Rose City Anti-Fascists: Austrian Far‐Right Musical Project on West Coast Tour

Statement by the Rose City Anti-Fascists

“That is the power of an invisible order. Its members know that they are members. Those who are not members are aware that they do not participate.”

Romanian Legionary propagandist Ovidiu Gules, as quoted by Gerhard Petak in interview¹

“If the mythical and irrational, as well as the desire for anti‐Enlightenment introspection and living transcendence, find a voice in youth culture, the aesthetic consensus of the West will be broken.”

From the German New Right newspaper Junge Freiheit, 1996²

“Folkish is today a dangerous word. Like the words home, roots, loyalty it is situated in the cross wires of an omnipresent brainwashing. Those who use this word are pushed close to the Third Reich. But the foreign policy of the Third Reich was not folkish at all. The principle that the peoples were different, but equal of birth, was not taken into consideration.”

Gerhard Petak, as quoted by the “Tasmanian National‐Anarchists”³

“Separate but equal”

Policy underlining Jim Crow laws in the American South

Allerseelen on Tour

This December, the Austrian far‐Right “post‐industrial” and martial music project Allerseelen is set to give a series of performances on the US West Coast. Allerseelen is the project of Gerhard Petak (aka Kadmon and Gerhard Hallstatt) who also incorporates other performers into the act when playing live⁴. Several of the Allerseelen shows are scheduled to take place in larger venues supporting the prominent Portland, Oregon “dark metal” group Agalloch, who will be touring to promote their new album. The hitching of Allerseelen onto the tour of a larger heavy metal act will provide new outlets for Petak’s extreme‐Right messages. Agalloch, the group which Allerseelen will support, is at present crossing over from underground cult status to something nearer the mainstream, the group’s latest album even being promoted with a write‐up and “exclusive first listen” on National Public Radio’s music webpage.⁵ It is troubling that the accompanying act Agalloch chose to expose its growing audiences to, has a long history of far‐Right involvement and propaganda, and is an attempt to make aspects of fascist discourse acceptable. (Allerseelen will first play two separate headlining shows before joining the Agalloch tour.) Agalloch’s decision to further link itself to Petak / Allerseelen by appearing on a new compilation CD released by Petak’s label⁶, is likewise of concern to anti‐fascists and is of similar poor judgment.

The dates of Allerseelen’s tour are:

Waldteufel + Allerseelen

• 15 Dec 2010: Portland
• 16 Dec 2010: Salem (+ HELL, Barghest)

Agalloch + Allerseelen

• 17 Dec 2010: Portland OR Berbati's Pan (+ Aerial Ruin)
• 18 Dec 2010: Seattle WA Neumo’s (+ Alda + Waldteufel)
• 21 Dec 2010: Los Angeles CA Ultra Violet Social Club (+ Winterthrall)
• 22 Dec 2010: San Francisco CA Great American Music Hall (+ Dispirit)⁷

Petak’s Politics and Associations

Gerhard Petak has been releasing music under the name Allerseelen since the end of the 1980s⁸. During the 1990s, the extreme‐Right nature of Petak’s politics became increasingly evident, through his writing and publishing as well as his musical releases. Before explaining how Petak promotes far‐Right discourses, we must first provide a thumbnail sketch of what his politics actually are—while Petak has had contact with some people who could be fairly described as Nazis or neo‐Nazis, Petak has also criticized the Third Reich in print, and we do not describe him personally as a Nazi. (We will discuss Petak’s attitude towards historical Nazism later.) We place Petak’s viewpoints and advocacy on the terrain of neo‐fascism and the far‐Right, especially that of the European New Right. Some other ideological influences will be discussed in passing. If at times Petak’s viewpoints appear as a jumble of varied and even opposing influences, it is worth noting that fascism has always been a syncretic ideological movement—one that attempts to fuse differing elements into a single whole. Indeed, this syncretic nature has given rise to one of fascism’s primary qualities, that of simultaneously being “A and not A” and often harboring diametrically opposed impulses, such as attempting mass political mobilization while also vocalizing contempt for mass society⁹ (These contradictions unfortunately do not render fascism or fascist politics harmless.)

The European New Right

As well as his own self‐produced pamphlets, Petak’s thoughts have also been printed in publications of the European New Right, such as Staatsbriefe and Junge Freiheit¹⁰. An understanding of this European New Right (ENR hereafter) is crucial for an understanding of Petak and Allerseelen. The European New Right stems from an attempt to rethink fascist politics in light of the failure of its mid‐20th Century manifestations. While the ENR now contains many voices, its primary ideologue is Alain de Benoist, who had been a member of the French neo‐fascist organizations Jeune Nation and its successor Europe‐ Action, before founding the GRECE think tank in 1968 at the age of twenty‐five¹¹. (The French word “Grece” means Greece, suggesting the glories of ancient Europe; the acronym GRECE stands for “Research and Study Group for a European Civilization” as written in French.) In the words of one account, GRECE “became the institutional pivot of the Nouvelle Droite (New Right), the name bestowed upon de Benoist’s Paris‐based circle by the French media.”¹²

One significant aspect of much ENR discourse is its break from biological determinism and racism phrased in such biological terms, which de Benoist in his younger years had argued for. In the place of biological racism, the New Right began to present itself as a defender of cultural diversity and “ethno‐ pluralism.” What this amounts to is a form of cultural racism expressed as difference—when cultures come together, this apparently breeds homogeneity, and therefore the ENR argues for a plurality of cultures precisely through separation and the cessation of pluralism within cultures. While renouncing at least in theory any authoritarianism and conquest between different cultures, in practical terms New Right politics would necessarily lead to neo‐Apartheid and bloody Balkans‐like carve‐ups. (It is telling that Petak / Allerseelen was “impressed” by Slobodan Milosevic¹³.) Within the ENR framework, the United States and the cultural Americanization of Europe are seen as primary opponents, as these are “melting pot” efforts which the New Right sees as homogenizing (paradoxically because they are not homogenizing.) The celebration of lack of difference within cultures, now defined as difference itself—and the imposition of internal homogeneity, described as the “right to difference”—is typical of the transvaluation that occurs within New Right discourse. Similarly, the New Right can even adopt the language of democracy while arguing for purging internal difference: “Direct democracy need not be associated with a limited number of people. It is primarily associated with the notion of a relatively homogenous people conscious of what makes them a people.”¹⁴

Two other aspects of the European New Right are important to note, especially as they relate to Allerseelen: the ENR’s pagan aspect, and its stress on fighting a cultural war. In contrast to the American New Right of the time, which was generally a Christian movement, the ENR’s identity was strongly pagan and anti‐Christian. Christianity is presented as an alien force that imposed itself on indigenous European peoples; the universalist aspect of Christianity is seen as a major enemy¹⁵. (The ENR also sees the capitalist market as spreading the pathogen of universalism, and hence adopts a sort of fascist “anti‐ capitalism.”) In terms of strategy, the European New Right borrows from the Italian Communist leader Gramsci, who argued that lasting political and economic change would have to be preceded by a major shift on the cultural terrain¹⁶. The ENR therefore focuses on creating a cultural environment favorable to their political ideas flourishing—especially culture that popularizes (imagined) “indigenous” European cultural / ethnic identities and lashes out at universalism and Enlightenment values.

While Gerhard Petak does not generally reference de Benoist or GRECE—and it is possible that Petak has theoretical quibbles with some of de Benoist, just as de Benoist himself does not like Petak’s musical genre¹⁷—Petak’s ideas and output are nevertheless infused with ENR influence. This influence is already pointed to by Petak’s statements being carried in ENR journals, and the influence will become especially clear when examining Petak’s attitude towards the Third Reich. Some of this influence may have arrived directly through Petak reading specific ENR theoreticians, while some may stem from the broader far‐ Right cultural / political milieu which Petak works within. Even if he has never thought much of de Benoist’s work, Petak has certainly been presented by third parties as having something to do with the European New Right. In the second volume of the book‐sized American “Radical Traditionalist” journal Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition, an interview with Petak is one of the longest of the issue, only shorter than the extensive interview with de Benoist¹⁸. (There is also an Allerseelen track on the journal’s accompanying CD; one of the editors of Tyr is Petak’s friend Michael Moynihan, about whom more later.)

The Iron Guard (Romania)

Petak / Allerseelen contribute to the ultra‐Right culture war through his attempts to circulate and rehabilitate classical fascist ideas and imagery. Petak is especially keen on the Romanian fascist movement the Legion of the Archangel Michael (also known as the Iron Guard.) This movement, led by Corneliu Codreanu (1899 – 1938) “displayed all the characteristics of fascism”¹⁹ and “was an extremely violent organization”²⁰ noted for its anti‐Semitism, aiming for “not just the purification of Romanian life from Jewish influence but also the ‘moral rejuvenation’ of Romania on a Christian as well as a national basis.”²¹ While the Iron Guard’s outer embrace of Romanian Orthodox Christianity may appear as at odds with Petak’s paganism, it is the esoteric and mystical elements of the movement that most fascinate Petak—the Legionaries had their own mysticism and internal rites, including members of its death squads ritually drinking each other’s blood²². Such a combination of violence, fascism, blood and the occult is irresistible to Petak, who claims that “The Iron Guard [still] exists, of course” in terms of an eternal ideal and motivating myth. Petak then quotes with approval Ovidiu Gules²³, who edited the Gazeta de Vest publication that promoted the Legionary tradition. (This publication was further linked to the fascist International Third Position organization.²⁴) Gerhard Petak not only issued a pamphlet about Codreanu and the Iron Guard in his Aorta pamphlet series²⁵, but also in 1998 issued a set of two 7” vinyl records of Legionary music, with the fourth side containing a speech by Codreanu²⁶.

Petak’s release of Romanian Iron Guard music on his Aorta label, 1998

The Nazis, Their Precursors, Third Reich Culture and Mysticism

Petak’s relationship to National Socialism and the Third Reich is expressed in a variety of approaches. On occasion, his statements could be considered as historical revisionism and rehabilitation of the Nazi past. At other times, Petak distances himself from Nazism, but on a basis that is still far‐Right. Petak furthermore has an abiding interest in the Conservative Revolutionary streams that fed into Nazi politics. While Petak is not himself a neo‐Nazi, his criticisms of Nazism—such as they are—betray broader far‐Right and fascist sympathies. Petak’s criticisms are generally little but variations on ENR positions surrounding these topics. It is worth taking one of Petak’s criticisms as an example. In an interview on the Raunend post‐industrial music site, Petak discusses the exterior of Haus Atlantis in Bremen, Germany, which at the time of the Third Reich had on its facade “a large wooden sculpture showing Odin surrounded by runes.” Petak used an image of this statue for the cover of his third CD, “Sturmlieder.” Petak comments:

This was the strangest Odin statue I ever saw (unfortunately only on images) with its sad expression. […] In the Third Reich, many Christian as well as pagan National Socialists hated this statue because it was Odin or because it was an Odin some did not want to see. There were also articles in SS magazines against this ‘ugly’ totemistic statue, calling it ‘Entartete Kunst’ [Degenerate Art]. So Allerseelen used some Entartete Kunst on Sturmlieder. Finally it was burnt to ashes ‐ but it were not National Socialists setting it on fire. It was burnt to ashes by British bombers through air‐raids in WWII which destroyed a huge part of Bremen.²⁷

Why is this story so important to Petak? Through his use of the Haus Atlantis image on the cover of “Sturmlieder,” this statue is associated with the Allerseelen project and thus Petak—he sees himself in the art. While the Haus Atlantis’ exterior was condemned by segments of the Nazis according to Petak’s account, it also probably would not have been on public display at all, without the general cultural ambience of pagan revival during the Third Reich. The burning of the building—which would be properly understood as part of a military campaign to defeat the Third Reich—is instead through Petak’s quick switch associated with campaigns against Degenerate Art and presumably Nazi book burnings. The Allies become the harshest arbiters of taste. It is those fighting to overthrow the Reich, who thus seem to be involved in “Nazism” of the most extreme kind. The point is underscored immediately afterwards when Petak mentions his other “close and infamous connection” to Haus Atlantis (subsequently owned by Hilton and possessing “another, quite boring facade now.”) Having attempted to use the Haus as the venue for an Allerseelen show, the far‐Right connections of the project were exposed in the media and the event got cancelled. Criticism of Petak’s far‐Right politics, is generally portrayed by Petak as the height of real “Nazism,” as compared to the actual Nazism of the Third Reich, which warrants more tepid criticism. In one statement, Petak even likens criticism of far‐Right influence within the “darkwave” music scene, to oppression of Jewish people forced to wear the Yellow Star.²⁸ (This is, needless to say, historical revisionism on a grand scale.)

