I recently gave an interview to the "Loyal Opposition to Modernity" blog where I discuss a number of topics that might be of interest to readers of AlternativeRight.Com, including Carl Schmitt, totalitarian humanism and its relationship to ethnic and cultural balkanization, the alternative right, the role of the "anti-fascists" as the thug wing of liberalism, and the Nietzschean critique of modernity, along with some of my own idiosyncratic anarchist views of course. 

Read the interview here.

Keith Preston writes the blog Attack the System, which attempts to tie together both left and right anarchism in a Pan-secessionism against the empire.   While I come from a radically different perspective than Keith, I find his critique of the way many left anarchists are militant shock troops of liberalism to be a serious and disturbing critique as well as the Nietzschean critique of modernity to be taken seriously and not softened as it has been in French post-structuralism.

I can’t say that I’ve been supportive of the “Anonymous” online movement—the collective of hackers associated with, among other things, the outlandish wiki-page Encylopedia Dramatica, the antiwar Wikileaks.com, and various denial-of-service attacks against Master Card, PayPal, and the federal government. That said, even if their ideology was something on the order of “FUCK EVERYTHING!!!”-Anarcho-Leftism, Anonymous certainly had the right enemies: political correctness, the military industrial complex, the Federal Reserve System, etc. That’s a start.

Moreover, Anonymous represents something that is necessary, if potentially toxic—a vanguard that aggressively calls out the System as morally and intellectually bankrupt. (We and Anonymous can be allies, if not quite friends.)

Looking at Anonymous’s latest project, however, the thought crossed my mind that it 1) had been captured by the System 2) was a group of System operatives all along, or 3) includes people so deluded by the System’s ideology that it is unwittingly working on the System’s behalf.

The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

This work was originally published in 2001 and author Norling, a historian and lawyer, is a native Swede who now resides in Spain. Norling observes that throughout the entirety of his early life, from childhood until World War One, Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.

When World War One began in 1914, Mussolini initially held to the Italian Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but in the ensuing months switched to a pro-war position which earned him an expulsion from the party. He then enlisted in the Italian army and was wounded in combat. The reasons for Mussolini’s shift to a pro-war position are essential to understanding the true origins and nature of fascism and its place within the context of twentieth century political and intellectual history. Mussolini came to see the war as an anti-imperialist struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary. Further, he regarded the war as an anti-monarchist struggle against conservative forces such as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, and the Hohenzollern’s of Germany and attacked these regimes as reactionary enemies who had repressed socialism. Mussolini also prophetically believed that Russia’s participation in the war would weaken that nation to the point where it was susceptible to socialist revolution (which is precisely what happened). In other words, Mussolini regarded the war as an opportunity to advance leftist revolutionary struggles in Italy and elsewhere.

When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?

The answer appears to be a combination of three primary factors: Marxist propaganda that has regrettably found its way into the mainstream historiography, the revision of leftist revolutionary doctrine itself by Fascist leaders, and the inevitable compromises and accommodations made by Fascism upon the achievement of actual state power. Regarding the first these, David Ramsay Steele described the standard Marxist interpretation of Fascism in an important article on Fascism’s history:

In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism" in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:

Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.

This perception continues to be the standard leftist “analysis” of Fascism even in present times, and goes a long way towards explaining why, for instance, American political movements or figures that have absolutely nothing to do with historic Fascism, such as the Tea Party or the neocon mouthpieces of FOX News or “conservative” talk radio, continue to be recipients of the “fascist” label by atavistic liberals and leftists.

The reality of Fascism’s origins was quite different. Its creators were an assortment of leftist intellectuals and political figures whose common reference point was their realization that Marxism was a failed ideology. As Steele observed:

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.

The early Fascists were former Marxists who had come to doubt the revolutionary potential of class struggle, but had simultaneously come to regard revolutionary nationalism as showing considerable promise. As Mussolini remarked in a speech on December 5, 1914:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!...Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. The class struggle is a vain formula, with effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate.

