Untimely Observations

                             “Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.” –Pierre Joseph Proudhon

In his important work Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (Arktos, 2011), Alain De Benoist aptly summarizes the first article of faith of the present day secular theocracy which reigns in the Western world:

One proof of this is its dogmatic character; it cannot be debated. That is why it seems today as unsuitable, as blasphemous, as scandalous to criticize the ideology of human rights as it was earlier to doubt the existence of God. Like every religion, the discussion of human rights seeks to pass off its dogmas as so absolute that one could not discuss them without being extremely, stupid, dishonest, or wicked…(O)ne implicitly places their opponents beyond the pale of humanity, since one cannot fight someone who speaks in the name of humanity while remaining human oneself.

While reading the above passage, I was instantly reminded of a particularly venal leftist critic who once amusingly described me as “flunking out of the human race” for, among other things, promoting the work of Benoist. The zealous religiosity which the apostles of human rights attach to their cause is particularly ironic given the nebulous and imprecise nature of their cherished dogma. As Thomas Szasz has observed:

Never before in our history have political and popular discourse been so full of rights-talk, as they are today. People appeal to disability rights, civil rights, gay rights, reproduction rights (abortion), the right to choose (also abortion), the right to health care, the right to reject treatment…and so forth, each a rhetorical device to justify one or another social policy and it enforcement by means of the coercive apparatus of the state.

Indeed, contemporary “rights-talk” often resembles the scene in one of the Star Trek films where Captain Kirk and his cohorts are engaged in negotiations of some sort with the Klingons and the Chekhov character raises the issue of the Klingons’ lack of regard for “democracy and human rights.” A Klingon responds by denouncing the term “human rights” as “racist” (presumably because Klingons are excluded from the human rights pantheon).

Benoist traces the development of modern “human rights” ideology and explores how the concept of “rights” has changed throughout history. In the classical world, “rights” were conceived of as being relative to an individual’s relationship to a particular community. Someone possessed “rights” because they were a citizen of a specific political entity or some other institutional context. The notion of abstract “rights” in a quasi-metaphysical sense was non-existent. Benoist considers the ideology of human rights to be an outgrowth of Christian universalism. Christianity introduced the concept of an individual soul that is eternal, transcendent, and independent of one’s specific social identity. Out of the Christian notion of the transcendent soul emerged the Enlightenment doctrine of “natural rights.” These rights are assumed to be universal and immutable.

Yet the very concept of “rights” as conceived of in this manner has itself undergone a number of profound metamorphosis. In its early phase, rights doctrine recognized only the Lockean negative liberties of “life, liberty, and property” and so forth. With the advent of ideologies like socialism or progressive liberalism the rights doctrine began to include what are now called “positive” rights. FDR’s famous “four freedoms” are an illustration of the foundations of this perspective. With the racial and cultural revolutions of the postwar era, rights doctrine took on a whole new meaning with “rights” now including exemption from discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability and an increasingly long list of other things. This certainly would have come as a shock to the great apostle of “natural rights,” Thomas Jefferson, who, as the Left never ceases to remind us, was a white male slaveholder who thought homosexuals should be castrated.

The definition of “human rights” continues to become increasingly murky over time. Benoist provides an apt illustration of the escalating imprecision of the rights doctrine by citing this quote from Pierre Manent:

To respect the dignity of another human being is no longer to respect the respect which he conserves in himself for the moral law; it is today, more and more, to respect the choice that he has made, whatever this choice may be, in the realization of his rights.

Benoist describes the predictable outcome of the rights doctrine that is now observable in contemporary politics:

The present tendency…consists in converting all sorts of demands, desires, or interests into ‘rights.’ Individuals, in the extreme case, would have the ‘right’ to see no matter what demand satisfied, for the sole reason that they can formulate them. Today, to claim rights is only a way of seeking to maximize one’s interests.

Particularly disastrous has been the fusion of the rights doctrine with mass democracy and the parallel growth exhibited by these two. Hans Hermann Hoppe has observed that a mass democracy comprised of an infinite number of interest groups making infinite rights claims is simply a form of low-intensity civil war. Likewise, Welf Herfurth has demonstrated how the very meaning of “democracy” has changed over time whereby earlier definitions of this concept, even in their modern liberal variations, have been abandoned and “democracy” has simply become a pseudonym for the limitless right to personal hedonism.

