Who now is the enemy of Europe? Yockey and the Jewish-Islamic pincer movement.

by Matthew Neville

1.         Introduction: A Personal Note

I have been reading Francis Parker Yockey's 'The Enemy of Europe' (written in 1948, revised in 1953) off and on for ten years now, along with his 'Imperium' (1948). In that time, I have taken the message of the books to heart to such an extent that I have thoroughly internalised them. Both books are, to me, like the multiplication table, and once learned, are never forgotten.

If I were to recommend two books to any nationalist, it would be these two. Why? Because, more or less, they encompass all the developments in Western nationalist thought since the war. In them, you can find racialism (with an amusing chapter in 'Imperium' on the "problem" of the 'American Negro'); hostility towards non-white immigration; Holocaust Revisionism ('Imperium' has, to my knowledge, the first instance of Revisionism in print); probably some of the earliest accounts of the Morgenthau Plan and other atrocities perpetrated by the Allies and Soviets against the Germans, in the aftermath of WWII; anti-Semitism; denunciations of the Roosevelt regimé; a revisionism applied to the American Civil War, with sympathies for the South; endorsements of, for white people, marriage and large families; reasoned arguments, from a nationalist perspective, against Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism and neoliberalism; reflections on the American national character and American history; and Pan-Europeanism, mixed with vitriol against EU liberal democratic politicians.

Something that stands out, of course, is the neofascist character of the work ('Imperium' is dedicated to 'The Hero of the Second World War', i.e., Adolf Hitler) and it goes without saying that Yockey is a fanatic partisan of both German National Socialism and Italian Fascism. What makes Yockey's work 'neofascism' (as opposed to the 'old' fascism of the 1930s and 1940s) is his new approach to political theory. He more or less jettisons the theory of Hitler's, Rosenberg's and Mussolini's writings, and creates a new ideology, returning to the ideas of the two great Weimar-era German intellectuals, Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt. (Spengler voted for the NSDAP in 1933, but came under attack from NSDAP intellectuals and was censored. A similar fate befell Carl Schmitt, who joined the NSDAP in 1933 and helped craft the emergency 'enabling act' following the Reichstag fire; unfortunately, he, too, fell foul of the NSDAP intellectuals and was forced to retire from politics). The result is a kind of political revisionism: this is the 'revised Hitler' (in the same way European Marxists would 'revise Marx' in the 1950s and 1960s). I am almost tempted to call Yockey's position 'Post-Nazism'.

The result is a clean slate. Yockey is not a "National Socialist" in the sense that Savitri Devi and George Lincoln Rockwell are; what he has achieved, intellectually, is a new synthesis. In that respect, his work resembles that of Julius Evola, another fascist sympathiser who forged a new synthesis, not out of Spengler, but out of the occult doctrine of Traditionalism.

Yockey's work suffers from one major defect: it is, on many points, badly out of date. Dying in 1960, he never lived to see the great cultural, demographic, political and technological developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Evola, at least, had the advantage of living until 1973, and was well up-to-date with the cultural changes of the time, making frequent (disparaging) references to the hippie and beatnik cults in his later writings. Is Yockeyism, and the basic strategy outlined in 'Enemy of Europe', relevant to today's political situation? This is the question that this article will explore.

2.         Yockey and the American Jew

As readers of Yockey will know, Yockey takes from his mentor, Spengler, the idea that the world civilisations are 'Cultures' - organisms which are born, live and die. Cultures go through changes comparable to the seasons: hence, the (white) Western Culture has gone through a spring, summer, autumn and is now, according to Spengler, going through a winter. Democracy and liberalism is going into decline, and shortly will be abolished. The West will be united into an empire, or 'Imperium', under the authoritarian rule of 'Caesars', who, to judge by Spengler's writings, are dictators who, while being populist, have, at the same time, contempt for the masses. After the period of the 'Caesars' and 'Imperium', the West will go into a terminal decline over the next few hundred years. We will see the rise of a 'second religiousness'; that is, Westerners will become absorbed in religion again (for the first time since the medieval period). But this will not be a return to the Christianity of old, rather, an interest in (what appears to be) a trashy occultism and New Age-ism. Finally, the West, with its greatest political, intellectual and cultural achievements behind it, will go the way of all things, and will join the ranks of the 'dead' civilisations - including the (once great) Cultures of ancient India, China, Rome and Greece, Babylon, and the Middle East. The final chapter in the history of the West will be written, Western history will come to an end. Westerners will become 'fellahin' - that is, what is left over after a great Culture has passed away.

All of this sounds somewhat gloomy, but to Yockey, it was not. Yockey believed in the historical inevitability of 'Imperium' in the West as much as the Marxist believed in the historical inevitability of socialism. One of Yockey's innovations was that he saw the correlation between the rise of fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of Caesarism predicted by Spengler. On that basis, the defeat of fascism in WWII was but a temporary setback. Even though liberal democracy had been restored to Europe, through American force of arms, and communism imposed on the Eastern half, both ideologies would wither on the vine. Yockey predicted that the fascist 'Caesars' would reappear, because Spengler's theory predicted it.

So what was the cause of fascism's defeat in WWII? American intervention on the Allied side, brought about by what Yockey calls Culture Distortion (another one of his additions to Spenglerian theory). When one Culture imposes itself upon another, it  distorts it, bends it out of shape, politically, economically, culturally and every other way. In the case of America, it is the Jews - who belong to the Middle Eastern, Semitic Culture (called 'Magian' by Spengler) and which includes Islam and Coptic Christianity - who are the Culture Distorters. Yockey writes:

America must now be counted among the enemies of Europe, since ethically and politically it is dominated by the Culture-alien Jewish entity of Church-State-Nation-Society-Race. Just how this domination came about is of less concern to Europe than the fact of it. The objective events of world-history since 1933 [when the Jewish-dominated Roosevelt administration came to power] show that in not one instance has America pursued an American nationalist policy, but exclusively a policy in the interests of the Jewish entity...

The Jewish entity is a Cultural form-world of its own stamp, and can therefore never be assimilated by the Western Culture.

In this period of history, America and Jewry form a Symbiosis. The head of the organism is the Jewish entity, the body is America. [Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, in the chapter 'The Outer Enemies of Europe'.]

Yockey writes, penetratingly, that in America, 'For political purposes, the "elite" is the Jewish entity, which enjoys a monopoly of power in all matters but is especially conspicuous in the direction of foreign affairs'. [Ibid, 'The Concert of Bolshevism']. When one looks at the dominating influence of the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., and the authority accorded to the neoconservatives in the Bush Jr. years, this is especially true. This is all par of the course for most nationalists in the West, who understand the idea of Jewish influence in America thoroughly (and a few non-nationalists in America are beginning to understand it as well, especially in relation to the Israel lobby). The question most nationalists will ask of Yockey, however, is whether or not white Americans will resist that Jewish influence. Yockey thinks not:

For practical political purposes, the "White America" which still existed in strength in the 1920s has today ceased to exist. Whether that submerged spirit will rise again in some remote future is unforeseeable. In any case, Europe cannot allow itself the luxury of dreaming that a revolution in America by the pro-European elements will lead to Europe's Liberation. [Ibid, 'Introductory Note'].

The sad truth is that white Americans are too thoroughly demoralised by Culture-Distortion and multiracialist propaganda to see American Jewry as an enemy:

The [Jewish] Washington regime's leading internal thesis - which has not changed since 1933 - is that Americans must be "tolerant" of the alien elements (which now number roughly 50% of the population), since, after all, these aliens are "brothers". "Brotherhood" is glorified on all public occasions, by all public officials, is taught in the schools and preached in the churches, which have been coordinated into the master-plan of the Culturally-alien Washington regime. Newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, films - all vomit forth the same "Brotherhood". The "Brotherhood" propaganda is a ghastly caricature of the Christian idea of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, but there is no religious intent to the propaganda. Its sole purpose is to destroy whatever exclusiveness, national feelings, or racial instincts may still remain in the American population after twenty years of national leprosy. The result of the "tolerance" and "brotherhood" campaign is that the alien enjoy a superior position in America - he can demand to be "tolerated". The American can demand nothing. The tragic fact is that the attenuation of the national instincts has proceeded so far that one cannot envisage how a Nationalist Revolution would even be possibile in America. [Ibid.]