Petak is highly inspired by the work of the “Conservative Revolutionaries” who came to prominence in Germany following WWI, and who provided a large number of themes and ideas that were put to use by the Nazis. When Petak describes himself as “conservative avant‐garde,” the “conservative” in this formulation refers to the Conservative Revolutionaries, according to the sympathetic assessment of Petak / Allerseelen by Tyr co‐editor Joshua Buckley.²⁹ These Conservative Revolutionaries—two of their most famous members being philosopher Oswald Spengler and writer Ernst Jünger—were also major influences on the European New Right. The ENR has argued that the Third Reich never in practice followed Conservative Revolutionary thought despite appropriating Conservative Revolutionary intellectual efforts.³⁰

The Conservative Revolutionary movement was characterized by fervent nationalism following the German defeat in WWI; a view of the nation as an organic whole; glorification of hierarchy, militarism, industrial mobilization, as well as “folk‐community”; plus deep anti‐liberalism and anti‐egalitarianism. While the Conservative Revolutionary movement provided many political, conceptual and rhetorical tools for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, or Nazi Party) to utilize, Conservative Revolutionaries did not wholly approve of the Nazi regime—several saw it as insufficiently elitist, especially scorning its socialist elements. Furthermore, Conservative Revolutionaries did not tend to stress biological racism in the strict manner of the Nazi Party. Some Conservative Revolutionaries faced penalties for not wholly embracing Nazi orthodoxy, even though the worldview they spread had helped the NSDAP to power; some Conservative Revolutionaries even ended up as plotters against the regime, especially as WWII ceased going in Germany’s direction. On the other hand, many other Conservative Revolutionaries found a more‐or‐less comfortable home for themselves within the Nazi Party. Petak / Allerseelen has directly paid homage to the Conservative Revolutionaries Ernst Jünger (the Allerseelen track “Käferlied” is a tribute to him³¹) and Friedrich Hielscher (the compilation CD “Wir Rufen Deine Wölfe” on Petak’s Aorta label, contains versions of Hielscher’s poem of the same name, set to music by seventeen acts including Allerseelen.³²)

While the idea of “folk‐community” (or Volksgemeinschaft) was important to the Conservative Revolutionaries, it became an obsession for the Nazis. Yet just as the European New Right argued that the Nazi regime misapplied or failed to implement Conservative Revolutionary principles, Gerhard Petak criticizes the Third Reich not because of its völkisch obsession, but merely because the regime did not enact völkisch principles properly within its foreign policy—Petak articulates a “different, but equal” policy amongst different Völker. One should also note that it is pluralistic democracy that Petak accuses of implementing “omnipresent brainwashing,” not the Third Reich.³³

Photograph of Leni Riefenstahl on cover of Allerseelen’s “Alle Lust Will Ewigkeit” single

Although Petak makes minor criticisms of the Third Reich, his work also references and portrays positively several aspects of Nazi culture. Prime examples of this are Petak’s homages to Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the infamous Nazi propaganda movie “Triumph of the Will” (Triumph des Willens). Petak issued a pamphlet about Riefenstahl’s 1932 (pre‐Third Reich) film “The Blue Light” (Das Blaue Licht)³⁴ and also released a music single paying tribute to her.³⁵ Petak’s evaluation of Riefenstahl prior to her death was: “She was and still is a beautiful and powerful woman.”³⁶ Zero criticism is made of her talents being placed in the service of the Nazi regime. Indeed, when Petak discusses Riefenstahl again, it is to return to his theme of intolerant non‐fascists: “Leni Riefenstahl said that after World War Two, everyone considered her a witch who had love affairs with Nazis and so on, and she definitely had a hard life after the war.”³⁷ Allerseelen also contributed to a Riefenstahl‐themed CD compilation released in 1996 by the German Right‐wing record label VAWS³⁸.

Allerseelen recordings and Petak’s writings also reference and pay tribute to Nazi völkisch researchers and explorers grouped around the Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”) think tank. This think tank, founded in the early 1930s, then formally integrated into the SS at the start of 1939 with the support of Heinrich Himmler, aimed to research the achievements of the Nordic race that they believed
once ruled the world. The SS‐ Ahnenerbe also integrated a number of sideline projects, such as human experimentation at Dachau. Friedrich Hielscher—the Conservative Revolutionary celebrated on one of Petak’s compilation discs, and who did work for the Ahnenerbe—testified on behalf of Ahnenerbe Director Wolfram Sievers during the Nuremberg Trials, claiming that Sievers had been active alongside him in opposition to Hitler. Sievers was nevertheless found guilty of crimes against humanity and executed; Hielscher visited Sievers in prison shortly before the execution, and they performed a farewell ritual together³⁹.

Another Ahnenerbe member favorably referenced by Petak is Otto Rahn, who was the topic of one of Petak’s Aorta tracts⁴⁰. Rahn’s main contribution to the Nazi mysticism of the Ahnenerbe was through his 1937 book Lucifer's Court (Luzifers Hofgesind) which described his travels across Europe in search of a hidden “Cathar‐Visigothic tradition”⁴¹. Even more important to Petak is Karl Maria Wiligut, another Ahnenerbe member who had one of Petak’s Aorta pamphlets devoted to him.⁴² Wiligut was a Nazi occultist and Ariosophist who performed pseudo‐religious ceremonies for the SS, as well as designing the death’s‐head ring worn by SS members. Wiligut was also involved with the SS redesign of Wewelsburg castle in Westphalia, intended to be made into the SS leadership hub as well as mystical center.⁴³  The second Allerseelen CD, “Gotos=Kalanda” has as its cover the Sonnenrad (sunwheel / “Black Sun”) mosaic on the floor of the SS Generals' Hall in the redesigned Wewelsburg castle.⁴⁴ This “Black Sun” design has become a popular motif within far‐Right and neo‐Nazi circles,⁴⁵ and has been widely used by Petak himself. The whole “Gotos=Kalanda” release is based on texts by Wiligut.⁴⁶ Petak also assisted the publication of a book of texts by and about Wiligut in English, published by far‐Rightist Michael Moynihan’s Dominion Press.⁴⁷

The Allerseelen CD “Neuschwabenland” (“New Swabia”) is also a Third Reich reference, referring to the 1938‐1939 German Antarctic expedition, which named a section of the Antarctic as “New Swabia” (after the German region of Swabia.) This expedition, despite its real strategic importance for the Nazi regime, has within sections of the extreme‐Right become the stuff of myth. Within such discourse, New Swabia is the site of secret Nazi bases from which they launch their UFOs, a doctrine for example promoted by the infamous Holocaust‐denier Ernst Zündel.⁴⁸ It is likely that Petak is at a minimum aware of this association, as he has published his own tracts (in the Ahnstern successor to his Aorta series) about Viktor Schauberger and Joseph Andreas Epp, both engineers discussed in the context of Nazi flying saucer mythos.⁴⁹ The site of New Swabia is also blended in Nazi esotericism to hollow earth theories and myths of polar peoples. High technology and achievement in exploration are in this way combined with mysticism and alleged ancient mysteries.

For Petak, a process of double‐mirroring is at work when he displays such symbolism. Firstly, the mixture of antiquated irrationality with a glorification of technical matters and industry, is a central aspect of Allerseelen’s 'technosophical' project as a whole; secondly, this reflects in aesthetic terms the simultaneous stress on both atavism and industrial productivity found within fascist regimes, even when explicit references are absent. Through his clear and direct references to the Third Reich, however, Petak portrays this regime—despite certain muted criticism—as a realm of achievement, mastery and mystery. The SS, especially through Petak’s focus on the Ahnenerbe, become seen mostly by reference to mysticism and spirituality, not in regards to the massive crimes against humanity that were the true practice of the organization.

Julius Evola

Petak celebrates another man who was attracted to the SS, the Italian 'traditionalist' theorist Julius Evola (1898 ‐ 1974). While Evola had been published in Ahnenerbe publications, his theories on race clashed with this organization (and with Third Reich orthodoxy), and it was to the “pan‐Europeanist” elements of the SS that Evola ended up being most connected⁵⁰. During WWII, Evola worked for German intelligence⁵¹; following the defeat of the Axis powers, Evola became an extremely influential figure to the most intransigent of the Italian far‐Right, and was a theoretical influence on the fascist bombers of the 1970s and early 80s in that country⁵². Similarly to Petak, Evola had a romantic image of the SS and the Iron Guard, seeing them as elite orders of warrior‐mystics fighting to restore hierarchical values in a world of inversion, corruption and decay.

Evola’s ideas have had some influence within various sectors of the far‐Right, including the European New Right and various non‐Hitlerian fascist organizations. Evola differed with the Third Reich’s racial policies and their biological determinism, favoring instead a “spiritual” and elitist form of racism. Evola argued that only members of an elite could properly be understood as having “race,” and that such race could not only be understood in terms of biology. Such a view was still very much compatible with anti‐ Semitism and racial bigotry, just not the official racial doctrines of the Third Reich. (Evola’s opposition to this policy of the Nazi Party was obviously not enough to prevent his collaboration with its regime.) Elitism is at the core of any of Evola’s criticisms of fascist governments—all were too plebian to earn his complete approval, although some violent closed groups (such as the SS) held a great appeal to him. Evola’s worldview was not primarily political, but rather his political engagements and thought were outgrowths of his broader metaphysical ideas. Evola is a key author of the Traditionalist School, an anti‐ modern intellectual movement with a focus on religious practice and initiation, and Evola also authored several books on esoteric topics. In his later and most pessimistic work, Cavalcare la Tigre (Ride the Tiger) Evola argued for “apoliteia”—detachment from the polity—as the world slid irreversibly into decline. However, this “detachment” did not rule out such acts of mayhem as his adherents would later put into practice in Italy, but instead served as justification for them. Acts of terror and extreme violence became framed as spiritual affirmation by a spiritual warrior‐elite still committed to ordering principles in a corrupt and contemptible world. Evola’s aloof and “spiritual” aspects—and the fact that his thinking was metaphysically‐based—are often used by Evola’s defenders in order to place him in a category outside of fascist political thought. However, Evola’s own affiliations are a matter of record, and even his later apoliteia is noteworthy mainly by reference to the fascist violence it inspired.

Gerhard Petak has explicitly tied Allerseelen to Julius Evola’s works and worldview, through frequent mention of Evola in interviews, as well as the contribution of an Allerseelen track to the “Cavalcare La Tigre ‐ Julius Evola: Centenary” tribute CD⁵³. Petak also contributed, under the name of “Kadmon,” an article in “an issue of a conservative revolutionary French journal, Dualpha […] dedicated to Julius Evola”⁵⁴. A split CD between Allerseelen and the American act Changes (about whom more later) is entitled “Men Among the Ruins”⁵⁵, a reference to Evola’s book of the same name that provided “Post‐ war Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist” and which bemoaned opposition to fascism and totalitarianism.

Changes / Allerseelen split CD, 2006

Black Metal and Right‐Wing Occultism

Petak’s involvement in esoteric fascism also extends to giving interviews to occult fascist journals, such as the interview published in the second issue of The Nexus during the late 90s⁵⁶. The Nexus was published by New Zealand resident Kerry Bolton, who as well as being active in a series of occult organizations, was also a co‐founder of the New Zealand Fascist Union. Bolton’s organization “The Black Order” was an attempt to synthesize his political and occult sympathies, and aimed to “revive the esoteric current of national socialism”⁵⁷. Petak’s association with Bolton began prior to the Nexus interview. The twentieth pamphlet of Petak’s mid‐‘90s Aorta series lists a precursor to The Nexus named The Heretic in its contact addresses following the main article⁵⁸. The central article within of that issue gave Petak’s interpretation of the Norse cult of the “wild hunt” or oskorei, attempting to portray the “black metal” musical scene of the time as a return to the same pagan impulses that were manifested in the old cult. Petak commends the black metal scene’s “fight against Kristianity [sic] and partly also against Americanism afflicting all areas of European life today,” a statement that echoes European New Right formulations. Petak then singles out the Norwegian black metal musician Kristian “Varg” Vikernes and his Burzum solo project for special praise. The rest of the pamphlet is devoted to a sympathetic interview with Vikernes, at the time imprisoned for the murder of a rival black metal figurehead. Vikernes is a central figure in the far‐Right and ideologically racist turn made by a segment of the black metal scene; Petak’s attempts to popularize Vikernes probably played a small part in this development.

Key Associates (One): Blood Axis / Michael Moynihan

Petak’s friend Michael Moynihan—an American far‐Rightist who has his own fascist experimental music project named Blood Axis—has played a much larger role than Petak in popularizing fascistic tendencies within the black metal scene, through his book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground⁵⁹. The central argument of this book, written by Moynihan and Norwegian co‐author Didrik Søderlind, is that subconscious archetypes and a “return of Wotan” may be behind the racism and violence of individuals such as “Varg” Vikernes, thus absolving these black metal scene participants of responsibility for their own fascist politics and instead imbuing their activity (murder, arsons etc.) with otherworldly mystery⁶⁰. (We are not arguing that most black metal enthusiasts are racists or fascists, merely those individuals such as Vikernes who easily fit within both categories, were largely excused by Lords of Chaos and its archetype theories.) Unsurprisingly, as Petak’s “Oskorei” essay itself comes close to describing the black metal phenomenon as a reawakening of racial archetypes, it was reprinted as an appendix to Lords of Chaos⁶¹. Other occult fascists such as Kerry Bolton are also provided with publicity in the book⁶².

Moynihan’s affiliations are worth briefly examining, firstly because he for some time lived in Portland, Oregon and influenced the milieu that is now hosting Allerseelen, and secondly because Moynihan often tries to obscure his politics and pretend as though he is being unfairly maligned by antifascists. Ironically, Moynihan criticizes similar behavior from others:

I’m sick of people saying they’re ‘not political,’ as I think this is a cop‐out… If you’re going to espouse ‘fascist’ ideas, then I believe you have to accept some of the responsibility for their application in the real world; otherwise what is the point of espousing them in the first place?⁶³

In 1992, Moynihan published Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason under his Siege imprint. Mason, a neo‐Nazi activist since his teens, for a while edited a publication of the National Socialist Liberation Front, but in 1982 he separated the Siege journal from that organization, creating a new project named the Universal Order which combined neo‐Nazism with recognition of Charles Manson as a movement leader⁶⁴. The name of Moynihan’s musical act also gives some not‐so‐subtle clues about his politics: Blood as in “Blood and Soil,” plus Axis as in the Axis Powers. Moynihan has done much to promote Julius Evola within the post‐industrial scene, and has edited two Evola books for publication in English, including Evola’s Men Among the Ruins: Post‐War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist⁶⁵. Moynihan is currently involved as a co‐editor of Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition, a journal combining a loosely Evolian outlook with the European New Right and racially‐charged variants of Germanic neo‐ paganism. Tyr does not describe itself as a fascist or Nazi publication, yet it is fixated on völkisch identity, reproduces far‐Right anti‐modernity discourses, and has no problem publishing authors whose political lineages trace back to classical fascism.

Gerhard Petak interviewed Blood Axis in an issue of his Aorta series⁶⁶; Petak was granted a major within Moynihan and Buckley’s Tyr a number of years later⁶⁷. There have been two spit releases between Allerseelen and Blood Axis, a split single in 1994⁶⁸ and a second split single in 1998⁶⁹. The first of these releases is of particular interest, being the first release on Moynihan’s Storm Records label and therefore signifying the deep connection between Moynihan and Petak. Allerseelen’s side of this release contains lyrics from a poem by SS mystic Karl Maria Wiligut, and the song was later included on Allerseelen’s “Gotos=Kalanda” release. Allerseelen’s liner notes contain the “Black Sun” image favored by Petak as a design element (this of course being particularly important in a Wiligut‐themed release.) The Blood Axis side of this release is a cover version of Joy Division’s “Walked in Line,” the song transformed into an unequivocal affirmation of fascist regimentation and violence.

Key Associates (Two): Changes / Robert N. Taylor

Another important ally of Petak’s is Robert N. Taylor of the “folk noir” act Changes. Taylor has also worked closely with Moynihan, and is active within ultra‐Right neo‐pagan circles alongside him. Moynihan is also responsible for the first releases of Changes’ music, issued through his Storm label⁷⁰. Changes and Allerseelen released a split CD in 2006, the album title taken straight from one of Julius Evola’s books⁷¹.

