Holocaust and resistance: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, June 2021

I have heard nothing about Hilberg taking my side. He is pretty stupid and crazy. He babbles now about a “death wish” of the Jews. His book is really excellent, but only because it is a simple report. A more general, introductory chapter is beneath a singed pig.
—Hannah Arendt, letter to Karl Jaspers, 4/24/1964

I have Raul Hilberg’s three volume opus The Destruction of the European Jews. I’ve read it, skimming it in parts, and studying select chapters. I’ve also used the footnotes and index for related research. Hilberg relied on mostly German primary sources supplemented by secondary literature, but precise figures of Jewish deaths were hard to come by. He necessarily had to round his numbers. The conventional view is that between 5 and 7 million Jews perished in the Nazi Final Solution, with the number 6 million cited as standard. Hilberg’s comprehensive research, with various rounding factors taken into account, posits a range of 4.9 million to 5.4 million deaths, with a mid-point of 5.1 million Jewish lives destroyed by the Nazis.

Hilberg’s landmark study, with its exhaustive research, focused on German collective responsibility and bureaucracy, not on the Nazi leadership or their victims, and arrived at a figure that was at the low end of the official range. But Hilberg could be cantankerous and didn’t shy away from controversy. As Hannah Arendt knew, it was possible to like the man’s work but dislike the man. Hilberg was clear on a number of contentious points, principal among them that the Jewish people were overwhelmingly passive in the face of Nazi persecution and murder. “The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance […] [T]he documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight,” according to Hilberg, who further stated: “In exile, the Jews […] had learned that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies. […] Armed resistance in the face of overwhelming force could end only in disaster. Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to survive they had to refrain from resistance.” These historical tendencies were augmented by Jewish communal structures—in particular the cooperation of the Jewish councils, or Judenräte, that made the Nazis’ job easier—and a deference for authority. Further, Hilberg rejected the contention that “[e]ven passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance” as highly problematic.

Hilberg argued that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was grossly overstated and that less than 300 Germans were killed by Jews during the second World War. The Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB, Socialist Zionist and Labor Bund fighters) and the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW, Revisionist fighters) futilely attempted to defend the Warsaw Ghetto from Nazi deportations in 1943.[1] Similar armed actions followed in the Vilna and Bialystok ghettos. But had every Nazi-controlled Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe rebelled in emulation of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and given the resources the Nazis needed to deploy to crush that insurrection alone, the German military on the Eastern Front would have been totally immobilized. Hilberg disagreed with what he called a “campaign of exaltation” of heroic Jewish resistance to the Nazi Holocaust. Mitchell Hart stated that “[t]his sort of ‘inflation of resistance’ is dangerous because it suggests that the Jews truly did present the Nazis with some sort of ‘opposition’ that was not just a horrible figment of their antisemitic imaginations.”

Yad Vashem disagreed with Hilberg and countered that his thesis amounted to blaming the victims for their plight; that the Jews themselves somehow bore some responsibility for the extent of the Nazi genocide. I visited Yad Vashem in 1974 and walked through the rooms dedicated to depicting Jewish heroism. I choked up over the portrayal of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Europe—from the armed uprisings in Eastern European ghettos and concentration camps and guerrilla groups (like the Bielski and Parczew partisans and the UPO) to the sabotage, disruption, intelligence gathering and participation within national resistance movements in Western Europe. Given my proclivity for revenge, I was particularly taken with the post-war Nokmim partisans/Nakam assassins—the Jewish Avengers—who intended to annihilate as many Germans as the Nazis had killed Jews. But compared to the decades long Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotian national liberation struggles happening concurrently in Indochina against Western imperialism, I had to admit that Jewish resistance to the Nazis seemed sparse. And I understood why most Israeli Jews believed that European Jewry went “like sheep to the slaughter,” walking meekly into Hitler’s gas chambers. I had burned my draft card, applied for a Conscientious Objector status, and otherwise spent six years of my life protesting against the Vietnam War. My resistance to America’s slaughter conservatively of 1,156,000 Vietnamese, 273,000 Cambodians and 28,000 Laotians, not to mention the reduction of the Indochinese countryside into a subtropical moonscape saturated with Agent Orange, felt exceedingly paltry to me at the time.[2]

My Polish Catholic mother lived through the second World War and was interned in a Nazi forced labor camp as an adolescent. She developed an abiding hatred for all things German and once said that there must be something positive about the Jews because the Germans despised them so much. I inherited my knee-jerk anti-German sentiments from her. As a libertarian Marxist, I’ve found the Jewish left particularly constructive and instructive for my own socialism. The Jewish Labor Bund and its program for diaspora socialism—emphasizing do’ikayt (here-ness), Yiddish, secular Jewish culture, national-cultural autonomy, trade unionism, and community control—was liquidated by the Nazis along with the Jewish community of Eastern Europe. What remained was Jewish nationalism as exemplified by the tens of thousands of socialist Zionists who immigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine prior to 1940 to found a socialist society. I’ve been an admirer of the former having befriended a Bundist union baker in 1969 who retired from Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, to Ojai, California. And I became a student of the latter at UCSC taking World Systems Theory in Walter Goldfrank’s Sociology class.

I’ve argued that socialist Zionism was perhaps the first example of a modern socialist struggle for national liberation, albeit one with a fatal flaw—that being its program of “socialism for one people” in a settler-colonial context. I sympathize with the bi-nationalist libertarian communism of the Hashomer Hatzair which became MAPAM, and I have a soft spot for the left communism of the Gdud Ha’avoda/Labor Brigades. Socialist Zionism ultimately failed to achieve a socialist society both internally and in socialist peace and justice with the Palestinians. What’s more, when Labor Zionism took power as the social democratic State of Israel in 1948, and especially when Revisionist Zionism—openly rooted in European Fascism—gained control as Likud after 1977, Israel can be understood as a settler-colonial regime little different from apartheid South Africa.[3]

As for the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict I unequivocally oppose the Jewish settler movement, Israeli ethnic cleansing and the IDF’s ongoing repression and massacre of Palestinians. I favor first a decentralized bi-national socialism of autonomous federated Jewish and Palestinian communities residing side by side in the region. Then I support, ultimately, a bi-national democratic one-state solution for all of Palestine/Israel, with the formal two-state solution that Amos Oz called “a peace through gritted teeth” coming in a distant third. Yet none of these solutions are likely, with the current de facto degraded Israeli apartheid state reality of endless occupation and war the norm for the foreseeable future. So I protest Israeli military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, and Israeli civilian assaults on Palestinians and their lands, without rejecting the promise of a bi-nationalist Jewish socialism upon which that society was founded. And I express solidarity with Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler-colonialism without endorsing Palestinian politics as “objectively anti-imperialist.”

