National-Anarchism and Classical American Ideals: Is A Reconciliation Possible?

This essay is included in the recently re-released NATIONAL-ANARCHISM:A READER edited by Troy Southgate and available from Black Front Press.

By Keith Preston  
Attack the System


“Establishing a new world order of supranational government is Hitlerian in concept and will need to be Stalinist in execution.” (1)

 -Taki Theodoracopulos

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence-it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”(2)

 -George Washington

“That government is best which governs least.”(3)

  -Thomas Jefferson

“anarchism (‘an-ar-kiz-im) n (1642): a political theory holding all forms of government to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups”(4)

  -Webster’s Dictionary

As long as there has been power and authority, there has been rebellion. From the insurrectionary efforts of Spartacus in ancient times to the noble resistance of the people of Occupied Palestine in our own era, the enslaved and oppressed have sought to throw off the chains by which their masters keep them bound. The great libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard argued that the history of human civilizations is largely a struggle of liberty against power with the latter gaining the upper hand with much greater frequency than the former. The great nineteenth century historian Lord John Acton insisted that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At no point has the truth of Acton’s famous adage been demonstrated more strongly than in the last century. R. J. Rummell’s monumental studies in a unique field that he chooses to label “democide”, a term coined to describe the systematic slaughter of subjects by the states which rule over them, show that nearly one hundred seventy million persons were annihlated by “their” governments during the twentieth century alone. These figures exclude those killed in intra-state warfare. Reviewing the sorry record of the treatment of subjects by states, Rummell paraphrases Acton and concludes that “power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely”. (5) In a similar vein, the Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich August von Hayek recognized that power comes most easily to the ruthless, treacherous, cunning and amoral. Those who achieve power are faced with constant challenges to their position of supremacy and are therefore driven to eliminate all those who can challenge their rule. The more concentrated power becomes, the more ruthless and deadly those who hold it will be. Hence, those who have held the greatest amount of power throughout history have also been history’s massest of mass murderers-Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others of their ilk.
The greatest crimes are those committed by large disciplined organizations rather than solitary individuals. Arthur Koestler noted:

“…a series of fundamental misconceptions…which prevented (man) from learning the lessons of the past, and…now put his survival in question. The first of these..is putting the blame for man’s predicament on his selfishness, greed, etc.; in a word, on the aggressive, self-assertive tendencies of the individual…I would like to suggest that the integrative tendencies of the individual are incomparably more dangerous than his self-assertive tendencies.” (6)

One need not reject the claims of a Hobbes or a Burke that humans are creatures of passion rather than reason to recognize that the most severe crimes perpetrated by individuals pale in comparison to those committed by organizations led by some sort of institutionalized authority. The modern serial killer is insignificant when contrasted with the death squad member or secret policeman. The greatest crimes of all are, of course, committed by the institution of the state, what Nietzsche characterized as a “cold monster”. It is of the utmost importance to recognize that even persons of “normal” psychological make-up or moral temperament can be driven to act in the most atrocious ways when prodded by group norms or the direction of malignant leaders. This is borne out by the relevant studies in social psychology, particularly those of Stanley Milgram.(7) Hannah Arendt described this phenomena as “the banality of evil”, a process whereby the most senseless and irrational forms of inhumanity acquire an aura of normalcy and take place within an atmosphere of dull mechanization. (8)
Various critiques of power, authority and the state have arisen thoughout history. The European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave birth to the ideology of classical liberalism, which sought to limit the rule of power through various institutionalized mechanisms and processes. Classical anarchism arose as an ideology that explicitly rejected the authority of the state in toto, rather than seeking to simply curb its worse abuses. In his study on the origins of the state, Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that states have their roots in the invasion, conquest and plundering of some groups by others. (9) This observation strips the state of any veneer of legitimacy it may try to shroud itself with. Modern theorists of “democratic” or “constitutionalist” expressions of the state will typically argue that “modern” states are somehow to be differentiated from those of the Old Order, who claimed authority on the basis of divine right or superior might rather than “popular sovereignty”, “the general will” or other such platitudes. Yet claims of this type have been effectively exposed and discredited by Lysander Spooner, Hans Hermann Hoppe and other notable anti-state thinkers. (10)
If the primary danger to human life and liberty is the excessive concentration of power, then humanity has never faced a greater threat than it does today as the universal dictatorship of the New World Order under the boot of American imperialism continues to be consolidated. At present, the American imperial regime demands the exclusive “right” of the first-use of military force, including nuclear weaponry, as part of its own “defensive” perogative, yet curiously seeks to deny this right to others. In a manner rivaling the greatest tyrants in history, the US regime has systematically fabricated all sorts of extravagant falsehoods to justify its imperial ambitions regarding the Islamic nations. The American regime has established a Faustian bargain with the degenerate ideology of Zionism for the purpose of further consolidation of its own power, both internationally and within the American nation itself. The emerging world order is one of unilateral and utterly arbitrary rule by a regime that demands absolute obedience, economic domination by a handful of transnational corporations of the First World by means of mercantilist arrangements managed by byzantine bureaucracies, and cultural dominance by the combined values of liberal commercialism-consumerism and authoritarian leftist-egalitarianism and “multiculturalism” under the ideology of “political correctness”. David Michael describes the dangers, both bellowing and subtle, posed by such a global order:

