![](http://web.archive.org./web/20200928162139im_/https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y2NcpWI6iJk/maxresdefault.jpg)
Three years ago I wrote an article titled “National Bolshevism rides again” that called attention to Golden Dawn’s support for Russia against Euromaidan that sounded exactly like the sort of thing written by Mike Whitney: “Ukraine is Washington’s pretext for a conflict with Russia. The threat of conflict is evident from the flood of propaganda in the Zionist media. Putin is demonized daily as Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi were earlier, while known Zionist newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times, present daily ‘evidence’ Russian troops are ready to invade Ukraine. The only things missing are the weapons of mass destruction in order to have a complete repeat.”
Little did I suspect that within three years, an American version of Golden Dawn would be saying the same thing. On May 13th, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer led a small demonstration protesting the removal of a statue honoring Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. Among the chants heard from the mouths of these fascists (I use the word advisedly) was “Blood and soil” and “Russia is our friend”.
If “Russia is our friend”, it is understandable why Stephen F. Cohen would tell Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly’s replacement at Fox News, that the “Assault on Trump is [the] greatest threat to our country”. Like Cohen, Spencer considers the liberal onslaught on Trump to be the main danger to the USA. In a comment on Trump’s divulging classified information to the Russians, Spencer used words that could have come out of Cohen’s mouth: “This is only a scandal in the minds of those who haven’t heard that the Cold War is over.”
Spencer is a fairly crafty operator, looking to speak out of both sides of his mouth. In addition to paying reverence to Robert E. Lee, he also has good things to say about Karl Marx, on May Day no less:
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20200928162139im_/https://louisproyect.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/screen-shot-2017-05-17-at-10-00-11-am.png?w=1024&h=466)
I am not the only person who has been noticing this development. Sukant Chandan, who unlike me is a major supporter of Bashar al-Assad, began to speak out largely because of the support of the ultraright for Brexit. The nativism that defines UKIP, the Trump administration and other ultraright parties that have been coming together in an informal global movement taking inspiration from the Kremlin is certainly going to antagonize an Indian immigrant in England where a dark skin is an open invitation to a beating. On Facebook, Chandan wrote:
Here I argue in 2mins that there are many who advocated on Press TV and RT etc years that Trump would be ‘better’ than Hilary, that these people invited the man who bombed Syria and Afghanistan, humiliated Russia, went to the brink of war with Korea and China, that these people should either apologise publicly and conduct some serious self critique (I made a wrong analysis on Obama, have apologised for that many times and critically self analysed a lot publicly for years), or they should be chased out of our circles and all platforms should be taken away from them. They advocated for the guy who bombed two of our homelands and threatened total war against China and Korea. These people are mainly those organised around far-right/alt-right/fascist circles and those collaborating with them around things like: Centre for Syncretic Studies (and all individuals and organisations involved, which is easily found), Katehon, New Resistance, The Duran, Saker, Fort Russ, 21st Century Wire, Sputnik, and others. These are forces who are directly in alliance with blatant neo-Nazi and western far right and openly fascist forces. The rise of fascist oriented forces and leaders like Trump are *not* friends of ours but fascist imperialist enemies of our peoples.
Of the websites called out by Chandan, I am familiar with The Duran, Saker, the aptly named Fort Russ, 21st Century Wire and Sputnik. But who were the others?
As its name implies, the rather academic sounding Centre for Syncretic Studies attempts to bring together (syncretize) “various ideologies which originate from across the entire spectrum” and overlaps ideologically and personnel-wise with Katehon. Katehon is likely the same word as Katechon, a term found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 that refers to the apocalypse.
Essentially, both think-tanks are devoted to the thinking of Aleksandr Dugin, a latter-day National Bolshevik. Katehon was founded by Konstantin Malofeev, who is the CEO of Marshall Capital Partners, a private equity firm. Malofeev is a devout Russian Orthodox believer and has also been accused of defrauding the state-owned bank VTB of $200 million. I suppose in this day and age, the two things go together. You can find a typical Katehon article by Dugin titled “Russian Geopolitician: Trump Is Real America” whose title speaks for itself. Speaking for Spencer and countless other rightwing scumbags, Dugin wrote:
Thus, there is Donald Trump, who is tough, rough, says what he thinks, rude, emotional and, apparently, candid. The fact that he is a billionaire doesn’t matter. He is different. He is an extremely successful ordinary American. He is crude America, without gloss and the globalist elite. He is sometimes disgusting and violent, but he is what he is. It is true America.