Fascism subsequently abandoned class struggle for a revolutionary nationalist outlook that stood for class collaboration under the leadership of a strong state that was capable of unifying the nation and accelerating industrial development. Indeed, Steele made an interesting observation concerning the similarities between Italian and Third World Marxist “national liberation” movements of the second half of the twentieth century:

The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.

During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.

After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.

It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else. As Steele noted:

Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism. The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.

Surely, only a Western academic leftist could come up with something as stupid as this. This is reminiscent of when the late televangelist yahoo Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested the Teletubbies were really just a bunch of closeted homos working subversively to turn good Christian children into fudge-packers. Totalitarian humanism is the fundamentalist theocracy of our era. Burn the universities!

Are the Smurfs crypto-fascists?

Editor's Note: The following article comes from Worldcrunch, an innovative, new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. This article was originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur.

By Tristan Berteloot, Worldcrunch

The stars of an upcoming summer blockbuster, the world-famous Smurfs are once again the talk of the town – though not necessarily for all the right reasons.

Known as Schtroumph in the original French, Puffi in Italian, Pitufos in Spanish, Stroumfakia in Greek, Kumafu in Japanese and Schlümpfe across the Rhine (since “schtroumpf” means “sock” in German), the little blue imps have been going strong for more than half a century, entertaining children the world over in comic books, animated cartoons and feature films.

More recently, however, the Smurfs have also caught the attention of a controversial French academic who says there may be more than meets the eye when it comes to the pint-sized characters. Hidden behind their charming veneer are some pretty dark undertones, argues Antoine Buéno, whose work “Le Petit Livre Bleu” (The Little Blue Book) accuses the Smurfs of being maybe just a bit fascist.

Buéno, who is both a senior lecturer at SciencePo University in Paris and a novelist, never set out to destroy the magical energy that emanates from these blue-colored characters. Nevertheless, he analyzes their society and ideology – Smurfology – through an unforgiving political lens.

“Le Petit Livre Bleu” focuses specifically on the man behind the cryptic cartoons, original Smurf author Pierre Culliford, aka Peyo. Whether he meant it or not, Culliford endowed his magical little creatures with some Stalinist, racist and anti-Semitic leanings, argues Buéno.

Read: Here comes the McBaguette.

Buéno first questioned the Smurfs' biological nature and sexuality: by the way, why is there only one Smurfette? Then, he tried to show that Smurf society is the archetype of a totalitarian utopia marked by Stalinism and Nazism.

Peyo came up with the word “Smurf” while dining in 1958 with his friend André Franquin. Peyo reportedly asked Franquin: “could you pass me the Smurf?” He meant to say “could you pass me the salt?” The rest is cartoon history.

The spirit of an era

Born in 1928 in Brussels, Peyo lived in German-occupied Belgium. As an adult, he did not look back fondly on that time in history. Nonetheless, Buéno thinks that “a piece of work can convey an imagery that the author himself does not support. Thus, the Smurfs seem to reflect more the spirit of an era than Peyo's political leanings.”

The Smurfs are self-sufficient. Smurf society is collectivist and interventionist. Its only leader, Papa Smurf, is all-powerful. And, like Stalin, his favorite color is red.

They all eat at the canteen and are all ridiculously puritan. In “The Black Smurfs” album, racism is obvious: blood purity becomes something vital and the dark brown Smurf is referred to as "the ugly one." In another album called “Smurfette,” Buéno notes how the Aryan blond is idealized.

The Smurfs are also united against a sworn enemy called Gargamel, a large-nosed, black-haired possibly anti-Semitic caricature, and his cat Azrael.

Smurf lovers have been quick to challenge Buéno’s “Little Blue Book,” saying his arguments are neither serious nor credible. “Generally speaking I’ve gotten two types of knee-jerk reactions: people saying that I’m either an idiot, or a crook,” says Buéno’s.