In interviews, Robert Taylor has discussed his involvement with white anti‐Black rioting in Chicago during his youth. Taylor went on to participate in the Minutemen, a Right‐wing paramilitary group active in the 1960s and early ‘70s. Taylor continues to have radical‐Right views. He has discussed in an interview his vision for racial separation in America, with people of color being relocated to specific regions in a plan that plan that mirrors that of David Duke⁷². Additionally, “Robert Wulfing” (Robert N. Taylor) sent lyrics and a description of the Changes song “Waiting for the Fall” to the “musical terrorists” section of Folk & Faith, a “national anarchist” website. While Taylor notes that the song is “a generic revolutionary song” with “no mention of ideology,” he is certainly placing the song in a specifically far‐ Right context by sending his words to Folk & Faith⁷³ (National anarchism is an ideology with its origin in fascist politics; despite the name, the tendency did not initially spring from the anarchist movement, and it is rejected by many anarchists⁷⁴).

Allerseelen’s Support in Oregon

The current tour is not the first time that Allerseelen has been on the West Coast. A 2003 tour played three West Coast dates, all with the Portland group Waldteufel, who are also playing several dates with Allerseelen this year. Markus Wolff, the primary force behind Waldteufel, is a frequent collaborator with Michael Moynihan, and supplies writings on German völkisch authors and pagan revivalists to Tyr and similar publications. Wolff is also an Evola enthusiast who supported the Moynihan‐edited English edition of Men Among the Ruins⁷⁵. Wolff currently also edits Hex magazine, a “heathen” journal that has published Petak (as Gerhard Hallstatt) in several issues⁷⁶. Hex has some other interesting associations with the far‐Right; one of its founders and initial editors, Amie Rautmann (listed as “A. von Rautmann” on the Hex website⁷⁷) is an enthusiast of the Holocaust‐denier David Irving, who attended Irving’s speech in Portland on July 19, 2009⁷⁸. The Hex website also promotes Allerseelen’s current tour⁷⁹.

Allerseelen played in Portland on June 14, 2003, supported by Waldteufel and Sacrificial Totem. The event took place at Optic Nerve Arts on Alberta Street. Michael Moynihan played with Allerseelen at this show. Petak’s far‐Right sympathies were further alluded to in Petak’s account of this tour, which cited questions he had to answer in a form when entering the United States. The following are the only questions cited by Petak:

Are you seeking entry to engage in criminal or immoral activities? Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved in any way in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?⁸⁰

Petak’s friend Markus Wolff further organized a show for Changes and Waldteufel that took place on August 26th, 2005 at the Alberta Street Public House. The event was publicized in an update from Soleilmoon, an experimental record label and music distribution also headquartered on Alberta Street⁸¹.
While Soleilmoon distributes a variety of different musical styles and artists, it does carry releases by Waldteufel, Changes and Allerseelen. Soleilmoon is also a major US distributor for the fascist⁸² neo‐folk act Death in June and its New European Recordings (NER) label.

A final Oregon ally of Petak is Tyler Davis of Jacksonville, Oregon, who runs The Ajna Offensive record label and the Ajnabound Esoteric Books publishing company. Davis’ connection to Petak traces back to the 1990s, when Davis helped with the black metal and experimental music ‘zine Descent alongside editor Stephen O’Malley. (O’Malley is responsible for an article on the topic of black metal published by the white supremacist Resistance magazine in 1995⁸³.) Davis’ Ajna Offensive distributes a number of Allerseelen titles, and Davis will be following along with the Allerseelen tour⁸⁴. Davis is also planning to issue a book of Petak’s collected tracts from the 1990s (issued as Gerhard Hallstatt) entitled Blutleuchte⁸⁵. While Tyler Davis is involved with issuing and distributing many titles that are not related to fascist politics—many instead focusing on Satanism, evil and the occult—he also seems to have no problem with fascists. The Ajna Offensive, for example, reissued the album “Blodsband (Blood Religion Manifest)” by white nationalists Sigrblot in 2005⁸⁶.

Conclusion

Petak has frequently denied having any interest in politics, stating for
example that “I do not believe in economics or politics. I believe in the power of art.”⁸⁷ Yet Petak continually deploys imagery from fascist movements, maintains associations with others on the far‐Right, and puts forward politics that appear as a combination of völkisch, Conservative Revolutionary and European New Right influences. Allerseelen is also promoted by publications and websites that stem from the fascist political tradition. As well as Petak’s interview in Kerry Bolton’s The Nexus, Allerseelen was also interviewed in Lutte du peuple, a publication of the French “national revolutionary” organization Nouvelle Résistance⁸⁸. Allerseelen is also promoted by in the far‐Right culture war efforts of Richard Lawson’s Flux Europa site⁸⁹, and is reviewed on national anarchist Troy Southgate’s RoseNoire website⁹⁰.

What is the meaning of Petak’s denial of any politics or political motivation? While not referring explicitly to Allerseelen, Anton Shekhovtsov’s article “Apoliteic music: Neo‐Folk, Martial Industrial and ‘Metapolitical Fascism’” points to an answer by discussing Evola’s concept of apoliteia as well as European New Right influence in relation to certain sectors of the post‐industrial scene⁹¹. From a stance of apoliteia, Petak is able to claim detachment from worldly politics, yet apoliteia is far from the same as pure political apathy. Rather, Petak appears to be active in a metapolitical “invisible order” engaged in anti‐Enlightenment culture wars, along the lines of the European New Right and its Right‐Gramscian project. While Petak does not dirty his hands in Right‐wing Party‐building, he nevertheless contributes to a climate favorable to fascist politics, through fighting for the hearts and minds of countercultural audiences. He knows what he is doing. As antifascists, we can only wonder whether Agalloch equally knows what it is doing, by helping such a fascist propagandist to access new audiences.

~ Rose City Antifascists, December 2010
~ download the statement

---

NOTES

1. Gules quoted in 'Allerseelen interview', Stigmata magazine (Belarus), No. 2 (August 2001)
2. Junge Freiheit article quoted in Shekhovtsov, Anton, "Apoliteic music: Neo‐Folk, Martial Industrial and ‘Metapolitical Fascism’", Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 43 No. 5 (December 2009), 431‐457 (Shekhovtsov gives his source for the Junge FreiheitFarin, Klaus: Die Gothics: Interviews, Fotografien (Bad Tölz: Tilsner 2001), 15.) quote as:
3. Petak quoted in Tasmanian National Anarchists, “Dark Green Romanticism”, Tasmanian Autonomous Zone: Heathen Anarchism in the Apple Isle website, February 24, 2010
4. Allerseelen interview, Stigmata magazine, op. cit. (Note 1). (Petak: “I am the heart of ALLERSEELEN. Usually I am only collaborating with other people on stage.”)
5. Gotrich, Lars, “First Listen: Agalloch, ‘Marrow Of The Spirit’,” National Public Radio website, November 14, 2010
6. “Steinklang‐Industries präsentieren: OAK FOLK – compilation,” Klang‐Konsortium wordpress blog, November 29, 2010
7. Allerseelen, Myspace Music site (Listing of “Allerseelen Live Performances” on front page, accessed December 3, 2010.)
8. Allerseelen, Discogs website.
9. Passmore, Kevin, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11. (Passmore attributes the phrase “A and not A” to Ortega y Gasset; the contrast provided by Passmore himself, is that fascism “idealizes the people” while it shows contempt for mass society.)
10. Bündnis gegen das Allerseelenkonzert (Rosenheim), “Nein zum Allerseelen Konzert in Rosenheim,” April 2005 (“Coalition Against the Allerseelen Concert” / “No to the Allerseelen Concert in Rosenheim.”)
11. Lee, Martin A., The Beast Reawakens (Boston / New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 209‐10.
12. Lee, op. cit. (Note 11), 210.
13. 'Allerseelen interview', Stigmata magazine, op. cit. (Note 1).
14. De Benoist, Alain, “Democracy Revisited,” Telos, No. 95 (Spring 1993), 63‐75, 75. (Translation from Démocratie: Le Problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985) by Tomislav Sunic.)
15. Lee, op. cit. (Note 11), 211.
16. Lee, op. cit. (Note 11), 210.
17. Shekhovtsov, op. cit. (Note 2). (“For example, the leader of the French New Right, Alain de Benoist, who actually enjoys folk music, finds it disturbing when folk artists […] add ‘elements of Nazi subculture’ to their music, and considers them provocateurs.”)
18. Buckley, Joshua and Michael Moynihan, Eds., Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition No. 2 (Atlanta: Ultra Publishing, 2004). (Alain de Benoist interview is at 77‐109 following the publication of a de Benoist essay at 65‐76; the Allerseelen / Gerhard Petak interview is at 285‐296.)
19. Passmore, op. cit. (Note 9), 83.
20. Passmore, op. cit. (Note 9), 84.
21. Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, (Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press , 2004), 113.
22. Passmore, op. cit. (Note 9), 84.
23. 'Allerseelen interview', Stigmata magazine, op. cit. (Note 1).
24. Ghetu, Dan, “Synthesis Editor Troy Southgate” (2001 interview), Synthesis: Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire website (Southgate, a theoretician of the fascist “national anarchism” tendency, is a former member of International Third Position, and names Gules’ Gazeta de Vest as “a thinly‐disguised propaganda outlet for the ITP.”)
25. Goodrick‐Clarke, Nicholas, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York / London: New York University Press, 2002), 340‐41, Note 46.
26. “No Artist ‐ Eiserne Garde: Gardia De Fier,” Discogs website.
27. 'Allerseelen interview', Raunend website (undated).
28. Bündnis gegen das Allerseelenkonzert (Rosenheim), op. cit. (Note 10). (Petak is quoted from the scene publication Black 14 (1998): “Apparently every culture needs a witch's mark, a Yellow Star. Today the accusation of fascism against industrial and dark wave music is a Yellow Star. The Yellow Star looks different today, they are the Ariosophic nationalistic symbols, runes, Thor's hammers, the Kruckenkreuz and the swastika.”)
29. Buckley, Joshua, “Musical Ammunition: An Interview with Allerseelen’s Gerhard,” Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition No. 2, op. cit. (Note 18), 285‐296, 286.
30. Lee, op. cit. (Note 11), 210.
31. “Allerseelen CD Strib und Werde” (reviews), Aorta blogspot site.
32. “Wir rufen Deine Wölfe” (reviews), Aorta blogspot site.
33. Petak quoted in Tasmanian National Anarchists, “Dark Green Romanticism,” op. cit. (Note 3).
34. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit. (Note 25), 340‐41, Note 46.
35. “Allerseelen ‐ Alle Lust Will Ewigkeit / Traumlied,” Discogs website
36. 'Allerseelen interview', The Noiseist (France), No. 4 (2000)
37. Collins, Simon, “The Alchemy of Allerseelen,” Judas Kiss magazine website. Interview of May 20, 2006.
38. “Various – Riefenstahl,” Discogs website.
39. Bahn, Peter, “The Friedrich Hielscher Legend: The Founding of a Twentieth‐Century Pantheistic ‘Church’ and Its Subsequent Misinterpretations,” Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition No. 2, op. cit. (Note 18), 243‐262, 249‐250. (Translated from “Die Hielscher‐Legende. Eine panentheistische ‘Kirchen’‐Gründung des 20. Jahrhunderts und ihre Fehldeutungen” (Gnostika No. 19, October 2001) by Michael Moynihan and “Gerhard”—presumably Gerhard Petak.)
40. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit. (Note 25), 340‐41, Note 46.
41. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit.
42. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit.
43. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit., (Note 25), 135‐36.
44. “Allerseelen ‐ Gotos=Kalanda,” Discogs website
45. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit. (Note 25), 227. (Goodrick‐Clarke writes of “the rapid internationalization of this German neo‐Nazi symbol.”)
46. 'Allerseelen interview', Descent magazine (Olympia, WA), No. 3 (Spring 1996).
47. Flowers, Stephen E. (Trans.) and Michael Moynihan (Ed.), The Secret King: Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler's Lord of the Runes (Vermont / Texas: Dominion Press / Rûna‐Raven Press, 2001), Amazon Books “Look Inside!” result (“Kadmon” listed as having “contributed to the eventual publication of this book” on copyright page.)
48. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit.
49. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit. (Note 25), 340‐41, Note 46.
50. Coogan, Kevin, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), 310.
51. Coogan, Kevin, Dreamer of the Day, op. cit. (Note 50), 315‐316.
52. Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World, op. cit. (Note 21), 179‐186.
53. “Various ‐ Cavalcare La Tigre ‐ Julius Evola: Centenary,” Discogs website.
54. François, Stephane, “The ‘Euro‐Pagan’ Scene: Between Paganism and Radical Right,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 1 No. 2 (2008), 35‐54
55. “Changes / Allerseelen, Men Among The Ruins”, Discogs website (Rather amazingly, in an article mentioning this association as well as Petak’s references to Wiligut and his release of Legionary music, François states that Petak “has never had an ideologically oriented message.”)
56. “The Nexus (journal),” SpiritusTemporis website
57. Gardell, Mattias, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 294.
58. Petak, Gerhard (as “Kadmon”), Aorta No. 20 (1995).
59. Moynihan, Michael and Didrik Søderlind, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1998).
60. Morrow, Charles, “Resurgent Atavism? Resurgent Nazism, Or, Wotan Made Me Do It,” in Burghart, Devin, Ed., Soundtracks to the White Revolution: White Supremacist Assaults on Youth Music Subcultures (Chicago: Center for New Community, 1999), 68‐70.
61. Petak, Gerhard (as “Kadmon”), “Oskorei,” in Moynihan and Søderlind, Lords of Chaos, op. cit.
62. Moynihan and Søderlind, Lords of Chaos, op. cit.
63. Moynihan quoted in Coogan, Kevin, “How Black is Black Metal? Michael Moynihan, Lords of Chaos and the ‘Countercultural Fascist’ Underground,” Hit List Vol. 1 No. 1 (February / March 1999), 32‐49, 45. (Coogan quotes from a Momentum interview with Moynihan.)
64. “Michael Moynihan's Siege Mentality,” Who Makes the Nazis? blog, October 8, 2010
65. Evola, Julius, Men Among the Ruins: Post‐War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 2002).
66. Goodrick‐Clarke, op. cit. (Note 25), 340‐41, Note 46.
67. Buckley, Joshua, “Musical Ammunition: An Interview with Allerseelen’s Gerhard,” Tyr: Myth‐Culture‐Tradition No. 2, op. cit. (Note 18), 285‐296
68. “Blood Axis / Allerseelen ‐ Walked In Line / Ernting,” Discogs website.
69. “Allerseelen / Blood Axis ‐ Käferlied / Brian Boru,” Discogs website.
70. “Changes ‐ Fire Of Life,” Discogs website (The following year, Storm co‐released the first Changes CD, also titled “Fire of Life,” see: Discogs.com)
71. “Changes / Allerseelen ‐ Men Among The Ruins,” Discogs, op. cit. (Note 55).
72. Lunsford, John, “Nazis, Noise and Nihilism: Infiltrating the Experimental Music Scene” in Burghart, Devin, Ed., Soundtracks to the White Revolution, op. cit.
73. Wulfing, Robert (Robert N. Taylor), “Waiting for the Fall,” Folk & Faith website
74. Sunshine, Spencer, “Rebranding Fascism: National‐Anarchists,” The Public Eye Vol. 23 No. 4 (Winter 2008).
75. Evola, Julius, Men Among the Ruins, op. cit.
76. “Hex Contributors,” Hex Magazine website.
77. “Past Staff,” Hex Magazine website.
78. Registration list for July 29, 2009 David Irving event in Portland (Item leaked on internet following event. Scott Rautmann purchased two tickets and is listed as “married to Amy” [sic].)
79. “Winternights/Samhain News 2010,” Hex Magazine website.
80. “2003 Allerseelen Pacific West Coast,” Aorta blogspot blog, November 14, 2005.
81. “Updates”, Soleilmoon website, August 4, 2005
82. Chicago Anti‐Racist Action, “Death in June, Der Blutharsch, Changes”, Infoshop News website, December 17 2003.
83. O’Malley, Stephen, “Nordic Darkness...,” Resistance magazine (Fall 1995).
84. “Allerseelen ‐ US dates,” The Ajna Offensive website.
85. “Gerhard Hallstatt: Blutleuchte,” Facebook page.
86. “Sigrblot ‐ Blodsband (Blood Religion Manifest),” Discogs website.
87. 'Allerseelen interview', Stigmata magazine, op. cit. (Note 1).
88. Bale, Jeffrey M., “‘National Revolutionary’ Groupuscules and the Resurgence of ‘Left‐wing’ Fascism: the Case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance”, Patterns of Prejudice Vol. 36, No. 3 (2002), 25‐49, 42‐43 Note 46.
89. “Allerseelen,” Flux Europa website.
90. Southgate, Troy, “Allerseelen ‐ Stirb und Werde,” Synthesis: Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire website.
91. Shekhovtsov, op. cit. (Note 2).

Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction

A recent post highlighted the disparity between Troy Southgate's claims to have moved to a position 'beyond Left and Right' and his role as a founder and Chairman of the New Right. A commenter posted a link to this article by Graham Macklin on the Slackbastard blog (originally from the journal Patterns of Prejudice), which provides a useful outline of the origins and development of Southgate's 'National Anarchist' politics - Strelnikov

Graham D. Macklin: Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction
Patterns of Prejudice
Vol.39, No.3, September 2005
 

Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a ‘national-anarchist’ groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ‘anarchist’ agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move ‘beyond left and right’, transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism. Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident ‘national-revolutionaries’ who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization.


In his monumental A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 Stanley Payne devotes only two pages to British fascism–‘a political oxymoron’–the volume of literature devoted to which is ‘inversely proportionate to its significance’.[2] Such disdain has all but smothered the study of post-war British fascism, which is characterized merely as an ‘epilogue’ to the ‘epochal significance’ of inter-war British fascism, which in itself is only of interest as a benign footnote to the history of fascism and Nazism. Walter Lacquer is similarly scornful in his refusal to study post-war British fascism, ‘because it has not been very significant or in anyway original’.[3] Although there is an element of truth in this proposition its reductive methodological focus on the traditional canons of ideological core and electoral performance overlooks the extent to which British fascism operates outside neatly quantifiable electoral, national and legal boundaries. This inevitably underestimates the wider impact of fascist politics.

In this respect Roger Griffin’s recent elaboration of the concept of the fascist ‘groupuscule’ provides a much-needed corrective to an analytically stunted approach that obscures as much as it reveals. This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism’s cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. While the synthesis of left and right in ‘third position’ groupuscules makes their classification suitably problematic, this article demonstrates that despite a protean capacity for change ‘national-revolutionary’ groupuscules retain, at least to the initiated, the recognizable mark of Cain. These origins are equally evident in the synthesis of ‘anarchism’ with Evolian fascism, which is espoused by NRF founder Troy Southgate whose rapidly evolving political odyssey from (comparatively) orthodox British fascism to the radical, anti-capitalist, ‘post-third-position’ ideology of ‘national-anarchism’ represents a highly personalized and idiosyncratic revolt against the modern world.

Origins

The origins of the NRF can be traced to the collapse of the National Front (NF) in 1979. From its formation in 1967 the NF grew rapidly in strength until by 1973 it had approximately 17,500 members, though approximately 64,000 people passed through its ranks during the course of the decade.[4] Following its comparative success in the May 1977 Greater London County Council elections — which masked an overall decline in its political fortunes — many commentators feared the NF was on the verge of a major political breakthrough.[5] Buoyed with hubris the NF fielded 303 candidates in the 1979 general election, more than any insurgent political party since the Labour Party in 1919.[6] However, a resurgent Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, which usurped its anti-immigration platform while taking an equally draconian line on law and order, trounced the NF, which polled a derisory 191,706 votes (1.4 per cent).[7]

It was Götterdämmerung. The resulting trauma accelerated the decline and fragmentation of the NF and led to the departure of its titular chairman, John Tyndall, who was blamed for its humiliation. Riven by internal dissent and struggling to cope with its failure, the NF entered a period of frenetic ideological radicalization. The catalyst for this development was the arrival in England of approximately forty fugitive Italian fascists belonging to Terza Positione and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, several of whom had been involved in the horrific bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980 that killed eighty people.[8] As well as supplying the NF with funds they also introduced its membership to the ideas of Julius Evola, the aristocratic Italian racial theorist who had assumed centre-stage after 1945 as the inspiration for generations of youthful Italian fascists.[9] The radicalization of these younger, educated, ambitious activists created a further rift within the NF, which culminated in the departure in 1983 of Martin Webster, the National Activities Organiser.[10]

Webster’s departure paved the way for the ascendancy of the ‘leftwing’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ tendency within the NF inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite and the ‘anti-Nazi’ writings of Otto Strasser.[11] The absorption of these ideological imports led to the development of a more intellectually sophisticated, internationalist, ‘third position’ ideology showcased in the NF’s theoretical journal Rising. Modelling itself on the esoteric elitist pretensions of Evola and Corneliu Codreanu, the NF sought to transform itself into a ‘revolutionary’ cadre-based organization and to rid itself of ‘armchair nationalists, tin-pot dictators or refugees from old political parties’.[12] By January 1985 membership had declined to 1,000.[13] The NF’s ideological inspiration was Derek Holland’s The Political Soldier (1984), which envisaged an elite form of racial nationalism led by ‘a new type of man who will live the Nationalist life every day’ while preparing for a ‘holy war’ against the iniquitous British state.[14] Abandoning electoral politics, the NF extolled grassroots, community-based activism and aspired eventually to replace parliamentary politics with direct democracy or ‘popular rule’ adapted from Colonel Qaddafi’s Green Book, which was eulogized alongside Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and Louis Farrakhan’s black separatist Nation of Islam. Not everyone accepted his ideological evolution, however. In 1989 the NF split into two separate groups: the Third Way led by Patrick Harrington, and the International Third Position (ITP) led by Derek Holland, Roberto Fiore and Nick Griffin, currently the British National Party (BNP) chairman.[15]

Troy Southgate

Born in Crystal Palace, South London in 1965, Troy Southgate’s political odyssey began in 1984 when he joined the NF as it was completing its rapid transformation into a ‘revolutionary organization’. Southgate claims he was attracted by its platform of ‘popular rule’ and Catholic distributism, rather than its ‘racial separatism’, which he accepted only later. Of immediate influence was Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and I Believed, the autobiography of Douglas Hyde, former editor of the Stalinist Daily Worker who became a minor cause célèbre in the 1950s when he renounced Communism and converted to Catholicism. Southgate followed suit in 1987, joining the ultra-conservative Lefebvrist sect, the Society of St Pius X. It was during this period that Southgate was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for serious assault during a streetfight. Following his release in 1989 he took over NF operations in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.[16] As the NF disintegrated into rival factions that year Southgate joined the ITP, believing it to be ‘the legitimate heir to the National Revolutionary Movement in Britain’, acting as its Kent organizer and editor of the Kent Crusader, Surrey Action, Eastern Legion and Catholic Action.[17]

Despite its radical origins the ITP quickly degenerated into an insignificant though fanatically ‘pro-life’ and homophobic Catholic sect, eulogizing the self-same ‘reactionary’ figures like General Franco and Mussolini it had previously denounced. Southgate became increasingly dissatisfied with the ITP leadership, particularly Holland and Fiore, whom he believed were far more interested in the possibilities of developing a rural fascist enclave in Northern France (and later in Spain), into which they had invested the group’s finances, than in sustaining the ITP as a cadre-based organization. Accusing them of gross financial impropriety, hypocrisy, racial miscegenation and of practising a ‘bourgeois’ form of reactionary ultra-Catholic fascism incompatible with the ‘revolutionary’ nationalism that, he claimed, they had betrayed, Southgate acrimoniously departed from the ITP in late 1992.[18]

Southgate immediately formed the English Nationalist Movement (ENM), which was intermittently active in Dover, Kent with small cadres in London and Bradford. It had ‘a small fluctuating hardcore’ of between 25 and 35 committed activists, though anti-fascist estimates put the figure as low as 4.[19] Signalling that the ENM represented the genuine embodiment of ‘national-revolutionary’ essentials Southgate established the knowingly titled Rising Press and reprinted influential articles from NF magazines like Rising, New Nation and Nationalism Today.[20] Vehemently opposed to the spiritual enslavement emanating from the twin materialistic poles of ‘Capitalist greed and Marxist servitude’ the ENM sought to define a usable ideological inheritance, untainted by its association with ‘classic’ fascism. Thus Hitler and Mussolini were denounced as ‘reactionary charlatans’ and enemies of ‘genuine’ revolutionary nationalism.[21] Corporate economics was also dismissed as the perpetuation of capitalism ‘behind a nationalist facade’.[22] The BNP was rejected as a mere ‘pressure valve’ for closet Tories and ‘small time drug dealers’.[23]

In contrast to the increasingly ‘reactionary’ ITP Southgate paid fulsome tribute to the pantheon of ‘forgotten’ dissident fascists that had motivated the original third position, including Strasser, Codreanu, José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Léon Degrelle, not to mention the Welsh nationalism of Plaid Cymru. The resulting ‘patriotic socialism’ was assimilated with the writings of Victorian socialists like William Morris, Robert Blatchford, Robert Owen and William Cobbett to create a native Anglo-Saxon völkisch tradition that desired the reclamation of an English pastoral idyll supposedly swept away by the Industrial Revolution.[24]

This was coupled with Southgate’s desire for a ‘mono-racial England’, which he claimed was not ‘racist’. Borrowing his terminology from the Nouvelle Droite, Southgate claimed to seek only ‘ethno-pluralism’ (i.e. racial apartheid) to defend indigenous white culture from the ‘death’ of multiracial society. Defending ‘human diversity’ Southgate advocated ‘humane’ repatriation and the reordering of the globe according to racially segregated colour blocs. Within this framework Southgate advocated a radical policy of economic and political decentralization: England, Alba (Scotland), Cymru (Wales), Ulster, Mannin (Isle of Man) and Kernow (Cornwall). These regions were to be governed according to the economic principles of Catholic distributism and a wealth redistribution scheme modelled on the mediaeval guild system. The ensuing growth of private enterprise and common ownership of the means of production would end ‘class war’ and, ergo, the raison d’être for Marxism, and would also encourage an organic nationalist economy insulated from ‘foreign’ intervention.[25] Politically the regions would be governed by the concept of ‘popular rule’ extolled by Qaddafi. The resulting restoration of economic and political freedom would re-establish the link between ‘blood and soil’ enabling the people to overcome the ‘tidal wave of evil and liberal filth now sweeping over our entire continent’. ‘Natural law’ would be upheld and abortion, race mixing and homosexuality forbidden.[26]

This desire to create a decentralized völkisch identity has its roots in the ideological ferment gripping National Front News and Nationalism Today in the 1980s. Southgate’s continued ideological morphology was stimulated through contact with Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective formed in 1989 to discuss ‘European identities, autonomies and initiatives’ and which emerged from the NF’s cultural appendage IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic). IONA organized joint symposia with Michael Walker’s Scorpion magazine at which ‘former British Nationalists’ met to discuss finding a ‘rooted radicalism’ to challenge the nationalism of the NF that was ‘out-dated, discredited and overtaken by events’.[27] Despite such ideological innovation Southgate betrayed signs of remaining wedded to older biological fulminations espoused by Nazi racial scientist Hans “Rassen” Günther and American racist Lothrop Stoddard.[28] Even his assimilation of Noam Chomsky’s scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[29]

Anarch(y) in Britain: the National Revolutionary Faction

In 1998 Southgate disbanded the ENM and founded the National Revolutionary Faction, a new cadre-based groupuscule that embraced a far broader range of dissident fascist positions than the ENM, reflecting Southgate’s increasingly occult and esoteric trajectory following his break with Catholicism in 1997, which he blamed for the ‘complete stupefaction’ of the ITP.[30] Ironically, many of Southgate’s esoteric ideas were reconstructed from his own reading of the key texts of liberal ‘fascist studies’ rather than originating with any organic tradition.[31] Through the NRF Southgate pushed ‘third position’ thought on decentralism and regionalism to its ‘logical’ conclusion, rejecting the very cornerstone of fascist ideology itself: nationalism. While retaining the ‘palingenetic’ component of its ideology, the NRF nevertheless rejected the ‘artificial’ nation-state and the ‘reactionary’ nationalism emanating from it as the focus for rebirth. Drawing on Evola’s ‘spiritual racism’ Southgate rejected abstract geography, advocating instead a ‘tribal and organic’ Indo-European ‘ethnic heritage’, extending from Europe to Iran, Afghanistan, India and Tibet, which offered an impregnable racial defence against the ‘quagmire’ of globalization and the faltering security provided by national borders.[32] Added to this ‘spiritual racism’ was C. G. Jung’s concept of the ‘collective subconscious’, which provided the NRF with further evidence of the existence of a ‘primeval Aryan psyche’. In this respect Southgate admired Heinrich Himmler’s activity at Wewelsburg Castle as ‘one of the most significant developments in modern history’, which had contributed to a ‘deeper’ occult understanding of race, even though in the same breath Himmler could be derided as a ‘fascistic pig’ funded by ‘secret wall street financiers’ who had murdered many of his own ideological heroes.[33]