I should add that the words globalism and globalist have become signifiers for the alt-right. The next time you hear someone using them, run the opposite direction as fast as your feet can carry you.
Moving right along, we come to New Resistance that is based in the USA as opposed to the two Russian-based groups discussed above. The New Resistance appears to be some sort of left group whose views are expressed at Open Revolt!, a blog with little impact according to Alexa that ranks it at 1,897,874 globally. (For comparison’s sake, my blog is ranked 383,286.)
The most recent post to Open Revolt is from February 22nd and titled “New Resistance on Alex Jones, Alexander Dugin and Infowars” that ties it to Dugin ideologically:
Alex Jones gets more than 50 million views at Infowars a week. Last night I watched his feature with Alexandr Dugin and I was expecting to be very critical of it. For once, I was pleasantly surprised. Alex Jones couldn’t have been more respectful and fair, treating Comrade Dugin with the respect he has earned and deserves. He also made a point of showing screenshots of Katehon.com and running the Katehon web address in text beneath Dugin’s name. Many of you probably know Katehon is a Traditionalist and anti-globalist project and some of the major people involved with the site are also part of New Resistance.
That’s a huge breakthrough moment.
Thanks to Alex Jones potentially tens of millions of American eyes are being opened to Alexander Dugin and to the Fourth Political Theory in an honest way. That’s totally jaw dropping.
Notwithstanding the shout-out to Dugin, Open Revolt does not seem nearly as bad as Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. In fact, the New Resistance manifesto sounds as good as the one Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in 1848:
We believe that the capitalist system we have today needs to be replaced by something that truly fosters a civilized, sustainable & just society, where economics is subordinated to the social good. NEW RESISTANCE, therefore, supports the following policies:
1) the abolition of wage slavery and landlordism;
2) the distribution of land (either a certain acreage or as apartment square feet) to all citizens and making it non-transferable, thus avoiding accumulation into the hands of a privileged few;
3) some sort of guaranteed annual income & humane social safety net;
4) free universal health care (medicine and related fields should be a calling, NOT a business);
5) economic enterprises larger or more complex than a small family business or farm should be self-managed by workers, via workers’ councils.
Of course, you have to read the fine print:
Like the Black, American Indian and Chicano nationalists, NEW RESISTANCE is a movement geared towards National Liberation. Our people, as we define them, are the “white” American working classes, in which we include the urban proletariat, the rural poor, those unemployed or under-employed (“precarious labor”), as well as displaced members of the middle class. We use the term “white” reluctantly to denote the vast pool of Americans of European descent and those who adopt the cultural mores of “white America”.
This is just a soft sell version of what David Duke has been peddling for decades.
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James Porazzo
New Resistance was founded by James Porazzo, a Boston man who was formerly involved with the American Front, a skinhead group that worked closely with Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance and that eventually came to espouse The Third Position, which “syncretizes” racial separatism and socialism. Like Richard Spencer, Porazzo figured out that socialism was not a scare word any more and might even help him recruit new members.
Indeed, Porazzo seems like a natural ally to all those people in the “anti-imperialist” camp. He links to a Bashar al-Assad interview and crossposts Eva Gollinger’s tribute to Hugo Chavez. Interviewed at the Center for Syncretic Studies, Porazzo can barely be distinguished from James Petras (maybe that’s the problem):
Capitalism or institutionalized looting, selfishness and greed are a kind of religion for the pigs that govern the United States. The Democratic and Republican parties are united in this, just showing different shades of the same disease. Most of the right-wing opposition here, including the reactionary extreme right, are infected by this disease. It can be seen from the fact that hardly wait to cast aspersions onto any other organization with a revolutionary social program, such as as ours.
For us, the absolute enemy is the cult of the golden calf. We are open to discuss common goals with all genuine anti-capitalists. The struggle against capitalism must always be a priority.
