Troy Southgate, the New Right and Old Nazis

Troy Southgate
Not Right Wing. Not Fascist.

In an attempt to provide Fascism with some Green credentials and a gloss of anti-authoritarianism and even Socialism, 'National Anarchist' Troy Southgate (who also runs the neo-Classical / post-Industrial group H.E.R.R, and is a member of the groups Seelenlicht and Horologium^*) has created some of the most bizarre ideological hybrids conceivable, grafting bits of Anarchist and Socialist phraseology onto his hard core Racist and ultra-reactionary politics to try to recruit from the Anarchist and Green milieus. He has denied ever being a Fascist ("I am not and have never been a Fascist of any description" - WMTN? Comment), and in an essay, 'Revolution vs. Reaction', he says that "it is quite certain that we have nothing in common with the intellectually bankrupt legions of the modern Left, but then neither do we owe any allegiance to those on the Right. Many so-called Nationalists are content to describe themselves as being 'right of centre', or even on the 'Far Right', but it must be stated quite categorically that true Nationalism has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Right-wing politics." [Southgate, Tradition and Revolution, p68].

If you took Southgate seriously as an ideologist you might therefore be a little surprised to learn that - as someone who "has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Right Wing politics" - he is somehow also a founder and the Chairman of the 'New Right' (NR) group, the aim of which is to "unite the disparate strands of the British Right and get everybody pulling in the same direction" [Dan Ghetu, 'Interview', Synthesis], and which, in a clod-hopping, British Empricist manner, is trying to imitate the continental Nouvelle Droite and become a focus of far-Right ideological innovation. You might be even more surprised to hear that, despite his claims to be against Fascism (which is 'reactionary'), this group collects together not only extreme anti-Semites and other racists, but also, er, Fascists in a discussion group aimed at forging a new image for the, er, Right. The following is an extract from an article about the NR taken from the latest edition of the UK anti-Fascist magazine Searchlight ('New Right, Old Nazis'). The article begins by discussing last month's NR meeting at which Martin Webster - the Chairman of the National Front (NF) during its 70's heyday, who boasted that his party were "forming a well-oiled Nazi machine in Britain" - gave a speech full of traditional Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric.

"The New Right group was formed by Troy Southgate, a man whose life has been an odyssey across the far right scene since his imprisonment as an NF street thug in the 1970s.  He has dabbled in far-right music, National Bolshevism and similar movements that emerged in the former communist states during the 1990s, various Green Anarchist outfits and a blend of far-right paganism and satanism.

He was a founder member of the International Third Position (ITP) together with Nick Griffin, now leader of the BNP, and other NF 'Political Soldiers' in 1989. Like Southgate and his followers today, it was heavily influenced by the Italian mystic and National Socialist Julius Evola, a man so extreme that the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had him locked up twice. Evola's wartime exile was lived out in the company of senior SS men and after the war he mentored Roberto Fiore, who in turn acted as political mentor to Nick Griffin while on the run in the UK from a terrorist conviction in Italy. Griffin still works closely with him in Europe.

Southgate left the ITP in September 1992 and from then on changed political affiliation as often as his underwear. In the middle of this decade he and a small group of others, including the quasi-intellectual Jonathan Bowden, created the New Right group with the aim of inspiring old thinking in a refreshed way. Its meetings... gave London's far right the chance to hear pagans, Muslim converts and leading figures in Europe's far right and beyond. 

Despite being a BNP officer until the end of last year, Bowden has regularly chaired and addressed New Right meetings without any objection from Griffin. Audiences... comprise a mixture of boot boys, pagans, well-to-do Jew baiters and several BNP councillors.

The long list of speakers reads like a who's who of far-right extremists. They have included Alexander Dugin... Dr Tomislav Sunić... the Holocaust denier 'Lady' Michèle Renouf... Michael Woodbridge... and... Norman Lowell.
...
It is not only old nazis who attend new Right meetings. Matt Tait, the BNP's Bletchley organiser, acts as the New Right student organiser...
...
While Southgate remains on the fringe of the far-right music scene in Britain, he has a big fan club among nazis, pagans and other oddballs in eastern Europe" [Searchlight, December 2010, pp14-15]

So there you have it, Southgate - who has "never been a Fascist of any description", for whom "Fascism itself was and remains a bastardised form of Capitalism" [Southgate, Tradition and Revolution, p103], and whose beliefs have "absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Right-wing politics" - is a founder of the 'New Right' and organises meetings at which the speakers are almost exclusively Fascists, old and new, like Webster, Bowden, et al. Frankly, when he says that he's not of the Right and not a Fascist Southgate is either the most confused political ideologue in recorded history... or a liar trying desperately to infiltrate the Anarchist and Green movements to turn them toward Fascism. What do you reckon?


* According to Wikipedia,"He has also worked with Sweden's Survival Unit, Holland's Erich Zahn, the Canadian project, Funerary Call, the Italian projects Ouroboros, Bonebound, Silent Cathedral and Sala Della Colonne, the Polish projects Elvatorium, Ollin and Desert Divinity, and the German bands, Sagittarius, Von Thronstahl & The Days of the Trumpet Call.