By Pietro Missiaggia

When the Italian scholar of political doctrines, the historian of the “radical right”, the so-called “revolutionary left” or the anarchist movement hears about National-Anarchism and its leading ideologue, Troy Southgate, they are baffled and doubtful in the face of such a thinker and such an innovative worldview (weltanschauung); this is because he is completely ignored in the context of Mediterranean Europe, but Italy in some respects is an exception to the rule.

Troy Southgate was born in London in 1965, graduated in History and Theology at the University of Kent and became the ideologue of a National-Anarchist movement that aims to create new syntheses and go beyond the right and the left. Fortunately, in Italy Southgate’s thought has been read and is known, even if only marginally, thanks to the dissemination initiative put in place by Edizioni Sì who published his National-Anarchist Manifesto (Edizioni Sì, Milano, 2018). This article aims to try to objectively illustrate Southgate’s thought and understand, what the Italian reader can draw from his ideas in our age of pure dissolution.

Let us start from the beginning, from the definition of National-Anarchism; what does it mean? What does it represent? An oxymoron? Absolutely not, for Southgate anarchism must free itself from the distortions that the left has imbued it with. The left is an ideology functional to the system, in fact, the young anarchist who will call to the left thinking he is really an anarchist will remain a hedonist who criticizes society with the mere appearence of being more or less “militant” but in fact is an integral part of the system because he does not know how to go beyond the materialism of anarcho-communism and cannot separate the thought of thinkers like Bakunin, Kropotkin or Proudhon from that of Marxism. Indeed, they often do not even know who Marx is and are content to drink a bottle of Coke to forget. In this regard, the words of Nicolás Gómez Dávila on the fact that the faded insignia of the Communist Party is now forgotten and left in some dark closet whilst the future belongs to Coca Cola and pornography (see Pensieri Antimoderni, Edizioni di AR, Padova, 2010) are very topical.

Another mistake made by the left, although it will never admit it on behalf of Southgate; is the fact of having transformed anarchy, as well as any ideology that has come into contact with its cultural substrate, into a dogmatic, paranoid and centralised system. Current are the words of our ideologue when he states: “[…] the majority of people on the Left, will not be able to rest until they are able to organise every single minute aspect of the lives of others.” (Op.cit. Milan, 2018 cit. p.30) “The Left, just like the totalitarian Right, refuses to tolerate anyone who tries to oppose its vision of an all-inclusive society.” (Ibid)

The Left, for Southgate, is part of a paranoid and obsessive-compulsive system (In this regard we cite Kerry Bolton’s text, The Psychopathic Left, Gingko Edizioni, Verona, 2018); part of a totalitarian mentality inherited partly from twentieth-century totalitarianisms and, on the other hand, from its own secularised dogmatism that does not know how to go beyond the twentieth century. The Marxian dialectic is now out of date; its devotees should cut their own dead branches to make their ‘ideological tree’ sprout new buds, but very often they fail to do so because they have forgotten both Marx and how to renew themselves.

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