“Even without the danger of the machinery of world government falling into the hands of a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, and without the danger of large supranational institutions or nations being manipulated or exploited to serve certain groups or individuals at the expense of other groups or individuals, the sheer remoteness of supranational institutions from the ordinary people can have undesirable effects. The remoteness of decision making can lead to inappropriate decisions, as might occur where the quality of the food we eat is determined by supranational institutions rather than local farmers. The remoteness of the dominant culture can engender psychological and sociological problems-violence, alienation, crime and youth problems have been attributed, inter alia, to globalization and the breakdown of communities that it has engendered.” (11)

As power has never been quite so centralized as it is at present, the anarchist critique is now more relevant than ever. The essence of the traditional anarchist position is that the state is no more than a criminal gang writ large. The state exists to control territory, protect an artificially privileged ruling class, exploit its subjects or expand its power. Any other claims by or on behalf of the state are simply a matter of evasion, obfuscation, or perhaps mere naivete. Although the philosophical anarchist critique of the state originating from the ideas of William Godwin or Pierre Joseph Proudhon is the most radical and comprehensive, this critique follows in the footsteps of many strands of traditional ethical, religious and philosophical systems going back to very ancient times. These include the criticisms of power offered by the early Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, the Stoic and Cynic branches of classical Greek philosophy, the very ancient Hebrew scriptures, and the teachings of early Church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo as well as tendencies within the Radical Reformation, such as the Anabaptists. (12)
Having emerged only a couple of centuries ago and having never been dominant in any particular nation or culture, philosophical anarchism is still a rather new and underdeveloped political outlook. “Classical” anarchism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century variety, represented by Bakunin, Kropotkin and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, positioned itself as the most radical wing of the international socialist labor movement, as the so-called “labor question” was the dominant social struggle of the day. The political programs of the classical anarchists, as well as their contemporary “neo-anarchist” descendants, typically call for some sort of decentralized socialism, although neo-anarchism often focuses more on the advancement of left-wing cultural values such as feminism, “anti-racism” and “gay liberation” than on politico-economic matters. Another branch of modern anarchist thought, the “libertarian” anarchism of Murray Rothbard, is more rooted in classical liberalism than classical socialism, and traces its ancestry to the uniquely American branch of classical anarchism that emerged in the nineteenth century, the so-called “individualist” anarchism of Lysander Spooner and Benjamin R. Tucker. Although these variations of anarchist thought provide a rich intellectual heritage that can be drawn upon, they are clearly inadequate in a number of important ways. The principle error in the branches of anarchism thus far established is that of universalism. It is particulary important that this error be confronted if anarchism is to offer a viable alternative to the universalist ideology that provides the intellectual foundations of the New World Order.
Reading through the incessant manifestos and political statements issued by anarchist factions, one notices a number of dominant themes. Foremost among these is a type of Rousseauan utopianism that postulates the innate benevolence of human nature, a benevolence that would realize its potential if only the oppressive chains of established institutions were removed and the true essence of humanity allowed to flourish. As the nineteenth century was a time of enormous human advancement, classical anarchists like Proudhon or Bakunin can be forgiven for adopting such a childishly naive outlook. However, with the experience of the twentieth century now behind us, such a perspective becomes laughable with the advantage of hindsight. Another common theme in conventional anarchist thought is an implicit reliance on archaic Marxist and Fabian social democratic economic theory, a set of ideas that have been disasterous in every nation where they have been put into practice. Marxism is a dead faith, except among Western radicals, and the elitist social democratic views advanced by the Fabians have served to create a permanently entrenched “new class” of bureaucratic parasites that are slowly but surely driving the First World nations towards stagnation, deterioration and eventual collapse. (13) Anarchists are typically the most zealous champions of the cultural ideals of the modern Left-feminism, environmentalism, homosexualism, anti-racism. Yet these ideas are hardly radical in the modern welfare states of the West. Traditional forms of oppression such as bestial violence towards ethnic out-groups, the traditional religious subordination of women, and the organized state persecution of homosexuals have become socially unacceptable in modern societies to such a degree that Scotland Yard now maintains a “Diversity Directorate” to police attitudes not sanctioned by the high priests of “political correctness”. Left-wing anarchists have, on such matters, become a type of self-parody that robotically parrots the rhetoric of the left-wing of the ruling class.