“But my analysis isn’t just coming out of nowhere,” he goes on to say. “People from other institutions have been looking at [the Smurfs] before me. People in the United States at one point suspected Peyo’s Smurf albums of being socialist propaganda, going so far as to say the word Smurf was actually an acronym for ‘Small Men Under Red Forces.’”

After Peyo died in 1992, his son, Thierry Culliford, continued to draw the Smurfs. Culliford's albums offered a much more educational approach. According to Buéno, that explains why “the Smurfs' village becomes more explicitly a metaphor for reality.”

The Smurfs make their next big appearance this summer in a 3D live-action movie directed by Raja Gosnell. The blue-colored creatures will besiege New York City for the occasion.

But before the movie is released, the Lombard Editions will publish a 29th album called “The Smurfs and the Golden Tree,” and in November, “the Smurf Encyclopedia”.

When a chubby man in a Phoenix diner offered to buy me dinner, I had no idea of who he was or of the consequences of chatting with him for another hour. The internet rumours, the blogs, the newspaper articles, the phone calls at all hours of the day and night, the death threats, the mace, and more . . . none of it was on my radar screen. I had been driving all day and I was starving. Club sandwich, please, and hold the tomato.

I assumed him to be a customer of the diner who was simply curious about what was going on, especially as the antifa protesting outside had drawn everybody’s attention. It's not unusual to encounter curious bystanders while on a book tour. The result of that conversation was not one, but three, sleazy articles about me.

The man was a journalist, though he did not disclose it to me until afterwards, when someone confronted him. As it turned out, he had come at the invitation of the antifa.

Call me naïve (which I certainly was), but I tend to take people at face value. There is something about two-faced people that doesn’t compute with me. How could this person be so nice to my face and then turn around and write nasty articles about me? Did I really deserve that? I had been kind to him and remained courteous even after his admission to having engaged me under false pretenses. I couldn’t understand where the rabid hatred had come from.

Yes, David Irving is controversial and I was aware of that (though when I first got involved with him, my awareness of that was marginal), but until this point, his enemies had left me out of the fight. Some people might say I should have expected that not to last, but I was new to it and no one ever warned me of what I might be getting myself into. I don’t think I could have been reasonably expected to anticipate it given my limited knowledge of such matters at the time. And because I would never stoop to such tactics, the thought that someone else might do it, and do it to get to me somehow, never crossed my mind.

Eventually, I learned that almost all journalists are like this. Oh, a few I’ve talked to have been okay, but at the end of the day, most of them are subject to their editor’s demands. The story that gets printed is never the story you gave them in the interview. A sensationalised story sells better than a balanced story, after all. After David Irving’s emails were hacked, the UK’s Daily Mail ran a story on me (complete with my copyrighted pictures, which they had stolen and used without permission) based on snippets of these emails, which they twisted in order to create a story where there was none. Not once had they attempted to contact either of us for clarification prior to going to press. It’s just another example of how the media makes the news, but rarely reports the news.

It is thanks to journalists that the antifa came to know of me. They targeted me initially because of my association with David Irving. Because they had decided that they don’t like David Irving, they declared me guilty by association, playing judge, jury, and executioner. That I look “sufficiently Aryan”, as one newspaper described me (was it supposed to be an insult?), is apparently further evidence of my guilt. Were I a dark-complected Latina, like David’s previous assistant, I doubt they would had paid nearly so much attention to me. But my genes dictated that I be born with fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Mea culpa.

As anyone else who has been the target of Left-wing hatred knows, it is more of an annoyance than anything. I am not easily offended. Posting on the internet that I should be raped and murdered does not make me cry myself to sleep at night. Leaving me voicemails saying that I am a “racist whore” does not drive me to overdose on Prozac. I roll my eyes and I move on. You see, I’m a busy person. Unlike antifa who are usually unemployed and unemployable, I don’t have time to sit around being offended. And I don’t have time to be offended on behalf of anyone else. The antifa, on the other hand, seem to spend their entire day feeling offended by the existence of people who think differently than they do, but who otherwise don’t bother them. I cannot imagine a greater waste of life, nor can I understand what motivates them to exist in a state of perpetual outrage.

