"As I grow older I see clearly and distinctly what is right and wrong in our way of life and how ridiculous is everything not achieved with one's own blood and one's own soul and everything not infused with love." -- Marc Chagall
"The Things That Carried Him," by Chris Jones, is the true story of Sgt. Joe Montgomery's death in Iraq and his nine-day journey home to Scottsburg, Ind., to be buried. It's a very strange article -- essentially the story of the transportation of a corpse -- and Jones makes it even stranger by telling it in reverse chronology, beginning with the funeral and moving slowly backward to the moment when Montgomery was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.
But somehow it works, and in its painstaking accumulation of detail, it becomes a deeply moving story about how ordinary Americans live and die and attempt to help one another salvage a measure of meaning and dignity in terrible circumstances.
Growing up, Joe Montgomery was a skateboarder and a Nine Inch Nails fan with a goofy haircut and an anarchist symbol tattooed on his arm. He married his high school sweetheart and got a job in a steel forge. But no matter how hard he worked, he couldn't support his wife and three kids, so in 2005, he joined the Army.
On May 22, 2007, Montgomery and his platoon were marching down a dirt road, heading toward a farm where insurgents were rumored to hide weapons, when a buried bomb exploded. Montgomery became the 3,431st American serviceman killed in Iraq.
His body was placed in an aluminum "transfer case," packed in ice, and flown to Kuwait, then to Germany, then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the U.S. military maintains the world's largest mortuary. Montgomery arrived in a shipment of 14 corpses -- 10 soldiers, two Marines and a body too mangled to be identified...
The Australian armed forces in Afghanistan have also just lost a soldier. Jason Marks, 27, was killed and four others wounded during a firefight with the Taliban in Afghanistan (Matthew Burgess, Aussie soldier killed in Afghanistan, The Age, April 28, 2008). According to KRudd, there's more on the way: "Mr Rudd today paid tribute to the dead soldier, but warned further casualties were likely. “I think the nation needs to steel itself for higher casualties than we have had so far,” he said" (Samantha Maiden, More Afghanistan deaths likely: Rudd, The Australian, April 28, 2008).
ROME: Residents of Rome have elected the Italian capital's first right-wing mayor since World War II and given Silvio Berlusconi's conservatives another major victory, final returns from local elections showed Monday.
Gianni Alemanno took 53.6 percent of the vote versus 46.3 percent for Francesco Rutelli, a former two-time center-left Rome mayor, according to the municipality...
Alemanno is a leader of the National Alliance, an Italian 'post-fascist' party (the NA formed in 1993). Formerly, he was a member of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which included elements of Mussolini's Fascist Party, and was established in 1946 by the remnants of the Salò Republic, immortalised by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma ('Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom'). The film, incidentally, is banned (that is, refused classification) in Australia, and has been since 1998.
Alemanno is also married to Isabella Rauti, the daughter of far-right activist Pino Rauti (a former member of the MSI and also the Ordine Nuovo/New Order), and wears a Celtic cross, which in Australia, Italy and elsewhere is recognised as a symbol of the far right, though he of course insists it is a 'religious symbol'.
3) "Who did you say the good guys were again?"
During the 1960s and 1970s, members of the New Order routinely attacked anarchist and left-wing activists. On May 28, 1974, members of the Order were suspected of involvement in the bombing of an anti-fascist demonstration in the Piazza della Loggia, killing eight. Other outrages committed by Italian fascists and the Italian and US states during this period included the Piazza Fontana bombing in December 1969 (which killed 16 and injured 90), the bombing of Italicus train on August 4, 1974 (killing 12 and wounding 105 others), and the Bologna railway bombing of August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured 200.
At the time, the Italian authorities blamed the Piazza Fontana bombing on anarchists (much like the Melbourne May Day Committee blamed the 9/11 attacks on "anarchists"). Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli, a railway worker, was one of those accused. Arrested by police, he was thrown by them from the fourth floor window of a police station on December 15, 1969, and died. His story was later immortalised by Italian playwright Dario Fo in The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Naturally, no police were ever punished for his murder, although one interrogator, Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, was later shot dead outside his home in 1972. In 1988, Leonardo Marino, an ex-Fiat worker, former armed robber and member of Lotta Continua, gave himself up to the police, claiming responsibility for the murder of Calabresi. He later implicated others, including some of the leaders of the group, Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Piotresetafani: see Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, Verso, 1999.
