I have just deleted the following comment from greengalloway.
The “counterculture” was acted out by bourgeois individuals in a bourgeois way. The “action” you speak of, flyers, zines, and magazines, is not action but mediation, the mediation between their inner anguish of being bourgeois that mostly attempted to express that anguish to shock or devalue the existing social arrangements. Far from being original the counterculture was the latest in a long line of Euro-American nihilists who took their cue from fools of no integral consequence other than making themselves look important when they were not. The march of the decades proceeding from that time and the dissolution of all previous modes of social existence in Western countries qualifies the claim that the baby boomer generation has been the most destructive people the planet has ever seen. This is especially true for people that actually give a damn about that which is not ephemeral.
For revolution,
BANA
At first I thought it was from a new situationist group, since it was on a situ-related post. But BANA turns out to stand for “ Bay Area National Anarchist” and ‘National Anarchist’ = anarcho-Nazi. There is a wikipaedia entry on National Anarchism which gives background if you really want to know more.
Bit of a back-handed compliment – if it means our (somewhat aging now) counterculture remains offensive to today’s neo-Nazis.
gerard
January 31, 2008 at 8:26 pmSalon Kitty was good though 😉
Chris
February 1, 2008 at 12:53 amwhy bother posting this up here? ignore these clowns and they’ll go away soon enough.
Pete
February 2, 2008 at 1:13 amAnarchists can be whatever they want, but as soon as they start congregating and becoming ‘something’ then their anarchist status must surely become irrelevant. That’s why I had enough of the UK anarchist community – too many extreme leftists posing as anarchists. Yawn.
Pete
February 2, 2008 at 1:13 amSpeeling mistooks come at no extra charge….
Penguin
February 2, 2008 at 1:21 amThese fools are based in the U.S not U.K Pete. Ignorance is world wide unfortunately, bit differcult to escape it!
Pete
February 2, 2008 at 2:35 amIndeed, I’d been on their site a while back and left scratching my head.
Personally, I think if somebody with such views came up to me, espoused them then claim to be an ‘anarchist’, then fair enough in my book. But a whole group of them? Don’t think so. I tend to take the idea of anarchism to its individualistic conclusion…
Chris
February 2, 2008 at 2:47 pmActually Mickey, the leading exponent of ‘National Anarchism’ a Mr Troy Southgate who I believe lives in Brighton. It’s just another name for all that 3rd Positionist NF faction bollocks that a lot of the Death In June geeks seem to think is ‘cool’. You should delete this thread. Why give them the oxygen of publicity?
Penguin
February 2, 2008 at 2:57 pmCheers Chris, I meant the actual post from the BANA was from U.S. not necessary the guy who thought it and talked it. My point to Pete was leaving the UK does not mean escaping from ignorance and hatred, cos it could be anywhere you go to.
Al posted this and I do not delete other people posts. Maybe he can make a decision on it.
alistairliv • Post Author •
February 2, 2008 at 10:53 pm“know your enemy” … but will delete if serving no useful purpose.
gerard
February 2, 2008 at 11:22 pmdon’t delete it – just stop posting about it – THATS the oxygen of publicity
Mutley
February 25, 2008 at 1:16 pmMost folk who post on here are Left-Wing, not Anarchists. As dialectical as any Communist. Oh well…………
Nic
February 25, 2008 at 2:02 pmhehehe…
🙂
sean
February 25, 2008 at 5:56 pmmutley,sorry mate,cant help you,I thought dialectic was when you needed insulin and couldnt eat sweets
Mutley
February 25, 2008 at 10:52 pmTee Hee Hee!
Josh Rhodes
July 27, 2008 at 2:53 amI realize I’m coming a little late to the party here, but I found this blog post by searching for “nazi anarchists” because I had heard of the “national-anarchist” faction by reading Keith Preston’s Attack the System website. (Preston is not a national-anarchist exactly, more of an old-time classical anarchist, but has written sympathetically of the N-As.)
http://attackthesystem.com/national-anarchism-and-the-american-idea/
While he makes a pretty convincing case for taking them seriously, and it does seem like they’re saying some of the same stuff the original classical anarchists (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, etc.) said, I’ve been doing a bit of mild internet research on them and I’ve definitely found residual fascist and racialist tendencies among them. For example, the BANA people keep criticizing “illegal” immigrants and obsessing over the content of Heeb Magazine.
http://bayareanationalanarchists.com/blog/2008/01/how-to-cook-a-gentile.html
The comic in question is actually pretty funny, poking fun at the alleged Jewish hostility to Gentiles, and it’s hard to believe that the “National-Anarchists” that fume about stuff like this don’t have some Nazi type tendencies.
