“Rather than view ‘Western civilisation’ as something that must be saved in its entirety, I would prefer to see those with a ‘conservative’ mentality adopt a more eclectic approach. To pick and choose, define one’s own borders, create your own realities, distinguish between authentic culture and a national or geopolitical trading bloc that one is simply born into.” -Troy Southgate
Tag Archives: Troy Southgate
The System Is the Real Cause of Blame 10
By Troy Southgate
Those of you who are genuinely opposed to injustice, regardless whether you think Blacks get a worse deal than Whites or vice versa, might like to set your emotions to one side for a moment and think about the following. The mass protests organised by Black Lives Matter are two steps removed from what should really become the focus of public outrage. Let’s take it one stage at a time:
1. The RACE issue is irrelevant because it has not been established that George Floyd was killed for racist motives and police violence is directed at people of all colours and creeds.
2. The POLICE are not the ultimate source of blame as they are mercenaries who are answerable to the State.
3. The SYSTEM is the real cause of blame and those in the banks, boardrooms and stock exchanges are using your taxes to fund the politicians, bureaucrats, soldiers and police who enforce tyranny on their behalf.
Just a Temporary Pass by the Establishment? Reply
By Troy Southgate
What we are being told is a ‘cultural revolution’ in which the Left is targetting mediums of expression that do not meet with its ruthless iconoclastic standards is almost certain to have the opposite effect. Indeed, whilst leftists themselves probably think they are on the verge of some kind of Maoist uprising it seems clear to me that this is little more than a juvenile fantasy and that the Left itself is being handed a temporary pass by the Establishment in order for the current period of social unrest to justify a new form of tyranny that will come back to haunt its protagonists. What begins with the toppling of historical statues or the destruction of Classical art galleries, therefore, will surely herald a new age of state-sanctioned production that will determine the value of culture in the way that social media now decides what constitutes fake news.
A New Kind of Totalitarianism Reply
By Troy Southgate
I see that sections of the American Right are now accusing Bogeyman Soros of helping to bring about a ‘colour revolution’ on home soil. How convenient. That’s how it works, you see. The Left gets taken in by the lies that have been generated by the System and the Right defends that very same System to the hilt, even to the point of reinforcing the credentials of its own alleged opposition. In other words, not only has racism against Black people been taken out of context as a means of hiding the very real persecution that is being faced by all races who live under the country’s police state, but those who try to separate the riots and demonstrations from the System are helping to sustain the illusion.
No Lives Matter to Capitalist Parasites Reply
By Troy Southgate
How interesting that British tea giants PG Tips and Tetleys have come out in support of Black Lives Matter. Although these capitalist parasites will be hoping to sell more teabags as a result of uttering a few politically correct platitudes, I suppose they’ve forgotten how they were exposed by the BBC just five years ago for exploiting Indian workers to the extent that they are “living in broken houses with terrible sanitation. Many families have no toilets and say they have no choice but to defecate amongst the tea bushes.” As the report from September 2015 continues:
Applying Lipstick to the Bride of Frankenstein Reply
By Troy Southgate
When are all these Americanised Europeans going to realise that removing a few statues, changing the signs on the bathroom door, jailing neo-nazi fantastists for making jokes about immigrants, dragging a few disabled people up the side of Mount Everest or giving the Mayor of London a Muslim name is like applying lipstick to the Bride of Frankenstein? Daddy is more than happy to build you a new play-pen, with as many safe spaces as you want, but you’re not having any pocket money and that’s final. In fact millions of people living in places like Yemen and Palestine have already upset Daddy so much that they’re going straight to bed without any supper. As far as Daddy is concerned, you can listen to Bob Marley or write ‘BLM’ on the crèche wall as often as you wish but no lives matter to Him.
The Problem is the System, Not Its Mercenaries Reply
By Troy Southgate
Having mentioned in an Anarchist forum that George Floyd was apparently charged with holding a gun to the stomach of a pregnant Black woman, or so various sub-media sources claim, I was criticised on the basis that it does not justify his murder. That’s perfectly true, of course, but my intention was to provide information and I was not inferring that it is somehow acceptable for police scum to choke somebody to death. However, when an individual is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and justice it is important to put things into context. This incident is being used to manipulate public dissent and ensure that people focus on the mercenaries of capitalism rather than on the more serious issue of the System itself. More…
“In the Eyes of the System, We Are All Black” 3
Like I used to say during the Bush years, “We are all Iraqis now.” The race and class disparities among victims of the police state are obvious enough, and should be pointed out, but by no means should it end there. The System is the enemy of all humanity, from upper-class Americans railroaded by the legal system to peasants killed by American drones in Yemen.