The most intriguing ideological innovation, however, was Southgate’s conversion to ‘anarchism’ and his subsequent formulation of a doctrine of ‘national-anarchism’. At first glance the ‘total insanity’ of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism.[34] When put into its wider context, however, ‘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 and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated.[35]

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’, a notion that reinforces Southgate’s belief that ‘the concept of humanity coming and going in the same direction is a 1960s dead-end’. Redolent of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Futurist poetry, Nietzsche’s rejection of dogmatism and even Max Stirner’s extreme egoism, the concept of the Anarch finds its fullest expression in Ernst Jünger’s novel Eumeswil. For Jünger the Anarch differed radically from the anarchist, whose acts of insurrection (‘beacons of the impotent’) only brought further state repression. For the Anarch all external poles of power, whatever their relative merits, are both arbitrary and transitory. Having undergone a fortifying process of inner migration the Anarch ‘adjusts accordingly’ to external authority as a ‘question of form’ rather than faith. Stoically abjuring from this ‘ultimate devotion’ the Anarch preserves his autonomy and ‘metaphysical integrity’. This was also paramount in Evolian thought, which also divined a ‘spiritual’ basis for genuine authority beyond naked self-glorification.[36]

By recognizing this inviolability, by gaining the mastery of himself, the Anarch personifies a spiritual, aristocratic elite. The recognition of multilayered realities sees the Anarch ‘endlessly moving nomadically with mercurial freedom through thought . . . free to explore and synthesize’.[37] In this way the Anarch appropriates authority rather than succumbs to it, thus securing his own salvation and, ergo, that of the nation. In essence, Jünger’s work provides an esoteric reworking of Southgate’s original understanding of the ‘political soldier’ as a ‘Godlike figure’ who ‘can only truly be master of his situation when he is truly master of himself’. Only this ‘new man’ can save society from the ‘corruption and decadence’ that has engulfed it.[38] The concept of the Anarch therefore provides sanction for the amorphous ideological shape-shifting and rampant eclecticism of ‘national-anarchism’, allowing Southgate to claim that he is not ‘fascist’ but that he has transcended the dichotomy of conventional politics to embrace higher political forms that are ‘beyond left and right’.

In order to ‘change society completely’ the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy, which coincidentally led Southgate to jettison the ‘socialist trappings’ of Strasserism and ‘reformist’ distributism as incompatible with his Evolian racial vision. Indeed, Southgate is vehemently opposed to immigration and miscegenation, which he believes have severely disrupted the ‘organic balance of nature’.[39] The depth of his contempt for those who contravene this ‘natural order’ can be surmised from his attack on glamour model ‘Jordan’, whose child was fathered by a black footballer. ‘She has been rewarded for her racial treason’, jeered Southgate, ‘her picaninny has been born blind. just [sic] like his father, it would appear. still [sic], he can always become a Stevie Wonder impersonator when he grows up.’[40]

As such sentiments reveal, NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism’s humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as ‘infected’ with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism.[41] In its place Southgate has propagated a ‘third position’ anarchism based not on ‘moral’ rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the ‘natural order’ from which every group with ‘insurrectionist potential’ could unite to destroy ‘One World’ tyranny with a ‘primal bloodlust’.[42] NRF propaganda revels in this discordant Conradian stereotype of anarchism, glorifying both Bakunin’s ‘propaganda of the deed’ and Sergei Nechayev’s ‘science of destruction’.[43]

Having styled itself as an urban guerrilla group, NRF propaganda pays particular attention to the avoidance of state repression and surveillance by extolling a cellular, cadre-based organization comprising ‘political soldiers’ with four degrees of membership: the cadre or ‘active unit’, the trainee or probationary cadre, the supporter, and the outer circle who do little more than receive NRF publications. These four degrees of membership are subordinate to the Revolutionary Command Council, betraying a linguistic nod towards the continued ideological attraction of Qaddafi’s Libya, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir’s Egypt and the Iraqi Ba’athist Party.[44]

Such political organization reveals the NRF to be closer in inspiration to the Leninist ‘revolutionary vanguard’ than anarchism, even though it eulogizes the Angry Brigade and recommends Towards a Citizens Militia, published by Stuart Christie, one of [the] anarchists who was indicted though subsequently acquitted during the ‘Stoke Newington 8’ trial.[45] Indeed the NRF appropriates its symbolism from Marxist terror cells like the Red Army Faction, and its publications regularly feature instructions on the manufacture of homemade explosives, rockets, grenades, short-range mortars and napalm. In preparation for the total systemic collapse of capitalist society NRF cells are urged to immerse themselves in survivalist literature, military field manuals and encouraged to join the Territorial Army so that, as the Irish Republican Army discovered in the 1950s, ‘you can actually be paid and trained by the State in order to deal with its consequences’.[46] The NRF found even greater inspiration in the native terrorist tradition of the American far right and its concept of ‘leaderless resistance’, which is portrayed as an ‘anarchist’ alternative to the traditional mass-based organization that is rejected as ‘self-delusion’.[47] Having abandoned the constitutional’ approach of the British National Party the NRF is free to wage its ‘war of liberation’ against the British state and ‘international Zionism’ and in doing so evokes the inspiration of liberation leaders like Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, who are listed as ‘exemplars for the struggle’.[48] This synthesis leads the NRF to promote a form of ‘black’ anarchism. These ideas owe a far greater debt, however, to fascism’s own tradition of terrorism and the ‘active nihilism’ of Julius Evola who in his later life preached that the outright destruction of the state was imperative. Southgate’s concept of ‘Real Anarchy’ is therefore little more than a repackaging of the esoteric principles of conservative revolutionary and Evolian thought.[49]

Richard Hunt and Alternative Green

Southgate’s espousal of Evolian Traditionalism underwent further ideological morphology through his contact with the anarcho-primitivist ideas of Richard Hunt, the founding editor of Green Anarchist who had been forced to resign over his support for the Gulf War. Southgate was exposed to Hunt’s ideas through the pages of Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective that eventually merged with his new publication Alternative Green.[50] Hunt’s ideas found their fullest expression in his book To End Poverty (1997), which argues that poverty in the ‘periphery’ is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the core’. This ‘progress’ represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and ‘biologically unhealthy’ population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards ‘total social breakdown’. Hunt’s panacea is to return to ‘the original affluent society’ of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a ‘peck order’ of ‘respect and influence’, bound by ‘kinship’, that would reestablish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism.[51]

Impressed by Hunt’s ‘grubby sort of utopia’ Southgate recognized that it could only be implemented following the ‘complete collapse’ of capitalism. Southgate believed that this eventuality was nearer to hand than was generally imagined, counselling that ‘national-revolutionaries’ needed to create ‘alternative revolutionary structures’ and ‘independent enclaves’ away from Britain’s ‘Asian infested cities’ in order to hasten capitalism’s demise. Thus the NRF advocated a localized ‘counter-economy’ based on smallholdings and allotments whose produce and required skills could be bartered through local exchange trading systems (LETS) suffused with a racist imperative to break the ‘dominating stranglehold’ of Asian shop owners. This racist anti-capitalism had as its end the desire to foment civil and racial strife through ‘no-go’ areas for ethnic minorities and state power as an essential prelude to racial civil war and the collapse of the capitalist system.[52]

Key to this is the maintenance of a network of like-minded and ideologically committed individuals, families and groups who have ‘turned their backs upon the corrosive influence of urbanism and decay’ and might feasibly form racially segregated rural communities and build something ‘tangible’.[53] Emulating the example of the Wandervogel, the British Woodcraft folk and the ‘legionary spirit’ of Corneliu Codreanu’s Iron Guard, Southgate formed the Greenshirts and a uniformed Iron Youth to re-establish the ‘eternal’ principles of blood and soil through cross-country hikes and camping.[54] Here can be found Southgate’s attempt to create the archetypal Fascist Man who, in Codreanu’s words, ‘does not bend, who is inflexible’.[55] These activities represent an integral part of the NRF’s long-term strategy to construct a broad range of viable political, social, cultural and economic alternatives to those of ‘the Establishment’ through which the children of its activists can emerge as ‘the true vanguard of our people’s future’.[56] To insulate them from the degenerate Americanized values of their peer group and a national curriculum based on ‘reading, writing and buggery’, Southgate schools his children from home.[57]

This racist communitarianism is given an ‘anarchist’ gloss through Southgate’s reinterpretation (and limitation) of the ideas of free and instinctive association implicit in Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid as an expression of ‘folkish’ identity. Proclaiming that it is ‘anarchist’ to insist on ‘our own space’, Southgate excludes from these communities the ‘unnatural’ presence of ethnic minorities, homosexuals and feminists, not to mention those who support abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, vivisection and genetically modified foods. They would be free to form their own communities.[58] Influenced by Hunt’s anarcho-primitivism Southgate’s view of ‘Traditional Anarchy’ is suffused with Evola’s advocacy of ‘self-rule by an elite’ and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by ‘genetics’ that, despite its alleged ‘anarchism’, looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial ‘kingship’.[59] Southgate’s vision also absorbs the ideas of anarchist thinkers like John Zerzan, not to mention the Luddite terrorism of Ted Kaczynski, in order to theorize a ‘more natural lifestyle’, superficially free of the taint of ‘fascism’, adding a novel green/anarchist spin to Evola’s Traditionalism in the process.[60]

This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of ‘folk autonomy’ rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization. He was quick to appreciate that the anti-globalization movement was ‘sectarian’ in its political leanings. Alternative Green and its ‘overriding aversion to the Capitalist system’ was therefore an ‘ideal platform for formulating practical strategy’ to oppose capitalism.[61] Alternative Green was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a ‘sincere’ alliance of ‘anti-system’ protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe, though admittedly ‘there wasn’t much input from the far left’.[62] To push this agenda the Beyond Left and Right website was founded, although efforts to convene further events during 2001 proved unsuccessful when Anti-Fascist Action and members of Green Anarchist (and their arch-detractor Stewart Home) mobilized to ‘smash convergence’.[63] Southgate’s aborted attempt to transcend the left/right dichotomy and open a dialogue with the (now-reviled) ‘anarcho-dogmatists’ failed utterly.

Members of the anarchist trade union, the International Workers of the World, founded an anti-nationalist-anarchist e-group to refute the assertions being made by ‘national-anarchists’. Black Flag, the backbone of British anarchism, provided its Internet audience with a vast archive of online texts refuting Southgate’s assertion that racism and nationalism were ‘anarchist’. Individual members of Anti-Fascist Action have also been particularly active in challenging NRF activity in online newsgroups. The furore led to Hunt’s further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate’s frequent contributions to Alternative Green, his views have not permeated further within the far right.[64] Denounced as a ‘fascist’ Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green.[65] Having become ill Hunt finally relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green to Southgate; it was, however, suspended after only one issue and replaced with a new publication, untainted by the furore, entitled Terra Firma.[66]

The brief existence of the ‘Beyond Left and Right’ project hinted at its nebulous potential. Two veteran socialists, Gary Holden and Terry Liddle, both prominent in the Greenwich branch of the London Green Party, its Green Socialist Network and the South London Republican Forum, attended the 2000 Anarchist Heretics Fair. As news of their attendance emerged members of the UK_Left_Network e-group (unsuccessfully) lobbied the London Socialist Alliance and the Republican Communist Network (RCN), with which they were involved, to institute an enquiry. Liddle offered a somewhat unconvincing defence of his actions in both Republican Communist and Weekly Worker, organ of the minuscule Communist Party of Great Britain, which was closely aligned with the RCN, that stated that he had ‘no case to answer’. Calls for an enquiry were dismissed as a ‘witch hunt’ motivated by the ‘paranoid’ fantasy of Green Anarchist, thus sidestepping the actual content of the accusations. A parallel Green Party enquiry ended with Liddle’s resignation, however.[67]

As these events unfolded it became apparent that the NRF was practising a form of virtual entryism through the eco-anarchy e-group, an arm of the Canadian-based anarcho-green forum, in order to enquire into, among other things, the viability of forging a green/black bloc. Its moderator Joseph Catron had previously posted a number of messages to ‘national-revolutionary’ e-groups announcing his opposition to the ‘multicultural and imperialist nightmare’, and it has been suggested that the eco-anarchy e-group was a ‘honey trap’ designed to lure genuine and unsuspecting greens and anarchists into its orbit.[68] This thesis was given some credence by the fact that Dave Parks, the Anti-Fascist Action activist who exposed these machinations, was barred from the list rather than those he exposed.[69]

Mindful of the contemporary success of the red/brown coalition in Russia, NRF cadres sought to create ‘a working synthesis’ between anti-capitalists of both the left and right.[70] Indeed, with the collapse of ‘really existing’ Communism in 1989, the NRF abandoned ‘third position’ fascism as ‘irrelevant’. Having immersed himself in the writings of both Hunt and anarchist theorist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), Southgate reconceptualized the coming struggle in terms of a Manichaean division between ‘those for Capitalism and those against Capitalism, Centralists versus Decentralists’.[71] In this respect ‘national-anarchism’ was ‘transcending the very notion of beyond’ by taking synthesis to its ‘logical’ extreme and uniting all anti-systemic opposition against a single enemy: global liberal capitalism deemed to operate as a front for the ‘shadowy financiers’ of the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, and therefore ‘International Zionism’.[72]

There was little evidence that this ‘synthesis’ represented anything more than a strategy for infiltration as NRF cadres gradually shifted from low level antisemitic demonstrations against traditional fascist targets to the permeation of ecological and anarchist concerns, like direct action protests against a proposed multiplex cinema in Crystal Palace, the ‘Stop the City’ protests in 1999 and the May Day protests in 2000.[73] Southgate claims to have been active in the increasingly violent protests surrounding the Huntingdon Life Sciences vivisection laboratory in Cambridgeshire during August 2000.[74] He also claims NRF cadres are active in the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the Animal Liberation Front.[75]