The professed aims of anarchists of the Left also conflict with one another. The ideal political order postulated by left-anarchists is typically something that resembles a traditional New England town meeting or the participatory democracy of ancient Athens. While this model is no doubt as legitimate as any other, it is hardly any sort of panacea. After all, it was the democracy of Athens that put Socrates to death, thereby souring his successors Plato and Aristotle on democracy, and it was the town meeting governments of Puritan New England that instigated the witch trials of Salem. Yet, left-anarchists somehow assume that all of their idealized directly democratic, consensus-based, decentralized communities are somehow going to embrace the egalitarian-multicultural perspective of the Left. If such a system were put into place in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, the first vote taken would be to appoint Osama bin Laden to the position of President for Life. Libertarian anarchists make a similar mistake in their efforts to universalize a commercialist culture bound together by no common threads other than the actions of consumers in the marketplace and the standard common law rules concerning crimes, torts and contracts.
To understand what is wrong with these schools of anarchism, it may be useful to draw upon the work of Hayek. Loosely and awkwardly, we might characterize a Hayekian approach to social theory as one that draws a sharp distinction between “constructivist” and “organicist” understandings of social evolution and the origins of human institutions. Both leftist and libertarian variations of anarchist theory are implicitly rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, which tended to glorify and overstate the capacities of human reason and the ability of human beings to achieve a certain state of existence through the application of critical intelligence for the purpose of reconstructing the external world. While the excesses of the Enlightenment in this realm may have been an understandable backlash against the superstition and irrationalism that often dominated previous eras, the enduring legacy of all this has been a prevailing tendency towards fantastic utopianisms on the part of modern intellectuals, whether they be of the left-anarchist, left-liberal, libertarian, Marxist or neoconservative varieties. As an antidote, Hayek emphasized the inherent limitations of human knowledge and human reason as a means of “constructing” elaborate plans for the reorganization of society that are ultimately doomed to failure and the intellectual conceit reflected by such efforts.
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of anarchists is the smallness of their ranks. This is likely rooted in the tendency of most anarchists, of whatever school, to focus on ideological abstractions and a type of intellectual elitism that disregards the sentiments and sensibilities of ordinary people. Most people are not intellectuals. Most people are not interested in ideology. Most people are not the rugged self-reliant individualists idealized by libertarians or the faithful crusaders for social justice that serve as left-wing archetypes. Instead, the nature of most people is to focus on their immediate day-to-day business. Most people seek security, identity and self-actualization in groups and get their ideas about what constitutes “right and wrong” from cues taken from peers, members of their own in-groups and perceived leaders and authority figures. The strongest attachments of this type seem to be family, ethnicity, religion, culture, language, geography and, to some degree, economic function and social class. Particularistic attachments of these types are commonly disregarded by leftist and libertarian intellectuals (and by establishment liberals and neoconservatives!) as reactionary, backward, overly parochial or provincial, ignorant and superstitious and even bigoted and hateful. Yet it is precisely these types of particularism that provide the social glue that holds organic and authentic human societies and cultures together. It is these types of particularism that the ruling class of the New World Order wishes to eliminate in order to reduce every individual to the level of identity-less worker-consumer drone faithfully practicing the religion of the credit card and reciting the catechism of political correctness. Consequently, it is these particularisms and the attachments that ordinary people have to them that serve as humanity’s best hope for fostering resistance to the universal slavery the oligarchs of the New World Order wish to bring about.
There remains the question as to how the anarchist critique is to be practically applied and what sort of institutions an anarchism-influenced civilization would likely produce. Unlike some of his successors, the godfather of classical anarchism Pierre Joseph Proudhon recognized that “anarchy” was an ideal, like “peace” or “justice”, towards which humanity could only strive. Said Proudhon:

“…It is scarcely likely, however far the human race may progress in civilization, morality and wisdom, that all traces of government and authority will vanish.” (14)

Likewise, the eminent philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell characterized anarchism as “the ultimate ideal to which society should approximate”. (15) Instead of pursuing utopian fantasies, anarchists should focus on identifying and breaking up concentrations of power wherever they may be located. The best bet for achieving this aim would likely be the development of strong regionalist and localist movements, both inside and outside of the territorial boundaries of the United States, with each of these reflecting the unique cultural or ideological orientations of their own organic or intentional communities, and organized in ways whereby different regions and communities are independent but mutually supportive of one another in the face of imperial power, regardless of their particular sectarian differences. The perspective of Troy Southgate offers a clue as to how to proceed:

“We firmly believe in political, social and economic decentralization. In other words, we wish to see a positive downward trend whereby all bureaucratic concepts such as the UN, NATO, the EU and the World Bank and even nation-states like England and Germany are eradicated and consequently replaced by autonomous village communities.” (16)

Such a vision is entirely compatible with the original anarchist vision of Proudhon who offered decentralized confederations of communities, municipalities and distinctive regions, each containing their own cultural identity, combined with an economy ordered on the basis of small property holders and dispersed control over resources, cooperatives and worker organizations. Such a vision affords most of humanity the opportunity to obtain sovereignty within the context of the social groups most strongly identified with. Such a vision offers a means of reconciling the numerous social conflicts fostered by the modern state resulting in an increase in social harmony, liberty, prosperity and peace. Those with conflicting values should simply separate from one another in favor of mutual self-segregation. Such is the way to authentic cultural diversity as opposed to the vision of those for whom “diversity” is simply a collection of exotic foods, museum displays and state-mandated social engineering.
As noted, anarchism as a political philosophy is still very much in the elementary stage of its development as an intellectual system. Fortunately, certain strands of anarchistic thought have emerged in recent years that may eventually prove to be a corrective for some of the extravagance and frivolity found in the established branches of anarchism. One of these is a tendency emerging from the British Far Right known as “National-Anarchism”. This particular variation of anarchist theory lacks the irrational utopianism found in most other schools of anarchism. It might be said that national-anarchism is anarchy without pretensions. The core tenet of national-anarchist ideology is a fervent opposition to the emerging global system of the “New World Order” under the rule of American imperialism. More than any other political tendency, anarchist or otherwise, national-anarchism recognizes that there is really only one system of government in the contemporary world and that is the American empire. As a national-anarchist publication, “Voice of the Resistance”, puts it:

“Nations, at least as you knew and loved them, are dead. We live today in a post-nationalist, globalized world. What you call your nation is now a mere administrative district of the New World Order. Never mind its ‘proud and ancient history’! Never mind its ‘wonderful accomplishments’! Never mind how many of your ancestors fought and died for it! Those things were in the past.” (17)

Incidentally, this apt description of the nature of the New World Order applies to the American nation as well, despite the American origins of the global system. The conservative Catholic commentator Joseph Sobran observes:

“Only a few Americans have clearly understood that contrary to our sentimental illusions, the old federated constitutional republic has become not only a single consolidated state, but an empire as well. Today the president has ceased to be a mere executive, subordinate to the legistlative branch, and has become an elective emperor, a temporary Caesar. This is hard for Americans to see, because it goes against our cherished national myths and has no close historical precedent. But foreigners may see it more clearly than we do. To American ears, the phrase “American imperialism” still sounds like leftist jargon. But it is more accurate than our slogans of democracy.”(18)

American conservatives, libertarians and other anti-statists and anti-globalists now find themselves in an interesting ideological predicament. To consistently oppose “Big Government”, one must first and foremost oppose centralized government, imperial government and global government. The foremost proponent of centralism, imperialism and globalism in today’s world is the US regime. This necessitates that authentic anti-statists adopt an attitude that the jingoist wing of US politics would characterize as “anti-Americanism”. As a look at the leading “paleoconservative” publications will show, this is a position that traditionalist conservatives are loathe to adopt. Their deathly fear of being labeled “anti-American” and lumped together with the riff raff of the reactionary left prevents them from developing as comprehensive a critique of the global imperial order as they otherwise might (just as their deathly fear of being labeled “anti-Semitic” prevents them from developing a similar critique of the role of Zionist ideology in the formulation of American imperial ambitions).(19) Yet these phobias are unfounded. If the historic America that traditionalist conservatives cling to is just another nation that has died at the hands of the empire, then the current US regime is not an expression of America but a hostile, enemy, occupational regime. Joseph Sobran notes:

“At any rate, the old America-the America of hard work and sound money, of thrift and piety, of small property and free markets, of individual freedom and responsibility, of limited government and dispersed power-is gone. The kind of people who made the old America hardly exist anymore. Their descendants might as well belong to another species; anyway, they will soon be outnumbered by aliens and “minorities”… Americans neither remember the old America nor comprehend the new one, which defies comprehension. What is an “American” these days? Someone who has filled out the proper forms? One out of hundreds of millions of disinherited people, who have nothing in common but a government that supplies them with depreciating paper currency? A mere digit of the empire, I suppose.” (20)

Serious opponents of global empire are not conservatives but radicals and revolutionaries of the first order. More than any other ideological tendency, national-anarchism recognizes that traditional ideological, cultural and even national boundaries are irrelevant in the current world order. As David Michael, a leading theoretician of national-anarchism, explains:

“The ‘left/right’ political distinction is a cynical ploy to divide the people and set them against each other so that they do not unite against the single main enemy of us all: the Establishment. As Eduard Limonov remarked: ‘There’s no longer any left or right. There’s the system and the enemies of the system.” (21)

If traditional nations have been absorbed by the empire, and if the traditional left/right political spectrum has been dissolved by the universalization of the values of American imperialism and global capital, then the traditionalist elements of the right are the natural allies of the anti-corporate left. The primary divisions among these scattered forces are cultural in origin. The traditional right places its emphasis on established institutions and values such as family, religion, ethnicity, nationality, traditional culture and organic communities. The left focuses first and foremost on those social groups believed to have been previously dispossessed or “excluded” in some way. These include workers and the poor, racial minorities, women, homosexuals and others. This type of progressivism has become institutionalized and rigidified in its own right as the existence of Scotland Yard’s Diversity Directorate and the “speech codes” found on the campusues of American universities demonstrate. Both sides on these matters regard their opponents as tyrants and reactionaries. If effective opposition to the New World Order necessarily involves the creation of an anti-Establishment alliance that transcends conventional ideological, cultural and national boundaries, then obviously some means of accommodating such a diverse array of perspectives is sorely needed. National-anarchism invokes the ideal of radical decentralization as a means to this end. Read entire article