Yockey concludes:

So long as America was dominated by men of stocks from Culture-European soil, America was a European colony, even though sometimes vocally rebellious. But the America that has been distorted by the Revolution of 1933 is lost to Europe. Let no European dream of help or cooperation from that quarter. [Ibid.]

Yockey was, in regard to American "brotherhood" propaganda, prescient. America was still very much a white country when he wrote the above, and the US Army in WWII was an ethnically-homogenous, racially-segregated army. Churchill and Roosevelt themselves were of a racist bent. But Yockey managed to see the existing tendencies in American society - tendencies towards multiracialism and "brotherhood" - in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and already pronounced those tendencies to be dominant.

3.         Yockey's answer

Yockey's 'Enemy-' covers, within its short number of pages, a great many topics. But the main thrust of it is to outline a strategy for European nationalists. Europe, at the time, was partioned by two Culturally-alien forces: the Soviet Union and the (Jewish by proxy) American. Nationalists, Yockey felt, had to choose between the two in the event of a Third World War. Old fascists, like Oswald Mosley and Leon Degrelle, counselled supporting the Americans in their newfound, post-war anti-communism. These men believed that America's anti-communism was a belated recognition, by America, that the fascists had been right all along about the Soviet Union. Yockey, on the other hand, sthirf that European nationalists should relish a Soviet occupation of Western Europe in the event of a victory in the Third World War (which, like a good many intellectuals of that time, he believed was inevitable). His arguments were complex and many. Suffice to say, 'Enemy-' is one long propaganda pamphlet urging nationalists (particularly those of Germany's Socialist Reich Party, for whom the book was written) to take a pro-Soviet line for strategic purposes. I will not spend any time analysing Yockey's position here (and I think that Yockey, here, makes a very good case for it (after all, he was a lawyer)), for the reason that it is out of date. As we know, the West, particularly America, underwent an economic and political revival in the 1980s, while the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc floundered - becoming, politically and economically, as old and antiquated as their sub-standard military equipment. The result was that Yockey's Third World War never happened, and America grabbed all of Germany, and Eastern Europe, without firing a shot. (One has to wonder if, had Yockey survived into the late 1970s, he would have adhered to his pro-Soviet thesis, had he seen the sclerotic state the USSR fell into in the time of Brezhnev).

Yockey's notion of a judaised America - particularly in its foreign policy - is still valid, of course; in fact, one of the major political developments of the 2000s was that Israel became the sovereign nation in the Washington-Tel Aviv axis. Yockey writes, 'Independence means being able to act alone... Sovereignty means being answerable to nobody except oneself', and America, after Bush Jr., was unable to act without considering the interests of Israel first and foremost, and unable to formulate a clear course of action in political situations in which Israeli interests were not directly involved. But this is old news now. The entire world knows Israel is no good (a recent survey of 26,000 people placed Germany as the 'most popular' country in the world, and put Israel down near the bottom in terms of popularity, along with Pakistan and North Korea) and has a fairly good understanding of Middle East politics, including the dispossesion of Palestinian territory, etc.; it knows that the US is disproportionately concerned with Israeli interests, and that the US stands alone, amongst all the nations in the world, in this (the US was the sole country to veto a recent UN resolution branding the Israeli settlements as illegal). Some sectors of the educated, US, non-Jewish elite - such as Jimmy Carter, and Mearsheimer and Walt - even dare state this in print. In short, the world has, in 2011, to a large extent caught up with Yockey.

Where Yockey has really been overtaken in events is by the developments in the Western Culture itself, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s: the legalisation of homosexuality,  pornography and interracial marriage; women's rights; desegregation; growing numbers of white children born out of wedlock; and, most significantly of all, the mass migration of non-whites to the West. Yockey would have been astounded by the demographic changes to the West in this regard, particularly in America. (Yockey called the presence of 'Culturally alien' immigrants 'Culture Parasitism'. Culture Parasitism is what happens when large numbers of immigrants from another Culture (or even from a country which has not developed into a fully-fledged Culture, e.g., Russia) embed themselves in a Culture and start to divert vital resources away from it and towards themselves. Culture Parasitism only becomes Culture Distortion when the alien group actively starts to impose its mores upon the host society and bend its politics in an unnatural direction. Yockey would say that the mass Hispanic immigration to America is a case of Culture Parasitism, while the judaisation of American foreign policy is Culture Distortion). The fact that the Western élites, and the white Western layman, have internalised 'brotherhood propaganda', and now all sing the praises of non-white immigration, multiracialism, and race-mixing, would have perplexed him.

We can understand the recent phenomenon of mass Islamic migration to Europe, however, using Yockey's framework. In Yockey's view, Islam is part of the 'Magian Culture', which includes the Jews: 'The Jewish entity comes from the Magian Culture and will always belong to it spiritually, that Magian Culture which during its life-span gave rise to the Arabian, Persian, Nestorian and Parsic peoples, among others'. [Ibid, 'The Definition of the Enemy'.] Yockey would regard the presence of 17 million Muslims in the EU member states as 'Culture Parasitic'; but he would also see the potential for Culture Distortion as well.

How does this Islamic Culture Distortion make itself felt? In a sensationalist article for the British Daily Mail tabloid, a journalist identifies how Islamist groups fulfil their agenda by imposing their values, using coercion, on the communities around them:

But the Islamists seldom want to take control of the government machine; they have little interest in setting tax or energy policy. The influence they seek is cultural totalitarianism.

Bereft of sensible — let alone practical — solutions to the real ills that plague their societies, they aim to Islamise society from below...

The events in Tunisia are merely an echo of what has been happening in the region for a decade. In Yemen, Islamists have long since been busy raiding alleged brothels and campaigning against all other forms of what they denounce — wrongly — as imported western decadence.

In Bahrain, too, the Islamists have explicitly dedicated themselves to clamping down on prostitution and the sale of alcohol.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the Islamists have quickly ruled out running for the all-important presidency. They do not seek to lead a government, because with that power comes responsibility and accountability.

What they need is a government sufficiently biddable to allow them to impose their cultural tyranny — and to succeed, they don’t need majority support. All the Islamists require is to be louder, more forceful and better organised than their opponents. [Daily Mail, 'Sex, brothels and the REAL tyranny threatening the Arab world', 26/02/2011.]

These are penetrating comments. It is the 'cultural totalitarianism' which is making itself felt on the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and other European cities. Europe is caught between two pincers: while powerful Jewish groups in the upper political echelons of Europe advocate a NATO bombing of Iran, and demand more and more monuments to the Holocaust (itself a Jewish religious concept), from the street, radical Islamist groups, flourishing in the large, self-isolating and ethnically-cohesive Muslim diaspora communities, demand compulsory Islamisation, not only for their communities, but for the Western European host populations as well.

At last, however, the peoples of Europe are beginning to show signs of resistance, not in the militant manner that Yockey would have preferred, but through the electoral support for Far Right populist parties in Finland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Denmark. Likewise, in the US, the grass-roots movement against illegal Mestizo immigration is a positive development, and is the first popular American nativist movement that has appeared in many decades.

One flaw is that both the American and European tendencies frame their argument against immigration using liberal terms. The Americans claim to be not "racist", just against people breaking the law; likewise, the Europeans will say that they are against Islam's opposition to liberal democratic values and traditional European values of liberalism, tolerance, pluralism and women's rights. But something is better than nothing, the question is whether or not it is all too late.

4.         The meaning of neofascism in the 21st century

After the Second World War, writes Yockey, 'The opponents of the Hero [i.e., Hitler] of that War were still dominated by his compelling personality... Either they took up his ideas and declared them their own, or they continued to fight against him' [Ibid, 'The American Occupation of Europe']. Continuing in that vein, he writes:

It was Cromwell who inspired generations of leaders long after his death and subsequent disgrace, not the later Stuarts who had caused his body to be dismembered by wild horses. It was Napoleon who inspired a whole century of leaders after him, not Louis XVIII, nor Metternich, nor Talleyrand. About 1840, Napoleon triumphed, he whose name one could praise in Europe twenty years before only at one's peril. Napoleon's Idea conquered the spiritual-political realm, his personality the Heroic realm. Who would reproach him now with the fact of the lost battles of Leipzig and Waterloo?

