 2011, Israel had the great moral advantage of being ‘The only democracy in the Middle East’. For this reason, the British journalist, Robert Fisk, naively declared that Israel should be supporting the Arab Spring. But, as events have shown, Israel doesn’t want democracy in the Middle East, given that the Arab masses really do hate Israel, and certainly, the Egyptian masses don’t approve of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

And all the attention paid to the suffering Libyans, Syrians, Egyptians and others, the unending news coverage, night after night, of ordinary Arabs, ordinary Muslims, courageously going up against their own governments, risking life and limb for ‘reform’, ‘liberalism’, ‘democracy’ (however vaguely defined), getting their eyes shot out by Egyptian police snipers – all this has been a public relations disaster for Israel.

William Pierce once said that the Jews are a theatrical people, and certainly, the present Israeli government is an attention-seeking one: you can sense Israel’s frustration at not being the center of attention, in the world media, any more. ‘You keep on talking about the Arab Spring – BUT WHAT ABOUT IRAN? Israel is in danger! Israel is threatened. Jews are nervous…’. One can almost sense, too, Israel’s pleasure regarding the terrorist attack against Israeli tourists in Bulgaria: here is a chance for Israel to play its traditional role – of the poor little Jewish state, oppressed by Islamist terrorists, who won’t let its citizens holiday by the beach in peace – but, unfortunately, the media hubbub about Bulgaria has been overshadowed by the crazy gunman incident in Colorado (talk about bad timing!).

Overall, it’s an open question whether or not the Arab Spring is good for Israel and America. Strategically, the situation in the Middle East has become a muddle. Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen had been in the Washington-Tel Aviv sphere of influence for decades. Libya more or less tilted towards Washington and Tel Aviv after 2003, and it was after then that the Ghaddafi family became ‘accepted’ within the international community: Ghaddafi was visited by George Bush Jr., Ghaddafi’s son attended parties with the Rothschilds, and so forth. Now, in 2012, no-one knows exactly where any of these states stand, and even after various referendums, elections, and so forth, it’s not clear whether these states will go over to Washington. A post-Assad may be pro-Washington and Israel, or anti: no-one can say at this point.

It is this uncertainty that really aggravates Russia: it doesn’t want to grant America, Israel and NATO a strategic and diplomatic victory, and acquire Syria. But, in relentlessly supporting Assad, militarily and diplomatically, the estimation of Russia – and Putin – has been lowered in the Arab world. The Scots philosopher David Hume once said that all governments are founded on opinion. What he meant by that is that no state can succeed in accumulating, and keeping, power, by consistently annoying and alienating people: this rule applies no matter how powerful that state is, diplomatically and militarily. Putin should take note of this, but he is blind to how others perceive him, and lives, like Assad, in a crazy dream world – all the resistance to him is the product of foreign interference, all his foes are unspeakably evil and have to be destroyed and repressed. In essence, Hume’s dictum is that a state, in order to be popular, has to do something good for humanity. Israel is unpopular because it does not good for humanity – it is relentlessly self-interested and prepared to walk all over all others, and take and offer nothing in return – and Russia and China are unpopular in the Middle East for pretty much the same reasons. Assad will eventually fall, and Russia can kiss its ‘warm water port’ in Syria goodbye.

In Iran, at least, there is some awareness of Hume’s dictum, as we see in a recent news story on a pro-Assad speech by Hezbollah leader, Sheik Nasrullah:

Iran, too, has been staunch in its support of Syria, whose ruling Alawite minority belong to a branch of Shiite Islam, the predominant faith in Iran. Tehran continues to provide Mr. Assad with economic and public support, and it might be sending military assistance as well.

But some voices inside Iran are worried about the awkward position imposed on anyone who supports Mr. Assad against what seems like an increasingly popular and widespread uprising.

“We are supporting some uprisings and ignoring others,” said Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, a Middle East analyst based in Tehran. “Arab people do not believe us anymore. We come across as antagonists, following our political agenda.”

The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was once a model for the region, but the Arab world’s revolutionaries now look to Egypt, he said, with its experiment in democratizing an Islamic society. “Instead of gaining influence, we are witnessing the emergence of new powerful countries that in the future could pose a challenge to us,” Mr. Shamsolvaezin said.

A year ago, Hossein Alaei, a former admiral in the Revolutionary Guards, predicted on the Web site Iran diplomacy that “ideally” Mr. Assad would survive. “But this ideal might not be fulfilled,” Mr. Alaei wrote. “We should think of other ways to protect our national security.”