A paradoxical effect of the infinite expansion of the rights doctrine has been the simultaneously infinite growth of the state. Fustel de Coulandges described the political order of pre-modern Europe:

At the top of the hierarchy, the king was surrounded by his great vassals. Each of these vassals was himself surrounded by his own feudatories and he could not pronounce the least judgment without them…The king could neither make a new law, nor modify the existing laws, nor raise a new tax without the consent of the country…If one looks at the institutions of this regime from close quarters, and if one observes their meaning and significance, one will see they were all directed against despotism. However great the diversity that seems to reign in this regime, there is, however, one thing that unites them: this thing is obsession with absolute power. I do not think any regime better succeeded in rendering arbitrary rule impossible.

Benoist contrasts this with subsequent political developments in European civilization:

The end of the feudal regime marked the beginning of the disintegration of this system under the influence of Roman authoritarianism and the deadly blows of the centralized state. Little by little, hereditary royalty implemented a juridicial-administrative centralization at the expense of intermediary bodies and regional assemblies. While the communal revolution sanctioned the power of the nascent bourgeoisie, the regional parliaments ceased to be equal assemblies and became meetings of royal officers. Having become absolute, the monarchy supported itself upon the bourgeoisie to liquidate the resistances of the nobility.

Indeed, it could be argued that a similar process is presently transpiring whereby the New Class (or what Sam Francis called the “knowledge class” or what Scott Locklin regards as simply a new upper middle class) is aligning itself with the central government for the purpose of destroying the traditional WASP elite and marginalizing the traditional working to middle classes just as the nascent bourgeoisie of earlier times aligned itself with absolute monarchies against the nobility.

The growth of the rights doctrine has of course brought with it the explosive growth of rights-enforcement agencies and bureaucrats as any small business owner or self-employed person who has dealt with Occupational Health and Safety Administration would agree. Likewise, the autonomy of regions, localities, and the private sector has been nearly entirely eradicated in the name of creating rights for an ever expanding army of grievance groups and their advocates. Benoist discusses how the rights doctrine has also resulted in the phenomenal growth of the legal system. Today, there is virtually no aspect of life that is considered to be beyond the reach of state regulation or prohibition. Says Pierre Manent:

In the future, if one depends principally upon human rights to render justice, the ‘manner of judging’ will be irreparable. Arbitrariness, that is to say precisely what our regimes wanted to defend themselves against in instituting the authority of constitutionality, will then go on increasing, and will paradoxically become the work of judges. Now, a power which discovers that it can act arbitrarily will not delay in using and abusing this latitude. It tends towards despotism.

Far more dreadful than the use of “rights” as a pretext for enlarging civil bureaucracies and creeping statism in domestic and legal matters has been the application of the “human rights” ideology to international relations. Benoist points out the irony of how the military imperialism that the decolonialization movements were ostensibly supposed to end has been revived under the guise of “humanitarian intervention.” The doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” not only contravenes the international law established by the Peace of Westphalia but as well the Charter of the United Nations: “It suggests that every state, whatever it be, can intervene at will in the internal affairs of another state, whatever it be, under the pretext of preventing ‘attacks on human rights.’” The effect of this doctrine is the simple sanctioning of aggressive war without end.

Plato’s observation that a democratic regime on its deathbed is most typically characterized by a combination of individual licentiousness and creeping political tyranny would seem to be apt assessment of our present condition. As one Facebook commentator recently suggested:

Barbarism. Take a picture, we need to get it down for future civilizations. They need to know how the dialectic works: the negation of parental and local authority does NOT lead to freedom, or does so only briefly. That negation is in turn negated by a soft totalitarianism, now becoming harder and more crystallized in order to fill the vacuum of authority. If we record it for them, when some future Neo-Enlightenment philosopher promises liberty and equality circa 2800CE, he can be properly dressed down before he does any damage.

Hear, hear!

Conservatives, whether Catholic or not, tend to have a sympathy for the Catholic Church for two basic reasons. First, left-wingers despise the Church because of its public stance on abortion. If liberals hate the Church that much, conservatives reason, it can’t be all that bad. Second, the Catholic Church seemingly takes generally conservative positions on some “social issues” such as “gay marriage” and euthanasia.

But what I can assert for certain, as a lifelong devout conservative Catholic, and what both Catholics and non-Catholics have got to understand, is that the Catholic Church is obsessed with three things.

It is extremely paranoid about its public image, which is why it protected pedophile priests for decades instead of doing the only morally correct thing—turn those child predators in to the authorities. The official Church is also obsessed with money, which is why it sells out on virtually every issue, the better to attract liberal donors. The third obsession is actually related to the first two. The Catholic Church is maniacally obsessed with sucking up to the politically correct liberal establishment. Church leaders undoubtedly stay awake at night strategizing as to how they can further endear themselves to the politically correct Zeitgeist and left-wing opinion leaders. It is an absolute mystery why liberals hate the Church—for liberals are the Church’s master!

Indeed, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, from the Pope down to individual parish priests, when it addresses areas outside the realm of Catholic doctrine and veers into economic and political issues, tends to wander into left field. Far left field.

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.

The brand of historiography promoted by the Mises Institute is at its best when it is revisionist, and fearless of social and political taboos. It is at its very worst when it is Manichaean: The Black Hats vs. the White Hats; The Good Guys (a term these historians actually like to use) vs. The Baddies; the Party of Liberty vs. the tyrannical Statists etc. etc. etc.

I might agree with Thomas DiLorenzo on some crucial issues, including the Federal Reserve and the Cult of Lincoln, but history-writing should not be a kind of extended op-ed, in which readers silently cheer on the Good Guys, hiss at the Baddies, judging both by the degree to which they adhere to a 2012 Anarcho-Capitalist Platform.

All this was brought to mind as I was reading what DiLorenzo surely considers to be devastating take-downs of his National Review opponents in the Beltway, regarding the Ron Paul newsletters saga.

The official National Review line has, for a while, been that Ron Paul is borderline unmentionable, mostly due to his foreign-policy positions.  If there is a strong need to go after him, the NRchiks haven't hesitated to bring up that at one point in time, Paul's newsletters promoted unfashionable views on race, as well as conspiracy theories of various degrees of crankiness—despite the fact that such views are out of tune with Paul’s more recent public statements on racial matters and the civil rights movement. 

DiLorenzo’s response is to dig up some money quotes from NR’s past and insinuate that the “neocons” are racist bigots. That is, he does EXACTLY what he accuses NR of doing. (In the process, he proves that NR was once a pretty interesting magazine!)

Richard's post, "Obama's Ennabling Act," raises some interesting questions regarding the significance of the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, and its probable impact, that I believe merit further discussion. The editorial issued on December 17 by the editors of Taki’s Magazine, “The Government v. Everyone,” represents fairly well the shared consensus of critics of the NDAA whose ranks include conservative constitutionalists and left-wing civil libertarians alike. While I share the opposition to the Act voiced by these critics, I also believe that Richard is correct to point out the questionable presumptions regarding legal and constitutional theory and alarmist rhetoric that have dominated the critics’ arguments.

Wholesale abrogation of core provisions of the U.S. Constitution is hardly rare in American history. The literature of leftist or libertarian historians of American politics is filled with references to the Alien and Sedition Act, Lincoln’s assumption of dictatorial powers during the Civil War, the repression of the labor movement during WWI, the internment of the Japanese during WW2 and so forth. Mainstream liberal critics of these aspects of American history will lament the manner by which America supposedly strays so frequently from her high-minded ideals, whereas more radical leftist critics will insist such episodes illustrate what a rotten society America always was right from the beginning.

Meanwhile, conservatives will lament how the noble, almost god-like efforts of the revered “Founding Fathers” have been perverted and destroyed by subsequent generations of evil or misguided liberals, socialists, atheists, or whomever, thereby plunging the nation into the present dark era of big government and moral decadence. These systems of political mythology not withstanding, a more realist-driven analysis of the history of the actual practice of American statecraft might conclude that such instances of the state stepping outside of its own proclaimed ideals or breaking its own rules transpire because, well, that’s what states do.

Carl Schmitt considered the essence of politics to be the existence of organized collectives with the potential to engage in lethal conflict with one another. Max Weber defined the state as an entity claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Schmitt’s dictum, “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception,” indicates there must be some ultimate rule-making authority that decides what constitutes “legitimacy” and what does not, and that this sovereign entity is consequently not bound by its own rules. This principle is descriptive rather than prescriptive or normative in nature. Schmitt’s conception of the political is simply an analysis of “how things work” as opposed to “what ought to be.”

Like all other political collectives, the United States possesses a body of political mythology whose function is to convey legitimacy upon its own state. For Americans, this mythology takes on the form of what Robert Bellah identified as the “civil religion.” The tenets of this civil religion grant Americans a unique and exceptional place in history as the Promethean purveyors of “freedom,” “democracy,” “equality,” “opportunity,” or some other supposedly noble ideal. According to this mythology, America takes on the role of a providential nation that is in some way particularly favored by either a vague, deist-like divine force (Jefferson’s “nature’s god”) in the mainstream politico-religious culture, or the biblical god in the case of the evangelicals, or the progressive forces of history for left-wing secularists. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the sacred writings of the American civil religion. It is no coincidence that constitutional fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists are often the same people. Prominent “founding fathers” such as Washington or Madison assume the role of prophets or patriarchs akin to Moses and Abraham.

In American political and legal culture, this civil religion and body of political mythology becomes intertwined with the liberal myth of the “rule of law.” According to this conception, “law” takes on an almost mystical quality and the Constitution becomes a kind of magical artifact (like the genie’s lantern) whose invocation will ostensibly ward off tyrants. This legal mythology is often expressed through slogans such as “We should be a nation of laws and not men” (as though laws are somehow codified by forces or entities other than mere mortal humans) and public officials caught acting outside strict adherence to legal boundaries are sometimes vilified for violation of “the rule of law.” (I recall comical pieties of this type being expressed during the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s.) Ultimately, of course, there is no such thing as “the rule of law.” There is only the rule of the “sovereign.” The law is always subordinate to the sovereign rather than vice versa. Schmitt’s conception of the political indicates that the world is comprised first and foremost of brawling collectives struggling on behalf of each of their existential prerogatives. The practice of politics amounts to street-gang warfare writ large where the overriding principle becomes “protect one’s turf!” rather than “rule of law.”

 As an aside, I am sometimes asked how my general adherence to Schmittian political theory can be reconciled with my anarchist beliefs. However, it was my own anarchism that initially attracted me to the thought of Schmitt. His recognition of the essence of the political as organized collectives with the potential to engage in lethal conflict and his understanding of sovereignty as exemption from the rule-making authority of the state have the ironic effect of stripping away and destroying the systems of mythology on which states are built. Schmitt’s analysis of the nature of the state is so penetrating that it gives the game away. Politics is simply about maintaining power. Period.

Another irony is that Schmitt helped to clarify my anarchist beliefs considerably. I adhere to the dictionary definition of anarchism as the goal of replacing the state with a confederation or agglomeration of voluntary communities (while recognizing a certain degree of subjectivity to the question of what is “voluntary” and what is not). Theoretically, anarchist communities could certainly reflect the values of ideological anarchists like Kropotkin, Rothbard, or Dorothy Day. But such communities could also be organized on the model of South Africa’s Orania, or traditionalist communities like the Hasidim or Amish, or fringe cultural elements like UFO true-believers. Paradoxically, such communities could otherwise reflect the “normal” values of Middle America (minus the state).

The concept of fourth generation warfare provides a key insight as to how political anarchism can be reconciled with the political theory of Carl Schmitt. According to fourth generation theory as it has been outlined by Martin Van Creveld and William S. Lind, the state is in the process of receding as the loyalties of populations are being transferred to other entities such as religions, tribes, ideological movements, gangs, cults, paramilitaries, or whatever. Scenarios are emerging with increasing frequency where such non-state actors engage in warfare with states or in the place of states. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has essentially replaced the Lebanese state as both the defender of the nation and as the provider of necessary services on which the broader population depends, is a standard model of a fourth generation entity. In other words, Hezbollah has replaced the state as the sovereign entity in Lebanese society.

Another example is Columbia’s FARC, which has likewise dislodged the Colombian state as the sovereign in FARC-controlled territorial regions. The implication of this for political anarchism is that for the anarchist goal of autonomous, voluntary communities to succeed, a non-state entity (or collection of entities) must emerge that is capable of protecting the communities from conquest or subversion and possesses the will to do so. In other words, for anarchism to work there must be in place the equivalent of an anarchist version of Hezbollah  that replaces the state as the sovereign in the wider society, probably in the form of a decentralized militia confederation similar to that organized by the Anarchists of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War…in case anyone was wondering.

The Future of Repression

Dealing with more immediate questions, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act raises the issue of to what level repression carried out by the American state in the future will be taken, and of what particular form this repression will assume. I agree with Richard that it is improbable that NDAA represents any significant change of direction or dramatic acceleration in these areas. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that American political dissidents (the readers of AlternativeRight.Com, for instance) will be subject to mass arrests and indefinite detention without trial. Such tactics are likely to be reserved for individuals, primarily foreigners, genuinely involved or believed to be involved in the planning of acts of actual terrorism against American targets. There is at present very little of that within the context of domestic American society.

However, the unwarranted nature of Alex Jones-style alarmism does not mean there is no danger on the horizon. What is needed is a healthy medium between panic and complacency. Richard has argued that our present systems of soft totalitarianism that we find in the contemporary Western world may well give way to hard totalitarianism as Cultural Marxism/Totalitarian Humanism continues to tighten its grip. While this is a concern that I share and a prophecy that I regrettably think has a considerable chance of fulfillment, the question arises of what form “hard” totalitarianism might take in the future of the West.

It is unlikely we will ever develop states in the West that are organized on the classical totalitarian model complete with over the top pageantry and heads of states with strange uniforms and facial hair, given the way in which these are inimical to the universalist ideology, globalist ambitions, commercial interests, and aesthetic values of Western elites. Rather, I suspect the future of Western repression will take on either one of two forms (or perhaps a combination of both).

One of these is a model where repression rarely involves long term imprisonment or state-sponsored lethal action against dissidents. Instead, such repression might take on the form of persistent and arbitrary harassment, or the ongoing escalation of the use of professional and economic sanctions, targeting the families and associates of dissidents, or the petty criminalization of those who speak or act in defiance of establishment ideology. Richard has discussed the recent events involving Emma West and David Duke, and well as his own treatment at the hands of the Canadian authorities, and I suspect it is state action of this type that will largely define Western repression in the foreseeable future.

The state may not murder you or put you in prison for decades without trial, but you may lose your job, have your professional licensees revoked or the social service authorities threaten to remove your children from your home, or be subject to significant but brief harassment by legal authorities. You man find yourself brought up on minor criminal charges (akin to those that might be levied against a shoplifter or a pot smoker) if you utter the wrong words. Likewise, the state will increasingly look the other way as the use of extra-legal violence by leftist and other pro-system thugs is employed against dissenters. Indeed, much of what I have outlined here is already taking place and it can be expected that such incidents will become much more frequent and severe in the years and decades ahead. What I have outlined in this paragraph largely defines the practice of political repression as it currently exists in the West, particularly outside the United States, where traditions upholding free speech do not run quite as deeply.

However, this by no means indicates that Americans are off the hook. An even greater issue of concern, particularly for the United States, involves the convergence of four factors within contemporary American society and statecraft. These are the decline of the American empire in spite of the continuation of America’s massive military-industrial complex, mass immigration and radical demographic transformation, rapid economic deterioration and the disappearance of the conventional American middle class, and the growth of the general apparatus of state repression over the last four decades (the prison-industrial complex frequently criticized by the Left, for instance).

The combination of mass Third World immigration and ongoing economic decline, if continued uninterrupted, will have the effect of replicating the traditional Third World model class system in the U.S. (and perhaps much of the West over time). A class system organized on the basis of an opulent few at the top and impoverished many among the masses (the Brasillian model, for instance) will likely be accompanied by escalating social unrest and political instability. Such trends will be ever more greatly exacerbated by growing social, cultural, and ethnic conflict brought about by demographic change.

The American state has at its disposal an enormous military industrial complex that, frankly, wants to remain in business even as foreign military adventures continue to become less politically and economically viable. Likewise, the ongoing domestic wars waged by the American state against drugs, crime, gangs, guns, et. al. have generated a rather large “police industrial complex” with American borders. Libertarian writers such as William Norman Grigg have diligently documented the ongoing process of the militarization of American law enforcement and the continued blurring of distinctions between the rules of engagement involving soldiers on the battlefield on one hand and policemen dealing with civilians on the other. The literature of libertarian critics is filled with horror stories of, for instance, small town mayors having their household pets blown away by SWAT team members during the course of bungled drug raids.

The point is that as economic and social unrest, along with increasingly intense demographic conflict, continues to arise as it likely will in the foreseeable American future, the state will have at its disposal a significant apparatus for the carrying out of genuinely brutal repression of the kind normally associated with Latin American or Middle Eastern countries. Recall, for example, the “disappeared” of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. It is not improbable that we dissidents in the totalitarian humanist states of the postmodern West will face a dangerous brush with such circumstances at some point in the future.

I am a child of the Cold War, so I spent most of my life in an epoch where the 'Year 2000' was synonymous with ‘The Future’—a time when, provided we averted a thermonuclear apocalypse, people would be wearing silver spacesuits and bases would have been long established on the moon.

When the year 2000 finally came, however, it was anti-climatic: I spent New Years Eve in the company of investment executives, whose host never cared to keep track of the time in order to witness the year change at its precise moment. I was the only one to notice the stroke of midnight while sitting at the dinner table. When the date changed, I elbowed my neighbour to point out that we had entered the year 2000, but she only gave me a brief, distracted, half-lidded glance and an indifferent “Ah, yea… Hm.”

Twenty years earlier I would have been exasperated, but by 1999, amidst the hype surrounding the so-called “millennium” (which was not due until the following year anyway, since there was no year zero), I had began to think about the dating system we currently use in the West.

As a resident of the Philippines, I would be lying if I did not entertain thoughts of immigration at some point in time. One of the deepest desires of Filipinos is to stop being Filipinos in the Philippines, and instead become Filipinos in [insert wealthy country of your choice]. I personally don’t like this mentality, but that is how things are. I seriously doubt most non-Whites who immigrate to Western Nations want Whites to become a minority. I doubt most of them fully understand what multiculturalism, anti-racism, or political correctness, not to mention their consequences. For the most part, what people want from immigration is the ability to earn cash and cease living in poverty.

However, the question of immigration is not just about immigration per se. It is also about identity. Immigrants to Western Countries—by implication—want to be American, European, Australian, etc... That is to say, there is an implied desire among Non-White immigrants to become “Westerners” (since, you know, they can’t be White).

I personally don’t hold this desire. I may be inclined to visit other nations, study in them, and meet people from other cultures, but looking at the bigger picture, I rather like being a Filipino, despite all the problems and issues that go along with it. There is a subtlety and depth to my particular identity that is essential to how I perceive the world, and how the world perceives me. And besides, I rather like being a darkie!

Of particular relevance to this topic is an old cinematic masterpiece called Ganito Kami Noon... Paano Kayo Ngayon (This is How We Were Then...How Are You Now?). The setting of the movie was around the end of the 19th century, when Spain’s grip over the Philippine islands was weakening, and the fury of nationalism was getting stronger with each passing day.

Among the most important elements of the movie was the theme of identity, and in this case, Filipino identity. “Filipino,” during the Spanish colonial era in the Philippines, was a term reserved exclusively for Spaniards born in the Philippines. In other words, “Filipino” was an identity which was reserved exclusively for people of a specific ethnicity.

As if it were some kind of brazen insult to the Founding Fathers, on the 220th anniversary of the codification of the Bill of Rights, President Obama signed into law an act that, according to most civil libertarians and Constitution-thumpers, negates those hallowed guarantees of individual liberty.

Writes one LewRockwell.com columnist:

The National Defense Authorization Act will make it official. It will confer upon the executive branch and the military (increasingly, the same things) the permanent authority to snatch and grab any person, U.S. citizens included, whom it decrees to be a “terrorist” – as defined or not by the executive or the military - and imprison them, indefinitely, without formal charge, presentation of evidence or judicial proceeding of any kind. These “detainees” will have neither civilian rights in the civil court system, nor – crucially – even the minimal rights to due process and decent treatment conferred upon prisoners of war. 

The writer claims that the U.S. has “crossed the Rubicon,” that is, become something akin to the “20th century horror shows,” Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.

But has anything really changed? I don’t mean in terms of day-to-day operations of the government but fundamentally.

Most Americans are actually quite familiar and comfortable with Raison d’État (or what Alex Jones might call “black ops”), which has been around since time immemorial. Espionage, international intrigue, and state assassinations have, indeed, always captured the public’s imagination—from James Bond to GI Joe to Obama’s murder of Osama bin Laden. People of all levels of sophistication feel in their guts that the government should do things—bad things . . . illegal things . . . secret things . . . dangerous things—to “keep us safe.” 

Put in more scientific language, Raison d’État trumps legal and constitutional considerations. Only systematic libertarians and anarchists are much troubled by this fact. There are, of course, limits to what the public will tolerate in terms of the use of force, and actions must be justified in some way. But the key is that the state—and the state alone—is allowed to do such deeds.

While we are on the topic of immigration and the sentiment it elicits among frustrated White folk everywhere, it is worth highlighting once again how the media reports collisions between communities.

Perhaps one of the most egregious recent example I have seen is a report on the Copenhagen Post, ‘Denmark’s leading source for news in English’.

Titled, ‘Fears of Vigilantism After Rape of Young Girl’, the report begins:

The rape of a ten-year-old has shocked the residents of a small town in Jutland, and led to fears residents would seek revenge against the suspect – a 16-year-old boy of Somalian descent.

A week ago last Saturday two girls were threatened at knife-point by a boy and led into a forest. While the nine-year-old girl managed to escape and sound the alarm, the ten-year-old was raped.

It took over a week for the police to make an arrest, and in the meantime the description of the culprit – an ‘African-looking’ male between the ages of 16 and 18 and with black curly hair – was circulated.

So far, so good, right? Mr. Stanner has reported the crime and identified the suspect, not neglecting to mention his race. Now let us examine how the rest of the article runs. The next sixteen paragraphs follow directly after the above three, without transition:

Some 40 percent of the town’s residents are immigrants and several boys and young men fit the description given by the girls. While the police began collecting evidence, rumours started circulating that groups of residents were looking to take matters into their own hands and young immigrant men were warned to stay indoors.

To help calm nerves, a meeting was held the following Tuesday in which a family member of one of the two girls urged residents to let the police do their job in apprehending the culprit.

One of those in attendance was Kaj Mortensen, the manager of a local housing association, who told the press that fears of a vigilante mob forming were overblown, though it was worth reminding residents of the consequences of vigilantism.

“It’s something we want to avoid, it’s the police who have to handle these things. We shouldn’t do anything ourselves,” Mortensen said. “Broadly speaking we discussed the need to talk to each other, regardless of which ethnicity you might have.”

While it seems residents did allow police to conduct their investigation in peace, a right-wing political organisation used the incident to spread their anti-Islamic agenda.

Twenty members of the Danish Defence League (DDL), were spotted in the nearby town of Herning on Thursday night on their way to Gullestrup, where the next day posters could be found declaring the town an ‘Sharia Free Zone’ and signed by the DDL.

The DDL admitted on its Facebook page to hanging the posters and called the act a ‘good effort’.

The group is tied to the British organisation English Defence League, which is made up largely of white males linked to the football hooligan community and who are responsible for violent anti-Islamic rallies across the country.

In a press release, the DDL declared it was prepared to take on the role of the police at times when they felt the Danish people were not being protected

“The Danish Defence League declares that we will take the streets in areas where the number of rapes are rising if the authorities in Denmark are not getting the situation under control. We take this position after the Danish police once again have shown that they either can’t or won’t – or don’t have the resources to – protect the Danish people from Muslim immigrants’ perverted desires.”

A 16-year-old was been arrested late last week after forensic evidence linked him to the crime. The police would not confirm what the evidence was but one report suggests his fingerprint was found on a condom packet lying close to the scene of the crime.

According to information obtained by the tabloid Ekstra Bladet, the 16-year-old had recently returned from a year in Somalia and had reportedly witnessed that country’s strife at close quarters.

Acquaintances of the suspect described how the experience has affected him.

“He was unrecognisable when he came home. He seemed hard and superficial and spoke very loudly, almost shouting all the time,” one source was quoted in Ekstra Bladet as saying.

The boy appeared in court last Saturday in a close door hearing.

He denies any involvement in the rape.

Interesting, is it not, how the report focuses entirely on worries about the feelings and safety of the immigrant residents, and spares not one word for the feelings of the 9-year old who was threatened with a knife, or of the 10-year-old girl who was raped at knifepoint, or of the families of these two girls, or of the Danish local residents who may be parents to young girls. The safety of local Danish girls does not fall under reporter Peter Stanner’s radar.

What does fall under his radar are the feelings of the young rapist thug. Some would want to point out that Mr. Stanner’s report is sympathetic to the rapist, for it spends five paragraphs attempting to, let us say, nuance, or add context, to the Somali youth’s despicable crime, so that readers may not rush to conclusions. It is the boy who is the real victim, not the girl who will be traumatised for the rest of her life. The villains are those irascible Danish barbarians living in the neighbourhood and of course the DDL.