So it shall be with the Hero of the Second World War. He represented a new ethical type that will inspire and inwardly form all coming leaders of significance of the West. The bewailing of his "mistakes" after the Second World War was simply contemptible. Every journalist and every braggart knows bettter than the great man - they would not have made this mistake or that. Indeed, they would never have been in the place to do anything at all!

Heroism is and can never be wasted. So long as a men survive a Hero, they will be influenced by him and his legend... [Ibid, 'The Power Problems of the War'].

The BBC reported that sales of books, in Britain last year, about Hitler and National Socialism made millions of pounds; in Germany, a Hitler exhibition in Berlin drew thousands . The fascination with German fascism, and Yockey's 'Hero' and his army, in the West shows no signs of ending. In comparison, Roosevelt, Churchill and their armies don't do as well. Books on the Luftwaffe, Hitler's panzer aces and the Tiger tank fly off the shelves, while books on the US 1st Marine division, the T-34 tank and Britain's mass-murdering Lancaster bombers just sit there (much to the chagrin of Jewry, one can be sure). All this is because Western audiences agree, unconsciously, with Yockey's thesis, and see National Socialist Germany's tragic rise and fall as one of the turning points in the history of the West. Just as Napoleon defined the 19th century, Hitler defined the 20th. In the minds of the Western public, there is a question, forcing its way up from the depths of the subconscious: 'We are told that Normandy and V-E Day were great victories for the West and for humanity, but these same victories produced Obama, David Cameron, Sarkozy and Israel. But what if we were wrong?'.

What has happened is that the meaning of German fascism has changed. Contrary to the beliefs of Jewry, fascism's primary aim was not to destroy European Jewry, but Soviet communism. But, of course, Soviet communism no longer exists. Now, Hitler and German National Socialism stand for something else in the minds of the public: "racism". Hitler is, erroneously, portrayed as the most racist of all politicians - despite the fact that Churchill and Roosevelt, and their contemporaries in the Anglo-Saxon world, took a dim view of the moral and economic accomplishments of Negroes, for instance. Hitler, it is true, based his world-view on German racial purity; but his doctrines (if one reads his work carefully) were designed to prevent Germans from miscegenating with Jews. But, in the 21st century, after an avalanche of non-white immigration into Europe, the meaning of that racial world-view has changed. On the Left and Right, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, are all against "racism", in whatever form it appears, and have altered history so as to make Hitler out to be not only the worst "racist" of all time, but the only "racist" politician of the past 100 years. When the racial question is thrust into the consciousness of the average European, every day, and that same question is rapidly becoming the most important for the West in the 21st century - then a hyper-"racist" historical figure is going to end up becoming more and more attractive, despite rote condemnations by the political establishment and the Jewish lobby.

Does this mean that neofascism, or 'Authoritarian Prussian Socialism', as Yockey calls it, is about to burst onto the political stage once again, jackboots, uniforms, flags and banners and all? Yes and no. There are groups with strong neofascist influences in Europe: the English Defence League in Britain (which is a kind of post-Mosley, neo-Blackshirt outfit) and Jobbik in Hungary. But, in the main, neofascism expresses itself on the level of an underground subculture. One can buy music, badges, posters, flags, banners, pennants, stickers, clothes. (Even some of the songs have been inspired by Yockey). But none of this is political - i.e., running in elections and competing with the liberal democrats for political power.

If nationalists do want to get in to actual politics, they have to (in Europe) vote for and work with the populist parties. Nationalists really have no other choice, because of what Kevin MacDonald calls the 'abject terror' that 'most whites have of being associated with... National Socialism, anti-Semitism or racialist sentiments' (MacDonald, 'The Wilders Syndrome: Jews, Israel and the European Right', at: http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-wilders-syndrome/). For we nationalists, racialism, anti-Semitism, etc., is the very air we breathe; our movement tends to attract individualistic people who enjoy thumbing their noses at society's conventions (and right now, multiracialism and Holocaustism are the conventions). But, because of our absorption with the nationalist underground subculture, we often tend to fail to notice that Yockey's 'Prussian ethical socialism' is, to say the least, off-putting to many of the normal white Western people we want to attract. We nationalists are daredevils and subverters, while the mass of white people in the West are, passive, conformist, and cautious to the point of cowardice. There is no in-between. This is why the European electorate expresses its support only for the 'safe' nationalist Far Right parties, which say all the right things on the Jewish question (even to the extent of laying wreaths for the millions allegedly gassed at Auschwitz) and frame all their anti-immigration arguments in a liberal, deracinated way. Even then, you can be sure, the average Frenchman or Swede is very timid, and does not dare admit that he voted for the National Front, or the Swedish Democrats, respectively.

So these are the two courses nationalists can take, the two possibilities: nationalists working at the 'symbolic' level, staying at the level of a subculture; or getting involved in political activism with the Far Right populist parties. I myself am sympathetic to both courses of action.

At the same time, by ditching Yockey's 'Authoritarian Prussian socialism', we are giving up a potential source of strength. The problem the West faces, in the 21st century, is a lack of hard-heartedness. Many denizens of the Third World regard human life as cheap, but understand, at the same time, that Westerners are the biggest humanists in the world. An immigrant only has to say the magic word, 'Asylum', and be admitted to Europe with all the attendant rights and privileges. The countries of Europe are only now, after the Tunisian immigrant crisis, beginning to harden their hearts and say 'No'. But it will take a great deal more to prevent the coming influx of immigrants, illegal and legal, and expel the ones already there.

Ironically, the West may not have the will any more - I say ironic, because, in the eyes of the Marxists, and many in the Third World itself, white Europeans are history's worst exploiters and murderers, with hands stained in the blood of the coloured peoples.

The truth is that the Anglo-Saxon nations committed terrible cruelties - against their fellow whites, the Germans, in the aftermath of WWII. Today's concentration camps in Europe for illegal immigrants are a luxury version of Eisenhower's camps for German POWs, which killed hundreds of thousands through starvation and exposure. It is as though the Anglo-Saxons expended used up all their capacity for cruelty and violence in that period, and afterwards, cannot summon up even a fraction of it, just when they need it most (particularly Britain). (Actually, the Anglo-Saxons did commit atrocities after the war, but not with the clean conscience they had while maltreating the Germans).

Which brings us back to Yockey. His ideology is a martial one, and an intolerant one. The image the public has of Hitler is that of a hard man and a warrior - a warrior-king. (We only have to look at our history to see, to what extent, the West idolises warrior-kings: Napoleon, Bismarck, King Arthur, Charlemagne...). The West sees the "white supremacist", "Neo-Nazi" and "Anti-Semite" as a fearsome creature, who places himself outside the pale and is prepared to sacrifice his career, his comforts, and even his life, for his beliefs, and as someone who is, above all, prepared to fight. This image - regardless of whether or not it is true - is a source of power and strength, especially so now that we whites now live in a West which would be, in Yockey's view, soft, cowardly, and effeminate. (In contrast, Israel and the radical Muslims daily commit acts of ferocious violence against their political opponents). We are faced, in the 21st century, with a typical Yockeyist alternative: to fight, or not to fight, in order to defend the West against the threat from without.

Can ‘Big Man’ Politics Survive the Twenty-first Century?

by Matthew Neville

1.         Political birthdays and the alternative to liberal democracy

Recently, an AFP report appeared:

BUDAPEST (AFP)---A Hungarian online news channel backed by the extreme-right parliamentary party Jobbik paid tribute to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on his birthday, online observers reported.

The 30-second report, which originally aired on Wednesday evening on Hitler's 122nd birthday, praised the "German politician" for his economic and moral contribution to his adopted country.  Hitler "rapidly relaunched the destroyed, impoverished Germany, where an unprecedented upturn started in the economic, social, moral and cultural spheres," the news piece gushed.  However, it added that since the defeat of Nazi Germany, "the probably best-known politician in history has been the principal target of a political witch-hunt of the victorious powers," which it referred to as "the Anglo-Saxon and bolshevik allies."

By itself, this is unremarkable: had Jobbik been a communist group marking the birthday of a Stalin or Lenin or Mao, the media would not have noticed. But, when it comes to celebrating Hitler's birthday, the media sits up and takes notice. Why? The answer is, I think, significant. The political system of the West, for the past hundred years, has been liberal democracy (with a few excursions into conservative, military dictatorship, e.g., Portugal and Spain). There has been only one alternative to appear, in the West's recent history, to liberal democracy and that is fascism. (And by fascism, I mean the ideology of German National Socialism, Italian Fascism, Mosley's British Union of Fascists, Degrelle's Belgian Rex movement, and others).