YouTube (among other sites) also has a passable 1992 BBC documentary on the subject of Operation Gladio, a NATO-sponsored project (officially) begun in 1948 and (officially) ended in 1990. The project, managed largely by US and UK authorities, involved the creation of parallel state structures, and utilised members of the European far right (Nazis, Fascists and their epigones) to conduct terrorist campaigns against the left. The monkey business was justified by reference to the threat of 'Soviet' invasion. Speaking of monkeys, Three Monkeys contains a brief history of the Operation: N.A.T.O. Gladio, and the strategy of tension, October 2005. (See alsoThe Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP), which "provides new scholarly perspectives on contemporary international history by collecting, publishing, and interpreting formerly secret governmental documents".)
The term 'strategy of tension' refers to the ability of such networks as those derived from Operation Gladio to create or to sustain political crises. In this context the (far) right and the forces of 'law and order' are to offer themselves to a frightened population as constituting a viable alternative to violent social disorder (thus shoring up entrenched power and privilege). Gianfranco Sanguinetti's chapter 'On Terrorism and the State' (1975) provides an invaluable analysis of the strategy in the context of recent Italian politics (the English translation is by notbored).
"It wasn't just about killing Americans, and killing pigs, at least not at first. It was about attacking the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the forces of reaction. It was about Revolution."
According to IndyMedia and other sources, that segment of the Master Race belonging to the 'British People's Party' (a cheaper, sillier, and much smaller version of the 'British National Party') received some unwelcome news last weekend, as they prepared to attend a meeting in London. (Incidentally, the latest issue (Spring 2008) of the BPP's zine Imperium contains a feature article on Adolf Hitler's 'art'. Get it while stocks last!) According to the BPP: "The St.George's Day meeting of the British People's Party went ahead despite red street violence which exploded in Central London. Four members and supporters of the BPP were attacked by about twenty-five Red rabble armed with a variety of weapons"; one individual requiring hospitalisation as a result of the 'explosion'. A statement from Antifa.org.uk states that "The redirection point to the BPP meeting was completely turned over, with a number of Nazis, including BPP 'National Organiser' Sid Williamson, a drunken idiot who was supposed to be in charge of BPP security, receiving a well-deserved beating. Others fled leaving their squealing comrades to get their just desserts - with a menu which included hospital treatment! Happy Birthday Nazis! We look forward to giving you the same next year, and every chance we get."
Finally, the following post apparently originated on Stormfront:
This post is to make people aware of the events of Saturday 19th April and the attack by Antifa on the BPP Victoria meeting and to prevent the same thing happening again to any Nationalist group. There is no denying this Antifa group had at their disposal up to 35 people and they were organised, disciplined, informed and very bold. There were several football matches being played in London on that day, a heavy police presence who were doing a lot of stop and searches.
These scum cannot be dismissed as a bunch of kids or a bunch of middle class UAF students, they were very tough, split into small groups, had spotters and were carrying Stanley knives and screwdrivers. The attack took place on the way from the [rendezvous] point to the meeting place (they did not attack the meeting itself which was their aim), a couple of people got a good kicking, but the most serious injuries were a broken ankle and a comrade who was taken to hospital after being kicked unconscious. We were very lucky because previous experience shows the weapons they carry were not for show, they have and will use them. There is a strong possibility that they were present at two previous BPP/[British Movement] events, the aborted Holborn fundraiser concert for the BNP and the aborted Brick Lane paper sale. Please note both events were aborted because of a strong reaction by Antifa's allies in the Police force.
This is not the time for blame and [there] were no cowards at the BPP meeting on that day, but Nationalists must be aware of the red scum[']s potential and any meetings must have a good security regime in order. Discussing with comrades today, I would recommend that Richard Barnbrook... and Troy Southgate (a National Anarchist) [and] New Right... must be on their guard.
Be aware, don't take chances and check out newcomers who ring up and want to come to meetings, even if it means having [two] re-direction points.