Discord in the Middle East has offered the NRF further scope to enhance its anti-imperialist credentials. Unlike the BNP, which has transformed its virulent Islamophobia into a virtue since 11 September, the NRF supports Islam because ‘many of its adherents are vigorously opposed to International Zionism’.[76] NRF members often participate in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and, in one symbolic act of support, burned American and Israeli flags outside Downing Street as an ‘anti-Zionist’ protest against continued attacks on Iraq. Although the NRF opposes organized Islamic groups in Britain like Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun, which seek to establish a ‘global Caliphate’, NRF publications regularly eulogize groups such as Hamas for the ‘purity of thought and action’ with which they attack ‘the obnoxious disease that is World Jewry’.[77] Keen to build bridges with British Muslims the NRF claims a ‘handful’ of Arab members and has published a faux Islamist publication, Semitic Voice, which purports to be the work of ‘a group of young Muslim students’. In an attempt to foster greater enmity against Israel the NRF repackages traditional far-right concerns in an Islamic context, blaming the ‘holohoax’ for Palestinian dispossession and inciting Islamist militants to violence against the Jews by advocating the formation of ‘cells of God’ (leaderless resistance).[78]

This strategy had a limited virtual success through an online bulletin board called Jumeirah Beach: The Society of International Thinkers for Peace, run by Qasim Khan from Karachi in Pakistan, which purports to have a wide audience in the Middle East. Khan, who is linked to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the third largest political party in Pakistan whose activists were recently involved in the wave of sectarian violence in Karachi, describes the NRF as an ‘international think tank’ and acts as the ‘national-anarchist’ contact in Pakistan. Through this site Southgate has sought to acquaint Middle Eastern readers with Julius Evola and ‘lone wolf’ resistance and, in doing so, to transform national-anarchism into a ‘global idea’, thus hastening the ‘destruction of international Capitalism’.[79] Another contributor to the site is former BNP organizer for Hull and Lincolnshire, David Michael, who left the BNP because of its ‘disgraceful’ anti-Islamism after 11 September.[80] Michael views the American-led invasion of Iraq as potentially cathartic and argues:

All the people of the world who want peace and who fear America must unite now more than ever before, Muslims, anarchists, communists, nationalists, all of us . . . we must join together, put aside philosophical and religious differences, and start to work together against the American murderers and the British pig, Blair. Divided, we will accomplish nothing. Together, we might slowly begin to rid the world of this evil.[81]

In an effort to further such an alliance Michael founded Voice of the Resistance, which purports to act as a forum for resistance against the ‘new American Capitalist Empire’.[82] Using rhetoric traditionally associated with left-wing protest Voice of the Resistance bills itself as ‘George W. Bush’s worst nightmare’. Southgate and Michael soon encountered ‘insurmountable differences’ and ceased their co-operation.[83]

Geopolitics

One of the paradoxes of post-war fascism has been the repeated effort to transcend the ‘narrow’ nationalism of ‘classic’ fascism by becoming truly international through a series of grand designs for European unity. To compensate for their debilitating numerical deficiency, ‘national-revolutionary’ groups like the NRF have internationalized both their ideology and their organizational frameworks in order to reach out to similarly isolated groups abroad, globalize their struggle and consolidate their strength. In its attempts to realize this Eurasian ideology Southgate founded the Liaison Committee for Revolutionary Nationalism (LCRN) in early 1993 to unite the American Front, Canada’s National Liberation Front and Kerry Bolton’s National Destiny in New Zealand. These groups did little more than exchange publications and information, however. In September 1998 the LCRN merged with Christian Bouchet’s Front Européen de Liberation (FEL) under the shadow of the Front National’s annual Red-White-Blue festival. The FEL was inspired by the ‘one vision’ of European ‘liberation’ espoused by Otto Strasser, Jean Thiriart and Francis Parker Yockey, after whose original organization the FEL was named.[84] Southgate sought to anchor the NRF within this ‘living tradition’ by reprinting Yockey’s The Proclamation of London (1949), ‘a fully-fledged ‘‘Declaration of War’’’ against the ‘Zionist, Capitalist New World Order’. By February 1999 despite repeated efforts to organize these disparate ‘national-revolutionary’ sects the FEL had atrophied, although Southgate continued to ‘work closely’ with Bouchet.[85]

Geopolitically Southgate has shifted away from the older paradigms of Europe as a ‘third way’, gravitating towards the spiritual and esoteric national-Bolshevik solution advocated by Jean Parvulesco and Aleksandr Dugin, ideologue of the Arctogaia think tank, who seek a new Eurasian (and in Dugin’s case Russian-led) geopolitical axis: ‘Paris-Berlin-Moscow’.[86] Former Jeune Nation leader Jean Thiriart provides further inspiration through his more materially orientated idea of an economically insulated European empire stretching ‘from Galway to Vladivostok’ and acting as a third force between Occident and Orient. Despite having retired from politics in 1969 Thiriart was so enamoured with the FEL that he re-emerged shortly before his death in 1993 to lead a FEL delegation to Moscow for talks with national-Bolshevik ideologues Yegor Ligachev and Aleksandr Dugin.[87]

Southgate’s vision of western culture is saturated with a profound pessimism tempered by the optimistic belief that only by ‘complete and utter defeat’ can tepid materialism be expunged and replaced by the ‘golden age’ of Evolian Tradition: a return of the Ghibbelines of the Middle Ages or the ‘medieval imperium’ of the Holy Roman Empire before it collapsed into the ‘internecine struggle’ and ‘imperialistic shenanigans’ of the nation-state.[88] This panacea has been injected into the contemporary Russian national-Bolshevik milieu through Southgate’s analysis of Evola’s Men among the Ruins that appeared on the Pravda.ru website.[89] The Eurasian geopolitical solution is not conceived by Southgate as a cynical extension of Russian imperial chauvinism, but a ‘golden opportunity’ to create a ‘decentralised imperium’. Adopting the slogan of Breton nationalist Yann Fouéré, Southgate advocates a ‘Europe of One Hundred Flags’ wherein ‘each historic nation can assert its own political, social and economic freedom within the ancestral boundaries of its racial and cultural heritage’. This Eurasian ethnic ‘federalism’ is to serve as an impermeable barrier to the culturally enervating forces of MTV ‘musak’ and ‘Coca-McDeath’. To liberate Europe from the all-encompassing ‘blanket cosmopolitanism’ of American-led consumerism, not to mention the ‘occupying force’ of its military presence in Europe, Southgate advocates relinquishing ‘the very idea of the West’. Enmeshed in a vortex of materialist society and therefore ‘deep within enemy lines’, Europeans are encouraged to reach out to the ‘common struggles’ waged by the heirs of Che Guevara, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and Patrice Lumumba, whose revolutions on the ‘periphery’ should be supported as part of a dual strategy of ‘encouraging dissent and resistance from within’.[90]

Paganism

Southgate, who has a degree in theology and religious studies from Canterbury University, rejected Catholicism and moved towards neo-pagan and heathen groups that are ‘very loyal to the Gods of the Northern Tradition’, including the Odinic Rite, the Tribe of the Wulfings and the Asatru Alliance, a pagan movement concerned with practising rituals and magic and led by Valguard (Mike) Murray, a former member of the American Nazi Party.[91] Further evidence of this transition from Catholicism to paganism emerged in an interview with Wotan, the organ of the Charlemagne Hammer Skins.[92] Southgate believed that Wotan’s celebration of the heroes of the Norse pantheon represented ‘the most genuine expression of European spirituality, culture and identity’.[93] Another key expression of this ‘identity’ is exhibited by Southgate’s interest in the militaristic cult of Mithras and the ‘pagan spirituality’ of the apostate Roman emperor Julian II.[94]

This rejection of Christianity has an avowedly antisemitic dimension. Through the figure of Christ, Christianity has Judaic roots and is therefore irredeemably tainted; only the ‘weak’ continue to worship a ‘dead Jew’.[95] The emphasis on the Judaic roots of Christianity, however, is regarded as of secondary importance to its usurpation of the rituals, sacraments and hierarchy of the ancient pagan solar religion Mithras, which was introduced into Iran and India by marauding Aryan tribes from the Russian steppes between BCE 2000 and 1500 before spreading to the Roman empire. Although it failed to defeat early Christianity in the battle for religious supremacy during the fourth century, Mithras continues to be viewed by esoteric thinkers (including Evola and Jung) as an alternative path the West could have followed. It retains its appeal as an initiatory cult or aristocratic order akin to the Knights Templar or, latterly, Himmler’s SS which, the NRF claims, had its origins in various ‘Anarchist droite’ circles like the Black Sun and the Thule Society. While Christianity tried to neuter this vital expression of the ‘Aryan psyche’, the awareness of Europe’s ‘Faustian’ destiny is currently enjoying a renaissance within the occult milieu. These ideas were also absorbed by thinkers like Evola and René Guénon who discerned in them the fragments of a ‘hidden albeit distinct and fundamental truth’.[96] For Southgate, as for Evola, Tradition is an ‘an underlying current which both permeates and transcends all’.[97]

Southgate’s discovery of Evolian ‘Primordial Tradition’ and his consequent rejection of Catholicism as ‘the sole cosmological truth’ ran in tandem with his immersion in the industrial music scene.[98] This ‘cultural vanguard’ is spearheaded by a number of Gothic-Industrial, Dark Ambient, Black and ‘Viking’ Metal bands, including Allerseelen, Blood Axis, Burzum, Current 93, Dark Holler, Death in June, Endura, Mayhem, Ostara, Puissance and Sol Invictus, though it also encompasses more commercial bands like Cradle of Filth.[99] Although it would be an exaggeration to say that these groups conform to a defined political agenda, their music serves to diffuse the ideals of Mithraic paganism and Nordic folk myths within this youthful underground subculture far more effectively than any number of meetings and marches could, thus providing the ‘perfect antidote’ to the spiritually enervating, multiracial values of a globalizing ‘system’. Southgate has also noted the potential of the Straight Edge punk movement and its hard core of puritanically intolerant followers, an interesting development given (exaggerated) reports of an emerging ‘anti-anti-establishment’ pro-Bush right-wing punk movement.[100] Although Southgate realizes that the groupuscular right cannot control music-orientated youth cultures, he believes a minority can be induced ‘to take a direction basically conducive to our aims’.[101] Southgate seeks to do this through his online magazine Synthesis, which features a music section replete with interviews and gig reviews.[102]

This is not simply cynical manipulation. Southgate appears genuinely interested in the counter culture he seeks to target. His fanzine, Tribal Resonance, ‘the voice of the racial avant-garde’, reveals Southgate’s strategy of linking his ideas to ‘the common language and the big ideas of our culture’.[103] Through the medium of musical subcultures and the creation of alternatives ‘from without’, Southgate hopes to permeate existing political subcultures transversally, as the Nazis did, through a process of ‘cultural osmosis’ that aims to recode the ‘social symbology’ of the host culture so that its ideas can metastasize throughout the body politic, recalibrating its genetic inheritance. By creating ‘cultural hegemony’ the groupuscular right believes it can forge the ‘political space’ necessary for political and racial hegemony.[104]

The struggle for cultural hegemony is greatly enhanced by the Internet, with the NRF establishing its own website in July 2001. As its name suggests, Synthesis, the online Journal du Cercle de la Rose Noire, seeks a fusion of ‘Anarchy’, ‘Occulture’ and ‘Metapolitics’ with the contemporary concerns of the ecological and global justice movements. It provides a huge, counter-cultural resource (‘a junction box for esoteric, third positionism on the web’) including a vast archive of articles, essays, interviews, music and book reviews not to mention providing opportunities for its readership to showcase their art, photography, poetry and fiction. This is accompanied by a profusion of interlocking e-groups acting as a forum for ideological exchange for the more esoterically and intellectually inclined.[105]

Synthesis was originally envisaged as a forum for the NRF, Evolians and members of the defunct White Order of Thule (Michael Lujan, former WOT secretary, is the Synthesis webmaster). However, borrowing the ‘template’ of Action Française’s ‘study groups’ Synthesis projects itself far beyond the confines of rigid definitional taxonomy to attract, so it claims, ‘Crowleyites, communists, anarchists, greens, libertarians, fascists and separatists’ who can use its facilities and e-groups to engage in debate and ideological refinement. This online convergence has the benefit of being insulated from the failure of the ‘Beyond Left and Right’ project. With a global reach, it ‘is far more useful than putting a few stickers on lamp posts’.[106]

This extensive Internet presence masks the weakness of the groupuscular right. Obsessed by the importance of its long-term, counter-cultural projects the NRF disengaged from ‘political’ activities and retreated into the realm of ideas.[107] Such was Southgate’s alienation from the groupuscule as an organizational form that on 29 January 2003 the NRF was disbanded altogether as Southgate concentrated on reorganizing as a ‘political think tank’ to promote and develop ‘national-anarchism’ as a philosophical concept that he hoped would come to exert a ‘formidable influence’ on the ‘anti-Capitalist struggle’.[108]

The significance of the NRF

In itself the NRF is completely irrelevant as a political force. Its importance lies in the case study it supplies of fascism as an amorphous and continually metamorphosing phenomenon. It is symptomatic of the transient nature of far-right groupuscules that by the time this article was completed the NRF had been disbanded. Southgate’s latest activities have shifted almost entirely to the Internet, which is seen as offering the best opportunity of turning ‘national-anarchism’ into a ‘global idea’. Although these developments are taking place on the farther shores of the cultural and political fringe, this miniature struggle for cultural hegemony should not be ignored. The Anti- Defamation League (ADL) recently argued that, with the increased use of traditional anarchist symbolism by white supremacists in the United States, the circle-A should be listed as a hate symbol. The ridiculous nature of this assertion ignores the fact that it has been precisely those left-wing and anarchist subcultures maligned by the ADL who have actively fought back against the genesis of ‘national-anarchism’, disrupting and exposing it both on the street and in cyberspace. Indeed, anarchists and the radical left in Britain appear alive to the validity of Charles Peguy’s observation made over a century ago: ‘Qui dit “ni droite ni gauche” dit de droite’. It was this hostility to Southgate’s calls for ‘convergence’ that forced him to relocate his activities to the Internet where a wider audience can be reached, ‘particularly abroad where the left/right spectrum is far more blurred and open to interpretation’.[109] As the antipathy for Green Anarchist reveals, this resistance has not always been generated by a sophisticated analysis of Southgate’s own activities but rather because it fell within the framework of pre-existing antipathy.