It is true that, at a few points in history, it seemed as though Soviet Communism was an alternative to liberal democracy in Europe, and, as we know, the communists had control of one half of the leading nations of the West - Germany - for nearly half a century. But Soviet Communism was a foreign import, and Russified to the core; fascism was home-grown. (Intellectually, of course, communism had its roots in the West, which was one of the reasons why it built up such a following in pre-war Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe). Liberal democracy has to fight to preserve itself, politically; and one of the ways it does so is by demonising the alternative, the 'other', which is fascism. Liberal democracy understands, on an instinctive level, that fascism is a competitor, and a dangerous and seductive one at that.  Hence the non-stop anti-Hitler, anti-Nazi propaganda which continues in the news media to this day, and the host of special anti-nationalist, anti-racist, anti-Holocaust Revisionist laws in Europe.

In contrast, not so much attention is paid to the militant Left. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and China's 'backsliding' into Western-style capitalism after 1979, the Left was thrown into turmoil. Now it makes itself felt primarily through hooliganism. The May Day demonstrations in Germany every year, for example, are an excuse for the militant Left (in particular, the anarchists) to go on a hooligan rampage, destroying property, assaulting police officers and causing millions of euros in damage.

The truth is that the old (mainly Trotskyite) communist parties are in decline, and the hooligan-anarchist element is on the ascendant (anarchists, for instance, threatened to disrupt the recent Royal Wedding in Britain, and assembled to do so (but were apprehended by the police in time)). With the recent riots against austerity measures in Europe, the old-style, hooligan, violent brand of Leftism - anarchism - is back, for the first time in around a hundred years.

The bottom line is, the Left will continue to be unpersecuted by the liberal democratic state so long as it does not break the law directly (i.e., commit acts of property damage and arson). The Left can continue to publish incendiary newspapers, demanding the overthrow of capitalism and the founding of a Trotskyite-style communist dictatorship; but liberal democracy tolerates this, for the simple reason that it does not see the Left as a serious competitor.

2.         The political use-by date

Fascism, on the other hand, is a serious threat. Part of this is to do with the passage of time. The fall of communism in East Germany, and Eastern Europe, was only recent, and so those countries still have fresh memories of what life in those countries was like. For the most part, those memories are not good. Communism failed because it failed to provide people with a decent standard of living. Substandard clothes, housing and other consumer items, shortages of basic necessities at state-owned supermarkets, endless queues... The problem was not so much lack of political rights (e.g., civil liberties, the right to form political parties and run in elections, press censorship) but the grinding misery and sub-standardness of it all. We see the same phenomena in North Korea and Cuba today.

In contrast, fascism never got a decent innings. German National Socialism survived for 12 years; Italian Fascism, 22; the occupation fascist regimes of Norway, Hungary, Croatia, etc., even less. Because the fascist regimes never survived the war, they never got the chance to grow old, degenerate and become decadent. An analogy could be made with the careers of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones: the Beatles broke up, in 1971, in their prime; the Stones, in contrast, are around to this day - and have produced a great number of substandard albums and played a great many substandard concerts. No wonder, then, that rock music fans only have golden memories of the Beatles.

In politics, one can outstay one's welcome. We have seen that, recently, in the uprisings in the Arab states against regimes which have been in power for decades (Mubarak had been in power in Egypt for about 30 years, Saleh in Bahrain for about 30, Gaddafi for 40, and the Assad dynasty in Syria for over 40). One can sympathise with the Egyptian people's impatience, for instance, with Mubarak: the best way for an Australian to think of it is to  imagine if former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke - who won the federal election of 1983 - was still in power. Hawke (despite his noxious views on Israel, South Africa, multiculturalism and the rest) was the man of the moment in 1983, Australia's answer to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the man to lead Australia out of the terrible recession of the 1980s and into a new period of national confidence. But, while he was fresh, and very much the man of the moment in the 1980s, as soon as 1990 came around, he was old hat. Like Thatcher, he was unable to cope with the recession his policies helped brought about, and so was toppled in a party coup. Liberal democratic parties - and the liberal democratic system - has that advantage over dictatorship: it punishes failure, and manages, by introducing new players into the political system, to stay fresh (for the most part). Liberal democracy, for example, gave American voters in 2008 the chance to expel the then-unpopular Republican Party from the White House and give the presidency to the dynamic , innovative unknown, Barack Obama. (Unfortunately, Obama proved to be just as bad as, if not worse than, Bush Jr., but that is another story).

3.         Good and bad authoritarianism

Not only have the regimes of the Middle East been long-lived, they have been extremely authoritarian (and, as we have recently seen, willing to use ferocious violence against their own people). They are as authoritarian as the Italian and German fascist states, and rely upon a secret police, phone tapping, emergency laws which override constitutional law, press censorship, arrest, detention and imprisonment for political crimes, the annulment of the parliament as a legislative body, the dissolution (or neutering) of rival political parties... The intellectual arguments made in order to justify this authoritarianism are similar to those made under fascism. The first is 'We are at war' argument (in fascism, the enemy was communism, in the Arab states, militant Islam); the second is that 'liberal democracy leads to chaos’.

In such a political climate, we see the 'cult of the leader' emerge, just as under fascism. (The leaders, in question, are Ghaddafi, El-Fadine, Mubarak, Assad Sr. and Jr...). The leaders act according to the Führerprinzip, and, as such, are responsible for all the country's successes (and failures). One of the reasons why so much public anger in Egypt was directed at Mubarak was because he was held personally responsible for everything that had gone wrong in the Egyptian state. (According to Hitler's theory in 'Mein Kampf', in a democratic system, the political leader can eschew all responsibility and slough it off on to others, which is why the Führerprinzip is so much better).

Authoritarianism, and phenomena such as the cult of the leader, are not unique to fascism, of course. There have been many military dictatorships since WWII, and of course, communism was an authoritarian, illiberal ideology which also practised the 'cult of the leader' - in China and North Korea, to an insane extent. In addition, even liberal democratic states have used authoritarian methods. Yockey writes, in his 'Enemy of Europe', of the American occupation of Western Europe after the war:

[America] proclaimed to Europe that the Americans had come as a Herrenvolk, possessed of great understanding for political realities and morality, to liberate "Europeans" and "educate" them up to True Democracy.

Although the American occupation used the slogan "democracy", it did not make even a pretence of introducing 19th century democratic forms. The press, political parties, every kind of gathering, every move - everything required a "Licence". This was the substitution of a negative, mechanical Führerprinzip for the natural, organic Authoritarian State [i.e., European fascist state] founded upon the inwardly imperative principles of Ethical Socialism [i.e., European neofascism], which is the destined state-form of Europe in this Age of Absolute Politics. This was the tyranny of capitalist liberalism, using the mere methods of the European state-form without understanding their spiritual content... [Yockey, The Enemy of Europe, 'The American Occupation of Europe'].

Germany, today, is very much the same as the American occupiers left it, still operating under the same "mechanical Führerprinzip" system. In fact, it is a kind of anomaly unique in the world: a hybrid between a normal liberal democracy and a Syrian or Egyptian-style police state.

As can be gleaned from the quotation from Yockey, he seeks to distinguish between 'good' authoritarianism (of the European fascist sort) and 'bad' authoritarianism. Evola makes the same distinction in his 'Men Among the Ruins' (1972). He contrasts the true and good authoritarianism of what he calls 'Tradition' with the 'inwardly dead' totalitarian regimes of communism. (He makes the intriguing comment that the communist totalitarian regimes are unconscious parodies of the 'Traditionalist' political system: the Kim Il-Sung or Mao type is portrayed, by communist propaganda, as a divinely inspired monarchical ruler with almost god-like powers).

