[Keith: One of my correspondents sent me this…]

A translation of Karlheinz Weißman’s entry on “Anarchismus von rechts” (right-wing anarchism) in the Lexikon des Konservatismus (Graz and Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1996) edited by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing.

Right-wing Anarchism

The concept of right-wing anarchism seems paradoxical, indeed oxymoronic, starting from the assumption that all “right-wing” political viewpoints include a particularly high evaluation of the principle of order. . . . In fact right-wing anarchism occurs only in exceptional circumstances, when the hitherto veiled affinity between anarchism and conservatism may become apparent. Ernst Jünger has characterised this peculiar connection in his book Der Weltstaat (1960): “The anarchist in his purest form is he, whose memory goes back the farthest: to pre-historical, even pre-mythical times; and who believes, that man at that time fulfilled his true purpose . . . In this sense the anarchist is the Ur-conservative, who traces the health and the disease of society back to the root.” Jünger later called this kind of “Prussian” . . . or “conservative anarchist” the “Anarch,” and referred his own “désinvolture” as agreeing therewith: an extreme aloofness, which nourishes itself and risks itself in the borderline situations, but only stands in an observational relationship to the world, as all instances of true order are dissolving and an “organic construction” is not yet, or no longer, possible.

Even though Jünger himself was immediately influenced by the reading of Max Stirner, the affinity of such a thought-complex to dandyism is particularly clear. In the dandy, the culture of decadence at the end of the 19th century brought forth a character, which on the one hand was nihilistic and ennuyé, on the other hand offered the cult of the heroic and vitalism as an alternative to progressive ideals.

The refusal of current ethical hierarchies, the readiness to be “unfit, in the deepest sense of the word, to live” (Flaubert), reveal the dandy’s common points of reference with anarchism; his studied emotional cold, his pride, and his appreciation of fine tailoring and manners, as well as the claim to constitute “a new kind of aristocracy” (Charles Baudelaire), represent the proximity of the dandy to the political right. To this add the tendency of politically inclined dandies to declare a partiality to the Conservative Revolution or to its forerunners, as for instance Maurice Barrès in France, Gabriele d’Annunzio in Italy, Stefan George or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany. The Japanese author Yukio Mishima belongs to the later followers of this tendency.

Besides this tradition of right-wing anarchism, there has existed another, older and largely independent tendency, connected with specifically French circumstances. Here, at the end of the 18th century, in the later stages of the ancien régime, formed an anarchisme de droite, whose protagonists claimed for themselves a position “beyond good and evil,” a will to live “like the gods,” and who recognised no moral values beyond personal honour and courage. The world-view of these libertins was intimately connected with an aggressive atheism and a pessimistic philosophy of history. Men like Brantôme, Montluc, Béroalde de Verville and Vauquelin de La Fresnaye held absolutism to be a commodity that regrettably opposed the principles of the old feudal system, and that only served the people’s desire for welfare. Attitudes, which in the 19th century were again to be found with Arthur de Gobineau and Léon Bloy, and also in the 20th century with Georges Bernanos, Henry de Montherlant and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This position also appeared in a specifically “traditionalist” version with Julius Evola, whose thinking revolved around the “absolute individual.”

In whichever form right-wing anarchism appears, it is always driven by a feeling of decadence, by a distaste for the age of masses and for intellectual conformism. The relation to the political is not uniform; however, not rarely does the aloofness revolve into activism. Any further unity is negated already by the highly desired individualism of right-wing anarchists. Nota bene, the term is sometimes adopted by men–for instance George Orwell (Tory anarchist) or Philippe Ariès–who do not exhibit relevant signs of a right-wing anarchist ideology; while others, who objectively exhibit these criteria–for instance Nicolás Gómez Dávila or Günter Maschke–do not make use of the concept.

Bibliography

Gruenter, Rainer. “Formen des Dandysmus: Eine problemgeschichtliche Studie über Ernst Jünger.” Euphorion 46 (1952) 3, pp. 170-201.
Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus, ed. Antichristliche Konservative: Religionskritik von rechts. Freiburg: Herder, 1982.
Kunnas, Tarmo. “Literatur und Faschismus.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 269-74.
Mann, Otto. “Dandysmus als konservative Lebensform.” In Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Konservatismus international, Stuttgart, 1973, pp. 156-70.
Mohler, Armin. “Autorenporträt in memoriam: Henry de Montherlant und Lucien Rebatet.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 240-42.
Richard, François. L’anarchisme de droite dans la littérature contemporaine. Paris: PUF, 1988.
______. Les anarchistes de droite. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
Schwarz, Hans Peter. Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers. Freiburg im Breisgan, 1962.
Sydow, Eckart von. Die Kultur der Dekadenz. Dresden, 1921.