I also plant olive trees in Palestine through a variety of non-Zionist charities, a symbolic act at best but one that I can take whether or not Israel is currently bombing the hell out of the Palestinians. By “supporting the act but not the actor” I reverse the precept held by Gandhi and later Martin Luther King to “hate the sin but not the sinner.” I thus refuse to reduce my politics to simplistic Leftist anti-imperialist drek. It’s a stance I take in confronting Stalinist tankies, crude Leninists and generic campists alike. But the dogmatists, sectarians and vanguardists of this leftover Left have never been good with political subtleties and ambiguities.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg
Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner
“The historian’s past in three recent Jewish autobiographies” by Mitchell B. Hart
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation by Isaiah Trunk
The Founding Myths of Israel: Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State by Ze’ev Sternhell

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Zionism warned that the Jewish community in Eastern Europe was in imminent danger of antisemitic persecution and mass murder almost from its inception. But whereas the socialist Zionist/Bundist ŻOB wasn’t formed until 1942 and then mainly in response to the Nazi threat to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto, the rightwing ŻZW—founded by Revisionist Zionism and Betar in 1939—anticipated the threat posed by Nazism. Soviet censorship aside, the ŻZW’s role in the uprising seems to have been exaggerated. I despise Revisionism’s parafascist politics even as I acknowledge its contributions to Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

[2] And these are very much the conservative estimates of the death toll. R.J. Rummel puts the upper estimates of American mass murder at 3,207,000 for Vietnam, 273,000 for Cambodia, and 115,000 for Laos, giving a grand total of 3,595,000 killed by US imperialism in Indochina from 1954 to 1975.

[3] In the 70s I took note of principled bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Palestine/Israel—mainly Rakah, Maki and the pivotal Matzpen. Inspiring and influential, Matzpen was numerically marginal back in the day. I remember reading Arie Bober’s The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism and following the various debates and subsequent splits. Now bi-national socialist anti-Zionism within Israel is virtually non-existent, examples like the Da’am Workers Party and Hadash notwithstanding.

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Fascisms: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2022

Jeremy was a dandy. At a time when young men were going hippie—growing their hair long, wearing faded, ripped blue jeans with western or tie-dyed shirts, buckskin or Edwardian vests and sandals or cowboy boots—Jeremy wore sharply pressed pleated dark slacks, pastel dress shirts with smart cardigan sweaters highlighted by the occasional ascot, and black or brown wingtips. This was 1970 and I was just such a wannabe hippie when I boarded the local Ventura city bus to sit down next to Jeremy. He sniffed in disdain at my unruly appearance and went back to writing in his notebook.

“I’m on the Prom Committee,” he said, holding his pen in the air between thumb and forefinger. “We’re developing the theme for this year’s Prom. What do you think about ‘a taste of bittersweet’?”

I had no school spirit nor had I plans to attend my high school prom so I simply shrugged. Jeremy was a walking contradiction. Everybody knew he was gay even though he was not out. He was overtly Catholic however and always wore a silver crucifix with a finely tooled image of the bloodied Jesus around his neck. Michael boarded the bus the next stop and sauntered back to where we sat. Michael was a year older and now a freshman at UC Santa Barbara where he had participated in the Isla Vista student riots that burned down the Bank of America. He wasn’t just a shaggy hippie but also a burgeoning New Leftist like myself. Michael and Jeremy despised each other. So while Michael and I chatted, Jeremy and Michael ignored each other. Then Michael happened to mention he “planned to hitchhike around Europe in the summer.”

“Spain is quite lovely, although a tad hot in the summertime,” Jeremy feigned a casual air. “I visited Spain last summer for an Opus Dei retreat and I had such a wonderful time.”

Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022

I sometimes view humanity’s sordid past as one long, interminable tale chronicling organized bands of murderous thugs trying to exterminate each other. Much as I admire the sentiment of pacifism and humanism, I’m neither a pacifist nor a humanist. Homicide seems to be part of our species, with genocide often its inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been on the left of the Left for most of my life; from being a left anarchist in my youth to a half-assed libertarian Marxist today. That means embracing a vision of stateless, classless global communism even as I abhor the terrors perpetrated by Leninist movements and regimes. I consider all forms of Fascism an abomination, and I dismiss the red-brown sophistry of Third Positionism as fascist sleight-of-hand. In the wake of the precipitous 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, there’s been an upsurge of tankyism/campism on the Left that sees world conflict in terms of US-led imperialism versus any and all opposition to imperialism. That anti-imperialist “camp” is considered socialist by default, even when it’s in defense of patently capitalist, authoritarian, totalitarian, even outright fascist regimes. Then there’s the steady rehabilitation of overtly Fascist/Nazi politics. Last column I commented that, when I was growing up I only saw Nazis as fictional TV characters. Now I see them unashamedly flaunting their fascism in the Republican Party and in demonstrations I’ve recently organized against.

So why do I identify with the Left, despise the Right, and consistently choose socialism over barbarism every time?

The libertarian fantasy: “What’s Left?” January 2020 (MRR #440)

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey — Ephemera, blog post, 3-19-09

The idea of expanding the traditional one-dimensional Left-Right political spectrum into a two-dimensional political map is an old one. Beginning in the 1950s, several double-axis models were proposed: Authoritarian-Democratic/Radical-Conservative (Eysenck), Left-Right/Ideological Rigidity (Greenberg & Jonas), Traditionalist-Secular/Self Expressionist-Survivalist (Inglehart), Liberty-Control/Irrationalism-Rationalism (Pournelle), and Kratos-Akrateia/Archy-Anarchy (Mitchell). The American libertarian David Nolan proposed his two axis diamond-shaped Nolan Chart in 1969 based on economic freedom and political freedom, which everybody knows about but nobody uses outside of libertarian circles. Which brings is to the problem of libertarianism.