The antifa don’t understand the real effect of their efforts to “name and shame” me. Sure, I got a few prank phone calls and I lost some friends, but that’s trivial stuff. What they have given me is a wider platform and greater networking opportunities.

By publishing my telephone numbers, the antifa caused me to receive numerous calls from fellow pro-white advocates who were concerned for my safety and well-being. I made several new local contacts and I expanded my network of friendly faces across the country. The phone calls I got from concerned strangers far outnumbered the ones I got from people who wanted to tell me they hate my guts even though they don’t know me.

By publishing my email address, the antifa also facilitated the involvement of several people new to the movement who write to me asking how they can get involved. Most of the time, I can direct them to someone in their area who runs an active group.

Additionally, by outing me, the antifa have made it easier for me to be active in the pro-white movement. I don’t have to worry about anyone finding out about me. This means I can take on a greater role in organisational and street activism. I can start an openly pro-white business. I can write articles and sign them with my real name. I can more easily network because people can Google me and know that I am genuine in what I do.

Had I not been outed, I would have continued my quiet existence and avoided any real involvement for fear of being discovered. I neither regret nor relish having been exposed. It is what it is and I can’t undo it. Yes, there are some things that are better accomplished by people who remain in the shadows, but there are also things better accomplished by people who have gone public. We need both kinds.

So this is my advice to anyone who finds themselves targeted by the enemy: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Look for a way to turn the inconvenience into an opportunity to help the movement. Do not be intimidated.

Samuel Francis defined “Anarcho-Tyranny,” which he saw regnant in most Western nations at the time of his death in 2005, as a political arrangement in which government does everything it shouldn’t with great vigor and exactitude (Tyranny) and everything it should with sloth and willed negligence (Anarchy).

Washington, DC, has more or less decided to leave well enough alone along the Mexican border, and yet will send military units to prevent mass immigration into Iraq. The European Union has declared its right to regulate the content of chocolate and imprison those accused of  “minimizing” the Jewish Holocaust, and yet if ever challenged militarily, it would be unable to exercise the most basic function of sovereignty.

And then there’s Toronto, Ontario: Canada’s financial capital, whose municipal government forbids by law owning Pit Bulls and positively encourages the homosexual lifestyle. This is a place I’ve called home for the past six months, and which this weekend hosted the “G20 Summit” of “world leaders.”

Toronto has mastered the Anarchy part of Francis’s expression. “Hog Town” was once a jewel of the Anglo-Saxon world. When I was a child, I remember hearing the city referred to as “the clean, safe New York” or “New York in the ‘50s” (that is, New York without the minorities.) Today, Toronto represents the most evolved case of state-engineered -- and historically incoherent -- multiculturalism on the planet: only 52 percent of the city is white, and it now boasts large blocs of South Asians, (more assimilated) Chinese, blacks, and Filipinos. No one knows who’ll ultimately win the demographic battle, but I have a good idea who won’t.

Canada has even had a little Tyranny, too (despite its reputation for down-to-earth goofiness.) Pierre Trudeau pioneered the promotion of “visible minorities” in the Great White North; his political following has been compared to “Obamania.” And yet when in 1970 the Front de libération du Québec began kidnapping politicians, Trudeau enacted emergency measures and began sounding like J.D. Hayworth:

Trudeau: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of ...

Tim Ralfe (CBC): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?

Trudeau: Well, just watch me.

(The fascinating confrontation can be watched here.)

Canada has been quite welcoming to one and all from the third-world, as its quarter-century demographic transformation can attest. Whenever I re-enter the country, however, I usually begin sweating about the possibility of someone in the government reading my blogs, deeming me a threat to the nation, and ordering the border guards to hold me indefinitely in Diversity Training Gitmo. (I don’t think this is a case of overestimating my own significance; Anarcho-Tyrannies do ridiculous things like this.)