Both of these ideologues of post-war Euro-neofascism would, were they alive today, hasten to assure their readers that their ideal political state form would not bring about a Syria, Egypt, Libya, Cuba, North Korea or Burma. They make long and complex arguments to the effect that their state would not be 'inwardly dead' or 'mechanical'. In essence, the arguments boil down to the contention that their neofascist states would be 'youthful', 'vigorous', 'fresh' and 'alive' - much like the German and Italian ones they admired. (Yockey makes frequent disparaging remarks about the age of the post-war European liberal democrats installed by the Allies - that they were older, as a rule, then the fascists and Far Right collaborationists they replaced). I would argue that yes, the European fascist states were certainly modernist, fresh, forward-moving, and so forth. But this could be either due to the fascist ideology itself, or to the fact that the fascist states - unlike Mubarak's Egypt, Ghaddafi's Libya or Assad's Syria - never got the chance to age and ossify.

3.         An anecdote from Syria

An Arab correspondent in Syria, Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff, relates this anecdote regarding life in Syria in 'The Guardian' newspaper ('Life in Syria's psychological prison of fear', The Guardian, 29/04/2011). It concerns a young man he befriended in Syria called Yusuf. It is a poignant story which describes some of the bad things that can happen to ordinary, apolitical people in authoritarian regimes:

At 26 years, he was neither engaged nor married.

Marriage is an important step in Syrian culture and an individual is not really considered a man until he is married, owns an apartment and has a job. But marriage is a tricky thing in Syrian society. Assuming the girl's family agrees to the marriage, Syrian men need to pay a dowry of roughly $4,000. Not only that, but the groom is expected to provide an apartment for the new couple. Housing in recent years has become very costly and between the dowry and the cost of housing, many young men do not have the means. Before the current wave of protests, the Syrian government was aware of this and was in the process of building thousands of new apartments to help bring down the price of housing.

Eventually my friend confided in me a story that illustrates how the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness of the Syrian regime combines with other social pressures. For a number of years, Yusuf was in love with a girl from his village. When he finally decided to ask her father for permission to marry, her father said no and proceeded to engage his daughter to another man. Yet my friend could not forget his love so easily and continued to see her even though he had been forbidden to do so. Unfortunately, her father was an important man in the internal security services. When he found out that Yusuf was still seeing his daughter, he wrote a false report that landed Yusuf in jail for several days, where he was beaten.

Even that was not enough. Yusuf was then sent to Damascus where he was held and tortured for another 11 days – until his father intervened and convinced high officials within the internal security services that my friend was a genuine supporter of President Bashar al-Assad and the regime. As proof, he showed them a poem my friend had written about the president. A general saw the poem and loved it so much that Yusuf was released.

Now, could have such a thing have happened in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy? According to the propaganda of the time (e.g., Hollywood movies produced by Jews, British wartime propaganda from the BBC), men were arrested all the time in Italy and Germany, for arbitrary reasons, and beaten, tortured, etc., and only released after they wrote poetic and fulsome tributes to Hitler or Mussolini. We can, in 2011, write off most, if not all, of these stories as rubbish. But, having said that: suppose that both Germany and Italy had managed to survive the war and both Hitler and Mussolini died of old age - would fascist Italy and Germany have turned into Egypt or Syria, after thirty or forty years?

The trouble with authoritarian states is that they can begin life as progressive, forward-moving (Ghaddafi was a young colonel, on the political Left, and a progressive and a reformer, when he seized power in 1969). But then, after a time, the negative side of authoritarianism kicks in. A power élite forms around the leader, and becomes entrenched, and develops a monopoly on political power and the economy. One result is that fresh young people do not attain positions of power and leadership. In order to obtain money for a house, a dowry, etc., one has to curry favour with that élite. What is more, the same élite begins to act in a capricious and self-indulgent manner. In National Socialist Germany, this process was already underway, as shown in David Irving's (largely neutral) biographies of Goebbels and Goering. The average German, of course, in the 1930s was materially better off than the average Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan or Syrian is now. But all the negative sides of authoritarianism of the Ghaddafi sort were becoming apparent. Presumably, over the course of decades, that negative side would have become grating - Italians and Germans may, for instance, have come to resent the vast fortunes amassed by National Socialist and Fascist leaders.

4.         Can 'Prussian Socialism' work?

I am unfamiliar with Jobbik's party platform, and am not aware if there is a demand, in there, for a return to the wartime Ferenc Szalasi/Arrow Cross style of rule. (As for the German, French and Italian nationalists, in those countries, one is forbidden, by law, to endorse fascist-type dictatorship). My impression is that nationalist groups in the West tend to brandish the old fascism (and, in particular, its symbols - the SS runes, the Italian fasces, the Arrow Cross, Mosley's BUF 'lightning-bolt' logo, etc.) like an amulet, as a means of warding their liberal democratic and communist enemies. The thought of a 'return' to the old fascism fills liberal democrats and communists with fear. And while liberal democracy has (rightly so) written off communism for dead, it still sees the old fascism as a threat.

The question is, whether the authoritarian political models - built around fascism - of Yockey, Evola, Bardèche, Thiriart and other post-war neofascist intellectuals can work, whether or not they can survive in the long run. The problem is not deciding, whether or not, if they are good alternatives to Obama or David Cameron-style liberal democracy; of course they are - almost anything is. Liberal democracy, for one, has proved to be a massive failure in one particular field: immigration. If present immigration continues at the present pace (as set by our liberal democratic politicians, all elected in free and fair elections), white people of Western European descent will be minorities in their own countries by about 2050. And then there is the question of what to do with the many millions of immigrants who already upon our soil: no amount of electioneering and parliamentary debates will get rid of them. While the recent successes of the Far Right populists in Europe are heartening, there is no sign, at present, that we can simply vote our way out of our difficulties. (And then, there are no guarantees: suppose that the French Front National, or the Swedish Democrats, were voted in - but lost the next election?).

But just because the existing system is bad is not to say that ours is any better. And fascism, and neofascism, are the only real alternatives we in the West have advanced to liberal democracy in the past hundred years. The runes and other symbols of the skinhead and National Socialist Black Metal bands are uniquely 'ours' - uniquely Western, uniquely our own creation. Nothing else, aside from neofascism, inspires the same level of intensity and devotion on the Far Right nationalist scene, and certainly, in the nationalist scene, our best intellectuals have been of a neofascist orientation. Without a doubt, if nationalists ever came to power, in Europe, America and Australia, it would be a revolution - driven by dedicated young men - which would blow the opposition away with its intensity and conviction, and it would be a total revolution at all levels, political, economic, cultural, intellectual. But how would nationalists prevent a nationalist state from descending into the authoritarianism, capriciousness, corruption, self-indulgence, ossification and petty tyranny of the Ghaddafi and Assad variety? Would we ever be in the situation of sending in the army to fire at our own people in the streets?

Perhaps what is needed is a synthesis of liberal democracy and Yockeyist/Bardèchean euro-neofascism - taking the best elements from each. This essay is not intended to come up with a comprehensive answer, merely to state, in clear and precise terms, the question.

To love your country, make it more lovable.

By Michael Kennedy

Nationalism for the people.

Nationalism is often associated with an unwavering national pride, with a love of country, of their nation and unquestionable loyalty. Strong feelings of patriotism, which would be more accurately termed strong feelings of allegiance are usually just called 'Nationalist' feelings and these are often caricatured in the media as an unwavering support of the country, regardless of facts, regardless of what the country is doing to people abroad or at home. My country right or wrong. Perhaps in the true sense of the word, someone who simply accepts as true all the time, without question or analysis, that their country or nation is supreme, superior, the leading example of civilisation could be called a bigot, but nationalism is distinct from simple minded support. After all, it is amazing how many people in the world just happen to be born in the country they believe is the best in the world. Just as its quite amazing how many people just happen to be born into the 'one true religion'.

Nationalism is world outlook. An ideology. A belief that the nation is the most logical basis to build a state or country around, as opposed to other modern ideologies which build states and countries based on the acceptance of certain premises, or simply define and build them by who holds particular documents, or who pays taxes, or who belongs to a particular religion. While modern liberalism states that a country is nothing more than an aggregate of participants, of which the background and cultural heritage of the participants is meaningless (and at the same time very meaningful in multicultural terms, an odd paradox), nationalism states that a country is defined by the very people which founded it, and that it is an organic entity.