Iran’s unrelenting support for Syria has cost it other friends in the region, as the Arab Spring gives aspiring young rebels a model other than the revolution of Iran’s elderly ayatollahs. Most Arabs are Sunnis rather than Shiites. Beginning in February, the leadership of Hamas, which had long enjoyed a friendly exile in Damascus and military support from Iran, began moving to Qatar and other havens and publicly expressed support for Syria’s revolutionaries. With Iran hampered and hurt financially by Western sanctions, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have proven to be more helpful and better-financed allies.

The Nasrallah speech tried to make it seem “as if nothing had happened since then, as if the Arab Spring did not happen,” said Sami Nader, an analyst and a professor of international relations at St. Joseph University in Beirut.

“This is the most important transformation in the history of the Arab world,” Mr. Nader said, “and it is proving that Islam and democracy are compatible.”

['As Chaos Grows in Syria, Worries Grow on the Sidelines', the New York Times, 19/07/2012].

It is no surprise that China and Russia support the Arab conservatives: they are authoritarian regimes who want to suppress internal dissent; it is no surprise, either, that the Trotskyites support them, given Trotsky and Lenin’s history of brutally repressing rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov, killing and tens and thousands there. But what of the nationalists, who are throwing their support, Nasrullah-like, behind Assad and the other Arab conservatives? What motivation do they have? Especially given that the darling Palestinians (that is, Hamas) have distanced themselves from Assad? Why are we denouncing the rebels and protestors as ‘Islamist’: that is, since when have we anti-Israel nationalists (who have, for the most part, taken the side of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, against America and Israel) viewed creeping ‘Islamism’ in the Arab world as a concern? Saudi Arabia, the Arab League, Hamas, indeed, the entire Arab world – which pretty much hates Assad and his ilk – have gone from heroes to villains, simply because they oppose Assad.

Nationalists in the West tend to oppose Israel, and the Jewish ethnic lobby, for a number of reasons which are different from those of the Left. The Left opposes Israel because Zionism is “racist”, oppresses the rights of the Palestinians, and so forth; nationalism opposes Israel for a completely different set of reasons, but often, in its anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) propaganda, does end up adopting some of the rhetoric, the style, of the Left: that is, it attacks Israel for its ethnic supremacism – it’s not for nothing that Duke wrote a book called Jewish Supremacism (2003) – and its oppression of the Palestinians. Which is all well and good, but: supposing that an Arab state treats Arabs with the same brutality and mercilessness that Israel does – shouldn’t nationalists react?

Indeed, in the case of the Arab Spring, the Arab conservatives were harsher than Israel has been in recent years. Israel would, of course, like to drop bombs, and subject the Palestinians to artillery barrages, and then send in soldiers and tanks to eliminate the Palestinians, block by block, house by house, in the same way that Assad is doing in Syrian towns and villages. But Israel can’t: even Israel (which killed 1300 Palestinians in its 2009 war in Gaza) is constrained by world opinion. Most liberals in the West dislike Israel enough already, and were Israel to be even more brutal, and indulge in really brutal, Assad-type violence against the Palestinians, it would be giving those liberals more incentive to mount a boycott and divestment campaign.

As to why, exactly, nationalists are taking a pro-Assad line – we have to look at history. The truth is that the nationalists, the racialists, the Far Right, in the West, has been politically isolated for a very long time, and isolation of that sort tends to distort one’s sense of political reality. We must remember that Mosley, along with millions of others, took up the cause of fascism because Fascist Italy and Nationalist Socialist Germany provided an example – a living example – of a white, Western European society that ‘worked’. The thirties, in Europe and the West, were a time of political, economic and social chaos. In the midst of that chaos, Hitler’s Germany, and Mussolini’s Italy, stood out like beacons: European fascism showed how things were ‘meant to be done’. (Likewise, for many socialists, the USSR provided an example of how things ‘were meant to be done’). But that was seventy years ago. Since then, nationalists have had no nationalist state to look to as a model. In the post-war period, some nationalist intellectuals took some very strange political positions. One only has to look at Yockey, who approved of the Nkrumahs, Nassars, Perons, Sukarnos and other ‘non-aligned’ (that is, neither pro-American nor pro-Soviet) despots. Yockey, in the end, lent his support to the Soviet Union, who, he hoped, would invade Western Europe and sweep the pro-American and pro-Israel liberal democrats out… Yockey was a great trailblazer, in this regard (and many others): by the mid-1980s, Ghaddafism had taken root in British nationalism – we are all familiar with the story of how Nick Griffin promulgated Ghaddafi’s ‘Third Universal Theory’ in the National Front.