Tim Yohannan. ¡Presente!: “What’s Left?” May 2019, MRR #432

[E]verything that was in opposition was good…
Michael Baumann, How It All Began, 1975

No one who likes swing can become a Nazi.
Arvid (Frank Whaley), Swing Kids, 1993

It was Movie Night at Maximum Rocknroll at the old Clipper Street headquarters circa 1994. The featured movie was Thomas Carter’s 1993 film Swing Kids. It was Tim and me and maybe one other person. I think Tim actually made Jiffy Pop popcorn and I had my ubiquitous six pack. The plot was simple; as the Nazi Party rises to power in pre-WWII Germany a tight countercultural scene of young kids grow their hair long, wear British fashion and use Harlem slang as they listen to banned American swing music, hold underground dances and street fight the Hitler Youth. Two rebellious young men take different paths—one into the Hitler Youth, the other into the Swing Kids and eventually jail.

The parallels to the mid-1990s were clear, with the rise of the Right politically and the explosion of punk’s second hardcore wave in the streets. After the closing credits rolled and Tim popped out the VHS tape he made the connections explicit. “Punk is like swing was in Nazi Germany. It’s the core of a revolutionary youth culture with rebellious kids resisting fascism in the streets.”

Tim loved punk, no doubt about it, but he was also on a mission. He not only wanted to cover the scene and its music, he wanted to push the politics of punk to the fore. And that link between punk music, the scene, its politics, and the fight against the Right is crucial to understanding both Tim Yo and his project, MRR. Tim considered MRR a lynchpin between punk music and the punk scene on the one hand and the Left’s fight against reactionary politics on the other hand.

A critique of Fourth Worldism

No more Negative Ned. Instead of critiquing Leftist practice and politics as I often do, I’m writing about something positive and hopeful this essay. To develop some PMA. I wrote a stupider version of this critique many years ago, from which I split off my July 17, 2017, piece called “San Cristobal and Zomia, an exercise in fantasy.” And like that essay, this commentary is not an official MRR column. It’s not Hooligan canon, but apocrypha.

***

Lenin formulated his theory of imperialism in 1900 which differentiates the world capitalist economy into the capitalist national centers of European empire and their exploited colonial periphery. In a Marxist anti-imperialist context, French social scientist Alfred Sauvy coined the term Third World in 1952 as an analog to the Third Estate of the French Revolution. Also jumping off from Leninist anti-imperialism, Mao propounded his Three Worlds Theory by 1974 in which the First World is the developed capitalist nations, the Second World is the socialist nations posing as an international alternative, and the Third World is the orthodox category of undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing  nations. Starting in 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein charted the differentiation of the present world capitalist economy via the consolidation of nation-states and national economies into the fully developed core region, an undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing exploited periphery, and a semi-peripheral region in between. These tripartite schemas imply a fourth geographic tier, a Fourth World in Maoism and an outer periphery in the case of Wallerstein encompassing the marginal territories and peoples incapable of consolidating viable nation-states and national economies.

National-Bolshevism, communism of-by-for fools: “What’s Left?” February 2016, MRR #393

Wir tanzen mit Faschismus
Und roter Anarchie
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Kammerad, komm tanz mit mir

Laibach, “Tanz Mit Laibach”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Laibach has been accused of glorifying fascism in the past to which their response has been: ‘We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.’ Which I assume means they are fascists, they’re just very, very bad at it.

John Oliver. “Laibach goes to North Korea,” Last Week Tonight #45 (7/19/15)

It’s been close to a century since Karl Radek popularized the concept of National Bolshevism. It was June of 1923, after the successful workers’ revolution in Russia and a failed one in Germany which ended the first World War. As the Secretary of the Third International—the Communist International or Comintern—Radek hoped to rally support and solidarity among disaffected German rightwing soldiers, veterans and rank-and-file nationalists for the besieged Soviet Union. The goal was to firm up an alliance between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army, irrespective of the interests of their different working classes, and to this end Radek made an infamous speech in the Executive Committee of the Comintern called “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” which was endorsed by both Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek praised Schlageter—a conservative WWI veteran who joined the German paramilitary Freikorps to suppress the German workers’ soviet revolution of 1918-19 and who then was executed for sabotage against the French occupation army of the Ruhr—as a national hero and argued that “[t]he insistence on the nation in Germany is a revolutionary act.”

Long before the present-day red-brown alliances in Russian politics, over a decade before the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, Radek’s “Schlageter Line” imposed an opportunistic alliance between para-fascist ex-military types and Germany’s revolutionary leftwing working class via the ever-pliant German Communist Party, the KPD. This was a strategy of National Bolshevism for the KDP and the German working class, ultimately to defend the Soviet Union and further that country’s interest in an alliance with Germany. To seal this pact with the devil, KDP Zentrale shut down the insurrectionary Hamburg Uprising by the district KP Wasserkante on October 22, 1923. Radek and Trotsky quickly defended the decision to stop the insurrection by condemning the uprising as premature. What followed was nearly a decade of on again/off again collaboration between the KDP and the NSDAP in the streets and the Reichstag against the SDP-dominated Weimar Republic.

This attraction to National Bolshevism on Radek’s part came as much from his personal experiences in Moabit prison trying to convert reactionary German nationalists to Bolshevism as from his reading of two renegade Hamburg communists, Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who coined the term National Bolshevism. These national communists promoted the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat in the service of German nationalism, the formation of a German Red Army, and a German-Soviet nationalist-socialist alliance in an all-out war against the US and UK. Sound familiar? Radek’s temporary and purely tactical “Schlageter Line” was part of a shameful history of Soviet and KDP intransigence, sectarianism and double-dealing that ultimately delivered the German working class into the hands of the Nazi Party in power, much as the PCE’s (Spanish Communist Party) machinations and red terror finally betrayed the Spanish proletariat to the clutches of Franco. Radek’s contribution to this debacle was to legitimize, for the first time as an official representative of the Comintern, the synthesis of right and left, ultra-nationalism with revolutionary socialism in Germany, that was the prototype for the obsessions of fascism’s leftwing thereafter.

To be fair, there were plenty of left-leaning German fascists in the 1920s and 30s, both inside the Nazi Party (Röhm, Gregor and Otto Strasser) and outside (van den Bruck, Jünger, Niekisch). And had the concept of National Bolshevism not existed in Germany by 1923, circumstance would have contrived something analogous, mirroring a common argument made about Hitler. But the initial willingness on the part of the Bolsheviks to cultivate National Bolshevism in Germany came to bite the Left on its ass. (Victor Serge said of the Schlageter tactic: “It’s playing with fire—all right let’s play with fire!”) The ideal of a red-brown, Soviet-Nazi, Russian-German alliance has been a goal of leftwing fascism ever since. From the NSDAP breakaway Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists through the ultra-Zionist, anti-imperialist LEHI (Stern Gang) in Mandated Palestine to the left Peronist FAR-Montoneros guerrillas in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the archetypal synthesis of revolutionary left and right epitomized by National Bolshevism has recurred over and over, much like a periodic, virulent outbreak of herpes. Most recently, the anarcho/ultra milieu has witnessed @ publisher AK Press accuse white South African journalist, writer and AK author Michael Schmidt of being a secret National Anarchist in league with Troy Southgate.