Although Southgate’s impact on left-wing counter-cultural concerns has been completely negligible, this case study of the NRF’s wanton intellectual cannibalism shows that groupuscular fascism poses a clear danger, particularly for ecological subcultures whose values are profoundly different from the ecological agenda mooted by the far right. The increasing ability of groupuscules like the NRF to absorb and mirror left-wing and environmental causes, effortlessly refracting their concerns about globalization and liberal democracy through their own antisemitic and racist framework, creates a dangerous conflation between ecology and anti-immigration as a way of restoring the ‘organic balance’ of nature. If this article is anything to go by, then anarchist, ecological and global justice movements need to remain on their guard in order to ensure that the revolution will not be national-Bolshevized.

~ Graham Macklin


1. I would like to thank Kevin Coogan, Martin Durham, Roger Griffin and Joe Street for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this article.
2. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (London: University College London Press 1996), 303–5. Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005.
3. Walter Lacquer, Fascism: Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 119.
4. Martin Walker, The National Front (London: Fontana/Collins 1977).
5. Guardian, 5 July 1977 and The Times, 6 July 1977.
6. Stan Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: Macmillan 1989), 163–70.
7. Christopher T. Husbands, ‘The decline of the National Front: the elections of 3 May 1979’, Wiener Library Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 49/50, 1979, 60–6.
8. These include Roberto Fiore, Massimo Morsello and his wife, Amadeo de Francisci and Stefano Tiraboschi. All were convicted in Italian courts in absentia of membership of a terrorist group. Another Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari terrorist who fled to Britain was Luciano Petrone who was wanted for the murder of two policemen. He was later deported and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Attempts by the Italian authorities to extradite Fiore and Morsello failed repeatedly, however, giving rise to speculation that while active in the Lebanon they had spied for MI6 and were now being protected by their former paymasters; see Guardian, 4 August 1998. Italy has since dropped the charges linking Fiore to the Bologna bombing, enabling him to return to Italy where he is extremely active as leader of the Forza Nuova, which has recently moved away from the periphery of Italian politics through its co-operation with the Lega Nord, which has representation in Silvio Berlusconi’s government; see Searchlight, no. 331, January 2003 and no. 333, March 2003.
9. Franco Ferraresi, ‘Julius Evola: Tradition, reaction, and the radical right’, European Sociology Journal, vol. 28, 1987, 107–49.
10. Ray Hill with Andrew Bell, The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network (London: Grafton Books 1988).
11. David Baker, ‘A. K. Chesterton, the Strasser brothers and the politics of the National Front’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 19, no. 3, 1985, 23–33, argues that this ‘Strasserism’ was more attributable to the home-grown antisemitic anti-capitalism of the NF founder A. K. Chesterton.
12. Nationalism Today, no. 32, August 1985.
13. Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I. B. Tauris 1998), 260.
14. Derek Holland, The Political Soldier: A Statement (London: International Third Position 1994).
15. Roger Eatwell, ‘The esoteric ideology of the NF in the 1980s’, in Mike Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (London: Macmillan 1996), 99–117.
16. Searchlight, no. 166, April 1989.
17. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Dan Ghetu’, Synthesis (online journal), 2001, available at http://www.rosenoire.org/interviews/southgate2.php (viewed 5 May 2005).
18. NRF, ‘Official statement on the International Third Position’, available on Synthesis website at http://www.rosenoire.org/essays/itp.php (viewed 14 May 2005).
19. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 10 September 2002.
20. ENM, The Best of Rising: A Booklet for the Political Soldier (London: Rising Press 1995).
21. Southgate also denounced Oswald Mosley as a ‘reactionary’, in his ‘Oswald Mosley: the rise and fall of English fascism between 1918–45’, n.d., available on the Synthesis website at http://www.rosenoire.org/articles/hist30.php (viewed 14 May 2005).
22. The Crusader, no. 5, n.d. and no. 6, 1996.
23. The English Alternative, no. 9, n.d.
24. ENM, The German Contribution to Revolutionary Nationalism (London: Rising Press 1995); ENM, Forgotten Ideals: National Socialism before 1933Destiny of Iron: Corneliu Codreanu and the Legion of St Michael the Archangel (London: Rising Press 1996); ENM, Foretaste of a New Dawn: Five Harbingers of the National Revolution (London: Rising Press 1995); and ENM, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries (London: Rising Press 1995). See also Troy Southgate, ‘Revolution vs. reaction’, n.d., available at http://www.geocities.com/bobmeyer_us/troy.html (viewed 14 May 2005). (London: Rising Press 1996); ENM,
25. ENM, Distributism: A Summary of Revolutionary Nationalist Economics (London: Rising Press 1995).
26. Muammar Qaddafi, The Green Book (London: Rising Press 1995); ENM, Popular Rule: The Authority of the English People in Post-Revolutionary Society (London: Rising Press n.d.).
27. Perspectives, no. 6, Summer 1993; Paul Charnock, ‘Eclectics in perspective’, The Scorpion, no. 17, 1996, available at thescorp.multics.org/17eclect.html (viewed 5 May 2005).
28. Troy Southgate, The Meaning of Nationalism (Dover, Kent: Rising Press 1992).
29. Despite overwhelming evidence that The Protocols is a forgery Southgate rejects this fact as ‘not proven’ or in any case irrelevant as its veracity had been borne out by subsequent events; see The Crusader, no. 6, 1996.
30. The Nexus, no. 13, August 1998. The staunchly Catholic ITP responded with a virulent assault on the prevalence of paganism within the far right, entitled Satanism and Its Allies: The Nationalist Movement under Attack (London: Final Conflict 1998). A later update singled out Southgate as a ‘Satanist’ and ‘pro-faggot’; see ‘Satanism and its allies: an update’, available on the Final Conflict website at http://www.politicalsoldier.net/satbkltupdt.html (viewed 5 May 2005). For Southgate’s response, see Paranoia in the Pews! (London: Rising Press 2000).
31. A sample of the breadth of these ideological influences includes the eastern orientated geopolitics of Francis Parker Yockey, Jean Thiriart, Aleksandr Dugin, Jean Parvulesco and Karl Haushofer; the national-Bolshevism of Ernst Niekisch and Karl Otto Paetel; the ‘left-wing’ fascism of Ledesma Ramos and Otto Strasser; the ‘legionary’ spirit of Corneliu Codreanu and Mircea Eliade; the ‘green’ fascism of Reich peasant leader Walter Darre´; the esoteric Nazism of Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano; the ‘spiritual racism’ and aristocratic Traditionalism of Julius Evola; the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and anarchist revolutionary Sergei Nechayev; the conservative revolutionary thought of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger; the psychology of C. G. Jung; the hermetic occultism of Alastair Crowley, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon; the ‘fantastic’ fiction of Arthur Machen and the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft; the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley; the ‘psychic art’ of Austin Osman Spare; the ‘esoteric symbolism’ of R. A. Schwaller de Lubitz, SS Grail seeker Otto Rahn and the mystic folklore of Friedrich Hielscher, founder of Das Ahnenerbe (the Society for the Study of Ancestral Heritage). These diverse figures are joined by a number of anarchists including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, several Islamists including the Quranic scholar Seyyed Hossien Nasr, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, Swiss art historian Titus Burckhardt, the explorer Sir Richard Burton who perpetuated the ‘blood libel’ myth in his book The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam (1898), not to mention black separatists Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, critics of totalitarianism George Orwell and Jack London, Marxist terrorists Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader, Catholic fantasy writers C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and French situationist Guy Debord.
32. NRF, An Introduction to National-Anarchism (London: Rising Press 1999). For more on Evola’s views on race as the embodiment of the ‘living nation’, see Julius Evola, Race as a Revolutionary Idea (London: Rising Press 2001).
33. The Nexus, no. 13, August 1998.
34. ‘National-anarchism: a reply to a leftist’, available at http://www.rosenoire.org/essays/n-a-dialogue.php (viewed 5 May 2005). This webpage appeared in response to a brief summary of ‘national-anarchism’ by ‘Lefty Hooligan’ in the punk-rock magazine Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, no. 214, March 2001.
35. Clifford Harper is the prolific anarchist illustrator, many of whose evocative woodcuts of anarchist history are collected in Clifford Harper, Anarchy: A Graphic Guide (London: Camden Press 1987).
36. Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil (London: Quartet Books 1995).
37. See ‘The Anarch’, available at http://www.angelfire.com/ak3/anarch/index.html (viewed 5 May 2005) and Abdalbarr Braun, ‘Warrior, Waldgaenger, Anarch: an essay on Ernst Junger’s concept of the sovereign individual’, 7 March 2002, available on the FluxEuropa website at http://www.fluxeuropa.com/juenger-anarch.htm (viewed 5 May 2005). For more on the concept of the Anarch, see Alain de Benoist, ‘Beyond the gods and the titans’, The Scorpion, no. 15, 1994 and no. 17, 1996, available at thescorp.multics.org/15jueng.html and thescorp.multics.org/17jueng.html (viewed 5 May 2005).
38. Southgate, The Meaning of Nationalism.
39. For reiterations of these themes, see issues of The Crusader or The English Alternative.
40. Troy Southgate, ‘Hee hee’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 28 July 2002, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/12253 (viewed 10 May 2005).
41. Troy Southgate, ‘National anarchy’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 29 April 2000, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/28 (viewed 10 May 2005).
42. Victor Anduril, Anarchic Philosophy (London: Rising Press 2000). ‘Victor Anduril’ is the pseudonym of Peter Georgacarakos, a leading member of the American group White Order of Thule (WOT), who wrote this pamphlet especially for the NRF. Currently serving a twenty-two-year sentence for cocaine dealing Georgacarakos is also awaiting trial for the 1996 murder of Randall Scott Anderson in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Anderson was a white supremacist who renounced his racist beliefs and became a Muslim while serving a nine-year sentence for the attempted bombing of an ice rink frequented by African Americans. Georgacarakos and Richard Scutari (a member of the white-supremacist The Order also incarcerated in the Lewisburg prison at the time), allegedly murdered Anderson as a ‘race traitor’; see Southern Poverty Law Centre, Intelligence Report, no. 98, Spring 2000. Southgate first encountered the WOT shortly after he had left the Catholic Church in 1998 when he was ‘far more open to spiritual alternatives’. Despite the subsequent influence of Miguel Serrano, Southgate claims to have been less impressed by the esoteric Hitlerism of Crossing the Abyss (WOT’s journal to which Georgacarakos was a regular contributor) than by its ‘truly amazing’ artistic layout. Emphasizing the ideological continuity between the two groupuscules Southgate notes that Crossing the Abyss ‘served as a kind of antechamber for the decidedly more anarchistic ideas that are now coming to fruition through Synthesis’, Southgate’s online journal. To this day he believes Crossing the Abyss ‘to be the best magazine ever to come out of America’. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 17 August 2002. 
43. The Crusader, no. 5, n.d.
44. ENM, Revolutionary Action: A Booklet for the Cadre (London: Rising Press 1995). In a British context Colin Jordan extolled this clandestine mode of organization in 1986 when he advocated the formation of an elite paramilitary ‘task force’ utilizing the methods of Nazi Jagdkommando leader Otto Skorzeny to bring down the state. His rejection of the ‘hopelessly unproductive’ party organization is a seminal piece of prose on the British fascist underground; see Colin Jordan, ‘Party time has ended’, National Review, no. 45, June 1986.
45. The Crusader, no. 6, 1996 and The English Alternative, no. 8, Winter–Spring 1998.
46. Guerrilla Warfare: An Introduction to the Art of Revolution (London: Rising Press 2001) and Leaderless Resistance: Where There’s a Will There’s a WayThe Crusader, no. 6, 1996, includes an exhortation to ‘take out’ the editors of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. (London: Rising Press 2000).
47. The Crusader, no. 5, n.d. and The English Alternative, no. 9, n.d. Southgate regularly eulogized American neo-Nazi terrorist organizations like The Order and the Minutemen. Robert N. Taylor, the Minutemen’s national spokesman and director of intelligence, was a formative influence on Southgate; see Troy Southgate, Life of Fire: An Interview with Robert N. Taylor (London: Rising Press 2000). Taylor also gave the NRF the benefit of his experience as a guerrilla leader in a specially written pamphlet, R. N. Taylor, Paramilitary Operations: A Handbook (London: Rising Press 2000). The NRF also adopted the violent revolutionary terminology of Joseph Tommasi, leader of the short-lived National Socialist Liberation Front, which in turn borrowed its slogans from New Left and Maoist groups.
48. The Crusader, no. 5, n.d.
49. NRF, ‘Official statement on the International Third Position’.
50. Green Anarchist, no. 29, Winter 1991. Hunt’s former colleagues have been his most vociferous critics. Green Anarchist itself lacks a belief in positive human agency and appears entrenched in a misanthropic, ideological cul de sac eulogizing the far right’s use of indiscriminate terror against the ‘system’ as a means to achieve its own primitivist ends. Celebrating the age of ‘irrationalism’ editor Stephen Booth praised the Japanese religious sect Aum Shinrikyo responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Japanese metro and the American militia movement, particularly Timothy McVeigh who, Booth argues, had ‘the right idea’ in attacking ‘The Machine’. His stance led to a further split within Green Anarchist and its degeneration into two warring factions. For a blistering critique of Green Anarchist’s politics, see Black Flag, no. 215, 1998 and no. 217, 1999. While incorrectly attacking Green Anarchist as ‘fascist’, a devastating critique of its politics can be found in Luther Blissett and Stewart Home, Green Apocalypse (London: Unpopular Books 1995).
51. Richard Hunt, To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the CoreThe Natural Society: A Basis for Green Anarchism and Alternative Green (Oxford: Alternative Green n.d.) and Richard Hunt, Who’s Starving Them? (Oxford: Alternative Green n.d.). (Oxford: Alternative Green 1997). See also Richard Hunt,
52. See ‘Interview with Troy Southgate (National-Anarchists, England)’, Auto, no. 7, June 2001, available on the Nationalanarchisten website at http://www.nationalanarchismus.org/Nationalanarchisten/Auto7/TroyQuestions/troyquestions.html (viewed 14 May 2005); The Nexus, no. 13, August 1998; and The English Alternative, no. 8, Winter–Spring 1998. Although the NRF rejected the compound culture of the American far right as ‘nonsense’ its own views are similar to the idea of a white Aryan ‘homeland’ espoused by Combat 18, whose imprisoned former leader, Paul ‘Charlie’ Sargent, wrote to Southgate approvingly.