A nationalist country is a country which defines itself by the people. Finland for example doesn't define what a Finn is, but a Finn defines what Finland is. Likewise, Japan isn't a country which makes its inhabitants Japanese, but the country Japan is founded upon the Japanese culture and ethnicity. The people define what Japan the state is. Many countries around the world exist on this premise. Ireland, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Mongolia, Fiji, these are countries which came into existence, not as blank administrative states which just 'happened' to be then filled with people of a particular type, but as creations of a particular type of people. Modern liberalism and its Marxist Socialist big brother work hard at denying this fact, in trying to 'prove' that nation states are artificial constructs, but the fact that these nation states happen to comprise of people who are ethnically and culturally and linguistically related, and that these relations existed long before the nation state was formalised, make this theory laughably absurd. Italy may be a relatively modern creation, but the shared cultural, linguistic and ethnic heritage existed long before. Italy was created because these ties existed. The creation of Italy is not considered the construct of an abstract state, but the unification of Italian states into one nation state, the result of efforts by Italian nationalists. Yugoslavia on the other hand was a single state created from Pan-Slavic ideals, a statist idea which tried to combine various (though closely related nations) into a single state. Italy still exists, Yugoslavia does not.

So a nationalist can be thought of in a strict sense, as one who holds the belief that the nation (in the literal sense) is the most appropriate basis for building political entities on. This is in opposition to the liberal ideal where a country (a term they use interchangeable with nation, as if they are the same thing) is simply an administrative entity, a resource which could consists of any type of citizen or any combination. More importantly, a nationalist works for the betterment of their nation, for its evolution, its cultural growth, its well being, prosperity and sustainability. One cannot improve their own home if they don't admit there is room for improvement.

To a nationalist, if Australia's population was to be replaced, then it would no longer be an Australian nation. We might have a government and political entity called a country under the name of Australia, but the Australian nation would have essentially been supplanted with another one. The globalist opponents of nationalism do not recognise that there is more to being a member of a country than simply having citizenship papers or a passport or having a tax file number. For them, to even suggest otherwise makes one a racist bigot. Clearly the ideas of nationalism are incompatible with the idea that a nation of people shouldn't have a country they can call their own.

For Nationalist Alternative, we quite simply believe that there is more to being Australian that simply being a tax payer, or following the cricket team, or having a passport. We believe that Australia is defined by a particular group of people, NOT vice versa.

Nationalism vs 'blind patriotism'.

But does a nationalist have to love his or her country? Is it necessary to be a nationalist to believe that your country is the best there is, that all is good? Is it necessary to defend your governments actions against critics? Holding the belief that a state needs a deeper, more significant definition that simply being a group of people who hold ideas of 'mateship', eating meat pies and watching football, doesn't mean that one has to necessarily hold the idea that their country is the best there is, that it must be supported despite what it does. The actions of the state, of the government and even of many of its citizens are distinct from what the nation is. What the country has become is again distinct. A nationalists wants the best for their country, but will acknowledge if there is a sorry state of affairs. To criticise Australia’s involvement in the Afghanistan conflict isn't to go against the nation, but to criticise the state. To many modern conservatives, who have also adopted the 'state is the nation' formula, one must support the country regardless, but a nationalist knows that the armed forces are doing the bidding of an administration, not the nation, and realises that there is no contradiction at all in opposing what the troops are doing, but still being committed to their nation.

Likewise, a nationalist may indeed feel dismay at their country, even so far as to hate what its become. Take for example a lady who's husband has taken to alcoholism. She may still love him, may still support him, because he is her husband. But she doesn't have to love what he has become, what he is. She knows deep down that he perhaps is not the best man in the world, she knows what he's doing is wrong and damaging to both him and her. But she cannot in good conscience lash at out those who criticise him, nor lie to herself and belief that these criticisms aren't true. Inside she may be torn between sticking by the man she met and fell in love with, and the man he has become, destructive, despotic and distant.

To love your country, make it more lovable.

For people to love a country, it must be lovable. It must provide fair opportunities for those who work to create them, a space to live, breath and be and to respect the national identity. Nationalism isn't about simply stating that ones country does this, its about making ones own country like this. True nationalists don't just wave flags at cricket matches, they set about making their country one they would be proud to support and live in. They oppose those manipulate the state to the detriment of the nation. A nationalist works for his or her people, and cannot improve their nation, if they don't admit there is room for improvement.

There is little doubt that Australia has become a less likeable country, and there is little doubt that Australians still want to call this place home. Many Australians grew up seeing a generation comfortably calling this country home, being able to buy a ¼ acre block in the suburbs to call home from doing an honest job. Now they struggle to call an apartment home despite both them and their partner working. Single Australians would have a much harder time of it. Australians struggle to move to work and back home in Sydney and Melbourne, fighting traffic. The urban sprawl has laid waste to what were ones green fields, valleys and places children used to play in and enjoy nature. The night sky is disappearing from the orange glow of the city. Wages are dropping relative to the value of the dollar. People in productive jobs are watching fat cat executive ship them off overseas to line their pockets further, and the divide between the rich and the middle class grows exponentially. The politicians in power have utterly no vision, no policy and no compassion for Australians except for photo opportunities during a crisis. Suburbs which were once pleasant places to live are turning more and more into third world habitats. The very face and culture of Australia is becoming more and more alien, as the demographic make up broadens. Multicultural policies are creating suburbs where people are distant from each other, where there is no longer a community, but aggregation of people. Australians are increasingly become submerged in an environment which just doesn't feel like home. Australians are increasingly losing a place which politically and socially is home.

For one to want to work positively for their community, they must feel attachment to it, but all the trends are moving to remove any attachment. Town planning in new urban areas is purely functional and pragmatic, with the seemingly sole purpose of maximising developer profit. The new suburbs springing up on the outskirts of Melbourne are among the most culturally desolate, isolating, anti community areas in Australia.

You cannot restore a sense of love of country by winning the cricket, hosting the ashes or having a diversity day. You cannot demand patriotism, as if it were a switch that could be flicked. You must work toward building a nation that people can be proud of, that they feel attachment to. To have Australians love and support their country, you have to work at making it worthy of support.

This is the true heart of Nationalism. Building and maintaining a country which one would want to be in. It is for this reason that Nationalist Alternative seek to redress issues of unaffordable housing, silly multicultural principles, unsustainable population growth through immigration and economic injustice. We support our nation, and want the state to be worthy of the people within the nation. For us, Australia isn't defined by the government, but by the Australian people, as discussed in our manifesto. Our country is for our people, for ourselves, just as we believe that every other peoples of the planet should have a place they can call home, that they can be proud of. There is no need to say 'my country is the best in the world', but there is definitely a need to say 'my country is the best one for ME', something that ideally every human should be able to say, or at least aspire for.

The Nuclear Debate Reignited

by Michael Kennedy

The nuclear debate has arisen once more, not that it ever left. With the continuing tragedy in Japan from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, focus has been on the nuclear power plants damaged by the Earth's rumblings. The Fukishima plant has had three explosions since the quake less than a week ago and an exclusion zone tens of kilometres wide enforced. 200,000 people have been evacuated. Radioactive materials have escaped and have been detected around the vicinity of the plant. There is no denying that this is a disaster, though it has not reached meltdown proportions, despite the fear-mongering that the media has engaged in, a media which has jumped on board the numerous disasters which have occurred in the past few months and milked them and resold the gravitas of the situation in consumable units.

To put the nuclear disaster in perspective, zero people have died (yet) from it. Chernobyl killed 43. Mining of coal, to fuel coal power plants among other uses has resulted in up to 100,000 deaths¹. Coal also potentially threatens to change a climate which humanity has become accustomed to, a climate we have become reliant on to sustain the existing population. Tens of thousands are dead from the quake and tsunami itself, but this event has nevertheless reignited debate and given ammunition to the anti-nuclear movement.

It should be clearly stated that nuclear power is the best of a bad lot, with emphasis put on the fact that it is part of a bad lot. Even long term supporters of nuclear power would have to admit, that is is far from perfect (though those with a direct financial interest in the industry may disagree). It is difficult and costly to build a plant that is safe, in a safe location, it is difficult to decommission safely, something that there is no good procedure for yet and worst of all, leaves behind dangerous waste which must be kept away from people, from living things and from entering the ecosystem, water or air cycle, for tens of thousands of years. The fact that after a magnitude 9 quake, and 10 metre tidal wave the plant has held up reasonably well is a testament that the immediate dangers of a well build plant are often overstated.

Nuclears long lasting legacy.