AK Press did its due diligence, thoroughly investigated Schmidt’s background, and determined that the rumors of his involvement in National Anarchism were true despite his outward adherence to an odd-duck anarchist Platformism. So AK stopped publication of his current book, removed his previous books from its inventory, and disseminated its lengthy, damning findings as widely as it could in the anarcho/ultra milieu. Schmidt’s story is that he is an anarchist and a journalist who was engaged in legitimate research of fringe fascist elements, and that every fact dug up by his detractors has another more innocent explanation. I think that the evidence is overwhelming that Michael Schmidt is at present a National Anarchist-identified fascist. Now, I really don’t care whether Schmidt infiltrated anarchism with his authentic NA fascist beliefs intact or simply developed his decentralized, tribal white nationalism “organically” over his time in the anarchist movement. The purported synthesis of revolutionary left and right that is at the core of National Bolshevism, National Syndicalism, National Anarchism, National Autonomism, ad nauseam—what this fascist tendency likes to call metapolitics—is a clear enough political signature for folks on the Left and the left of the Left to help screen against infiltration or “entryism,” or even genuine conversion.

Well done.

The issue is not jurisprudence or a fair trial or innocent until proven guilty or incarceration. Libertarians forget that, in promoting voluntary association, they automatically authenticate voluntary disassociation; everything from caveat emptor to outright ostracism. The anarcho/ultra milieu is just that—a milieu—and not a community, so its ability to put social pressure to bear is limited. Nevertheless, the option exists and needs to be exercised.

The initial opportunism and sectarianism that marked Bolshevik Russia’s attempt to set up a German National Bolshevik sock puppet does not account for the ongoing opportunism and parasitism of this fascist tendency’s constant attempts to piggy back onto the Left. But neither does it set up some sort of equivalency between socialism and fascism. This is not an argument either from Hanna Arendt’s sophisticated if misguided thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism or its dumbed down High School version that, if one travels far enough along the extremes of either political Left or Right one circles back around toward its supposed opposite, and thus that all political extremism is essentially the same. There are plenty of credible differences that make a true distinction between extreme Left and Right—libertarian and totalitarian—which I’ve covered in past columns. Unfortunately, this sophomoric understanding of politics persists, as does its flip side, a kneejerk contrarianism. So, when a mendacious former columnist proclaims on Facebook by analogy to the original American revolution that “This time it’s TWO royal families,” the Bushes and the Clintons, from which we must declare our independence by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the sheer knuckle-dragging idiocy is breathtaking. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed, particularly when it’s clear there’s no exaggeration, hyperbole or parody intended in his political analysis, such as it is.

What is involved is a sentiment akin to épater la bourgeoisie, the rebellious, indiscriminate desire to stick it to the establishment, which needs to be critiqued. The post-Romantic Decadents of the fin de siècle were fond of skewering the cultural banality, economic regimentation and political conformity of the stodgy middle-class society of their day. In this they prefigured virtually every rebellious Bohemian youth culture that followed, from the wandervogel to punk rock. Michael “Bommi” Baumann expressed this best in How it all Began/Wie Alles Anfing when he wrote: “You still didn’t feel like part of the left; but everything that was in opposition was good, including the neo-Nazis. […] Fascism as such was in opposition though, and you found pure opposition better than this petit-bourgeois mediocrity. You considered everything good that didn’t agree with it.” Or, as Sean Aaberg of Pork Magazine crudely puts it in protesting what he considers our “increasingly uptight society,” his magazine’s rebellion for its own sake and swastika iconography is “not suitable for squares” and a way of “outing closet totalitarians.”

As for Laibach’s sly lampooning of similar left-right political lunacy, return to the postmodern angst which begins their song “Tanz Mit Laibach” and defines the épater les bourgeois motivating much fascist courting of the Left:

Wir alle sind besessen

Wir alle sind verflucht

Wir alle sind gekreuzigt

Und alle sind kaputt
Von Reiztechnologie

Von Zeitökonomie

Von Qualität das Lebens

Und Kriegsphilosophie

Piling up the corpses: “What’s Left?” July 2015, MRR #386

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember [that] which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid [wait] for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Samuel 15: 2-3 (King James Version)

Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?

Adolf Hitler

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.

attributed to Josef Stalin

Last column, I took anarchism to task and concluded that it is ineffectual in practice. Hell, I called anarchism a joke. But what about anarchism’s chief rival on the Left? Time was, Marxist-Leninist one-party totalitarian regimes ruled over a fifth of the world’s land surface, governing around a third of humanity. Communism has fallen on hard times since those dizzying heights in 1985, yet there are still those who would revive Leninism’s lost fortunes, with many more nostalgic for the “good old days” of Stalinist dictatorships. So, let’s delve into one of the more prominent aspects of the Marxist-Leninist Left, that being mass murder.

Talking about mass murder is a tricky business. After all, who’s hands aren’t steeped in blood. Several years ago, France and Turkey exchanged words in a diplomatic row in which the French insisted that Turkey take responsibility for the slaughter of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, with the Turks responding that France had butchered perhaps 1.5 Algerians during the Algerian colonial war from 1954 to 1962. Claims and counterclaims flew back and forth as to who did what, when, and how, and as to whether one incident of mass murder could be compared to the other. What I’m prepared to do is far more foolish, but potentially more interesting, in that I plan to set up a ranking for mass murder, starting with Leninism’s crimes.

A note first on terminology. Mass murder and mass killing are the general words for a host of terms with more specific meanings. Genocide means the elimination of a race, ethnocide of an ethnic group, and classicide of a social class. Democide means the intentional killing of large numbers of unarmed people, and politicide the extermination of people based on their political beliefs or the deliberate destruction of a political movement. Femicide or gynocide refers to the massacre of women, and fratricide of family members killing each other, which is often used as a synonym for civil war. Finally, ecocide refers to the wanton destruction of an ecology or natural environment. All are perpetrated primarily, but not exclusively, by governments. Humans have become so expert at slaughter that there is a need to specify the kind of slaughter.