Oh yeah, at the same time, the 'National Front', or what remains of it, held their annual rally. About 17 people showed up and, accompanied by about 100 police, marched (on the footpath) from one train station to another. The BNP, on the other hand, are predicted to possibly obtain a seat on the London Assembly at the upcoming election on May 1. Its candidate for Mayor is Richard Barnbrook. Barnbrook is notable for his impending marriage to the BNP ballerina Simone Clarke and his production of a film (as an Arts student in 1989) titled HMS Discovery: A Love Story, "an art film... not a bloody porn film", despite apparently including "long scenes of men undressing and fondling each other, full-frontal nudity and a naked man apparently performing a sex act on another... also repeated scenes of flagellation in which a group of semi-naked men apparently whip a fourth semi-naked man senseless to the ground".
Antifa.org.uk : Militant anti-fascist network based in the UK
"(AGI) - Bolzano, 17 April - Bolzano state police are in the processing of arresting 16 individuals in Merano, Scena, Tirolo, Lagundo and the surrounding areas as part of the "Odessa" operation. The latter is an operation conducted by the DIGOS section of police (special investigations) and is the conclusion to a complex and articulated investigation which identified and disbanded a consolidated and sizeable South Tyrol group between the ages of 17 and 27, accused of incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence for racial, ethnic and national reasons. The 8 violent acts by the youths (assault and battery as well as intimidation) were committed against young Italians and foreigners held to be different for racial, ethnic or social reasons. The group had been in contact with extreme right movements in Austria, Switzerland and Germany."
"A gang of violent neo-Nazis arrested in South Tyrol on Thursday have links to right-wing extremist groups in Austria, police believe. It was announced on Thursday that 16 men were arrested in Bolzano, Italy, all between 17 and 27-years-old, on charges of violence and instigation of racist, ethnic, and nationalist discrimination. Propaganda materials, Nazi symbols, and German Navy war flags were confiscated from members of the group who held regular meetings at a cabin in the woods - with "One Tyrol" carved into the door - where ritual induction ceremonies would take place for new members. Police could give no further clarification as to the links with Austrian extreme far-right groups but it is believed the Austrian and Italian neo-Nazis met regularly."
"...An "Adolf Hitler Memorial and BBQ" planned in association with the neo-Nazi Hammerskin Nation in Houston will involve live entertainment and a swastika lighting."
Locally, the Hammerskins are also organsing a party. Well, by 'locally', I actually mean Wellington, where local (and by that I mean 'Melbourne') boneheads Bail Up! are scheduled to play a gig, presumably at the same location as last year's event: the Satan's Slaves MC HQ in Berhampore, where Blood Red Eagle played.
"Litvinov, North Bohemia, April 17 (CTK) - The court has permitted Czech neo-Nazis to stage a march through Litvinov which the town hall previously banned, Tyden.cz said Thursday, adding that the extremists organise the march annually to commemorate one of them who was stabbed to death in Litvinov nine years ago. The court said there was no evidence proving that law might be violated during the march, the server Tyden.cz writes. "Unfortunately, this is true. The court has abolished our ban saying we did not meet the legal conditions for the march to be banned. Nothing can be done about it. We respect the court decision," Litvinov town hall's secretary Alexandra Sixtova is quoted as saying. She said the town hall would not be opposed to a commemorative meeting, but it minds the march that is to follow. "Last year, cases of violation of law occurred during the march," she added. The participants in the Litvinov neo-Nazi march annually move from Litvinov to the nearby town of Most, where left-wing extremists protested against their march last year. A 26-year-old right-winger then ran with his car into a group of anarchists, injuring two girls. The court sentenced him to three years in prison."
I believe I noted this at the time on my previous blog. The dead bonehead, Reho Miloš, was stabbed to death at a railway station in May, 1999. The person responsible was supposedly a Romany, and sentenced to 10 years in jail for the crime. Every year since then, on May 20[?], fascists have organised a protest march, often confronting counter-protesters. The year before last (2006) the fascists were attacked by antifa, who threw bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails.
