National-anarchism
National-anarchism is a radical right-wing nationalist ideology which advocates racial separatism, racial nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and racial purity. National-anarchists syncretize ethnic nationalism with anarchism, mainly in their support for a stateless society, while rejecting anarchist social philosophy. The main ideological innovation of national-anarchism is its anti-state palingenetic ultranationalism. National-anarchists advocate homogeneous communities in place of the nation state. National-anarchists claim that those of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes while striving to be politically horizontal, economically anti-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.
Although the term national-anarchism dates back as far as the 1920s, the contemporary national-anarchist movement has been put forward since the late 1990s by British strasserist Troy Southgate, who positions it as being "beyond left and right". Scholars who have studied national-anarchism conclude that it represents a further evolution in the thinking of the radical right rather than an entirely new dimension on the political spectrum.
National-anarchism has elicited skepticism and outright hostility from both left-wing and far-right critics. Critics accuse national-anarchists of being ethnonationalists who promote a communitarian and racialist form of ethnic and racial separatism while "wanting" the militant chic of calling themselves anarchists without historical and philosophical baggage that would be said to have to accompany such a claim, including the anti-racist egalitarian anarchist philosophy and the contributions of Jewish anarchists. Most scholars agree that implementing national-anarchism would not result in an expansion of freedom and describe it as an authoritarian anti-statism that would result in authoritarianism and oppression, only on a smaller scale.
History
Origins
The term national-anarchist dates back as far as the 1920s. However, it would be the writings of other members of the conservative revolutionary movement such as Ernst Jünger which would later provide the philosophical foundation of the contemporary national-anarchist movement. Keith Preston, an influence on the American national-anarchist movement, "blends U.S-based influences" such as "libertarian, Christian rightist, neonazi, and Patriot movements in the United States" with ideas drawn from the European tradition of the New Right, a "right-wing decentralist" offshoot of "classical fascism" and from the German conservative revolutionary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, whose figures "influenced but mostly stood outside of the Nazi movement".Troy Southgate
In the mid-1990s, Troy Southgate, a former member of the British far-right National Front and founder of the International Third Position, began to move away from Strasserism and Catholic distributism towards post-left anarchy and the primitivist green anarchism articulated in Richard Hunt's 1997 book To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core. However, Southgate fused his ideology with the radical traditionalist conservatism of Italian esotericist Julius Evola and the ethnopluralism and pan-European nationalism of French Nouvelle Droite philosopher Alain de Benoist to create a newer form of revolutionary nationalism called "national-anarchism".Graham D. Macklin writes that although "at first glance the 'total insanity’ of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism'", national-anarchism "appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated".
Southgate claimed that his desire for a "mono-racial England" was not "racist" and that he sought "ethno-pluralism" to defend "indigenous" white culture from the 'death' of multiracial society". In claiming to defend "human diversity", Southgate "advocated 'humane' repatriation and the reordering of the globe according to racially segregated colour blocs" and "a radical policy of economic and political decentralization" in which the regions of the United Kingdom "were to be governed according to the economic principles of Catholic distributism and a wealth redistribution scheme modelled on the mediaeval guild system. The ensuing growth of private enterprise and common ownership of the means of production would end 'class war' and, ergo, the raison d'être for Marxism, and would also encourage an organic nationalist economy insulated from 'foreign' intervention". Politically, "the regions would be governed by the concept of 'popular rule' extolled by Gaddafi. The resulting restoration of economic and political freedom would re-establish the link between 'blood and soil' enabling the people to overcome the 'tidal wave of evil and liberal filth now sweeping over our entire continent'. 'Natural law' would be upheld and abortion, race mixing and homosexuality forbidden".
About Southgate's vision of Western culture, Graham D. Macklin writes that it is "saturated with a profound pessimism tempered by the optimistic belief that only by 'complete and utter defeat' can tepid materialism be expunged and replaced by the 'golden age' of Evolian Tradition: a return of the Ghibbelines of the Middle Ages or the 'medieval imperium' of the Holy Roman Empire before it collapsed into the 'internecine struggle' and 'imperialistic shenanigans' of the nation-state". Southgate's desire "to create a decentralized völkisch identity has its roots in the ideological ferment gripping National Front News and Nationalism Today in the 1980s".