53. ‘Who are the Greenshirts’, available at one time at autarky.rosenoire.org/greenshirts/whoweare.html (viewed 24 August 2002).
54. Troy Southgate, ‘FW: [GreenshirtsUSA] intro’, message to the National-Anarchist egroup, posted 30 April 2002, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/8962 (viewed 10 May 2005). The Greenshirts have an American chapter run by former neo-Nazi activist Cody Dickerson from Salt Lake City, Utah. Although small in number (its e-group has only fifteen members), the group has attracted the interest of members of the National Alliance (NA) whose ‘left/decentralist leanings’ have led to their participation in militant environmental activities like ‘tree spiking’, and to the formation of its own front group, the Anti-Globalisation Action Network, aimed at subverting these protests for its own ends. In this respect it should be noted that a NA member founded thulean-l, the e-group of WOT (see note 42) that feeds into Synthesis. This hints at a measure of ideological heterodoxy across the breadth of the contemporary far right as it tries to synthesize contemporary ‘left-wing’ concerns. See Nick Mamatas, ‘Fascists for Che: white supremacists infiltrate antiglobalization movements’, In These Times, 13 September 2002, available at http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/23/news1.shtml (viewed 14 May 2005).
55. Emulating the Iron Guard the NRF held ‘torchlight rituals during which small bags of earth were distributed’ to participants who were also awarded the ‘Hora Sima badge’ for feats of physical endurance. Southgate has also elicited interest from Dan Ghetu’s Letters from the Nuovo Europae website; see http://www.apoptose.net/interviews/nuovoeur.htm (viewed 14 May 2005). Synthesis has links to the Romanian Noua Dreapta (New Right), which describes itself as ‘the most serious attempt to continue the old Legionary Movement (Iron Guard) in new forms’; see http://www.nouadreapta.org (viewed 14 May 2005).
56. See the Iron Youth! website at http://www.national-anarchist.org/ironyouth/The Crusader, no. 6, 1996. (viewed 14 May 2005) and
57. Troy Southgate, ‘Re: [National-Anarchist] Zerzan on progress’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 13 May 2000, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/527 (viewed 10 May 2005).
58. Troy Southgate, ‘Transcending the beyond: from third position to national-anarchism’, Pravda.ru, 17 January 2002, available on the Beyond Left and Right website at english.pravda.ru/politics/2002/01/17/25828.html (viewed 14 May 2005). This has parallels in Hunt’s idea that ‘xenophobia’ was ‘the key to the communities success’, as it cemented communal bonds; see Hunt, The Natural Society, 3.
59. Alternative Green, no. 31, Spring 2002.
60. The English Alternative, no. 10, n.d. and The National Anarchist, no. 1, n.d.
61. Alternative Green, no. 12, Spring 1995 and Alternative Green, no. 18, Winter 1999.
62. Alternative Green, no. 24, Summer 2000. Those attending included the Wessex Regionalists, Oriflamme (mediaevalists), the Anarchic Movement (Jonothan Boulter), Albion Awake (Wayne John Sturgeon’s one-man ‘Christian anarchist’ movement), the Libertarian Alliance, the Sexual Freedom Collective, Anarchist Nihilist Accords, the New Age magazine Nexus, the Anti-Metric Society and the East London Republican Forum.
63. ‘Anarcho-Fascists attempt to organise’, n.d., available at http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ga/anafaorg.htm (viewed 8 May 2005). See also Do or Die, no. 9, 2000. For Southgate’s response, see Chinese Whispers Meets Leftist Dogmatism (London: Rising Press n.d.). The second fair in 2001 would be attended by Peter Töpfer’s Nationale Anarchie group, ITMA Publishing run by Alexander Baron and the Socialist Party of Great Britain who have a long history of debating with anyone, including the Transeuropa Collective, with whom they organized a conference, ‘Globalisation and Regionalism’, in 1995; see Alternative Green, no. 12, Spring 1995.
64. Hunt’s ideas have attracted a number of veteran NF leaders including David Kerr, the leader of NF Ulster, Patrick Harrington, former NF chairman and Third Way leader, and Michael Walker, former NF Central London organizer who currently edits The Scorpion. Abroad Hunt’s ideas have interested Guy de Martelaere, a regular contributor to Alternative Green and previously Perspectives. de Martelaere is involved with the Flemish Nouvelle DroiteTekos, which is closely aligned with the extreme-right Vlaams BlokMiedzy faszyzmem i anarchizem. Nowe idee dla Nowej Ery (Between fascism and anarchism. New ideas for a new age). A former punk rocker, Tomasiewicz became involved in the Polish skinhead movement in which he was renowned for the publication of a violent skinhead fanzine called Fajna Gazeta. By the 1990s he had become a leading figure in the Polish section of the International Third Position, the violent Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski (National Revival of Poland), whose journal TemplumPrzelom Narodowy (National Breakthrough), publishing numerous articles in Mysl Narodowa Polska (Polish Nationalist Idea), the organ of Poland’s most voluble antisemite, Boleslaw Tejkowski. At the time of writing Tomasiewicz is the leader of Stowarzyszenie na rzecz Wielosci Kultur (Society for Cultural Diversity) and coeditor of its journal, Zakorzenienie (Rootedness), which champions the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite. His shift away from overt fascism parallels Southgate’s and he can be found regularly contributing to a range of environmental, anarchist and moderate right-wing publications in Poland and indeed Britain, including Green Options, Perspectives and Alternative Green. publication, party. They have also been influential for veteran Polish neo-fascist Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz, who discusses them in his book regularly featured his contributions. Tomasiewicz was also active in
65. Calls for the boycotting of left-wing bookshops that continued to stock Alternative Green appeared on the now-defunct online bulletin board of the militant anti-fascist group Red Action.
66. See http://www.national-anarchist.org (viewed 14 May 2005).
67. Weekly Worker, no. 363, 7 December 2000 and no. 364, 14 December 2000. While defending his actions Liddle concedes that ‘to an extent’ he was ‘duped’ by Southgate; see Terry Liddle, e-mail to the author, 1 October 2002.
68. This message was posted on the now-defunct e-groups Solidarity2 and eco-anarchy (viewed April 2001, no longer available).
69. Troy Southgate, ‘From Weekly Worker’, message on the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 11 April 2001, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/3413 (viewed 10 May 2005).
70. The Crusader, no. 5, n.d. and The English Alternative, no. 8, Winter–Spring 1998.
71. Sword of Nechayev, no. 1, n.d.
72. For reiterations of these themes, see issues of The Crusader or The English Alternative.
73. Catalyst, no. 4, 1997, no. 5, 1998 and no. 7, 1999. The extent of NRF activism should be read with caution. The NRF compiles large lists of causes it supports and activities it approves of (though may not have taken part in) to give the impression of omnipresence and disguise its obvious numerical weakness.
74. Troy Southgate, ‘A day of revolt’, message on the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 24 June 2000, available at groups.yahoo.co.uk/group/National-Anarchist/message/1563 (viewed 10 May 2005).
75 ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Wayne John Sturgeon’, 2001, available at http://www.rosenoire.org/interviews/southgate.php (viewed 8 May 2005).
76. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Dan Ghetu’.
77. The English Alternative, no, 8, Winter–Spring 1998.
78. Semitic Voice, no. 1, n.d. and The Crusader, no. 5, n.d.
79. Troy Southgate, ‘Wanted: your participation’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 7 January 2003, available at groups.yahoo.co.uk/group/National-Anarchist/message/16789 (viewed 10 May 2005).
80. Searchlight, no. 325, July 2002.
81. David Michael’s message was posted on the now-defunct Jumeirah Beach Forum (www.jumeirahbeach.com).
82. See Keith Preston’s review of Voice of the Resistance, ‘Revolt against the New World Order’, available at http://www.attackthesystem.com/votr.html (viewed 14 May 2005).
83. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 5 March 2003.
84. Troy Southgate, Manifesto of the European Liberation Front (London: Rising Press 1999). The original English representative was Patrick Harrington’s Third Way until it was replaced by Southgate’s NRF. Other affiliates included Christian Bouchet’s Nouvelle Resistance (France), Devenir, Mouvement Nation and Odal-Aktiekomitee (Belgium), Nieuwe Weestand (Holland), Richter and Freiheit Volk Bewegung (Germany), Nouvelle Resistance (Switzerland), Orion and Rivolta/Gruppi Autonomi Solidarista (Italy), Fenriks and Przelom Narodowy (Poland), Aleksandr Dugin’s Natsionalno-Bolshevistskaia Partii and Arctogaia (Russia), JP (Portugal), Juan Antonio Llopart’s Alternativa Europea, which operates as part of the Movimiento Social Republicano (Spain), and Revolution (Greece). For more detail, see the special issue, ‘The ‘‘groupuscular right’’: a neglected political genus’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 36, no. 3, July 2002.
85. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 10 September 2002. See also Catalyst, no. 6, 1998 and no. 7, 1999.
86. See, for instance, Aleksandr Dugin, The Seminal Writings of Alexander Dugin, 3 vols (London: Rising Press 2000) and Aleksandr Dugin, The Eurasian Manifesto: The Crisis of Ideas in Contemporary Russia (Rising Press: London 2001). Another key Eurasian influence is Belgian Nouvelle Droite ideologue Robert Steuckers; see ‘Synthesis interviews Robert Steuckers’, 2001, available at http://www.rosenoire.org/interviews/steuckers.php (viewed 9 May 2005).
87. The NRF reprinted an article on Thiriart’s ideas published by Christian Bouchet in The English Alternative, no. 10, n.d. Further evidence of Thiriart’s impact on the NRF can be found in Carlo Terracciano, Jean Thiriart: Prophet and Militant (London: Rising Press 2000). The Moscow visit and Thiriart’s wider influence on post-war European fascism is discussed in detail in Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Post-War Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia 1999), 532–52.
88. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Dan Ghetu’.
89. Troy Southgate, ‘Julius Evola: a radical traditionalist’, Pravda.ru , 11 May 2002, available at http://english.pravda.ru/columnists/2002/05/11/28502.htmlPoliarnaia Zvezda (Polar Star); see ‘Dlia Rossii vazhno sokhranit’ svoiu funktsiiu kontinental’noi skrepy’ (It is important for Russia to preserve her function as a counter balance), 21 February 2003, available (in Russian) at zvezda.ru/article.php?area/1&id/100&sub/10 (viewed 9 May 2005). (viewed 9 May 2005). Southgate has also been interviewed for the Russian website
90. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Dan Ghetu’ and The National Anarchist, no. 1, n.d. See also the Eurasian Movement webpage, available at http://www.national-anarchist.org/eurasia (viewed 14 May 2005).
91. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Wayne John Sturgeon’. See also Jeffrey Kaplan, Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 1997), 69–100.
92. The leader of the Charlemagne Hammer Skins was Herve Guttuso, a French fascist resident in England since 1995. In December 1997 he was arrested as part of an Anglo-French investigation into death threats sent to prominent Jewish celebrities and politicians in France. Guttuso was arrested at the Essex flat he shared with Steve Sargent who led the National Socialist Movement, a violent groupuscule whose most infamous member was the London ‘nail bomber’ David Copeland. The NSM’s chief ideologue, David Myatt, was a long-time occultist as was Guttoso, who was connected to the desecration of a Catholic cemetery in Toulon in 1997, which led to the arrest of several members of the French Satanist group Deo Occidi, of which Guttuso was also allegedly a member. Deo Occidi was the French chapter of Kerry Bolton’s Black Order of Pan Europa, which was affiliated to Southgate’s LCRN. The Black Order later split with the North American faction and emerged, with Bolton’s blessing, as WOT (see note 42), a formative influence on Southgate.
93. ‘Vive la revolution: an interview with the National Secretary of the ENM’, The English Alternative, no. 8, n.d.
94. Julian’s brief tenure lasted from CE 361 to 363. An early convert to paganism and neo-Platonic mysticism, Julian aroused the considerable antagonism of his Christian contemporaries because of his attempt to revitalize paganism by reviving the cult of Apollo at Daphne near Antioch, which entailed large-scale blood sacrifices. Christians were further alarmed by his dream of restoring the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which implied the symbolic defeat of Christianity by directly challenging the teachings of Jesus that no stone of the Temple would be left on another. See Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire AD 284–430 (London: Fontana Press 1993), 85–98.
95. Troy Southgate, ‘Re: Julian and religious tolerance’, message to the ivlianvs e-group, posted 19 January 2000, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/ivlianvs/message/56 (viewed 14 May 2005).
96. The English Alternative, no. 9. n.d.
97. ‘Synthesis editor Troy Southgate interviewed by Dan Ghetu’.
98. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 5 March 2003.
99. Although The Crusader initially championed the more traditional canons of White Power music, including the Blood and Honour network and bands like Brutal Attack, Southgate has recently focused on bands like Endura (previously called Abraxas) (‘the pinnacle of ‘sinister’ music’) and Allerseelen whose leading light is Austrian occultist ‘Kadmon’, the editor of the journal Aorta. A rare performance by Endura at the Deadly Actions II industrial music festival in 1995 was ‘poorly received’ due to an accompanying visual show that featured ‘executions, torture, government oppression, mob violence, hardcore porn, Balkan war crimes and Janis Joplin at Woodstock’. Endura harbours a deep antipathy for ‘sub-humanity’ and was planning to record an album featuring excerpts from their correspondence with serial killer Dennis Nilson. Another similarly misanthropic Black Metal band that interests Southgate is Puissance, who called 9/11 ‘a good thing to happen’. For a fascinating view of the origins of this attempt to move beyond the confines of White Power music, see Kevin Coogan, ‘How ‘‘Black’’ is Black Metal?’, Hit List, vol. 1, no. 1, February/March 1999.
100. Guardian, 7 July 2004.
101. The English Alternative, no. 10, n.d.
102. Troy Southgate, ‘Black Metal’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 29 August 2000, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/1658 (viewed 10 May 2005).
103. Tribal Resonance, nos 1 and 2, 1998; Alternative Green, no. 33, 2003 and The English Alternative, no. 9, n.d.
104. Roger Griffin, ‘Notes on the definition of fascist culture: the prospects for synergy between liberal and Marxist heuristics’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, vol. 42, Autumn 2001, 95–115.
105. Synthesis is available at http://www.rosenoire.org (viewed 10 May 2005).
106. Troy Southgate, e-mail to the author, 23 August 2002.
107. Troy Southgate, ‘Re: [National-Anarchist] NRF website’, message to the National-Anarchist e-group, posted 11 August 2002, available at groups.yahoo.com/group/National-Anarchist/message/12669 (viewed 10 May 2005).
108. Troy Southgate, e-mails to the author, 28 and 29 January 2003.