This past G20 weekend certainly had some of the “just watch me!” feel. Ontario reportedly spent upwards of 1 billion on security. And on Friday, the province revealed it had passed emergency legislation in secret that allows police to demand papers and search anyone -- for any reason -- who was within five meters of designated “security areas.”

By the end of weekend, close to 600 protestors had been arrested. Quite a sum, though as revealed in the television interviews of those released, detention life wasn’t too shabby: the camps were equipped with lawyers and counselors. Anarcho-Tyranny in action!

There was also a kind of Anarchy in the air that was more immediate than anything Francis described. I don’t exaggerate when I write that on Saturday, the city had begun to resemble the surreal, post-apocalyptic wastelands of The Omega Man or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -- commercial activity was shut down, store fronts bashed in -- bands of black-clad “anarchists” roamed the streets smashing things with hammers and putting abandoned police cars to the flame -- groups of pranksters, literally dressed like circus clowns, cackled and danced -- protesters marched under a cacophony of flags, signs, and banners -- thousands of normal Torontonians (the ones who were brave or foolish enough to leave their homes) wandering the streets befuddled. (I was one of these.)

This scene was encircled by militarized police in riot gear, equipped with Plexiglas visors and Praetorian shields. I got the sense that things wouldn’t look too different if a nuclear device had just gone off somewhere in North America or a total collapse of the economy had just ensued.

We weren’t witnessing a disaster, of course, but the culture of the contemporary state -- which loves to put on billion-dollar “Global Summits” -- and that of the contemporary Left -- which loves to protest them.

The Left is variegated, of course, ranging from the suit-and-tie NGO “professionals,” who go on TV, to the unkempt, unwashed (literally), unemployable, universally ugly hangers-on, who schedule their lives around “the next protest.” Such Left People were able to turn the park just outside my apartment into a kind of Lallapalooza-cum-tent city-cum- fornication and defecation zone.

Most of the damage to private property was inflicted by another subgroup, labeled the “black bloc,” which would precipitously come out of the woodwork at opportune moments and start indulging in ultra-violence. (The phrase "black bloc" was unknown, at least to me, before this weekend, but by Saturday afternoon, it had become a dreaded household term.)

And despite the billion spent on security and the large number of arrests, the bloc didn’t have much trouble destroying Starbucks and bank storefronts, their preferred representations of, so I understand, Global Corporate Fascism.

One might presume that in the Dark Ages (Before Sensitivity Training), a cop who saw a “anarchist” dancing atop a flaming police car would grab the perpetrator by the scruff of the neck and rough him up a bit before the arrest. Again, welcome to Anarcho-Tryanny -- where the police are militarized and wussified.

Smashing up Starbucks is certainly pointless -- and fitting for the “black bloc,” whose “Fuck the System!” revolt amounts to a re-rerouted teenage rebellion against their parents. That said, the tens of thousands in damage they inflicted should be compared to the billion spent on “security” and the fact that most all shops in the financial district and Yonge Street area were closed, costing them untold amounts in lost business. Hosting, say, the Superbowl can be a bonanza (at least for hoteliers, restaurateurs, and t-shirt vendors.) The “G8 Summit” was, however, a pure loss of at least 2 billion for everyone in the region. The mayhem I describe in this essay would never have occurred if Obama, Merkel, Cameron & Co. had just decided to have a Skype teleconferece.

(And the price tag doesn’t include the actual programs enacted by the summit attendees. On Friday, at the more elite “G8” in nearby Huntsville, Canada promised 1.1 billion for “maternal health” in “developing nations.” As a good conservative, Prime Minister Stephen Harper refuses to support birth control in Africa … but he still wants to give the continent vast amounts of cash.)

Some rather hysteric Torontonians interviewed on television kept saying, “I don’t know what happened to my city”; others claimed that Toronto had “changed” utterly due to these events. (Since the coverage of the “peaceful protestors” had been universally positive, one must assume that the reaction was against the black bloc and armored police.)