The Soviet Union, and the Trotskyite and Maoist Left, of course, favoured the ‘non-aligned’ dictators – the Assads, the Saddam Husseins, the Ghaddafis – and Third World revolutionary movements (e.g., Yassar Arafat and the PLO) as well. In popular lore, the Arab merchant has a reputation, in the West, of being a guileful, deceitful, manipulative character: that’s true of the Assads, Ghaddafis and Husseins, who played the Western Left – and the nationalists – like a merchant in an Arab bazaar. The Arab conservatives could oppress their own people, enrich themselves, their families and clans (the Arab conservatives are a nepotistic and clan-based bunch), and proclaim themselves to be ‘Arab socialist’, ‘progressive’, ‘Anti-Israel’, ‘Pro-Palestinian’ and the rest, at the same time. And, like a bunch of suckers, the Western Left – and the nationalists – fell for it.

But then, what do you expect: in the West, especially in the Anglo-Saxon societies, we expect people – all people – to be basically honest. People, to us, are exactly what they appear to be. When someone (like Elie Wiesel, for instance) says that the Nazis tried to kill them four times (once, by throwing them into a giant fire pit in the ground, in Auschwitz) – we believe them. I think that this Anglo-Saxon gullibility is part of the reason why we Western radicals (on the Far Right and the Far Left) latch on to some (pretty oddball) politicians – Chavez in Venezuela, Ghaddafi, Putin, the mullahs of Iran – and put them on a pedestal.

As well as that, we radicals like rebels and underdogs, and Ghaddafi managed to convince us that he was precisely that – a rebel and underdog. For Ghaddafi stood out among the Arab despots: unlike his fellow Arab conservatives, he wanted to draw attention to himself – by fomenting acts of violence (supplying Irish Republican terrorists, and Palestinian terrorists, with weapons and equipment) and lending support to ultra-radical left-wing (i.e., Trotskyite) groups in the West, and even to Aboriginal rights activists here in Australia. He used violence and radicalism to make an impression on the world. He wasn’t content to keep a low profile, like other Arab conservatives (e.g., Ben-Ali, Mubarak), and just confine himself to looting from his own people: no, he had to be a player. So he carefully a cultivated an ultra-left, ‘national revolutionary’ image, and henceforth ensured the sympathies of the Western Left – and the nationalist movement – when he was bombed in 1986 and 2011.

But all that is in the past. In 2012, ‘Arab socialism’, ‘Arab socialism’, ‘Arab national-socialism’, have become stale, used-up, in the Middle East. It is liberalism which is youthful, forward-thinking and progressive – and much more alive.

The Arab masses believe – naively – that liberalism will solve all their problems. Perhaps it will; perhaps, too, liberalism and reform will have long-term beneficial effects, for the West. In the past few decades, millions of Muslims have emigrated to the West because of problems in their home countries. Perhaps, now, the Arab peoples will be more inclined to stay home and fix those problems instead of running away from them and emigrating to the West. That’s good for us.

But improvements will take a long time, of course – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, are still badly off, economically, after their liberal democratic revolutions – and this is time that Europe doesn’t have. That is, emigration from the Muslim world to Europe is of such a huge quantity that, if it continues, it will wipe Europe out demographically.

In terms of politics, the nationalist position, in the West, is the flip-side to that in the Middle East. Liberal democracy in the West is not a great, progressive, liberating force: it is, on the contrary, becoming a source of oppression. Now the concept of a liberal democratic police state is making itself: one only has to look at the 2012 Olympics in London, which requires a regiment’s worth of soldiers for ‘security’ (in contrast, Hitler’s 1936 Olympics required no such ‘security’). But much of the oppression is not merely political-physical: it is also ideological-mental. That is, the Camerons, Obamas, Merkels, Gillards – and the entire Western establishment, which makes itself felt in the media, academia, business and all walks of life – oppress the white Western peoples mentally. “Anti-racism”, the Holocaust, acceptance of mass non-white immigration – these have become the religion of the West. Westerners feel guilt for not believing in these things. The nationalist struggle against this is a totally different struggle than that of the Arab masses in the Middle East, which is a struggle against (clearly visible) state power.

To return to the Arab example: without being too Marxist or Hegelian about it, the Arab conservatives are on the losing side of history. There are still plenty of Egyptians, Syrians, Libyans, et al., who support the Mubaraks, Assads, Ghaddafis and other Arab conservatives: likewise, there are plenty of rich Russians – and not-so-rich Russians – who did well out of Putinism. But the tide has turned. The Putinistas, like the Assadists, have lost their legitimacy: that is, they no longer have the full assent of their own people. And, in our democratic age, as Carl Schmitt observes, legitimacy is to be found in the full assent of the people.

The Arab Spring has forced many political actors, Arab and non-Arab, to pin their colours to the mast and declare where it is that they stand. Certainly, for nationalists, the Arab Spring has cast a light on sections of our ideology which have been hitherto unrevealed.

Given that, we nationalists need to examine ourselves carefully and ask ourselves: do we really want to go for bat for the Arab conservatives – and why?