By Troy Southgate
Invoking so-called ‘white privilege’ as a means of pacifying an angry Black population at the expense of those who are not in possession of dark skin, thus allowing the System to get away with murdering people of all colours and creeds, is like suggesting that the vicious dog that sometimes bites your neighbour hasn’t already bitten you, too, and that whilst the dog-owner somehow remains unimpeachable you are to blame for either staying away from the dog or not making enough fuss when you get bitten.
Black and White: Unite and Fight! Reply
By Troy Southgate
People have every right to fight back against the corrupt US system and its brutal mercenaries, but let’s not pretend that police violence is reserved for Black people. At the same time, the Right’s predictable response to Black Lives Matter is to claim that most of the people who have been murdered by the police are themselves criminals and that they had it coming. Now, if it was ever officially decreed that instantaneous execution should be the penalty for criminality then millions of people in America, Black or White, would immediately be wiped from the face of the earth. Inevitably, therefore, by reacting to the racially-centred approach of Black Lives Matter in this ridicuous manner those on the Right inevitably justify the brutality of violent police officers and, thus, the institutionalised criminality of those who allow these murderers to patrol the streets in the first place. It is debatable whether all Black lives matter, just as it is debatable whether all White lives matter, but it is a fact that the American state is killing people of all colours and creeds, both at home and abroad, and that the only solution is for people to stop fanning the flames of racial conflict by attacking each another and to unite against the global establishment. That means rejecting the crass victimology of the mainstream Black organisations and the ignorant racists of the reactionary right. Black and White: Unite and Fight!
On Misrepresenting One’s Opponents 2
At long as I have known of national-anarchism, I have considered it be to a legitimate, interesting, and important form of anarchism. If other anarchists feel different, fine. The venerable anarchist principles of voluntary association and decentralization are our collective way around such conflicts.
“We do not consider ourselves ‘nationalists’ in the usual sense and the tribalism we espouse is a far cry from recognising existing borders and boundaries like France, Italy and Germany, or indulging ourselves in the jingoistic patriotism that merely reinforces oppressive states and regimes. As for the supremacist issue, we are completely and utterly opposed to that kind of thing and having a particular skin colour or certain other characteristics is not a mark of superiority or inferiority. Incidentally, I would argue that most people in National-Anarchist circles these days have joined us from the left. They trust us, and rightly so. As I always say to people, we have actually unmade more fascists than you can shake a stick at, but we need to remember that the things we actually DO stand for present an enormous challenge to the liberal-left (and the right, come to that), so if they can smear us at the slightest opportunity, they will. The means always justify the ends for these characters and they don’t care whether they are misrepresenting others if they consider them to be serious political rivals.” -Troy Southgate
National-Anarchism and Zen Buddhism Reply
By Troy Southgate
I don’t find it too far-fetched to claim that National-Anarchism is having the kind of impact – beneath the radar, in most cases – that Zen has had on Buddhism. When the purity of the latter was brought into question after its dissection into two different schools, Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna, Zen arrived on the scene to set things back on the right track.
No Return to Normal 1
By Troy Southgate
Tens of millions are labouring under the false impression that the current state of emergency is about to come to an end and that things will soon return to ‘normal’. If these people had paid more attention to history, rather than eagerly consuming anything which happens to be thrown in their general direction, a sizeable proportion will have realised that capitalism simply doesn’t work like that. What if I told you that the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the two devastating world wars on either side and the raping and pillaging of resources that has continued ever since, means that we have been in a state of emergency for a considerable period of time? You would think that the inherent selfishness displayed by those Europeans and Americans who were born during the last seventy-five years of ‘peacetime’ would awaken them to the stark realities of their own predicament.
A Precarious State in Our History Reply
By Troy Southgate
When governments impose a state of emergency it is simply a method of regaining or increasing control. Following on from that, I would even argue that we entered this precarious stage in our history during the insurrections of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when people first began to resist the ruling class on a larger scale and make a serious attempt to reverse the effects of mercantile plunder and what we are told is the Industrial Revolution.
Among these attempts to challenge capitalism one finds Republicanism, Marxism, Liberalism and Fascism, each of which have either compromised or failed to create a tangible alternative to the rapid encroachment of usury, mechanisation and globalisation. Despite the fact that a large number of people continue to put their faith in such ideologies, often to the point of simulation, the most obvious factor of all is rarely taken into consideration. The manner in which one reacts to a crisis should never become a permanent basis for a political, social and economic infrastructure and their many imperfections cannot be overlooked.