But in fact, the G20 protests were entirely predictable and hadn’t changed anything. Much like the “avant-garde” art world has been engaging in the same high jinx for the past 40 years, the Baby Boom and Gen X/Y Left has been essentially rehearsing the 1968 protests in Paris and Berkeley ad nauseam for just as long.

One might call this political masturbation, or the Left’s version of Civil War re-enactments, but then leftist protest isn’t simply a subculture but an industry. (In this line, it’s fitting that the G20 protests overlapped with Toronto’s state-funded “Pride Week” (which actually lasts 10 days)).

Conservative critics could easily point out the glaring, amusing, contradictions among the Left groups. There’s the quasi-primitivist rejection of the goods of the marketplace, expressed by suburban kids chatting on cell phones and typing “status updates” -- along with their demand that these wicked capitalist goods be redistributed to the masses. There’s the pretense of “anarchism” by groups that also claim every person on earth has the “right” to housing and a “living wage.” There’s the flirtation with Muslim activists by groups staffed by lesbians, gays, and Jews. There’s the unending multiplication of contradictory new fragments and new “rights.” And so on.

But in pointing out the obvious, one misses the guiding threads that run throughout the Left, and which unite it in ways the Right could only dream of.

One of these is the embrace of the “inverted world”: that is, anything -- truly, anything -- that is anti-white, anti-European, anti-Christian (unless you’re supporting “social justice”), anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-meat-eating, anti-beauty (I’m not kidding), and anti-traditional family (unless you’re helping “working families” of labor unionists). Disputes between lesbians and Muslims will be settled after The Revolution.

(If you don’t accept the racial aspect of the Left, imagine going to the G20 and holding up a sign reading “Stop Boer Genocide Now!” Such a sentiment could be described as “leftist” in that it involves helping a small people oppressed by a hostile majority. But as we all know, sticking up for White Protestants in Toronto is dead on arrival. Indeed, it might get you arrested!)

The other thread that runs through the contempo Left is that all its groups seek to be recognized -- and, most importantly, funded -- by the federal governments they condemn as “fascist.” As I was passing through the foul-smelling, hippie-like gathering that had cropped up in a nearby park, I watched as a nerdy white girl took the mike and started complaining about how “the government doesn’t respect us.” Ontario apparently only gave her project -- for lesbians or labor unions or Palestinians or who knows what -- five grand in funding. (If only AlternativeRight.com were so abused by the authorities!)

The Anarcho-Tyranny state, in turn, adores these groups, as all of their “problems” can be solved by new federal initiatives. Every “radical critique of bourgeois society” is in practice an excuse to expand a bureaucracy. The state will never oppose the Left -- and never stop importing the Left’s favored third-world populations -- until this arrangement ends.

For a long time in Western history, a state would establish sovereignty by appealing to theology and natural order (e.g. “the divine rights of kings”), or, with the birth of liberalism, the need to secure liberty. (Carl Schmitt: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”)

The postwar world not only witnessed the triumph of the said “radical critique of bourgeois society” -- what Kevin MacDonald has identified, in its active, subversive form, as the “culture of critique” and Paul Gottfried, in its passive, decadent form, as the “politics of (white) guilt” -- but its institutionalization in education, big business, and, most of all, government.

The critique is the establishment. The culture it engenders eventuates in scenes like the one we saw in Toronto this weekend.

I've found that no matter how revolting I find someone's views, it's impossible to dislike him if he's willing and able to provide an interesting analysis of his own psychology, motivations, and fears. (That is if he's got some other talent besides talking about himself, unlike many of the professional complainers of the New Left). As anybody looking through his new memoir Hitch 22 can tell you, Christopher Hitchens is almost impossible to read without appreciating his literary style or wishing the man himself well.

To take one example from the book, here's him explaining why he finds it difficult to accept the traditional justifications for Zionism.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background ... but under various reading of three codes which I don't respect much (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world -- or more probably comes to us via the Muslim world -- I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. ... The Jews will not be "saved" or "redeemed." (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.)  They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this is in some ways as it should be.