The issue with nuclear power lies in the waste it created. Waste that remains long after the water which was boiled to create the electricity has cooled, long after the electricity has been consumed, long after the individual who used the power has died, long after the device which was used has been discarded, quite likely even long after the civilisation that used the power to drive its economy and sustain itself has ceased to exist. To believe that it is possible to take care of this waste for this period of time is frankly laughable. For a society which cannot plan more than a few years in advance, taking on the responsibility of ensuring that spent fuel from a nuclear reactor remains tightly locked away and trapped, is not a responsibility that we should be taking with, or even remotely capable of handling.

While nuclear power may provide ample energy, it creates a debt, a long lasting debt. Future generations will be burdened with the cost of dealing with the waste, with potential issues from it leaking, with potential deaths, cancers and mutations from the leak, for something they didn't use. What if King Ur-Nammu from the Ur civilisation 4000 years ago, in order to power an entertainment device left behind a toxic package which the current inhabitants of Mesopotamia, the modern day Iraqi's still had to concern themselves about, and contend with? Is it morally justifiable to create such a long lasting debt to satisfy contemporary needs? This is, in this authors opinion, the one aspect of nuclear power which turns it from a 'bad, but definitely usable for now' source of power to a 'definitely powerful, but just wrong' one. Is it foolish to forgo the use of nuclear power for the moral purpose of saving future generations of this debt? It's a complex issue. It could be argued that future generations would inherit indirectly benefits gained from the use of nuclear power today in the form of technical and medical advancements, and this is indeed a good argument, but the lifetime of the waste means that these benefits must last many times longer than any civilisation has lasted for. Also, what benefit do they gain from modern day squandering and reckless use of power? From using power to run larger and larger TV's, home theaters, unnecessary street lighting, production of goods purely to sustain a decadent, consumerist lifestyle and to sustain an obsolete economic model which only a few really benefit from?

This raises another issue, which is at the real heart of the nuclear debate. From those who vehemently oppose it, to its supporters, it has to be realised by all who engage in debate, that nuclear is only good compared to other bad and insufficiently powerful sources of power. Even some environmentalists are accepting that nuclear power may be necessary, as it is less evil than coal. Renewable energies, while inarguably much cleaner and better, aren't reliable enough and don't provide the quantity of energy that modern civilisation seeks to consume. The issue is how did we reach a state where considering such options become a necessity?

Is it a necessity?

It appears necessary to find sources of power which can meet current consumption levels because it is assumed that the consumption of power is necessary. But quick observation shows this isn't true. Quite easily, power consumption can be cut by simply eliminating the most wasteful behaviours. Leaving lights on in rooms when not in use, something commercial establishments commonly due. Removing unnecessary street lighting and 'decorative' lighting which only exists to cast light for visual effect. Planning shopping trips better to eliminate frequent drives to pick up a few items and so on. Household devices have also become more energy hungry. TV's of old used to have a definitely on/off button, whereas now all appliances have a 'standby' mode, of little use, but a mode where the appliance still draws power. TV's are becoming larger and much more power hungry. Computer monitors larger and the computers themselves draw more and more power as they run faster processors and more powerful graphics cards. Add to that, the increasing list of devices, the DVD player, the PVR, the set top box, the modem router, the home theater and its easy to see why household energy usage is increasing, and for what?

But looking further out, we see vast amounts of energy being used to manufacture consumable and quickly replaced electronic items, marketed to have a short shelf life, designed to become quickly obsoleted by the next product. Then there is the energy used to produces a cornucopia of goods which no one really needs, energy used to market it, and energy used by people to have a job to earn the money to buy these goods.

Everywhere you look, you see a society built upon the assumption that energy is limitless. The city of Melbourne is geographically speaking, one of the largest in the world. New suburbs are built around the car. There is a lack of corner stores, as all stores are centralised into shopping centres. No public transport and few nearby working opportunities. The preoccupation with growth is creating suburbs up to 40km and more away from the CBD, which require people to use more and more fuel in order to go to work and back to earn a living. Our economic and social system, as we currently maintain it, require growth, require consumption and the production of surplus goods and services, all energy consuming activities.

But what if a change in the economic and social order could result in a state of existence by which a good standard of living was maintained, but with far less extraneous energy use? This certainly is possible but whether it would remove the need to consider nuclear is unlikely.

How did we reach this state?

This begs a deeper question. How did we reach a state where in order to maintain our current system of civilisation, we must choose between the horrendous pollution of fossil fuels, and the morally repugnant nuclear, which as the potential for quite severe accidents?

Humanity and civilisation has quite simply grown faster than the means to support it sustainably have. There is no escaping the fact that we have not restrained our growth and demand for resources and chose not to wait till a demand for power and resources could be satiated sustainably before creating the demand. Restraint is a much needed but lacking quality in modern civilisation. Had we, upon the discovery of the use of fossil fuels, been able to think ahead, to take into account their finiteness, carefully planned our growth so as to be within the limits of these resources, this debate perhaps won't be occurring. While it may not be reasonable to have known about climate change, or how quickly these fossil fuels may be exhausted, the industrial system marched on without any restraint or planning.

The crisis isn't simply about where to get power next, it goes much deeper than that. The nuclear debate, a debate about which of the two evils we will choose is the result of a population and industrial system which was allowed to grow to a size beyond its own capacity to support itself sustainably. Renewable energies could be viable if civilisation as a whole has the will and capacity to restrict its size and consumption within that which nature can support, but such a change of perspective is unlikely to come about with leaders who are beholden to commercial interested, to big business and who, because of the democratic political system, would have extreme difficulty in enacting unpopular, but necessary changes.

While some political schools of thought try to resist any challenge to the current status quo, it is necessary to look deeper than the nuclear/no nuclear dichotomy and challenge the assumptions about the necessity to use the quantity of energy we use now and to challenge the automatic assumption that further growth must be accommodated as is inevitable.

Our societies approach to the energy supply problems that we face have always been to force change in the source of energy, but perhaps we should look at both sides of the equation. Perhaps the issue of finding the resources isn't simply to force more resources, but to also adapt ourselves and accept the limitations of what the planet can provide and adjust ourselves, our own practices and assumptions and social morals in order to make our lifestyle more compatible the resources our planet can provide. This requires changes which most people would immediately dismiss as a pipe dream, as impossible, but unfortunately we are left with little choice.

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Dangers_to_miners

Dialectics of the Gringo

by David Ellerton

(In this essay, I shall be looking at the phenomenon of political correctness and cultural-Marxism, and one possible intellectual response to it, from the work of a French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. The issues involved can be potentially too abstract for some, so I shall resolve to bring them down to earth - into the nitty-gritty of contemporary political reality - as much as possible).

One of the most significant changes in the history of the Left was the adoption of politically-correct Marxism in the 1990s. Appearing, mostly, on university campuses, the new 'P.C. Marxism' or Leftism took the radical step of abandoning the old-fashioned worker's struggle for socialism, instead focusing on the "oppression" of women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics and other minority and victim groups by the white, male Western culture. The new Marxism first appeared in the humanities departments (mainly literary departments) at the universities, and was inspired by French postmodern thinkers who were, even by academic standards, difficult to read and often incomprehensible. As the Jewish-British writer Loren Goldner (an orthodox, old-fashioned Marxist) complained:

The big debate on the American left in the late 1980's and early 1990's was about the "difference" of the "identity" of every oppressed group, with the notable exception of the working class as a whole, and that this difference was, in fact, just...difference.

Multiculturalism is in... To the pseudo-radicals of the academic intelligentsia, who have turned social class into a "text", multiculturalism is the freeing of a "multiplicity of discourses", a dissolution of the ostensible "phallologocentrism" of an ostensible "Western" cultural tradition... The purveyors of the post-modern "French disease" continue a frenzied production of self-involved books and posh academic journals which communicate nothing so much as a basic ignorance of real history and the pathetic belief that the deconstruction of literary texts amounts to serious radical political activity.

(Loren Goldner, 'Multi-Culturalism or World Culture? On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown, 1991, at http://libcom.org/library/multi-culturalism-or-world-culture-left-wing-response-contemporary-social-breakdown )

Like a good many things from 1990s, P.C. Leftism went out of fashion with the Left - Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Black Studies and other departments still exist on university, of course, but the Left realised, after a time, that postmodern political correctness diverted their energies from what should have been their true focus - communism, anarchism, and the 'overthrow of capitalism'. (Whether or not such goals are achievable is another thing entirely. The reason why politically-correct, cultural Marxism appeared in the 1990s was because of the disillusionment, among the Left, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 'back-sliding' of China into capitalism. According to Marx's theory, these two events shouldn't have happened, but they did).