THE DIALECTICS OF DICTATORSHIP: COMMUNISM AND ITS LEGACY Reply
I have a contribution to this compilation.
Copies of THE DIALECTICS OF DICTATORSHIP: COMMUNISM AND ITS LEGACY are now available to pre-order. The book is 170 pages in length and costs just 20 EUROS with free postage to anywhere in the world. Our PayPal address is blackfrontpress@yahoo.co.uk and you can find more details below. We also accept bank transfers.
IT can be argued, and with sufficient reason, that the world already contains enough books on Communism to fill the Grand Canyon. What makes this text so different, however, is that it not only provides a theoretical and practical exposé of one of the world’s most destructive ideologies, but also offers a more contemporary reflection on Communism and the way in which we can approach it in light of the twenty-first century. With contributions drawn from a variety of political backgrounds – including Anarchist, New Right and Revolutionary Conservative thinkers – this book will serve as the perfect handbook to the thoughts and actions of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and various others from this authoritarian milieu. The contributors are Troy Southgate (Editor), K.R. Bolton, Keith Preston, Robert Steuckers, Tomislav Sunic and Dimitris Michalopoulos. Chapters include Karl Marx: Profile and Assessment; Rerum Novarum and After: The Catholic Response to Communism; Distinguishing Features of the Russian Bolshevik Party; The Loyal Companionship: Communism and the Orthodox Church; Red Alert: The German Left and the First World War; Dysgenics of a Communist Killing Field: The Croatian Bleiburg; The Development of Stalinism; Alexander Zinoviev as a Lucid Rebel; All Work and No Play: Who Really Benefits from the Marxist Obsession with Labour?; Marxism: Its Historic Role and Intellectual Legacy; and Marxism Repeats itself: First as Tragedy, Second as Farce.
Conformism in a Time of Crisis Reply
By Troy Southgate
I can’t say I’m too surprised at the high degree of naivety and conformism that we are witnessing during this period. I wonder how many people here are familiar with the old Twilight Zone episode from 1960, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street? The story concerns a group of American townsfolk who experience a series of inexplicable power failures in the wake of a suspected meteor, but as they become increasingly more frightened and paranoid they begin to turn on one another in an orgy of mob rule. It is easy to look at the people in contemporary America who are presently resisting ‘lockdown’ and dismiss them as Right-wing lunatics, and no doubt many of them are, but at least they have not quite degenerated to the shameful levels displayed by their counterparts in the British Isles.
The Periphery and the Core: All Under Imperialist Occupation Reply
By Troy Southgate
Having watched a YouTube video in which an American leftist provides a personal critique of the H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine (1895), I feel that I should use his analysis to highlight at least one of the difficulties presented by class-based thinking. Outlining the characteristics of the Eloi and Morlock races that Wells includes in his nightmare vision of the future and who are encountered by a Victorian time-traveller, the speaker went on to explain how the former are portrayed as a surface-dwelling people who live in a kind of naive utopia. He also describes how their subterranean counterparts, the Morlocks, seem brutal and primitive by comparison and live in complete darkness. We are then informed that the role of the cannibalistic Morlocks is to serve the needs of the Eloi, feeding and clothing them in exchange for the odd Eloi sacrifice. So far so good.
Hypchondria, Neurosis and COVID-19 Reply
By Troy Southgate
I began wondering about hypochondria and whether the present situation has enabled the average sufferer, or imagined sufferer, to overcome his or her neurosis. If you consider how making an appointment with the doctor may now provoke a degree of guilt in the sense that people may be inclined to feel that they are depriving a Covid-19 victim of the appropriate care and attention, it is possible that a lifelong hypochondriac might learn to overcome their persistent fear of illness. Remove the doctor from the equation and the pseudo-patient learns to draw upon one’s own inner resources. On the other hand, the fact that coronavirus is being used to evoke such fear among the global population conveniently implies that the medical fantasist now has something considerably more serious to worry about and thus a greater possibility of making that final transition from hypochondria into full-blown valetudinarianism.
Happy Carnation Revolution Day Reply
By Troy Southgate
Today marks the forty-sixth anniversary of the so-called Carnation Revolution (Revolução dos Cravos), but although large numbers of Portuguese continue to celebrate the events of April 25th, 1974, the entire occasion is but an annual display of collective psychosis. Not only was the possibility of authentic revolution shattered by the Communist Party (PCP) betrayal of Portuguese Anarchists – who, in a bloodless repeat of the Spanish Civil War, had made the mistake of collaborating with the forces of the authoritarian Left – but shortly after the pseudo-revolution had taken place the collapse of the Communist-Socialist alliance led to the appointment of Mário Soares as Prime Minister two years later and this cleared the way for Portugal’s wholesale capitulation to the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the tough austerity measures that followed.