On the very next page, he explains his old friend Edward Said's sense of humor.

When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure.  At first the very picture of professorial rectitude, with faultless tweeds, cravats, and other accoutrements (the pipe also being to the fore), he would react to a risqué remark, or a disclosure of something vaguely scandalous, as if a whole Trojan horse of mirth had been smuggled into his interior and suddenly disgorged its contents.

Hitchens is also the master of the telling anecdote or macabre detail, as when he informs the reader that Saddam Hussein had a Koran written in his blood and made a public monument out of the helmets of dead Persian soldiers, noting that if it were acceptable to world opinion, it's hard to doubt that the dictator would have created a mountain of skulls for everyone to see. Surprisingly, Hitchens at an early age found that he didn't have the "stuff" for writing fiction and instead dedicated his life to political thought.

Unfortunately, it's the very features that make him a talented polemicist and (I presume) entertaining dinner guest that lead the author to so many fallacious conclusions.

Take how he came to change his mind on the first Gulf War. Hitchens tells us that after the conflict he was riding in a car with two Kurdish soldiers when he noticed that they kept a picture of George H.W. Bush in a jogging suit on their windshield. When he inquired as to why they told him that they were only alive thanks to "your Mr. Bush." He then had a sort of moral revelation and realized how wrong the antiwar types were. Nice story and much more entertaining to read then most interventionist arguments, though personal impressions don't an argument for war make.

In the run up to the second conflict with Iraq, Hitchens met Ahmad Chalaby and found that he had read any Middle Eastern intellectual the author mentioned, knew all the Iraqi communists from the old days, and was even familiar with the phrase "permanent revolution."  Hitchens had found his new king of Mesopotamia! "Perhaps I seem too impressionable," the author writes in the understatement of the book. Someone whose heart gets this carried away can make a wonderful friend or artist but dreadful policy analyst.

Hitchens blames the war's failures on the Bush administration's incompetence, as if creating a modern democracy for one of the most rambunctious people in the world is simply a matter of efficient planning. And he only stopped believing in Chalaby when the politician joined a religious block in the Iraqi parliament.

His disillusionment with the Palestinian cause is remarkably similar. It's implied that it was a good fight until it became too influenced by the divine. Hitchens also spends a disproportionate amount of time recounting a few isolated pieces of evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime moved away from secularism in its later years, seeming not to recognize that such details could only help make the case for intervention for somebody with his pathological hatred of all religious faiths. In other works the author has tried to partly justify bombing Serbia by claiming that the Christians were blessed by priests before they went off to kill, while their Bosnian enemies were noticeably secular.  Though differences in extent of piety between rivals is never the sole reason for Hitchens to declare one side of a conflict to be in the right, the careful reader who takes the time to know the author can't help but feel that he needs to convince himself, if nobody else, that he's always advocating for the relatively godless.

Though he has a reputation for having often changed his mind, the ex-Trotskyite Hitchens has in many ways remained true to himself. He rejected from the beginning the more insane modern incarnations of the Left such as the postmodernist movement, Herbert Marcuse, and what he calls "Third World fetishism." He never stopped seeing racism and faith as the two unforgivable evils and in the last few decades has realized that these natural instincts are more prevalent among those in the developing world, hence Hitchens' new found "Americanism."

Hitchens is only the most interesting personality among the Western intellectuals who have taken in and acknowledged the successes of activists and writers like themselves, looked around at what used to be Christendom, and declared "Mission Accomplished!"  But make no mistake about it: if Hitchens and his neocon friends saw any hints of a return to traditionalism among Europeans or Americans they would show Occidental populations the same wrath they currently reserve for Muslims. (I will give Hitchens credit for at least applying his own standards consistently in the case of Israel, unlike the blatant ethnic activists who write for magazines like The Weekly Standard.)  For all his seeming idiosyncrasies and reputation as a gadfly, the story of Christopher Hitchens' political development is one we've seen before.