By Cake Boy
Yesterday, I read this Libcom article about the national anarchist movement. I take parts from it and respond to it.
https://libcom.org/article/rebranding-fascism-national-anarchists-spencer-sunshine
National-Anarchists appropriate leftist ideas and symbols, and use them to obscure their core fascist values.
Anarchism is the idea that all social relationships should be voluntary.
A pluralist anarchist world would be a world in which different worlds could exist—the same as multicultural modernity but more radical. Some days ago, I wrote about what anarchism would actually look like in its most realistic way.
What kind of values you have as a person isn’t really a topic for anarchism. As long as you don’t impose them on other people.
But it represents what many see as the potential new face of fascism.
National anarchism is harmful, but it’s different from the fascism we have known. It doesn’t want to create a police state like the German and Italian fascists wanted. So, I wouldn’t say it’s the new face of fascism. I would say it’s deradicalized fascism. This is good because national anarchism is far less dangerous and radical than old fascism. Libcom isn’t really honest about the theory of national anarchism. When we are not honest, we only create chaos.
Despite this claim, National-Anarchist ideology is centered directly on what scholar Roger Griffin defines as the core of fascism: “palingenetic populist ultranationalism.”
I wouldn’t really call the national anarchists nationalists because they don’t want to create a centralized nation-state or an etno state. They want to live with people of their own color. This is already possible anyway, so I don’t understand what they discuss. For example, already white nationalists live together in villages in Germany. They form small cults, and people who have a dark skin color wouldn’t go there because that’s dangerous. Of course, this is a very marginal phenomenon.
Leftist anarchism is itself based on palingenetic populism, by the way. It believes that after ‘the revolution,’ we will live in a new economic and cultural setting. A ‘revolution’ that never seems to happen because it’s all just ‘live-action role-playing’
For the National-Anarchists, this “ultranationalism” is also their main ideological innovation: a desire to create a stateless (and hence “anarchist”) system of ethnically pure villages.
The nationalist anarchists don’t care about other people living in multiculturalism; they only want to have their own whites-only spaces. They don’t want to impose their racial views on others. They will understand that 99,999 percent of people don’t have the same ideas as they have. And even if they wish that all ‘races’ would live together, when they do not have a centralized state, they can’t reach this goal. They are marginal, so they can never force people to live among their own ‘race’. They can only choose this lifestyle for themselves.
These new permutations have the potential of playing havoc on social movements, drawing activists out from the Left into the Right.
This will not happen. Nobody cares about national anarchism. They may have eighty members. The only thing they did was give anarchism, in general, a bad name, making it even more obscure.
Anarchists typically see themselves as part of a cosmopolitan and explicitly antinationalist leftwing movement which seeks to dismantle both capitalism and the centralized state
These nationalist anarchists want to do the same: destroy capitalism and the centralized state. But they desire to live with white people after the state is gone. Why they want this isn’t really clear; they think they have a lot in common with other white people.
Most anarchists—let’s say 99,99 percent—do not have this racial desire. But if someone wants to hang around only with white people, that’s up to him/her. This is now the case, and this will be the case in (pluralist) anarchism.
The National Anarchists claim they are not “fascist.”
I think they are confused. And they pollute anarchism with their confusion. Technically speaking, they are not fascists. I would say they are racist anarchists. And this is strange because 99,99 percent of both the libertarian anarchists and the leftist anarchists don’t care about someone’s so-called ‘race’. National anarchists are just anarchists who happen to be racist and want to tell everyone about their racist views. They do not understand that most people don’t share these views with them.
Being a racist doesn’t make you a fascist, per se. Every fascist is a racist, but not every racist is a fascist. Also, being racist isn’t really a problem as long as you don’t hurt or attack anyone for having a different color. It’s not forbidden to think that white people are better than black. You can think what you want. In a way, it’s all about what libertarians call the ‘non-aggression principle’. Hate as many people as you want, but don’t attack them.
The thing is, when you put a white cross on your black star, then 99,999 percent of people see you as a fascist. I don’t get why they don’t understand this. It’s as if I use a hammer and sickle symbol on my website and the red flag and then tell everyone I’m not a communist. How silly would that be?
Southgate actively promotes the work of Holocaust deniers, including the Institute for Historical Review, and holds party line anti-Semitic beliefs about the role of the international Jewish conspiracy.
We all know the Holocaust happened. Especially anarchists should understand what a state can do and what a totalitarian state will do. But then again, if he wants to deny the Holocaust or tone it down, that’s up to him. I mean, I’m in favor of free speech. You can say stupid things.
When you look at these images of the Nazis, then you see that they are the sort of people that are capable of something like the Holocaust. You see the insanity in Hitler’s eyes, and you know that he is the kind of person that will do disgusting things.
Totalitarian systems put people in camps. Hitler did this, Stalin did this.
The fact that Israel is doing horrible things now in Gaza doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen. The fact that there are a lot of Jewish bankers in America who have a lot of power doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen. The fact that the state teaches children about the Holocaust doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen.
There is not one ‘race’ controlling the world. We are controlled by bureaucratic and financial systems, not by ‘races’ or ‘religions. If bankers were white Christians, they would still do the same. In my country all the bankers and government people are Christians, they sort of do the same as the American Jewish ‘elites’. Neoliberalism and globalism are, in a way, ‘inclusive.’
Troy Southgate says of feminism, “Feminism is dangerous and unnatural… because it ignores the complimentary relationship between the sexes and encourages women to rebel against their inherent feminine instincts.’’
Here, I actually agree with Southgate, although I often don’t talk about it because it’s such a taboo topic. I’m in favor of liberal feminism. Women should have the same rights as men, etc. And, of course, women are as smart and capable as men. When I was in high school, the girls got the highest grades in math.
But I don’t believe in the radical feminist/woke feminist idea that men and women are the same. I’m not a social constructivist. Nature does play a role in human behavior. We are shaped by both nature and culture. But woke acts as if we are only shaped by culture.
Woke parents raised me, so for a long time, I believed gender is a social construct, etc. But I rebelled against my upbringing.
The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing.
It’s double. You rather have national anarchists than real fascists. Because real fascism is dangerous, and national anarchism isn’t. National anarchists don’t impose anything; they do not want to make a police state, and they don’t attack black people. But on the other hand, national anarchism gives anarchism a bad name. So, it does undermine the anarchist and libertarian projects.
I wish Southgate had just made the step from fascism to anarchism without calling it ‘national’. Just call yourself an anarchist. Skip the national nonsense.
Cakeboy is against national anarchism, but not in a way Libcom is against them. Cakeboy is more nuanced about these kinds of topics. This is the only way to get out of this mess the anarchist movement is in. Not with violence but with reasoning
This Libcom article was written a long time ago. National anarchism isn’t really a big movement at the moment, you never hear about them. But it divided a lot of people, when it came in the scene. This is why I wanted to write about it.
You can contact Cake Boy through Preston. You can also create a zine out of the cake boy texts if you want to.