The interview will be aired on Voice of Reason on Tuesday, June 8,  at 9 pm Eastern U.S time.

The Sunic Journal

On Tuesday, June 8, 2010, at 9 PM Eastern US time, Voice of Reason® will air Tom’s interview with renowned writer and revolutionary thinker Keith Preston.

How to listen and/or download the show for free is listed at the bottom of this page.

Topics for discussion will include:

· Pan-secessionism as the visionary tactic for detaching organically constituted communities from the Global-Bureaucratic Empire. An overarching empire that can easily be seen as the common enemy of all population groups.

· Keith gives Dr. Sunic and his listeners a broad overview of National Anarchism and its importance as a growing movement.

· The need for communities to regain their innate sense of self-determination by recognizing not only their uniqueness, but the “legitimacy of otherness.” For National Anarchists diversity isn’t simply a political locution used to browbeat white people, but something inherent in nature that must be respected.

· Keith and Tom discuss the mind and life of the legendary Warrior-Intellectual Ernst Junger. What follows is a development of Junger’s concept of the individual man as the “anarch.”

· Junger’s warrior ethos as a means for creating a truly free man who controls his own mind no matter how oppressive and ubiquitous the criminal state becomes.

About Keith Preston and his work:

To learn more about Keith and his ideas for “Pan-secessionism Against the Empire” please explore his website Attack the System. You can download his award-winning essay “Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy” here. Keith has also written interesting and insightful essays for the Alternative Right.

Listening and download instructions:

The show will air on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network. To tune in to the live feed for this and all VoR programming, click here to use Windows Media Player or here for Winamp.  For iTunes:  open iTunes, press Ctrl+U on your keyboard, copy/paste http://208.110.82.50/vor_high.pls into the Open Audio Stream dialog box, then click OK (you will now be able to listen to VoR live on iTunes any time by clicking on ‘Voice of Reason Broadcast Network’ in your music list).  If you cannot catch it as it airs on Tuesday, the interview will be archived in mp3 format for download on Tom’s page at the VoR site soon after the show ends (archived shows are listed on the right side of page).

Thanks to Luke for digging up this old essay on Landauer.

Timely article from Elizabeth Wright at AlternativeRight.Com. In the tradition of Booker T. Washington and Zora Neal Hurston.

Unity in true diversity.

The unveiling. Great work, Letty and Sebastian!

Over the past month or so, I’ve probably had at least half a dozen conversations with different colleagues and comrades regarding the need to get this pan-secessionist, national-anarchist, tribal-anarchist, anarcho-pluralist, alternative right, conservative revolutionary, whatever we are movement off of the internet and into the realm of real-world action. Some of our colleagues (most notably, the Bay Area National Anarchists) are already doing this. So what are the rest of us waiting for?

I’ve come full circle on this. For some years (roughly 1986-1992) I was heavily involved in activism of all different kinds. If it was part of the radical Left during those years, I was part of it. After developing the desire to move past some of the deficiencies I found on the Left, I became inactive for a good number of years and devoted myself instead to private study, radical journalism, and what might be called “behind the scenes” efforts. I recall a conversation with a close comrade circa 2003 where I said that I wasn’t interested in any activism at that point, on the grounds that before we could have a fresh and dynamic radical movement, we first needed to have a solid intellectual foundation for such a movement. After observing subsequent events in radical circles for a few years after that, I wrote in 2006:

In the realm of strategy, I have to confess to being a fairly orthodox Bakuninist. This perspective emphasizes the necessity of a militant vanguard and conspiratorial secret societies composed of radical intellectuals and activists acting as a leadership corps of a larger populist movement of which the lumpenproletariat and the rural population are the class vanguard. This is the strategy that was utilized by history’s most successful anarchist movement, that of the Spanish anarchists. Indeed, it was Bakunin’s emissary Fanelli who first planted the seeds of what was to become classical Spanish anarchism. As I will attempt to demonstrate, this approach might be quite feasible for modern North America as well. At present, the primary intellectual framework of a new American radicalism is pretty well complete…

The next step is the assembling of the “principled militants” whom Bakunin recognized as the intellectual and activist vanguard of the insurgency. This is not to be confused with the Marxist-Leninist concept of the “vanguard” whose only purpose is the achievement of military dictatorship for the sake of managing a centrally planned economy. We are now in need of an organizational framework that can play the same role as that of the FAI in the development of Spanish anarchism. Translated into modern American terms, such an organization would be a combination think-tank and activist and propaganda front, sort of an anarchist alternative to ruling class entities of a similar nature…

Four years later, such “militant vanguard” groups have slowly started to emerge. With increasing frequency, websites, blogs, editorials, and new articles have started to appear that present the alternative anarchist tendencies, the alternative right, secession, and other related outlooks in a positive light. Consequently, our enemies have begun to take notice as well. Last night, it was suggested to me by a leading figure in the new radical milieu that there could and should be at least 30 alternative anarchist “tribes” active in North America. Unfortunately, there are only about five at present and plans for a few more in the works. Another comrade recently suggested to me that a present we have all the theoretical work floating around that we need at present, but what we are lacking are serious volunteers who can turn theory and action into strategy.