April 11 marks the liberation of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, opened on July 15, 1937, and closed in 1945 by the entry of the Sixth Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army. The first inmates to arrive -- 149 in total -- were members of the resistance (see Frank McDonough, Opposition and resistance in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2001 [PDF]), Jehovah's Witnesses, previously convicted criminals, and "a few" homosexuals. Its first victim was the 23 year-old labourer, Hermann Kempeck of Altona, who was found hanged on August 14. In the intervening years, approximately 56,000 more people died at the camp. (SeeA Chronology of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.)
The liberation of the camp produced a rather remarkable phenomenon: The Buchenwald Ball, an annual celebration organised by some of the Jewish boys who managed to survive the horrors of the camp. Thus "Every year on April 11, the anniversary of their liberation, the Buchenwald Boys hold a ball filled with music, dancing, and an energy that defies their advancing ages. The ball is a defiant celebration of life, friendship, family, and love". The Ball is also the subject of a film. The celebration is also remarkable for the fact that it takes place in my hometown: Melbourne, Australia.
In Melbourne, neo-Nazis are rather thin on the ground. In fact, two local neo-Nazi groups, Blood & Honour Australia and the Southern Cross Hammerskins, have experienced some difficulties in organising their activities, activities which -- outside of babbling on the Internet -- principally revolve around the organisation of an annual gig to commemorate the death in 1993 of the founder of B&H;, the English bonehead Ian Stuart Donaldson.
In September 2006, this event took place, as it had in previous years -- in addition to gigs to celebrate Hitler's birthday and bonehead organising meetings -- at The Birmingham Hotel in Fitzroy. As a result of protest, complaint, and a boycott initiated in October 2006, the pub's management has just recently changed, and the new management is allegedly less sympathetic to the presence of neo-Nazis than the former mob. (SeeBoycott the Birmingham blog.) Support for the successful boycott came from a variety of groups -- anarchist, socialist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, queer, women's, punks and skinheads -- while opposition was largely confined to a small number of fashion punks, for whom The Birmy had also served as a venue, and for whom anti-fascist solidarity was less important than the opportunity to drink and to listen to music.
The venue for the 2007 ISD memorial gig was the Melbourne Croatia Social Club, the management of which -- like that of The Birmy -- denied and then defended the use of their premises by neo-Nazis. Fortunately, the President of the Melbourne Knights football club, Matt Tomas, took a very different line, describing the boneheads as "scum", and later apologising for the Social Club's irresponsibility (Greg Roberts, Neo-Nazis split Croat community, The Australian, October 27, 2007: "Contacted by The Weekend Australian, social club manager Catarina Malacic denied the event was held. "There was nothing on at the venue that night," she said"!).
Of course, much more information regarding fascist organising in Melbourne, Australia, Europe and elsewhere was, until earlier this week, available on my previous blog: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com. Unfortunately, as well as having to weather demented death threats, as a result of a complaint lodged by Mathaba New Network, I've had to temporarily revert to this location, and all of this information is subsequently -- albeit temporarily -- unavailable. What's interesting about this attempt at censorship, in the context of remembering the Nazi regime in Europe, is its origins. Thus among its dozen or so regular contributors, Mathaba.net boasts the presence of Welf Herfurth, a Sydney-based, German-born neo-Nazi, formerly a member of the NPD in Germany and One Nation in Australia, but currently functioning as the leader of a recently-established fascist groupuscule known as the New Right, a loose association of white supremacists who promote an ideology they term 'national anarchism'.
And now something I prepared earlier:
THE NEW REICH
All Heil The New Reich!
On September 8, 2007, approximately 15—30 individuals, all white, mostly young, and overwhelmingly male, dressed in black clothing and wearing caps, dark glasses and scarves, gathered in a group outside of Sydney Town Hall as part of a public protest against the APEC summit, scheduled to take place elsewhere in Sydney that weekend. The group carried with them three long banners — with slogans reading ‘Australia: Free Nation – Or Sheep Station?’, ‘Globalisation is Genocide’ and ‘Power to the People, Not Political Parties’ – which were joined together to form a three-sided bloc, within which those gathered assembled to form a ‘black bloc’. The group also distributed a leaflet, and claimed to belong to a group known as the ‘New Right’, one which — as other statements on the banners and on the leaflet stated — consists of ‘National Anarchists’ espousing a ‘Traditional-European Revolutionary’ philosophy. This brief essay examines ‘New Right’ philosophy and its origins in Europe, the emergence of this groupsucule in Australia, and argues that it can best be understood as the latest incarnation in a European-based trend in neo-fascist ideology and practice.
Who or what is the New Right? In Australia, the group was established in late 2005, largely via the efforts of one man, a German-born, Sydney-based businessman named Welf Herfurth. Herfurth has a long history of involvement in the far right, having been a member of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) prior to his arrival as an immigrant in 1987, and following that a member first of the Democrats, and then of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (ONP), serving as the vice-president of the New South Wales state branch (under David Oldfield) and as President of ONP’s Riverstone branch. More recently, from its inception in 2001, Herfurth has served as MC, and as one of the principal organisers — along with Dr. James Saleam of the Australia First Party (AF) — of the annual Sydney Forum. In this capacity, in 2007, Herfurth helped to arrange the visit to Australia of Croatian fascist Dr. Tomislav Sunic, a key New Right thinker, and in previous years has attempted, unsuccessfully, to arrange for a number of key members of the NPD (Gerd Finkenwirth and Udo Voight) to tour Australia and to address the Forum.
[Note that Sunic was present at the meeting which formally launched the New Right in London in December 2004. In fact, the meeting was partly organised to provide Herr Doktor with an opportunity to launch his then-recent book, Against Democracy and Equality. This text was published by Noontide Press. Noontide specialises in publishing and distributing Holocaust denial literature, and has since its establishment in 1978 by Willis Carto (1926--). It's also the publisher of The Journal of Historical Review, a key journal of Holocaust denial. Other titles published by Noontide include the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as other classic titles such as Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and ex-Ku Klux Klown David Duke's My Awakening. More recently, "The Institute for Historical Review, the most active Holocaust-denial organization in the United States, held a public meeting in Irvine, California, on March 24 [2007]. IHR director Mark Weber and two other veteran Holocaust-denial activists, Bradley Smith and Tomislav Sunic, were the featured speakers." Sunic's Kamerad in Sydney, Herr Herfurth, is also a Holocaust denialist, and a very close Kamerad of the Adelaide Institute's Frederick Toben. See Holocaust Denial: A Global Survey - 2007, Wyman Institute (PDF).]
Subjected to a liberal, middle-class upbringing in post-war Germany, as a young man in the 1980s Herfurth rejected his parent’s liberal values to embrace those of the neo-Nazi movement, establishing a role for himself as a fascist militant. Since then, his politics have developed into a more sophisticated version of the crude neo-Nazism of his youth, one which retains an overriding commitment to race and nation, but shorn of the naked bigotry and crude political analysis which remains one of neo-Nazism’s hallmarks. In particular, Herfurth is part of a generation of far right activists heavily influenced by the philosophies of figures such as Alain de Benoist (1943–), a French intellectual who, beginning in the mid- to late-1970s especially, and together with a small group of others centred around the ‘ethno-nationalist’ think-tank GRECE (1968–), reinvigorated post-war fascist thinking. Part of this project consisted of popularising and critically re-examining the ideas of earlier thinkers such as Carl Schmitt (1888—1985) and Julius Evola (1898—1974), and thereby attempting to craft a philosophy that would somehow transcend the divide between the political left and right; all in the name of establishing a new political order in Europe – a ‘communitarian’ one consisting of nation-states, but under the domination of neither the then-Soviet Union or the United States. It was this posture which also fed into the (re-)development of ‘Third Position’ politics within the far right, one which even attracted the intellectual support of nominally Marxist thinkers such as Paul Piccone (1940—2004), editor of the US journal Telos.
Such is, necessarily, a much-simplified version of the political etymology of the New Right. Of most importance in relation to Herfurth and the New Right in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand), however, is their embrace of the idea of the transcendence of the left-right divide, and their commitment to elaborating a contemporary form of fascist politics; one attuned to the history of ideas, and one which recognises the necessity of building an extra-parliamentary social movement which is capable of responding to contemporary political realities, especially in the realm of popular culture. And it’s in the realm of popular culture that the idea of ‘national anarchism’ has greatest relevance.
Briefly then, ‘national anarchism’, at least as it’s understood by the New Right, is the means by which those grouped around Herfurth in particular, and New Right philosophies generally, seek to intervene in political struggle: “National-Anarchism represents the political embodiment of the European New Right — it is the political wing”. Before examining what this means in practice, however, it’s worth also briefly examining the short history of this rather unlikely doctrine.
In the English-speaking world, the figure most commonly associated with ‘national anarchism’ is the English activist, writer and musician Troy Southgate (1965–). A member of the National Front in the mid-80s, Southgate left it in the late ‘80s to join the ‘International Third Position’; left the ITP to form the ‘English Nationalist Movement’ in the early ‘90s; abandoned this not especially successful group in 1998 to form the ‘National Revolutionary Faction’; and following that declared himself to be a ‘national anarchist’. What this actually means in terms of ideology is a difficult question to answer. However, Graham D. Macklin (‘Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005 [PDF]), for one at least, has tried to do so. He argues that:
When put into its wider context… ‘national-anarchism’ appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed… Central to ‘national-anarchism’, however, is a far older paradigm drawn from conservative revolutionary thought, namely, the Anarch, a sovereign individual whose independence allows him to ‘turn in any direction’…
In practice, what this means, at least in part, is demonstrated by the emergence of the so-called ‘black bloc’ at APEC in September (from which the ‘Anarch’ Herfurth was conspicuously absent). Specifically — in addition in adopting the name of anarchism to advance a far right agenda — fascists seek to appropriate anarchist imagery and rhetoric. Like Herfurth himself, this tactic appears to have been born in Germany, where in the last 5—10 years, the neo-Nazi movement has increasingly sought to use the radical chic associated with ‘anarchism’ and ‘autonomism’ to recruit youth. (For example, in addition to appropriating fashions associated with anarchists and leftist youth, “autonomous nationalists” have for some years now formed ‘black blocs’ at public protests).
In Sydney, the APEC ‘black bloc’ was the first public protest attended by the ‘national anarchists’ of the New Right, but given its success – in his online account of the protest, one pseudonymous member writes that “We were tremendously pleased, afterwards, that no arrests had occurred and that none of us had been physically assaulted. We had avoided identification, too” – it is unlikely to be the group’s last. Further, while the majority of its members appear to have been drawn from Sydney and Newcastle, a few travelled from Melbourne to attend, and it’s possible that others came from other parts of the country as well. It’s therefore possible that there will be other demonstrations in other cities; certainly, the New Right, on the basis of this success (however meagre), has the potential to draw towards it the many competing factions of the extra-parliamentary far right (including remnants of AF and the Patriotic Youth League (PYL), the more straightforwardly neo-Nazi Blood & Honour and the Hammerskins, as well as others) and in turn help stimulate the growth of a reinvigorated, if still tiny, fascist movement in Australia.
Finally, while the New Right’s adoption of ‘national anarchism’ may be considered bizarre, even comical, it nevertheless retains the potential not only to confuse the broader public with regards the nature of contemporary anarchism, its aims and methods, but also to confuse some who may be approaching anarchism as a serious political philosophy for the first time. As to the question of how to respond to the emergence in Australia of a small group of fascists in anarchist drag, it is beyond the scope of this very short introduction to the New Right to address. At a minimum, it would appear necessary to ensure that this confusion is addressed publicly, in both theory and practice, and the sooner, the better.
Further reading: Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, New York, 1999, provides an exhaustive account of the far right in Europe and North America following the end of the Second World War, and much of the background to the emergence of the New Right and associated ideologies and movements in the last few decades, and is highly recommended.
But to return to Europe, and first to Portugal, where members of the local "Hammerskin Nation" are currently undergoing trial.
The trial of 36 Neo-Nazi members of the Hammerskin Nation organisation commenced on Tuesday, with the activitists facing charges including racial hatred, illegal firearms possession, kidnapping, assaults, and spreading far-right propaganda.