In 1998, inspired by the concepts of the political soldier and leaderless resistance, Southgate formed the National Revolutionary Faction as a clandestine cell system of professional revolutionaries conspiring to overthrow the British state. The NRF stressed this was a "highly militant strategy" and advised that some members may only fund the organization. Southgate claims that the NRF took part in anti-vivisection protests in August 2000 alongside hunt saboteurs and the Animal Liberation Front by following a strategy of entryism, but its only known public action under the national-anarchist name was to hold an anarchist heretics fair in October 2000 in which a number of fringe groups participated. After a coalition of anti-fascists and green anarchists blocked three further events from being held in 2001, Southgate and the NRF abandoned this strategy and retreated to purely disseminating their ideas in Internet forums. The NRF had long been aware of the bridging power of the Internet which provided it with a reach and influence hitherto not available to the groupuscular right. Although Southgate disbanded the group in 2003, the NRF became part of the Euro-American radical right, a virtual community of European and American right-wing extremists seeking to establish a new pan-national and ethnoreligious identity for all people they believe belong to the "Aryan race".
Shortly after, Southgate and other NRF associates became involved with Synthesis, the online journal of a forum called Cercle de la Rose Noire which sought a fusion of anti-statism, metapolitics and occultism with the contemporary concerns of the environmental and global justice movements. Through the medium of musical subcultures and the creation of permanent autonomous zones for neo-völkisch communes, national-anarchists hope to disseminate their subversive ideas throughout society in order to achieve cultural hegemony. The national-anarchist idea has spread around the world over the Internet, assisted by groups such as the Thule-Seminar which set up websites in the 1990s. In the United States, only a few websites have been established, but there has been a trend towards a steady increase.
In Germany
While there exists some minor overlap, the Autonomous Nationalists of Germany are generally not national-anarchists, instead only adopting anarchist and Antifa aesthetics and/or methods while typically adopting a Strasserist, or other non-anarchist, ideology.Peter Töpfer
A proponent of the Querfront strategy and notable self-proclaimed national-anarchist in Germany is Peter Töpfer, who has been involved in the distribution of national-anarchist texts, primarily through his website nationalanarchismus.de, since the late 1990s and published the well-known fanzine Sleipnir. Töpfer has been noted for his correspondence with the neo-Nazi Christian Worch, to whom he complained about threats he had received from the Autonomous Nationalists when he showed up at an NPD-demonstration in 1998 with a black-and-red anarchy flag. Töpfer has also cooperated with the National Bolshevik Michael Koth, at the time of the Combat League of German Socialists, and associated himself with the convicted holocaust denier Horst Mahler, at whose events he and his followers apparently distributed leaflets. Leaflets, under the title "Tornado Runter" were also distributed at the 1999 in Hamburg, which protested the Kosovo War, by a group called "National-Anarchists in the People's Liberation Struggle", apparently associated with Töpfer. In 2004, Töpfer published a book that consisted of a collection of his national-anarchist writing from 1997 to 2000 named nationale Anarchie.Töpfer's ideology has apparently developed separately from that of Troy Southgate, although Töpfer did later associate somewhat with the National-Anarchist Movement. He notes his ideology to be an expression of radical anti-modernism that combines radical individualism, inspired by Max Stirner, with radical collectivism, inspired by figures like Mikhail Bakunin, combined in the will to ultimate self-determination. Töpfer contrasted his "German national-anarchism" with that of other contemporaries by declaring its roots to be pacifist, "post-left-hegelian", and "radical-enlightened" ; as well as noting his movement to be anti-political in nature. Töpfer also contrasted his ideology with that of an at-the-time emergent group of "Anarcho-Nazis" in Spain and Portugal by stating that he opposes Hitlerlism. In his 2004 national-anarchist manifesto, Töpfer writes, among other thoughts, of spontaneous action and the belief that anarchism mustn't inherently mean statelessness, but only freedom from authority, an idea that has been criticized as nonsensical.
In Töpfer's sense there apparently existed two groups in Germany, one in Berlin, where Töpfer resided, and one in Hamburg, although the latter apparently did not last long. Among the supporters of Töpfer's national-anarchism was the bioregionalist Leif-Thorsten Kramps, who, among other things, advocated for ethnopluralism in an article on Töpfer's website.