In recent times, as I’ve been working on networking projects for the North American secessionist movement, it has occurred to me that it will be the local groups who from the foundation of any future pan-secessionist effort. That has always been my position, but the difficulties I’ve encountered involving regional secessionist efforts have driven the point home further that localism is really where it’s at. With regards to secession, Norman Mailer rather than Jefferson Davis should be our role model. Some years ago I came up with an idea called the “100 Cities Project.” The idea was to find a hundred volunteers in a hundred different cities in the U.S. to run symbolic campaigns for mayor of their respective cities on Mailer’s model, and to do so simultaneously during the same election season so as to generate a blitz of media coverage regarding issues of decentralization and secession. But before such an effort could work, there would have to be strong local organizations capable of supporting such efforts with resources, time, and manpower.

So let’s get busy building functional and active local organization, collectives, “tribes” whatever we want to call them. Recently new groups have emerged in Dayton and Ontario. I’m told plans for a queer-oriented national-anarchist group are in the works. We can build local organizations around whatever themes or cultural identities the participant wish: race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, class, ecology, philosophical beliefs, economic preferences, etc. There can be different groups for Eurocentrists, pagans, Christians, Muslims, queers, blacks, native peoples’, women, primitivists, anarcho-capitalists, syndicalists, Evolans, Nietzscheans, and so forth. But whatever our individual or collective preferences, let’s just get something going. With these considerations in mind, I am announcing the launching of a new project for my own local area, Richmond Attack the System (RATS).

I’ve often said the pro-wrestling industry is the best analogy for the American political system. It may no longer be an analogy. Thomas Knapp seems to agree.

She’s never held political office before (and she still faces a primary fight in August), but if she’s elected this November McMahon’s 30-year career in professional wrestling will make her a strong contender for the “Most Experienced Politician in American History” belt before she ever even sets foot on the Senate floor.

Professional wrestling, as exemplified by WWE, is the purest imaginable distillation of the political ethos as art, specifically theater. Its executives have created a fantasy world in which they and the other actors fight an ongoing series of epic battles — extended wars, even — over imaginary issues.

“Marcuse Is Dead…And We Have Killed Him.” -Quagmire, ATS Reader

“What we fight is is _State_ socialism, levelling from above, bureaucracy; what we advocate is free association and union, the absence of authority, mind freed from all fetters, independence and well-being of all. Before all others it is we who preach _tolerance_ for all – whether we think their opinions right or wrong – we do not wish to crush them by force or otherwise… If our ideas are wrong, let those who know better teach us better.”

–Gustav Landauer, Social Democracy in Germany, Freedom Press 1896

Spontaneous Order

AlternativeRight.Com Is Now Live!

Community Organizing and National-Anarchism presentation by Andrew Yeoman

Tribal Anarchism Video Series Parts One, Two, Three, Four

United Anarchism Vs United Nationism

Fall of the New World Order

The Tyranny of “Tolerance”

“Isn’t it ironic that the government can criminally charge citizens with ‘conspiracy’ (an agreement or a partnership, not an action), but when a citizen even mentions that there is ample evidence (provided by the government’s own documents) that the government can and does conspire to commit and does commit various felonies, they are mocked, vilified, and labeled as kooks?

When the government came for militia, I remained silent; I was not militia.
When they locked up the religious conservatives, I remained silent; I was an atheist.
When they came for the bloggers, I remained silent; I was not a blogger.
When they came for the Muslims, I remained silent; I was not Muslim. When the came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

–Eli Cryderman

“There’s no difference between cops and outlaws.” –Kim Fowley

Fear of a Free Planet by Anna Morgenstern

NEW!!-The Armed Struggle Escalates

A Slow Burn Bonfire of the Liberties by Mark Steyn

PIGS Murder 7-Yr-Old Girl in Detroit by William Norman Grigg

Obama and Civil Liberties by John Whitehead

The $PLC Publishes Its Latest Hit List

Secessionist Sympathies Continue to Grow by Chuck Baldwin

Boutique Liberals Blowing Smoke by Maury Knutson

Reanimating Reagan by Maury Knutson

Running of the Bullshit by Maury Knutson

Not Another War, Mr. President! by Justin Raimondo

How to Survive Traffic Stops in the New America by Eric Peters

Take the Deal, Mr. President by Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan Under Attack by the Censors