Now, let’s consider history’s real mass murderers, a variety of totalitarian regimes all from the 20th century. For sources, I will be using Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder by R.J. Rummel, 1992, and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Laffont, Courtois, Werth, Panné, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, 1999. And, to further the thesis I’m arguing, I will consistently cite mortality figures in the mid range.

I’ll begin with worldwide Marxist-Leninist communism. Through “bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide,” all Marxist-Leninist regimes since 1917 have butchered around 110 million people. This breaks down for the major players to 62 million for the old USSR, 40 million for China, 2 million for Cambodia, 1.6 million apiece for North Korea and Vietnam, and 1 million for the former Yugoslavia, covering in total eastern Europe and most of the Asian land mass, as well as significant portions of Africa. Count in another 30 million for aggressive wars, civil and guerrilla wars, insurrections and uprisings, and the dimensions of this “red holocaust” are complete.

But wait, this is superseded by the “brown holocaust” perpetrated by Nazi Germany, which murdered outright roughly 20,946,000 people from 1933 to 1945. That includes some 5,291,000 Jews, 258,000 Gypsies, 10,547,000 Slavs, 220,000 homosexuals, 173,500 handicapped Germans, and assorted millions of French, Dutch, Serbs, Slovenes, Czechs, and other European nationals. This was accomplished “[b]y genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, ‘euthanasia,’ starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps.” Add that to the approximately 20 to 30,000,000 slaughtered by the Nazi’s militarily, and that’s a figure of over 40-50 million human beings obliterated in something like 12 years across continental Europe (this excludes all other fascist regimes; Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Hirohito’s Japan, etc.).

To emphasize how the Nazi “brown holocaust” qualitatively surpassed the Communist “red holocaust,” another quote from R.J. Rummel is in order. With respect to mass murder alone: [a]nnually […] the Nazis killed six to seven people out of every hundred in occupied Europe. The odds of a European dying under Nazi occupation were about one in fifteen. […] Moreover, even though the Nazis hardly matched the democide of the Soviets and Communist Chinese […] they proportionally killed more. […] The annual odds of being killed by the Nazis during their occupation were almost two-and-a-half times that of Soviet citizens being slain by their government since 1917; over nine times that for Chinese living in Communist China after 1949. In competition for who can murder proportionally the most human beings, the Japanese militarists come closest. The annual odds of being killed by the Japanese during their occupation of China, Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Indochina, and elsewhere in Asia was one in 101. Given the years and population available to this gang of megamurderers, the Nazis have been the most lethal murderers; and Japanese militarists next deadliest.

Much the same point is made by Paul Preston in his massive tome The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2011). Without discounting, downplaying, or apologizing for either the calculated CP-instigated Red Terror or the more spontaneous anarchist-inspired massacres of capitalists and clergy in the Republican zone, Preston contends that around 50,000 Spaniards were slaughtered by Republican forces, as compared to 150,000 Spaniards massacred by Franco’s rebel forces throughout Spain. This lead Preston to conclude that Franco’s atrocities during and after the Civil War amounted to nothing less than a holocaust, “a carefully planned operation to eliminate … ‘those who do not think as we do’,” a mass murder of Spaniards unprecedented in Spanish history.

In contrast, let’s try and calculate this country’s genocidal/democidal burden, an extremely difficult task for several reasons. First, the native Americans. It’s impossible to know how many Indians lived in what would become the territorial US of A prior to colonization, and thus it becomes just as impossible to come up with a number for those outright murdered by colonial and national Americans. Even if we take the maximum figure of 112 million natives residing across both North and South America prior to 1492, only some 6 million remained alive in the western hemisphere by 1650. Upwards of 90% of the native population on this continent died of European diseases introduced unintentionally after 1492, well before the first English colonists set foot in what would become the United States. And this does not account for native Americans killed in military action or massacred by white American settlers. The black population can be calculated with greater precision: about 645,000 Africans were imported as slaves to America, and that population had grown to 4 million by 1860. But figuring how many black American slaves died from outright murder or were worked to an early grave through forced labor, again, is impossible to accomplish with any accuracy. For the sake of argument, I propose using a figure of 1.5 million, which is incredibly high.

Now, let’s assume that every war Americans ever fought, as colonials and nationals, was imperialist in nature. That amounts to some 26 more or less official wars, and well over 200 unofficial interventions, in which around 1,340,000 Americans died, including the 625,000 who perished during the US Civil War. We didn’t get going with our military killing machine until we started targeting Asians (WW2—2 million Japanese; Korea—1 million North Koreans, 500,000 Chinese; Vietnam—1 million Vietnamese). Combining these numbers with other enemy casualties, we come up with around 8 million dead due to American military imperialism. Now, consider the costs of American capitalism, in workplace casualties, workers killed by Pinkertons and police, industrial accidents, overwork, etc., and put that figure at another 1.5 millions, again super inflated. Let’s put America’s overall genocide/democide of 11 million killed over some 400 years across the territorial United States, western Europe, and select regions of the Third World. This is an insanely hyperbolic description of American mass murder. To make the point this column is striving for, let’s double the figures for people of color killed and death by capitalism to 3 million each as a kind of “liberal white male guilt” gratuity, and round the total American genocide figure to an even 15 million slaughtered over 4 centuries over the same area described above. As a budding leftist in the 1960s, I believed that a wildly exaggerated number like 15 million was quite reasonable.

I’m sure I’ve opened myself up to criticism from those pomo Leftists (the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, anti-ageist, anti-ableist bastard children of the New Left and French philosophy) who would contend that, because I’m white, male, well-educated, and middle class, I passed—I avoided experiencing America’s full genocidal/gynocidal wrath. But when compared to the blood-soaked history of Nazi Germany or Leninist communism, America’s crimes, no matter how much I intentionally exaggerate them, simply cannot compare.

To conclude, Nazi Germany ranks at the top of the list for murdering people, followed closely by the rest of fascism. Leninism worldwide is actually only middling with respect to massacre. And the USA is in a paltry third place.

There are advantages to living in a liberal Western democracy.

(Copy editing by K Raketz.)

Israel and Palestine, confict without end: “What’s Left?” October 2014, MRR #377

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Jim Hightower

I’m a middle-of-the-road moderate.