All that said, though, how are fascist tendencies among National-Anarchists worse than Leninist tendencies among anarcho-communists? In my opinion, there’s not much of a difference between Lenin/Trotsky/Stalinism and Fascism in the first place. Food for thought, anyway. Hope I don’t sound like a pedant.
Jah Pork Pie
July 28, 2008 at 9:59 am@Josh Rhodes->”For example, the BANA people keep criticizing “illegal” immigrants and obsessing over the content of Heeb Magazine.”
Quite simply:
1) “All property is theft”: Proudhon
2) Owned land is property, and a country is an extension of owned land.
3) Anyone who objects to “illegal immigrants” is therefore relying on the notions of property rights and national power to back their argument.
Tony Puppy
July 28, 2008 at 9:21 pmBANANA MAN Speak of: The “action” you speak of, flyers, zines, and magazines, is not action but mediation”.
Sorry my phallic friend, the Puppy world I knew had those things in abundance but also achieved helping setting up homes for people (Black Sheep) and organising venues which had music and cheap food and sense of belonging (Centro Iberico, Brett’s food at the Wapping Anarchy Centre).
Life – lived for punks by punks.
Hey Banana, split!
Seriously though, I’ve heard of many nazi fringe groups edging into the eco-warrior scenes, and alternative lifestyle communes, never heard of this BANA bunch before tho’.
In my day we had to be wary of the Libertarian Anarchists – who are probably related.
Stewart
July 28, 2008 at 10:44 pmPersonally, I’m against all forms of censorship. I know this is a thorny moral and intellectual issue etc, but everyone has the right to say what they believe – and how do you change what people believe unless you listen to what they have to say first? How did each of you come to your values and beliefs today, if not honing them for yourself on other people’s words?
As that famous ‘quote’ (much argued over, I know) by Martin Niemoller goes:
“When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.”
If the army today rounded up all the ‘Nazis’ in Britain and put them in concentration camps, would you all stay quiet? At what point exactly would you begin to fear the army might be coming for you next?
Now, I’m very proud of the fact that my (deceased) parents both fought against the Nazis in World War II, and that it was a war that had to be fought, and that sometimes in life there comes a point when you have to commit yourself by violent deed to the values you believe in. But Nazis, Jihadists, and fundamentalists of all sorts believe the same, so then it becomes the question of who has the bigger, stronger stick… and we all know where that leads.
On the other hand, I understand completely that it’s your website and you should therefore have the right to decide what to allow to be posted and what not. I guess all I’m saying is that it’s very easy, surrounded by more-or-less like-minded people from a similar cultural context, to become very insular and – when it comes to having our own cherished beliefs challenged – lazy and protective. So, in my humble opinion, a little healthy debate never hurt anyone… 🙂
And now I’m off to bed before anyone challenges this ramble…
Tony Puppy
July 28, 2008 at 11:44 pmAL Puppy said he deleted the initial words from his own blog’s comments and posted it on here. Possibly because here was where it would raise the debate needed to assauge the anarcho-guilt of forbidding anything.
In other words if I deleted it then he could blame me!
That ‘when they came’ quote – at the time of Thatcher it was very relevant, as for what we were doing in London we would be amongst the first in line. I remember the night before the first Stop The City when the SPG burst into the Rosebery Avenue Centre and strode around us all in the basement as we continued to paint banners and prepare costumes.
That night they came for us.
But something happened which made them walk out again with out detaining any individual or containing the whole building.
What?
I like to think it was our patheticness.
They wanted bomb making, not peace-makers.
Your final paragraph seems to approve of the thread – as a source of debate. I agree, because some of the comments bring up parts of this BANA that I never knew existed – the fact that it exists is news to me.
And it comes from Brighton!
Anarchist complaining about illegal immigrants reveals one thing – the y are not anarchists. End of story. As shown by Jah Pork pie above. But Anarchists don’t believe in countries/nations/boundaries so how can anyone be an immigrant?