However, like a cancer, or a poisonous gas which has escaped its containers, P.C. Marxism lingers on. In Tuscon, Arizona, a Hispanic version of Queer Studies and Black Studies existed until recently: 'Mexican-American Studies', which indoctrinates Mexican immigrant high school students in Mexican and Latino nationalist propaganda. A liberal, Tom Horne, who was the state's superintendent of education, opposed the program on the grounds that it created ethnic divisions and helped draft a law against them. So what went on in these classes?

“It’s propagandizing and brainwashing that’s going on there,” Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general, said this week...

To buttress his critique of the Tucson program, Mr. Horne read from texts used in various classes, which in one instance referred to white people as “gringos” and described privilege as being related to the color of a person’s skin, hair and eyes. He also cited the testimony of five teachers who described the program as giving a skewed view of history and promoting racial discord.

For the state, the issue is... some of the texts used in the classes, among them, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Occupied America,” which Mr. Horne said inappropriately teach Latino youths that they are being mistreated.

Teaching methods in the classes are sometimes unconventional, with instructors scrutinizing hip-hop lyrics and sprinkling their lessons with Spanish words.

The state, which includes some Mexican-American studies in its official curriculum, sees the classes as less about educating students than creating future activists.

“On the first day of school, they are no different than students in any other classes,” said John Ward, who briefly taught a Latino history class in Tucson. “But once they get told day after day that they are being victimized, they become angry and resentful.” ('Rift in Arizona as Latino Class Is Found Illegal', The New York Times, January 7, 2011).

Amusingly, 'Mexican-American Studies' was banned in Arizona - under an anti-racist law:

Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.

“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday. ('Citing Individualism, Arizona Tries to Rein in Ethnic Studies in School, The New York Times, May 13, 2010).

So what is at the basis of 'Mexican-American Studies', and the entire identity-politics movement of the 1990s? The answer is: dialectics, and the German philosopher Hegel's parable of the master and the slave.

'Dialectics' is not a mere subject for academic study by philosophers. As students of Marxism know, dialectics is at the centre of the communist ideology - which went on take over large parts of the world, and oppress, starve and kill millions. So what is it?

In the textbooks, it is explained as a form of argument: one starts with a proposition (thesis), engages in discussion with someone who has an opposing view (antithesis). Finally, an agreement is reached, where both opposing viewpoints are reconciled (synthesis) and blended into one another to form a new whole. Importantly, there are always left-over elements of the original thesis, but these are transformed and never entirely culled. They undergo a process of what Hegel calls sublation, or elsewhere, 'Aufheben', or overcoming.

This is, admittedly, quite abstract. Dialectics is easier to understand if we look at it from the point of view of the Marxist version of history. Capitalism appears, and enslaves the working class. The workers adopt socialist ideas, and revolt against their capitalist masters, and negate him and all his works. Finally, there is the overthrow of capitalism and the appearance of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The 'sublation' occurs when the capitalist's technology is used - his modes of production. So capitalism, its technology, its methods, have not disappeared entirely - it has been 'sublated'.

In the ideology of politically correct Leftism, it is probably Hegel's famous parable of the Master and the Slave which has been the biggest influence. The parable is a strange passage, 'On Lordship and Bondage', in his master work 'The Phenomenology of the Spirit' (1807). It is an answer to the question: how did slavery come about? What was the state of consciousness of the two parties, master and slave, at the beginning of slavery?

The parable describes, at the dawn of history, an encounter between two human beings who are complete strangers to one another. At first there reaction is one of mutual astonishment, that another like himself can exist, and both are thrown into a state of confusion. Then one, attempting to regain control of himself, attempts to gain control of the other. The two beings undergo a fight to the death - one is braver than the other, and more willing to risk his life, so wins. Then the winner becomes the master and forces the loser to work for him as a slave. But the good news is that the slave is forced to labour and produce products and then develops consciousness of himself, for the first time, during that labour, and his conquest of nature, through that labour. The master, in the meantime, develops a parasitic dependency on the slave for his products, and, worse, he needs the slave for recognition: he needs to be recognised as the master. But recognition from a lesser being - a slave - is insufficient. Eventually the institution of slavery passes away. As Francis Fukuyama writes, in his classic book, 'The End of History and the Last Man' (1993):

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

One can recognise, of course, the 'dialectical' overtones of the parable; and also see how it would apply to any ideology - Marxism, feminism, Black Power, Hispanic Power, and so on - which takes itself to be the ideology of the oppressed, the slave, the victim. (The academic, Susan Buck-Morss, wrote a paper, 'Hegel and Haiti, for the journal Critical Enquiry, which argued that Hegel was influenced by the slave uprising in Haiti at the time - an uprising which saw the thorough slaughter, by blacks, of the white French of the island).

Identity politics, dialectics, Hegel's parable, are all about defining oneself as a slave, as oppressed, and the question is, ultimately, about how one defines oneself philosophically. Is there, then, a philosopher who is anti-Hegel, anti-dialectic, anti-identity politics (as described above)? According to Gilles Deleuze, the answer is yes: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his influential 1965 book on Nietzsche, 'Nietzsche and Philosophy', Deleuze outlines Nietzsche's position. I will quote from some of it here and show, in brackets, how the passages can apply to the problems we have considered already (all quotations are from Deleuze, pp.9-10]:

It is an exhausted force [e.g., Hispanic radicalism, Black revolutionaries] which does not have the strength to affirm its difference [e.g., its own individuality, its own sense of itself as a separate, self-contained race or ethnic group], a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it [e.g., the white man] - only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other [e.g., the desire to revolt against, and destroy, the white "oppressor"]. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence [e.g., the ethnic group defines itself only in opposition to its oppressor, the white man]. "While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is 'outside', what is 'different, what is 'not itself' and this No is its creative deed" (Nietzsche, 'The Genealogy of Morals'). This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction [e.g., the desire for revolution, for reconquista of land taken from the Mexicans by the white man] then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference [e.g., the white man's sense of individuality], reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.

The essential thing is that the identities of the oppressed - Black, Hispanic, and so on - in identity politics are, in effect, created in response to the white man and his activities. They do not exist independently:

Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master [e.g., the presence of Blacks in America, Hispanics] is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence [e.g., the white man's founding of the American state]... Who dialectises the relationship? [i.e., who invents Hegel's parable?]. It is the slave, the slave's perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave's perspective. The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as will to power but as representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by "the one" of the superiority of "the other" [i.e., when the slave triumphs over the master and delivers his comeuppance].

In other words, what the 'oppressed minority' wants, above all, is to be recognised by the white oppressor:

What the wills [i.e., the human beings] in Hegel want is to have their power recognised, to represent their power. According to Nietzsche we have here a wholly erroneous conception of the will to power and its nature. This is the slave's conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. The slave only conceives of power as the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore makes it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of established values [i.e., becoming respectable, a 'success' in American, and Western, society]... The portrait of the master that Hegel offers us is, from the start, a portrait which represents the slave, at least as in his dreams, as at best a successful slave. Underneath the Hegelian image of the master we always find the slave [i.e., in his mind, the slave misrepresents his master, and imagines him to be only a version of himself].

Deleuze himself would be shocked by my interpretation of Nietzsche in this fashion: Deleuze was a Marxist and was one of the leading philosophers of the French postmodern Left. His philosophy of 'difference' was one of the influences on politically-correct, Marxist thought (only not as big an influence as Hegel). Contradictorily, though, he thoroughly approved of Nietzsche's ideas - perhaps he was unable to see the implications of them for P.C. identity politics. (Deleuze died in France in 1995, and quite possibly he never encountered culture Marxism, which first appeared in American universities).

There is much in Deleuze's book on Nietzsche - and in certain of his other books - for the nationalist intellectual to ponder. Quite possibly, the ideas could form the basis of a new intellectual defence of the white Western culture against the onslaught cultural Marxism and multiculturalism. This would be ironic, given Deleuze's own political views, but postmodernism is full of ironies.