This feels like a stand up AA confession. Me, “Lefty” Hooligan, a moderate. But I’m middle-of-the-road when it comes to the whole Israel/Palestine conflict.

I grudgingly agree that Israel has the right to exist, but I vehemently oppose Israel’s military overkill, its collective punishment and massacre of Palestinians in pursuit of eradicating Hamas terrorism. I grudgingly agree that Palestinians should constitute their own nation, but I adamantly oppose Hamas terrorism, its indiscriminate targeting of Israelis and threats to wipe out the Jewish people. I think that Israel’s overwhelming military and economic superiority over the Palestinians, this massive day-to-day power imbalance, virtually guarantees the abuse of that power in the form of discrimination and slaughter, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.*

I wasn’t always such a reluctant moderate with respect to the bloody Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I know the subject deeply, but narrowly, and from one side only. As an undergraduate at UCSC, I studied Jewish history in general and Zionist history in particular, with a six month stay on an Israeli kibbutz (commune) in the Jezreel Valley with my Jewish girlfriend in the summer and fall of 1974. My grasp of the Arab side of things is glancing at best. Yet, like a shard of hologram properly illuminated, a slice of history properly studied will reveal the whole. What got in the way of my extremist sentiments, and what made me a moderate was what Israelis like to call “the facts on the ground.”

I was and remain a communist. I was intrigued by Zionist socialism and I had an affinity for kibbutz-style communism, but I soon discovered how intrinsically rightwing they were. Zionist colonial society was dominated from 1920 on by the Histadrut labor federation—part trade union, part capitalist owner and employer, and part de facto state. The Histadrut ran close to 75% of the Zionist economy in pre-1948 Palestine until the newborn Israeli state nationalized half of that, and the labor federation’s social power has been on the decline ever since. The national syndicalism professed by the Histadrut and key to Labor Zionism shunned class struggle for Jewish national unity. It was a non-Marxist, even anti-Marxist socialism rooted in Romantic notions of organic nationalism and ethnic purity.

That’s where the supposed radical communism of the kibbutzim came from. Labor Zionism, often used synonymously with Zionist socialism, was first cousin to Stalin’s “socialism in one country” in promoting a “socialism for one people,” the Jewish people. And Zionist socialism transcended its nationalist socialist roots into true proletarian internationalism only in communist fractions evident within the halutzim (pioneers) of the third aliyah (settler wave). These communist fractions were tangential to the kibbutz movement led by the Hashomer Hatzair and then by the old MAPAM political party. They were central to the Gdud Ha’avoda (Labor Brigades) founded by members of the Crimean Commune who followed Joseph Trumpeldor, which were then deliberately destroyed by the Histadrut. As such, this international working class communism, which attempted to make common cause with the Arab workers in Palestine, was a minority of a minority within the Zionist colonial project. It was doomed to failure. Probably why I identify with it to this day. Ze’ev Sternhell’s book The Founding Myths of Israel makes these arguments most cogently. Israeli society has since moved inexorably ever rightward.

Then as now, I’m an anti-statist. I don’t like to see the building and proliferating of nation-states. I don’t like people aspiring to create them, and I certainly don’t like people butchering each other with them. Arthur Waskow once spun out a lovely libertarian utopia for the area of Israel/Palestine that entailed decentralized federations of autonomous Jewish and Arab cantons residing side by side in a fully binational society. Sure, and if the cat laid eggs, so goes a yiddish saying, it would be a chicken. I don’t think I was ever that naive to imagine anarchism taking root in the area anytime in the foreseeable future. I was disabused of such fantasies by having experienced reality in Israel. Part of that reality is the current demographics of the region. There are 6.1 million Jews and nearly 5.8 Arabs living in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

These facts beg for a creative reconsideration of the “one state solution” put forward by the old pre-Oslo Palestine Liberation Organization for a democratic, secular nation-state in the region of Palestine. Not quite as elegant was the call for a binational state in Israel/Palestine by Zionist socialism’s left wing, the aforementioned Hashomer Hatzair and MAPAM, that evaporated with the formation of Israel’s Labor Party in 1968. The chances for either a democratic secular state or a binational state in Israel/Palestine however are slim to none, not without a lot of violence and social disruption. Far more blood and chaos will accompany the least favorable but far more likely solution, the “two state solution” that creates a Palestinian nation-state in the Occupied Territories alongside a mostly intact state of Israel. Not only is the two-state solution the highly probable outcome of decades of suffering and war, but it is likely to reproduce the same power imbalance, a militarily and economically hegemonic Israel running roughshod over a string of poverty-stricken Palestinian Bantustans.

Which is a tragedy considering that, at least on the Jewish side of things, there have been imaginative ways for a people to live and thrive without the need for a nation-state. At the beginning of the 20th century, as youthful European Jews took to socialist ideas and movements of various stripes, Zionist socialism predominated in a nationalist Zionist movement that promoted the colonization of Palestine under the patently false slogan of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Diametrically opposed to all forms of Zionism were the Jews who committed themselves to Marxist social democracy, specifically to the internationalist socialism embodied by the Bolsheviks and their Third International, which called for world proletarian revolution to bring about a classless stateless society. The Jewish Labor Bund positioned itself between these two poles to develop a hybrid socialism unique to the social situation of the Jewish people.

The Bund operated in eastern Europe, in the territorial ghetto known as the Pale of Settlement to which the Jewish people were confined and in which the Jews often comprised a sizable minority of the population. The socialism advocated by the Bund aligned with the international working class movement while defending the national characteristics of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement. The Jews of the Pale lived separately (in urban ghettos and Jewish villages called shtetls), had their own language (yiddish), religion, customs and culture, and shared various autonomous social institutions (schools, community councils, and mutual aid societies). From these facts the Bund derived a form of Jewish nationalism that downplayed any united sovereign Jewish territory for one based on Jewish community control of local schools, police and government. As such, the Jewish Labor Bund’s program prefigured the program of the Black Panther Party in the United States.

The Third Reich’s “Final Solution” put an end to the aspirations of the Jewish Labor Bund by liquidating the Jewish people in eastern Europe. I got to know some Bundists who had immigrated to New York City after the second World War. When they didn’t entirely assimilate, they became either ardent Communists or soft Zionists. Few remained affiliated with the Jewish Labor Bund, which like yiddish has recently experienced a revival in interest.