The rebirth of National Bolshevism is something to contend with. The original version first came to my attention writing about the Comintern and the German revolution of the early 20s. Ruth Fischer, an ultraleft and half-Jewish member of the German CP back then, gave a speech that included these words that sound even worse than anything Porazzo might come up with:
Whoever cries out against Jewish capital…is already a fighter for his class, even though he may not know it. You are against the stock market jobbers. Fine. Trample the Jewish capitalists down, hang them from the lampposts…But…how do you feel about the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klockner?…Only in alliance with Russia, Gentlemen of the “folkish” side, can the German people expel French capitalism from the Ruhr region.
Porazzo has paid close attention to the attempts of the Red-Brown synthesis in the 1920s that has now been given new life by Aleksandr Dugin. Not only has he crossposted Dugin’s articles, he has paid tribute to some obscure figures such as Ernst Niekisch. Starting off as a Communist during Weimar, Niekisch eventually broke with Marxism and developed the official National Bolshevik theory that combined elements of German nationalism and admiration for Josef Stalin, perhaps not that much of a contradiction. He was read by the Nazi “left”, including Gregor Strasser and Ernst Rohm.
I have no idea how much influence Porazzo has but Richard Spencer certainly has plenty. The fact that Spencer has lately been toasting Karl Marx might indicate that this is the direction the alt-right will be taking. Unlike the original National Bolshevism, there is not much support for a rebirth that is a carbon-copy of the original. Why? Because there is no longer a USSR. Vladimir Putin has said that Lenin was the worst thing that happened to Russia, so there’s not much of a “left” to the Kremlin nowadays. Mainly, Putin represents a left to people like Stephen F. Cohen, Robert Parry, James Petras and Diana Johnstone because he is despised by liberal politicians and journalists just as indicated in the Dugin picture at the top of the article. I doubt that any of these people, especially Petras and Johnstone, give a hoot about Spencer and Porazzo’s admiration for Assad and Putin. All that matters to them is salvaging the USA-Russia détente. This is a intellectual and political deficit of biblical proportions.
There’s a dirty little secret I’d like to share with you. Many on the left who are repulsed by people like Richard Spencer and James Porazzo are equally repulsed by the liberal onslaught against Trump for motives lodged in their subconscious. Since they share Spencer and Porazzo’s views on Syria and Ukraine, there is a natural tendency to see Trump as an obstacle to a “neocon” war against the “axis of resistance” even if they are barely aware of it.
What accounts for this? I would describe it as a retreat from class. Twenty years ago, Marxists were up in arms over how postmodernism was subordinating class criteria as part of a new methodology that linked Marx to the Enlightenment. “Identity Politics”, especially in the academy, became a substitute. To a large extent, the rise of postmodernism was related to changes in the capitalist economy such as the growth of multinationals, financialization, post-Fordism, etc. Leaving aside the merits of this analysis, it can be said that classical Marxism was bound to undergo a decline in the aftermath of the collapse of official Communism and the rapid expansion of the capitalist economy in the 1980s and 90s.
So is the current brand of “anti-imperialism”, with its lockstep adherence to the Kremlin’s talking points, also a reaction to changes in world capitalism? Undoubtedly, the stagnation that set in toward the late 90s and that only deepened after the 2007 meltdown have contributed to a sense of futility over capitalist growth. For many whose radicalism is paper-thin (i.e., most Noam Chomsky readers), the unit of analysis has become the nation-state rather than class. Why bother to interrogate class relations in Syria when the CIA has been sending rebels light weapons, after all? (The emphasis on light, of course.)
Into this stagnant ideological pool, it becomes possible for an American version of Golden Dawn to take root. Does this mean that fascism is on the agenda? I don’t think so. The main role of groups led by Spencer or Porazzo is to act as shock troops that are meant to embolden backward members of the working class and the petty-bourgeoisie to take their own actions in a thousand different ways, from insulting a woman wearing a hijab or a Black person walking in a white neighborhood. In other words, they will be trying to create the same climate of fear that exists in Europe even though they are not ready to begin attacking the picket lines of strikers on the rare occasions they materialize.
As was the case in the early Weimar Republic, the alt-right will be held in reserve. They can do damage now but not constitute an immediate threat to the American ruling class that much prefers bourgeois democracy, especially since it relies on the less expensive and less risky ideological hegemony rather than the truncheon.