The three dozen members of the [bonehead] gang, arrested a year ago in a major police swoop netting guns, ammunition and explosives, made their first appearance amid tight security before judges at the Monsanto court, just outside Lisbon.
Among those in the dock is Mário Machado, a leader of the far-right gang who has already served a four-year jail term for participating in a 1995 attack that killed a Portuguese citizen of Cape Verdean descent.
The [bonehead] leader has been in preventive detention since his arrest last year.
Most of Machado’s co-defendants were placed under strict bail conditions, including electronic tagging, ahead of Portugal’s biggest-ever far-right trial.
Best of luck boys!
In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, Aisha Gawad has penned some thoughts on the local neo-Nazi and fascist movements (Neo-Nazis emerge from the shadows, The Prague Wanderer). As is the case with Portugal -- the organiser of a gathering of the far right in April of last year, the National Renovation Party (PNR), called on immigrants to "leave Portugal to the Portuguese" -- Czech fascists rally around the slogan of a 'Czech Republic for the Czechs'. In November of last year, several hundred local boneheads and assorted other racist wankers -- reinforced by some of their German Kameraden -- attempted to assemble in Prague, ostensibly in order to protest against the Czech Republic's involvement in the US occupation of Iraq, but not coincidentally on the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht (aka Pogromnacht), and -- again, not coincidentally -- in an attempt to goose-step about the Jewish quarter of the city. According to Aisha:
Propagating outright Nazi ideology would be breaking Czech law, so [neo-Nazis] skirt around it. Prague, for example, struck down their request to march through the Jewish quarter on November 10, 2007, the 69-year-anniversary of Kristallnacht, yet they tried to gather there anyway, claiming to be protesting the Czech Republic's involvement in the Iraq War. The Czech police managed to keep hundreds of [boneheads] from coming into the city, a move praised by anti-racism groups.
Which is only half the story -- and perhaps not even that. In reality, in addition to the Czech police, the neo-Nazis were confronted by a large number of antifa, including many anarchists. In preparation for the neo-Nazi assault, Czech antifa produced a video:
And again, after the events -- which ended up being something less than a total victory for the Master Race -- other videos were produced. Like this one:
To be fair, Aisha does not entirely ignore such manifestations of militant opposition to fascism. Thus: "At the March 1 rally in Plzen, neo-Nazi opponents outnumbered the demonstrators by the hundreds, although many of these counter-protestors, anarchists and anti-fascists, were extremists in their own right". In other words, Aisha is drawing an explicit equivalence between the 'extremist' neo-Nazis and the 'extremist' anarchists. Note that the march of March 1 took place on the 66th anniversary of the beginnings of mass deportations of Jews to death camps. ("From March to October 1942, 57,752 Jews were deported from the Slovak puppet wartime state. Only some 800 of them survived World War Two"; Train exhibition on WW2 Jewish transports opens in Plzeň, ČTK, April 8, 2008.) Plzen is also home to what is allegedly the third largest existing synagogue in the world, and the march was -- surprise surprise -- scheduled to pass the building.
In terms of opposition to neo-Nazi shenanigans, Aisha notes approvingly the institution of an advertising campaign directed at young Czechs. "For instance, "Neo-Nazi. Do You Want Him?," is a new ad campaign designed by People in Need to show young people what is really behind the behavior of hate groups masked as defenders of Czech honor". Which is well and good, but it would also be worthwhile to note that such behaviour intermittently results in the deaths of those whom Aisha describes as similarly 'extreme' in their views. One recent victim was the teenage Czech anarchist skinhead, Jan Kučera, who was stabbed to death by a neo-Nazi in January. Still, accounts of anarchist resistance rarely receive positive press, and that includes some of the earliest instances of resistance to the Nazi regime itself.
...In Berlin the anarcho-syndicalists were part of a much wider anarchist movement and operated within a distinct socialistic culture, bitterly divided between orthodox Socialists and Communists which minimalised the effect of anarchism. The success of Hitler's party had a shattering and paralysing effect on the working class movement. For years it had been thought, even by those who opposed the Communist Party, that its Red Front/Army would put up a fight. It was expected that the struggle would come with its success, not with its failure. This attitude was ingrained even with those who advocated Socialist-Communist unity against Nazism. Though working class formations had long since battled in the streets against Hitlerism, nobody anticipated the struggle would be given up without a shot or a blow.
In a town like Cologne, only months before Hitler took power anarcho-syndicalists had organised a demonstration, receiving huge popular support, against the visit by Dr Goebbels, who bitterly complained he was 'chased out of his native town like a criminal'. It was a challenge to the larger tendencies, who felt obliged to organise similar demonstrations, making Nazi propaganda tours, at the height of the Depression (and therefore when 'historians' later claimed they were building support) risky in the extreme. Hitler took to travelling by plane (then considered hazardous) as the lesser danger.
In Berlin, marches by Nazis were surrounded and heavily protected by police (like fascist marches in Britain). Isherwood, as a young observer a few months before the Nazis took power, noted how the hostile crowds in the Moabit working class district laughed when an elderly and portly SS captain could not sustain the pace, and finding himself on his own, frantically tried to catch up with the protective cordon. (A few months later and that captain would probably be invested with the power of life and death over the scoffers.)
The Nazi murder gangs attacked individual opponents out on their own (something in the nature of contemporary gay-bashers) but shied in the main from open confrontation. One gang, to which Horst Wessel belonged, tried it on and he became a Nazi martyr. The Nazi (prepower) Jew-baiting activities were against professional people or writers, often when sitting around in cafes, and petty shopkeepers, on their own.
It never occurred to people, least of all organised workers living in proletarian districts, there they too would become isolated. After Hitler took power - was handed power by Hindenburg, with the tacit approval of most parties - the power of the SS dramatically increased.
Almost overnight the top-heavy organisation of the workers collapsed with the wholesale arrests, quite illegal, of their leadership. Nothing disappeared more ignominiously than the Red Front army, one day parading through the streets with its Moscow - trained generals, the next day languishing in holes and cellars in the hastily formed concentration camps (at first, converted derelict warehouses) without striking a blow (the despised Austrian reformist Social-Democrats at least fought it out to the last against Dolfuss).
The Communist party became illegalised, the Socialists and trade union movement tried to make their peace and niche and were slowly illegalised - after which social democracy had nothing to offer. Trade union leaders sought to transfer their funds to war veterans' organisations (where for ideological reasons the Nazis could not sequestrate them, but controlled them anyway). The working class as a whole was stunned at the fact that the entire defence they had built around themselves had gone with the wind.
This overcame the German anarchists too, with the exception of the Rhineland, it became a marginalised dissent movement, unable to speak and therefore to grow. The Rhenish workers were slower to accept the situation, they were not initially provoked to industrial action by the Nazis, but as propaganda contacts vanished, they too succumbed (though never completely). During the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, a few isolated, especially industrially based, groups, remained constant. But any concerted action was never possible, though in Madrid during the civil war people queued to see a dud German shell displayed in the window of a large store, bearing a sage, 'Comrades! The shells I make do not explode'. (It may have been indicative of sabotage, which certainly went on, or it may have been propaganda set up in Spain - who can tell?)
See also : Resistance to Nazism: Shattered Armies: How The Working Class Fought Nazism and Fascism 1933-45, Anarchist Federation (UK), 2006 (PDF). Includes short biographies on Edelweiss Pirates (Germany) | The Zazous (France) | Arditi del Popolo (Italy) | FAUD (Germany) | 43 Group (UK).
Hitler’s power may lay us low, And keep us locked in chains, But we will smash the chains one day, We’ll be free again!
We’ve got fists and we can fight, We’ve got knives and we’ll get them out, We want freedom, don’t we boys? We’re the fighting Navajos!
Andy is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a Jew in Nazi Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio... A pacifist in Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 pm, a peasant without land, an unemployed worker... an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics, a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains of southeast Mexico. So Andy is a human being, any human being, in this world. Andy is all the exploited, marginalized and oppressed minorities, resisting and saying, 'Enough'!
[NB. Andy is also a bogan saying "Pies in 2009!", and has a NEW! IMPROVED! blog here : http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com]