Tony Puppy
July 28, 2008 at 11:47 pmWhere do people stand on rune stone divination?
I ask because I’ve seen people use rune stones as fortune telling as a precursor to spreading nazi-philosophy as vegetarianism/eco-survival/communal-living speak.
Tony Puppy
July 28, 2008 at 11:48 pmIt’s also only runestone throwers use the phrase “fortune telling”.
Jah Pork Pie
July 29, 2008 at 1:00 amAnybody with a great modernist plan (and the Nazis certainly were foremost amongst them) has to lay claim to some “a priori” – some original and unassailable truth on which the rest of their hypotheses and conclusions are based. Reading Tony’s post above about rune stones immediately reminded me that there used to be a Nazi group who laid claim to “Thule” as their touchstone (quite literally) and I remembered a lot of Nazi skins wearing what was explained to me by my girlfriend at the time as “Thule badges”. Apparently it was some kind of runic symbol.
Here’s a bit of what Wiki has to say about the modern day usage of the word Thule:
“Nazi mystics believed in a historical Thule/Hyperborea as the ancient origin of the Aryan race. The Traditionalist School expositor Rene Guenon believed in the existence of ancient Thule on “initiatic grounds alone”. According to its emblem, the Thule Society was founded in 1919. It had close links to the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP), later the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the Nazi party). One of its three founder members was Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954). In his biography of Liebenfels (“Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab”, Munich 1985), the Viennese psychologist and author Dr Wilhelm Dahm wrote: “The Thule Gesellschaft name originated from mythical Thule, a Nordic equivalent of the vanished culture of Atlantis. A race of giant supermen lived in Thule, linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. They had psychic and technological energies far exceeding the technical achievements of the 20th century. This knowledge was to be put to use to save the Fatherland and create a new race of Nordic Aryan Atlanteans. A new Messiah would come forward to lead the people to this goal.”
It wouldn’t be unusual for people with a philosophy which wouldn’t stand up to debate to rely on magic to attract the lumpenproletariat.
I think that there have been a number of similarities between Nazism and Eastern and/or classical and/or mystic philosophies mentioned on this site over the last few months (Buddhism and Stoicism particularly). I’d just like to give my opinion that Nazism was not making any true link between these philosophies and religions and itself. It simply sought to corrupt them in order to gain legitimacy for its own evils.
There’s more to read on Thule at: http://www.crystalinks.com/thule.html
And Stu, I agree with you about censorship. Just one question that they asked us at college an I didn’t come up with a satisfactory answer for (dunno if you lot wanna have a go…)
“In a free society, how far does one tolerate intolerance”?
Deep one, innit?
Stewart
July 31, 2008 at 1:31 pmYou tolerate intolerance until you can tolerate it no more – then you, erm, shoot the little fuckers… (*winks*)
Jah Pork Pie
August 1, 2008 at 7:10 pmCheers Stewey, if only I’d have had your sage observations when I was doing the last year of that degree I’d have pissed it!
Stewart
August 2, 2008 at 6:49 pmAh well, learn from the master, my son, learn from the master… 🙂
Penguin
August 3, 2008 at 12:45 amThe master of fashionable footware Stewey?
Stewart
August 3, 2008 at 12:17 pm*looks for his gun*
Nic
August 3, 2008 at 12:25 pmI think you’ll find its hidden under these in the wardrobe, Stewey..
http://www.wearmolas.com/images/Thummys/Boxing-Boot_153.jpg
Stewart
August 3, 2008 at 12:46 pmHey, cool! 😉
sphinx
August 3, 2008 at 9:54 pmWasn’t Ian Read involved with some of these people?
jeff (Divination Power)
February 16, 2009 at 2:25 pmI realize I’m coming a little late to the party here, but I found this blog post by searching for “nazi anarchists” because I had heard of the “national-anarchist” faction by reading Keith Preston’s Attack the System website
andus
February 16, 2009 at 6:35 pmQuite simply:
1) “All property is theft”: Proudhon
2) Owned land is property, and a country is an extension of owned land.
I’m coming down to camp in your garden then and use your house, thanks for the offer really decent of you.
andus
February 16, 2009 at 6:38 pmWhats mine is yours.
give us your pin number then