We have seen ample evidence of how, for mainstream journalists, context is essential when attempting to understand attacks on White folk by coloured immigrants or their descendants, but wholly unimportant when attempting to understand the frustration of White folk who, Emma West or Darren Scully, decide they have had enough. For the likes of Mr. Stanner, the existence of the DDL has no context other than simple racism, and their reacting to this event is merely base opportunism, motivated by a mean-spirited desire to exploit an unfortunate incident for political gain. There is no legitimate reason to defend the Danish, of course.

We have finally learnt why England crawls with working-class women willing to complain openly about immigration: it seems the United Kingdom is run by a secret cabal of Nazi sympathisers, lodged deep within the Conservative Party, and close to Prime Minister David Cameron.

On Sunday the nation stood still as the Daily Mail, in an epic and immensely detailed report, made the terrible revelation. Earlier this month, Conservative Member of Parliament Aiden Burley attended a stag party, where 34-year-old Oxford-educated Mark Fournier, who works as an accountant and whose stag party it was, revealed his true colours—in public, in front of gay and Jewish eyes, and of those of respectable French citizens trying to enjoy a peaceful dinner with friends and family. Unable to bottle up his Nazism any longer, and eager to be as transgressive as possible, Mr. Fournier went around in full German Nazi SS uniform, complete with swastika armband, in proud and brazen defiance of French laws.

Fortunately, reporters from the Daily Mail happened to be in the same restaurant on that precise evening and at that precise time, and were able to document the outrage, filming it and photographing it conclusively. This is reporter Matt Sandy’s account [emphases here and further down are mine]:

Mail on Sunday photographer John McLellan and I were in Val Thorens working on an unrelated story last Saturday when we went to Restaurant La Fondue . . .

As we ordered drinks, we noticed a rowdy group of men at a table. Then we saw a man in an SS uniform walk past us to the toilet. We were surprised by the group’s brashness and their taunting of the waiters.

It was a small restaurant, with room for 50 diners, and was two-thirds full.

Watching other British people behaving as this group were in a foreign country was at the very least embarrassing.

Outside, we chatted to the men. Several agreed to pose for photos and, without prompting, did Nazi salutes. I have seen this happen only once before – at a football match.

The group invited us to join them at a British-themed pub later that evening. It was only at this stage that we discovered that one of their number was a Conservative MP.

In the bar, which was packed with holidaymakers enjoying apres-ski, they continued drinking, and their chanting became more frequent and uninhibited. It was hard to believe that an MP did nothing to halt this offensive behaviour.

This offensive behaviour included a toast that ran:

Let’s raise a toast to Tom for organising the stag do, and if we’re perfectly honest, to the ideology and thought process of the Third Reich.

Mr. Burley, who ‘[i]n an entry on [his] website, dated June 21 this year, . . . describes a visit to Israel’, witnessed this act, heard these words, and did . . . nothing. Worse, he was photographed paying the bill.

The British nation need not fear, however, for prompt action has been taken. According to the Daily Mail,

[a] French police spokesman confirmed that an investigation could be launched, and said: ‘Anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi crimes are taken extremely seriously in France. Anyone suspected of breaking the law in this respect can and will be prosecuted.’

The news report clarifies that

[t]his is because under the French penal code it is a crime, unless required for a film, a play or a historical exhibition, to wear or exhibit in public anything reminiscent of what was worn or used by the Nazis.

Meanwhile, Mr. Burley released a statement (through Conservative Central Office), stating,

There was clearly inappropriate behaviour by some of the other guests and I deeply regret that this happened. I am extremely sorry for any offence that will undoubtedly have been caused.

And the BBC reports that

[a] Conservative Party spokesman confirmed there would be a full investigation into what had happened.

Unsatisfied with that, shadow transport minister and Labour MP John Zak Woodcock, who is chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel group, has ‘called for Mr. Burley to be sacked’.

Events are unfolding, so we will see where this leads. Mr. Burley and friends have good reason to worry, for some have had their careers ruined for less.

Last month, for example, one Mr. Darren Scully, another conservative politician and now former major of Naas, in Ireland, was forced to apologise, resign, endure days of abuse and public humiliation, and face a police investigation—and a possible prison sentence of up to two years—following a radio interview where he expressed frustration with the bad manners of his Black constituents and his decision earlier this year to direct them to colleagues better suited to take up their concerns.

With so many reports of racists and Nazis coming out into the open, claiming support of the BNP or wearing a costume as the ultimate act of defiance to the system, the inevitable conclusion must be that more ‘education and love’ are needed, because if love for multiracialism is not forthcoming, it must be that we need yet more of the same.