The spectrum of Zionist socialism/ Jewish Labor Bund socialism/ international socialism parallels a broader spectrum within the Jewish people at large, generated by the question over the nature of the Jewish people. There are those who would argue that the Jews aren’t a people at all, among them outspoken jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, and academic Shlomo Sand whose book The Invention of the Jewish People summarizes this position clearly. Then there are those at the opposite end of the spectrum like the Jewish Defense League who believe that the Jewish people are a nation, even a race, chosen by God and given the land of Israel as their inalienable birth right. Most who weigh in on the subject, including most Jews, hold a middle position, that the Jewish people are some amalgam of race, nation, ethnicity, tribe, culture or religion which cannot be clearly fixed. The point is moot however, given that Jews consider themselves Jews, and define themselves as Jews no matter the argument or the circumstance.

The Jews have existed as a self-identified, dispersed people at least since the Babylonian destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE. Thus, the Jewish people have survived partly or entirely without a nation-state for over 2,500 years. The Roman destruction of the second temple in 70 CE forced the Jews to adapt with the development of the synagogue as a temple in absentia. Yet whether this Jewish dispersal is termed exile or diaspora, it took more than the institution of the synagogue to hold it together. Vibrant centers of Jewish culture and learning overlapped concentrations of Jewish population first in ancient Babylonia, then in Moorish Spain, and finally in Medieval Poland.

These dynamic social/cultural/religious centers provided guidance and cohesion to the Jewish people as a whole, throughout the eastern hemisphere and eventually the world, and were crucial to Jewish survival. It can be argued that this core/periphery structure of Jewish existence was in crisis by 1850, with the rise of the modern nation-state. But what can’t be substantiated is the Zionist assertion that without a Jewish nation-state, the Jewish people will always be threatened by discrimination, harassment, murder, pogrom and holocaust. One of the most dangerous places in the world for a Jew to reside today is in Israel. All it would take is for Israel to lose just one war in order to raise the very real specter of Jewish genocide once again.

Between the wholly inadequate two-state solution and Waskow’s anarchist idyll, there are a number of quite possible, favorable resolutions to the Israel/Palestine conflict. I’ve highlighted as viable examples leftwing Zionist socialism’s binational state, the one-state solution of the PLO’s secular democratic Palestinian state, the Jewish Labor Bund’s socialist program for Jewish territorial autonomy, and the non-state core/periphery structure so critical to Jewish survival as a people over the millennia. This middle ground is quite broad, providing a wide political middle-of-the-road from which true moderation can arise. And a moderate, just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be wonderful. In this instance, I would dearly love to refute Barry Goldwater when he said: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

*I rely on Max Boot’s exhaustive study Invisible Armies for the distinction between formal military action and terrorism.

Anarchism for Fools: “What’s Left?” April 2014, MRR #371

Part Three: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

What has to be stressed here, regardless of the philosophical foundations of Anarchism, is that National-Anarchism is Anarchism sui generis. An Anarchism of its own kind. We are not answerable to or responsible for the actions of those who also happen to call themselves ‘Anarchists,’ be they contemporary or in the past.

Troy Southgate

When I hear the term sui generis, I reach for my gun. Also, the term “beyond left and right.” Both are attempts to provide a patina of philosophical respectability to the idiocy that is National Anarchism (NA), an oxymoron if there ever was one.

Two columns ago, I discussed the relationship of capitalist libertarianism to historical libertarianism, that is, to old school anarchism. I didn’t require more than a sentence to position anarchism, which referred to itself as social anarchism, within the context of socialism or the Left as a whole. Individualist anarchism, up to and including its current capitalist iteration, is categorical in identifying the various schools of social anarchism as leftist. And that tiny yet shrill tendency calling itself post-left anarchism, first promulgated by Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed, acknowledges the leftism of much previous anarchism by defining itself as “post.” That NA describes itself as a unique “category in itself” suits most anarchists just fine, as they would be happy to be completely rid of these poseurs. NA is far from Fascism sui generis, however. In point of fact, NA is Fascism, simple and unadorned and quite generic.

Which brings up the tricky task of defining Fascism proper. The thumbnail description associated with Fascism is that it’s an “anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist revolutionary ultra-nationalist ideology, social movement and regime.” This tweet-length one-liner is woefully insufficient for most academics interested in researching the nature of Fascism and coming up with a paradigmatic “Fascist Minimum” that can encompass as many types of ultra-right ideological/social phenomenon as possible. But for those on the ultra-right, the above sound bite of a description is too definitive because it tries to nail down what seeks to remain intentionally vague, flexible, and sui generis.

I noted the explosion of political ideas, associations and actions, left and right, that occurred from the fin de siècle to the beginning of the second World War. With respect to the European ultra-right in the decades inclusive of and following La Belle Époque, and aside from Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism, there was political futurism, Traditionalism (Evola), völkisch nationalism (Dickel), Novecentismo (Bontempelli), Maurras’s Action Française, young conservatism (Jung), conservative revolutionism (van den Bruck), Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, national revolutionism (Jünger), the German Freikorps, the Croatian Ustasha, National Bolshevism (Niekisch), leftist “universal fascism” (Strasser), Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Perón’s Justicialismo, ad nauseum. This is by no means an exhaustive list of fascist, quasi-fascist, para-fascist, and crypto-fascist tendencies, movements and regimes in this era, and in a European context.

Despite the short-lived attempt to found a Fascist International Congress at Montreux, Switzerland in 1934-35, the relationships between these highly fractious tendencies, movements and regimes were often less than cordial, and sometimes quite brittle. To briefly illustrate: when National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy formed their Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 it became clear that Mussolini’s Italy was to play “second fiddle” to Hitler’s Germany in military expansion, empire building, and war against the allies. The Allied invasion of Italy led to German intervention and invasion to shore up Mussolini’s Fascist regime, resulting in the consolidation of the rump Italian Social Republic in northern Italy in 1943. The pseudo-leftist Salo Republic proved a “shrinking puppet-state of the Nazis in economic and agricultural production, in foreign affairs, and in the military campaign against the Allies.” (Roger Griffin) Both Germany and Italy came to the aid of Franco’s Nationalist rebels in Spain with military and financial assistance between 1936 and 1939. After Nationalist victory, Franco joined with Mussolini and Hitler to clamp down on liberal, democratic, secular social elements generally, and specifically to smash the international socialist working class, from anarchist to Bolshevik. But, given that Francoismo was above all traditionalist in orientation, Franco also dissolved the overtly fascist Falange as a party, declared Spanish neutrality, refused to enter the war as an ally of Germany, nixed a plan to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British fleet, and even allowed Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi Final Solution to transit Spanish territory. Italian Fascism made easy accord with the monarchy and the Vatican. Rightwing Italian critics of Mussolini and his Fascist regime were rarely imprisoned, but were occasionally placed under house arrest. Julius Evola was kept at arms length, never embraced but never renounced. Hitler’s National Socialist Germany was far more brutal in dealing with right wing critics and competitors. During the Night of the Long Knives (Operation Hummingbird) in 1934, Hitler ordered the murder of aristocratic and Catholic conservative opposition figures (von Bose, von Schleicher, von Kahr, Klausener, and Edgar Jung), as well as the purge of National Socialism’s left wing. Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was first imprisoned and then killed, while Nazi leader Gregor Strasser was assassinated. His brother, Otto Strasser, was driven into exile. The literary figure, war veteran and national revolutionary Ernst Jünger was kept under constant surveillance by the regime.