The White Coat Priesthood Reply
“The latest American soap opera now playing to a captive audience – in the most literal sense – involves corporate puppet, Donald Trump, and fellow New Yorker Dr. Anthony Fauci. As you can see from the photographs, the presidential performer who professed to drag his heels over the coronavirus affair is doing a fine job of pretending to listen intently to the sage advice of his scientific counterpart. In fact today’s Guardian tells us that ‘America’s future hangs on this delicate relationship’ and that Fauci’s previous efforts to find a cure for HIV makes him the perfect candidate to find a solution to the present crisis. One recent poll even assures us that ‘an adamant 78% majority of Americans approves of Fauci’s performance,’ although I doubt many of these people have heard of a Frenchman by the name of Luc Montagnier.
Home-schooling: Creating Real Alternatives in Education 1
By Troy Southgate
Nowhere News
ONE OF the main reasons people choose to become involved in political activity, is due to a growing concern towards the kind of world our children will be forced to inherit in the future. As opponents of private and State capitalism we would all like to see a new generation of young people become instilled with our own healthy values, but for a System which allows its moral and intellectual standards to be fixed by the mass society – so that individuality and non-participation are discouraged – this becomes a rather subversive demand. Are we fighting a losing battle or can we somehow ensure that our message of political, social and economic decentralisation is passed on to the youth of tomorrow?
What’s Really Going On, Anyway? Reply
“There are reports that the virus has now reached the isolated Yanomami tribe of Brazil, but these stories often throw up far more questions than answers. Knowing just how murderous the globalist ruling class can be and the manner in which it has brutally killed its enemies around the world for a number of centuries I would not be surprised if this entire exercise were not a way to dispense with anyone who stands in their way, be it indigenous tribes or millions of homeless people, alcoholics, drug addicts, old people and various others considered to be a burden to the ruthless nation-states of Europe and North America. Perhaps a different (and more serious) kind of virus is being used to dispense with people in different parts of the world, or even in the poorest regions of America, it is impossible to tell at this stage. One thing that seems certain is that the figures said to relate to those dying in the West are highly inaccurate and people are being listed as coronavirus victims when they already had a number of underlying health problems or one of the existing covid viruses that we already know about. People are dying WITH coronavirus, or so we are told, but not necessarily BECAUSE of it. Each time my friends and family start quoting statistics at me I just switch off, because they are merely taking the mass media’s word for it.
As I said, perhaps they are targetting some parts of the world in a more sinister fashion? It is difficult to know what is really happening in Iran, for example, or even whether Iran itself is not simply a performer in the same theatre company. We have to look at all sides in this affair, because we are dealing with some very nasty people and it would be foolish to trust a glorified multi-national corporation that will gladly blow the legs off a Yemeni child or allow an Ethiopian mother to die of starvation as a result of having plunged her country into debt without a single moment’s thought. Why on earth should we start trusting those who have a proven track record in deceit, corruption, extortion, torture, incarceration, colonialism, imperialism and mass genocide? Anyone who takes their word for it is forgetting the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Vietnam, Bengal, Armenia, Peterloo, Tiananmen Square, Congo, Siberia, the Paris Commune and hundreds of other private and state capitalist slaughter-houses. There are people who have spent their entire lives questioning the media and who are now choosing to swallow every word. Whatever happened to the revolutionaries? Never let fear impair your ability to think objectively or keep an open mind.” -Troy Southgate
Socialism for the Ruling Class Reply
It’s interesting how the ruling class already largely practices anarchism (in the sense of being exempt from laws) and socialism (in the sense of having their individual and collective needs met through socializing the costs). Who says socialist-anarchism can’t work? 🙂
By Troy Southgate
Some of us have been pointing out for a good many years that trying to juxtapose capitalism with socialism creates a false dichotomy and yet the Far Right continues to use the term ‘socialism’ as though it were some kind of threat. It’s a threat all right, but only in the sense that it reinforces the centre and enables the usual coterie of professional crooks to keep their grubby paws on the economy. In short, despite noble efforts by anarcho-socialists like Oscar Wilde to redeem it the term ‘socialism’ has become synonymous with state captalism. This, of course, is why left-wing parties in government never make any serious attempt to implement social justice and merely provide an alternative face to that of existing financial servitude. Thanks to the arch-capitalists at the Financial Times, who have just called for a system of universal ‘socialism’ to help deal with the present situation, this fact has been made crystal clear: “If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.”