Learning How to Disappear by Frank M. Ahearn

Representative Democracy Sucks! by Jim Fedako

Rand Paul’s Moment, Ron Paul’s Opportunity by Brent Budowsky

Defaults Ahead: America, Europe, China by Gary North

Time to Stop Demonizing the Germans by Ralph Raico

The Coming Sedition Act by Robert Ringer

Can a Christian Kill for His Government? by Laurence Vance

Obama’s Gulf of Tonkin by Justin Raimondo

Imagine How Pakistanis Feel About Drone Strikes by Joanne Mariner

From Safe Republic to Unsafe Empire by Bruce Fein

How Many U.S. Progressives Please the Right-Wing Israel Lobby by Ira Chernus

The End of the World As We Know It? by Stephen Walt

Ex-Cop Tells Pot Smokers How to Outsmart the PIGS by Michael May

PIGS Murder Oklahoma Man from The Aging Rebel

Getting to Know Elena Kagan by Ralph Nader

Noam Chomsky Denied Entry Into Israel by Simon McGregor-Wood

Closet Politics by Alexander Cockburn

Nepal’s First Days of May by Jed Brandt

Is There Hope for a Two-State Solution? by Naseer Aruri

Update on the Hutaree Hullabaloo by Chuck Baldwin

Putting Whitey In His Place by Paul Gottfried

Heroin and the U.S. Empire by Mark Hackard

Woody Allen: Total Idiot by Angel Lorenz

Elena Kagan and the Decline of WASP America by Kevin MacDonald

Generation X Justice by David Michael Green

Viva La Revolucion by Vox Day

Italian PIGS Get Five Years for Attacks on G8 Protestors by John Hooper

Saudi Woman Retaliates Against PIG

No Victim, No Crime by Laurence Vance

Beware a Centralized Europe by Ron Holland

“The Italians were called wops, the Jews were called hymies, I was of course a greaseball, and every Hispanic was a spic. Well, we all got along famously! It was rough, but it was fine.”

-Taki Theodoracopulos

“The “clash of civilizations” is, in a very literal sense, a clash of God and Mammon. The Islamic revolutionaries are driven by a fanatical devotion to their god and the promises they believe he has made to them if only they take up arms on his behalf. The nations of the West are driven by an almost as fanatical devotion to Mammon, that is, to wealth, luxury, power, pleasure and privilege. Further, the culture of the West combines this unabashedly materialist ethos with rejection of strength and discipline in favor of a maternalistic emphasis on health, safety, “sensitivity”, “self-esteem”, “potential”, “personal growth”, “getting in touch with one’s inner child”, “feelings” and other concepts common to pop culture psychobabble. Of course, the socio-cultural ramifications of this is to create a society of weaklings, mediocrities and crybabies.”

-Keith Preston

The Metal by Tenacious D

Tribute by Tenacious D

Master Exploder by Tenacious D

“Life is war and conflict, struggle and strife, from conception till death…Never shall the lion lie down peacefully with the lamb…”

“Why are those who espouse Univeral Love, Tolerance, and ‘Human Brotherhood,’ usually the most screwed up people you’ve ever met, socially and emotionally? Not to mention some of the nastiest and most self-centered narcissists around?”

-Chris Donnellan

“What You Believe is Not as Important as What You Do.”

-Andrew Yeoman

Audio Broadcasts

Alternative Right Radio

Antiwar Radio

Antiwar Left is Back in Gear Debra Sweet interviewed by Scott Horton

Private Violence is Bad James Bovard interviewed by Scott Horton

Medieval Political Ideas, Part One by Matthew Raphael Johnson

A Speech from Flanders by Tom Sunic

American Police Murder With Impunity Will Grigg interviewed by Scott Horton

Obama’s Iran Treachery Gareth Porter interviewed by Scott Horton

Iraq Still a Total Disaster Area Patrick Cockburn interviewed by Scott Horton

A Nation of Sheep, Ruled by Wolves, Owned by Pigs

The Revolution Within Anarchism

Forty Years in the Wilderness?

Liberty and Populism: Building An Effective Resistance Movement for North America

Organizing the Urban Lumpenproletariat

National Anarchy and the American Idea

Don’t Talk to the Police

“The king is most wounded by ridicule.” -Thomas Hobbes

Another one of the heroes of my youth passed away today. Some of my Dio favorites:

Gypsy, Neon Nights, Lady Evil, and Man on the Silver Mountain

The classic tribute from Tenacious D and a classic movie scene