(Röhm and the Strasser brothers considered themselves “second revolutionaries.” Yet it would be a “historical mondegreen,” referencing Death in June, to believe that the actual history of the Third Reich would have been much different had either of these three been führer instead of Hitler.)

Fascism guilefully thinks of itself as sui generis, beyond left and right. The various groupings within and surrounding Fascism, as well as its National Socialist “blood brother,” each insist on their status as sui generis. In attempting to synthesize a violent opposition to Enlightenment liberalism, Marxism, and capitalism with an embrace of populism, revolutionism, and ultra-nationalism, these ultra-right ideologies, movements and regimes exemplify not fusion and unification but splitting and division. Their sense of distinctiveness and uniqueness might be laid at the feet of Nietzsche and his philosophy of aristocratic individualism, what Jünger called the sovereign individualism of the Anarch. Yet more fundamental socio-political causes must be cited. Unlike Marxism’s highly programmatic politics, the Fascist ultra-right was decidedly less programmatic, and what platforms it did generate were intensely idiosyncratic. Leninism posited a scientific, universalist, international socialism that, when corrupted by nationalism, devolved into particular socialist types, say, a socialism with Chinese or Vietnamese or Cuban characteristics. By contrast, the particular cultural, social and national characteristics of the countries out of which Fascism arose, combined with Fascism’s innate syncretic tendencies, has produced a plethora of Fascist types. Consider the problem of nationalism. In opposition to the secular nationalism born of the Enlightenment, there is Evola’s Traditionalist pan-European Imperium on the one hand and on the other hand de Benoist’s Europe of a thousand flags comprised of separate tribal ethnies. Way stations along this spectrum are völkisch pan-Germanic Aryanism and the Romantic organic nationalism that was a fusion of local ethnic groups within a given nation-state. Then there is the issue of racism. National Socialism’s biological racism and virulent anti-Semitism stands in stark contrast to Italian Fascism which was relatively free of anti-Semitic and eugenic strains until influenced and then subsumed by Nazi Germany.

Academics and intellectuals, whose job it is to formulate unifying theories and overarching explanations of phenomenon, have been stymied by the variegated nature of Fascism. Attempts to define a “Fascist Minimum” have been as diverse as Fascism itself. Marxist approaches have predominated, and at times have been augmented by post-Marxist modernization, structural and psycho-historical theories. Liberal reactions to Fascism have remained thoroughly splintered, ranging from Nolte’s theme of resisting modernization to Payne’s understanding of a new kind of nationalist authoritarian state. A related conceptual constellation offered by Mosse’s “third way,” Sternhell’s “new civilization” and Eatwell’s “new synthesis” hints at a way forward. Personally, I find Roger Griffin’s summation that “Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” the most convincing.*

Which brings us back to National Anarchism. Troy Southgate has been engaged in “serial Fascism” based on a “palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” for most of his political career, pursuing the next big Fascist thing from the National Front, through the International Third Position, the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction, Synthesis and the journal Alternative Green, to his current New Right and National Anarchist affiliation. “As a prelude to an anticipated racial civil war and a collapse of the capitalist system,” NA seeks to “[E]stablish autonomous villages for völkisch communities, which have seceded from the state’s economy and are no-go areas for unwelcomed ethnic groups and state authorities.” Setting aside the ersatz weekend hipster tribalism of your typical Burning Man participant as an outright insult to aboriginal realities, NA’s anti-statist ethnic tribalism is, in actuality, well within the range of Fascist nationalism demarcated by Evola and de Benoist. NA’s racism falls within the spectrum defined by German Nazism and Italian Fascism as well. (“My race is my nation,” or so goes the White Nationalist slogan.) Whether NA prefers mutualism or autarky to national socialism or corporatism for its so-called anti-capitalist economics is also not unusual. Presenting itself as a resynthesis of “classic fascism, Third Positionism, neo-anarchism and new types of anti-systemic politics born of the anti-globalization movement” simply reveals the syncretic character inherent in Fascism as a phenomenon. That this segment of the “groupuscular right” champions a “a stateless palingenetic ultranationalism” amounts to subtle nuance, not radical difference. Nothing distinguishes NA from Fascism proper. Nothing sui generis here. Absolutely nothing.

So, let’s forego all the academic abstractions and get down to brass tacks. Individuals who claim NA talk to, hang out with, organize among, and act alongside fellow ultra-right Fascists. They claim to “go beyond left and right,” but they fully identify themselves as New Right. If NAs rear their ugly pinheads on internet forums like anarchist LibCom or leftist RevLeft, they are immediately identified, isolated, and purged. And if they openly show their faces at explicitly anarchist and leftist events, they risk a serious beat down. In contrast, NAs can and do freely join, discuss, argue and debate on white nationalist/white supremacist forums like Stormfront. They’re also welcome on disgruntled anarcho-individualist and self-styled pan-secessionist Keith Preston’s greatly attenuated Attack The System forum. His American Revolutionary Vanguard argues that “the mainstream of the anarchist movement has become unduly focused on left-wing cultural politics, countercultural lifestyle matters, and liberal pet causes.” His stated goal is to go beyond the Left/Right political spectrum to: “work towards a synthesis of the currently scattered anarchist tendencies. These include anarcho-collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, post-structuralism, Green anarchism, primitivism and neo-tribalism from the Left, and anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-feudalism, national-anarchism, tribal-anarchism, paleo-anarchism and Christian anarchism from the Right.”

Fuck this fascist noise!
—
*[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.
Roger Griffin, Nature of Fascism
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.
Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology