The “Alternative Right"

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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Dec 10, 2015 3:31 pm

.

tapitsbo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 2:24 pm wrote:AD's updates/barometer/scrapbooking is actually useful, though, even if not for its apparently intended purpose, right?


Utterly useless in my view. Whatever value it may have offered at one time (prior to the onslaught of recurrence and/or redundant copy/pasting) has been lost given the M.O. perpetrated by the deliverer ... though your mileage may vary.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Dec 10, 2015 3:46 pm

tapitsbo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 7:24 pm wrote:AD's updates/barometer/scrapbooking is actually useful, though, even if not for its apparently intended purpose, right?


Useful for whom?
A person doing a Masters into
"An investigation into patterns of discussion disruption on a conspiracy web forum in response to randomly introduced Copy Pasta"

Nothing against Scrapbooking, likewise, but just put it in DataDump or create your own Forum (here or elsewhere) or Pinterest or Tumblr.

tapitsbo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 7:24 pm wrote:Enjoying the music, I know I am descended in part from the Sami :lol2:

I honour your Ancestors.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby tapitsbo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 3:56 pm

I'm an un-ironic fan of a lot of what I've seen of AD's older posts/material
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 10, 2015 5:35 pm

Neo-Joik music can be awesome but some heres are quick to indulge in a very facile appropriation of something that represents the opposite of the kind of shit they often perpetuate.

They seem to have forgotten- or perhaps never have understood- that Sami culture is part and parcel of an ongoing resistance against the worst sort of things they have aligned themselves with...




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umNEnyxxFxE

"Vuolgge mu mielde Bassivárrái" (Come With Me To The Sacred Mountain) is a dream of freedom from Western civilization's oppression of minorities. Mari Boine portrays a woman who tries to escape from the darkness, the bleak conditions of the Sami people after the Norwegian colonization.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby General Patton » Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:16 pm

I don't think we have to worry about cultural appropriation of Sami culture here, no one is taking up Reindeer herding. Unless you count the very act of listening to music from a culture as appropriation.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby slomo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:26 pm

General Patton » 10 Dec 2015 14:16 wrote:I don't think we have to worry about cultural appropriation of Sami culture here, no one is taking up Reindeer herding. Unless you count the very act of listening to music from a culture as appropriation.

Why is cultural appropriation a bad thing (if it's done respectfully and without exploitation)?

It actually contradicts the folkish Asatru position that genetics and culture are necessarily intertwined, e.g. "the soul of a white man" could not possibly connect with Jazz, which is based on "the Negro soul"?

Lateral gene transfer is a biological thing, it promotes adaptation and fitness. Lateral transfer of culture seems to me, on the balance, a very good thing that promotes cohesion and understanding across different groups.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:32 pm

I think cultural sharing is a part of the world, so the devil is in the details.

In this case, people aligned with far right ideas wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Sami, seems pretty fuckin' horrific to me...
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby General Patton » Thu Dec 10, 2015 6:52 pm

American Dream » Thu Dec 10, 2015 5:32 pm wrote:I think cultural sharing is a part of the world, so the devil is in the details.

In this case, people aligned with far right ideas wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Sami, seems pretty fuckin' horrific to me...


Most definitely. The world is full of horrors, the least of which is someone who represents the status quo taking on a guise of victims and pretending to fight for them. It's good that you can still see horror and have a visceral reaction to it. I strongly urge everyone at RI to dive deeper into the horrors of the world.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Dec 10, 2015 8:55 pm

General Patton » Thu Dec 10, 2015 10:52 pm wrote:
American Dream » Thu Dec 10, 2015 5:32 pm wrote:I think cultural sharing is a part of the world, so the devil is in the details.

In this case, people aligned with far right ideas wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Sami, seems pretty fuckin' horrific to me...


Most definitely. The world is full of horrors, the least of which is someone who represents the status quo taking on a guise of victims and pretending to fight for them. It's good that you can still see horror and have a visceral reaction to it. I strongly urge everyone at RI to dive deeper into the horrors of the world.


There is a huge difference between:
a) seeing hearing feeling horror directly
b) reading about horror from someone who has seen it
c) reading about a person's interpretation of what someone else's horror means to them

a) >> b) >> c)

So when someones experience with horror comes from reading a landfill of c) rather than experiencing a) .......

What horrors of the world have you seen with your own eyes and hear with your own ears and felt with your own skin, General Patton?

AD, what devils are in which details?
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby backtoiam » Thu Dec 10, 2015 9:11 pm

American Dream » Thu Dec 10, 2015 5:32 pm wrote:I think cultural sharing is a part of the world, so the devil is in the details.

In this case, people aligned with far right ideas wrapping themselves in the mantle of the Sami, seems pretty fuckin' horrific to me...



Don't let any of those white folks find an excuse to squirm out from in front of the cross hairs AD, get em all...

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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby General Patton » Thu Dec 10, 2015 9:34 pm

I've seen the slow decline in sanity brought about by heavy meth use (and cooking). I've seen meth eat people alive, destroying their bodies and making them do lots of dumb shit for the sake of getting more meth. Meth took out the weak men who wanted escape without building a way out.

I've seen a dysfunctional family that lives in a condemned house, with a broken water heater, dog feces and urine everywhere, and the middle of the floor split in half from the foundation shifting. And they stay there... for reasons I still cannot entirely grasp. They have options, they just somehow keep living that way. CPS will intervene at some point in the future, but they live in a rural area and these sorts of things somehow persist much longer than they would in other places.

Those are more extreme cases, there's also run of the mill incestous abuse, PTSD after coming back from XYZ war, domestic violence, highly irresponsible disregard for the safety of one's children, that sort of thing.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby slomo » Thu Dec 10, 2015 9:42 pm

Does this count: living in ground-zero city hit by an epidemic where a generation of men were wiped out by a wasting infectious disease?
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 12, 2015 12:13 pm

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/ ... atism.html

AlternativeRight.com: Paleoconservatism for the 21st Century

By Matthew N Lyons | Friday, September 10, 2010

Paleoconservatives don’t have a mass following or much in the way of institutional power these days, but they do have a fairly lively intellectual scene. The defenders of Western civilization offer a number of competently written, well-produced journals, websites, and blogs, and a whole cohort of younger writers along with older, more established figures. Some of what they have to say is the same old predictable poison, but there is also some genuine political ferment going on, with ideas from other sources (tribalism and national anarchism, the European New Right, black conservatism, even the Left) contributing to comradely debate.

To get a sense of this discussion, a good place to start is the new website AlternativeRight.com. Launched in March 2010, AltRight describes itself as "an online magazine of radical traditionalism, [which] marks an attempt to forge a new intellectual right-wing that is independent and outside the 'conservative' establishment." AltRight's founder and executive editor Richard Spencer comes to the project from editing gigs at The American Conservative and Taki's Magazine, both influential paleocon organs. Like Spencer, several of the contributing editors are in their early thirties or younger, but there are also two "senior contributing editors": Peter Brimelow (editor of the anti-immigrant VDare.com) and Paul Gottfried (one of paleoconservatism's founders and one of the movement's few Jews). In look and feel, AltRight's website is more professional than VDare.com but less academic than The Occidental Quarterly, another important paleocon publication.

Background on Paleoconservatism
Paleoconservatism's ideological lineage goes back to the anti-New Deal rightists of the 1930s and the America First isolationists who tried to keep the U.S. from joining the Allies in World War II. Paleoconservatism began to take shape in the 1980s as a reaction to the rise of the neoconservatives, who included many Jewish and Catholic intellectuals rooted in Cold War liberalism. Neocons, who gained many influential posts in and around the Reagan administration, emphasized an aggressive foreign policy to defeat communism and spread American "democracy" worldwide, coupled with limited social welfare programs and nonrestrictive immigration policies. Paleocons, who regarded the neoconservatives as usurpers and closet leftists, saw no-safety-net capitalism and the continued dominance of native-born white Christian men as vital for the health of the nation.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, the anticommunist glue that had held together different rightist factions began to fail. Paleoconservatives increasingly voiced sharp criticisms of U.S. military interventionism, free trade agreements, and support for Israel. Many paleocons also gravitated with increasing openness toward white nationalism, which advocates some form of distinct nationhood for white people based on claims that they are biologically distinct from and superior to people of color. These positions isolated paleocons from most ruling-class backing and put them at odds with the dominant trends in U.S. conservatism.

Nevertheless, during the 1990s paleoconservatism found significant popular support. It spoke to fears and resentments among a broad sector of white Americans, who were angered both by the power of economic and political elites above and the erosion of their own privileges over traditionally oppressed groups below. The paleocons expressed a backlash against recent social liberation movements, growing state power, and economic dislocations connected to capitalist globalization. Paleocons helped generate a resurgence of mass-based racial nationalism in the form of anti-immigrant campaigns and the neo-Confederate movement. They also influenced the Patriot/citizens militia movement, which exploded briefly in the mid-nineties around fears that secret globalist elites were plotting to impose tyrannical world government on the United States. Paleocon Patrick Buchanan ran for president in 1992 and 1996 and made a strong showing in many Republican primaries.

After the late 1990s, paleoconservatism lost some of its support and visibility as a result of several factors, such as the decline of the Patriot movement, Buchanan's 2000 decision to run for president on the Reform Party ticket instead of as a Republican, and the George W. Bush administration's close relationship with the neoconservatives. But the underlying dynamics that had helped paleocons connect with a popular base have remained strong, and the movement has continued to attract young intellectuals, as AlternativeRight.com indicates.

An intellectual crossroads
Like the paleoconservative movement in general, AlternativeRight.com occupies a sort of gray zone between those conservatives who want to intensify traditional oppressive structures within the existing political/economic framework and revolutionary rightists who want to sweep away the established order by force. As a result, while contributors sometimes call for profound changes to the U.S. social order, they are generally vague as to concrete goals and means. At the same time, blurring political boundaries enables AltRight to function as an intellectual crossroads, where a variety of rightist currents converge and interact. AltRight has published articles by national anarchist Andrew Yeoman advocating "a new Tribal America," black conservative Elizabeth Wright castigating the Tea Party movement for remaining "captive to PC," and French New Right founder Alain de Benoist advocating a revival of paganism against the "totalitarian" universalism of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Paleocon scholar E. Christian Kopff has written glowingly about Italian far right philosopher Julius Evola. Keith Preston's role as an AltRight contributing editor is significant in itself. A former Love and Rage member who still calls himself an anarchist, Preston advocates a revolutionary alliance of rightist and leftist libertarians against the U.S. empire and writes prolifically through his blog, Attack the System, and other rightist outlets such as Taki's Magazine.

On race and ethnicity
Some of the pieces in AltRight are more interesting and politically innovative than others. Consider the following two articles. In "Mind the Gaps: Why the Government Should and Can Not Make Us Equal," John Derbyshire argues that "racial differences in education and unemployment have their origin in biological differences between the human races.... They can't be legislated out of existence; nor can they be 'eliminated' by social or political action." To Derbyshire, "intractable differences between the human races" are simple, natural facts, grounded in both elementary rules of evolutionary biology and straightforward empirical evidence, such as disparities in test scores or "the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans." Essentially this is a rehash of "scientific" claims that racist intellectuals have been making since the nineteenth century. The only thing new and different about Derbyshire's argument is that he presented it on a panel organized by the Black Law Students' Association at the University of Pennsylvania.

Compare this with Richard Hoste's "Eurabia in Perspective," which reconfigures ethnocentrism in genuinely new ways. Countering the Islamophobia that is standard among conservatives (including many paleoconservatives), Hoste declares that "there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power... [T]he West's problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam..." And rather than try to expel Muslims from Europe, he argues, "we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay." In fact:

"more Europeans may convert to Islam as times goes by and the religion gains power... But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity. It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or 'Europeanized' as Christianity was in the first place. I don't know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn't be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today. The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey."


Hoste's argument here represents a classic paleocon approach: a seemingly progressive position (rejection of Islamophobia) that's based on reactionary principles (biological racism plus hatred of Western liberalism).

A number of AltRight contributors also take issue with white nationalism as an ideological framework, while endorsing its racist premises. In "The Myth of the Old Republic," Andrew Fraser calls for abandoning not only "constitutional patriotism" but also white identity as too broad a loyalty. In this post-modern era, Fraser urges American WASPs to instead revive an Anglo-Saxon ethno-nationalism and -- borrowing a concept promoted by John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog -- to "reconstitute themselves as local, resilient communities." "The fact is that all 'white Americans,' of whatever ethnicity, will be better off if their own kith and kin manage to reconstitute themselves into socially cohesive tribal networks."

Coming at the same issue from a different angle, Keith Preston argues in "White Nationalism Is Not Enough" that "a resistance movement that defines itself exclusively, or even primarily, under the banner of race will be unnecessarily self-limiting." As an alternative, he proposes Conservative Revolution, a term which originally referred to a far right (but non-Nazi) intellectual movement in Weimar Germany. "'Conservative Revolution' is conceptually broad enough to accommodate an array of anti-liberal forces within a framework of respect for natural hierarchies... [I]t can accommodate tendencies ranging from fervent white nationalists to religious conservatives who are indifferent to race issues per se but oppose Cultural Marxist attacks on their faith and traditions to Jews and African-Americans who oppose mass immigration from the Third World."

On women
AltRight authors (almost all of whom are male) also vary significantly in their attitudes toward women. Scott Locklin typifies a type of old school conservative anti-feminism, which pretty much only pays attention to women in terms of how attractive and obedient they are to men. For example, his article "The Case For Open Borders: Foreign Replacements for American Women" complains that, compared with foreign women, most American women are unfeminine, overweight, acquisitive, and have a "weird relationship with sex." Further, "foreign women... rarely try to cut your metaphorical testicles off with ridiculous shaming language. American women, by contrast, don't seem capable of communication without bagging on some poor man." Citing "beautiful, feminine" movie stars of an earlier era such as Hedy Lamarr and Lilian Gish, Locklin jokes (sort of) that "they used to make them right here in America, back when Americans actually made things. Now we must make do with imports."

What is interesting is that AltRight also publishes pieces that reflect feminist influence. Andrew Yeoman, for example, lists "kryptonite to women" among the alternative right movement's eight major weaknesses. "Many women won't associate with our ideas. Why is this important? Because it leaves half our people out of the struggle. The women that do stick around have to deal with a constant litany of abuse and frequent courtship invitations from unwanted suitors. ...nothing says 'you're not important to us' [more] than sexualizing women in the movement. Don't tell me that's not an issue. I've seen it happen in all kinds of radical circles, and ours is the worst for it."

Keith Preston, in an interview about "Feminism, Women, & National-Anarchism" that received feature citation on one of the AltRight blogs, criticizes feminism on some counts but applauds it on others. "On the positive side historic feminist movements have gained greater legal, political, and economic rights for women, and greater opportunities in the professions and education, and have raised serious issues that were sometimes ignored or overlooked in the past. The problem has not been feminism per se..., but the particular form that Western feminism has taken since at least the 1960s,... where it has become aligned with Marxism, anti-Western and anti-European ethno-masochism, racism against whites, misandry, and its alliance with the state." In addition, "by seeking to eliminate sexual differentiation [feminism] has not only sought to defy basic biological science, but to devalue social and cultural roles traditionally occupied by women."

Preston advocates an "aristocracy of merit where everyone rises according to their efforts and abilities, including women, of course. I'd be very much in favor of a National-Anarchist movement where women were heavily represented among its leadership and public figures." While claiming that "women are naturally more drawn to helping professions and charitable activities than men," Preston argues that the movement should make such activities a major focus, as part of a move to replace the welfare state with a decentralized network of social institutions. In addition, "I think there's little doubt that women can often perform so-called ''man's work' like soldiering with a great deal of skill and talent."

On Jews
Recognizing that paleoconservatism's relationship with Jews has been a hot-button issue, AltRight invited three prominent paleocons to contribute to a "symposium" on the question, "Is the Alt Right Anti-Semitic?" Taki Theodoracopulos sums up the consensus with the first sentence of his response: "Yes, the traditional Right does have some anti-Semitic tinges, as it should." He and fellow respondent Srdja Trifkovic hold Jews as a group responsible for a number of "sins": Zionist attacks on anyone who criticizes Israeli policies, "Talmudic Judaism's insistence on Jews' racial uniqueness," and Jews' "disproportionate impact" on a number of political and intellectual movements harmful to Western civilization: "Marxism (including neoconservatism as the bastard child of Trotskyism), Freudianism, Frankfurt School cultural criticism, Boasian anthropology, etc."

It is left to Paul Gottfried, the only Jew among the respondents, to "add some shading to Srdja's and Taki's spirited and courageous assessment" of his ethnic group: Not all Jews everywhere have behaved badly, Jews' destructive actions are rooted in genuine if irrational fear of Christian society, and these actions succeeded only because many non-Jews cooperated. At the same time, Gottfried draws on historically antisemitic motifs in criticizing the neocons, describing them as a group of Jews who "poison the wells" for ideological rivals and who control the mainstream conservative movement through non-Jewish front-men. Even a major figure such as Bill Bennett (who is Catholic) is described not as a neocon but rather "a tool of neocon dominance."

Nevertheless, the type of antisemitism that AltRight promotes is more qualified and less manichean than the neonazi variety. It is ethnic bigotry, but not portrayal of Jews as the embodiment of absolute evil. Thus, in AltRight's antisemitism symposium, Srdja suggests that "the survival of the West, which is recognizably Christian in spirit and European in genes, is 'objectively' becoming the optimal survival strategy for the Jewish community as a whole, Israel included," and so Jews will in the long run increasingly support the traditionalist Right.

AltRight executive editor Spencer picks up on this in a follow-up piece entitled "An Alliance with the Jews." Spencer argues that Black and Latino politicians unsympathetic to Zionism will become increasingly powerful in the U.S., and that this may drive Israeli hardliners to seek a partnership with U.S. paleocons. Unlike "the ever-meddling Democrats and Republicans," a paleocon-led U.S. government would "extricate the U.S. military from the Middle East" and give Israel "a free hand" in the region. Spencer cites "Israel's fruitful relationship with the South African Apartheid government" as a model for such an alliance, and speculates that Israeli nationalists might even help finance the traditionalist Right in Europe and North America.

Conclusions
Since the collapse of Patrick Buchanan's presidential prospects a decade ago, paleoconservatism as a distinct political current has largely faded from public view. All too often, paleocons are either ignored, mislabeled as fascists, or subsumed under the nebulous category of "hate groups." But despite their small numbers, paleocons have important ties with the anti-immigrant movement -- one of the most dynamic sectors of the Right at present -- as well as Ron Paul libertarians, Patriot movement groups, and others. And as this brief sampling of writings from AlternativeRight.com shows, some paleocons are also listening to other movements and rethinking old ideas. The fact that many AltRight contributors are involved in a range of other publications and political initiatives indicates that this is not an isolated development. To varying degrees, this same political ferment can be seen on other paleocon websites such as Taki's Magazine and The Occidental Quarterly. More broadly, a dynamic interplay between paleocon and revolutionary forms of white nationalism can be seen on sites such as Attack the System, Occidental Dissent and American Third Position.

Why is this happening now? Although I'm not really in a position to answer this question, I'd like to suggest two broad factors -- one internal, the other external -- for further exploration. First, rightist movements sometimes experience ideological breakthroughs during periods of relative isolation, as they struggle to learn from past defeats and develop new strategies. Examples include the rise of fusionism among U.S. conservatives in the mid 1950s (uniting libertarian, cultural traditionalist, and anticommunist threads into one cohesive ideology), and the development of French New Right doctrine in the 1970s among former members of the traditional racist Right (offering a sophisticated new intellectual basis for fascist politics). It may be useful to compare current intellectual developments among U.S. paleocons with these and other historical examples.

Another factor to consider, of course, is the dramatic transformation that the capitalist world has been experiencing over the past few decades, with the end of the Cold War and collapse of Soviet-type socialism coupled with the rise of corporate globalization (a buzz-word that encompasses many forms of upheaval, restructuring, increased fluidity and movement, etc.). Political movements on both the Left and the Right have struggled to adapt to these changing circumstances, and paleoconservatives are no exception. The question is how to translate this generality into meaningful specifics.

AltRight's mixture of old and new ideas is significant here. Claims that rightists are trying to turn back the clock and reject modernity are usually oversimplified. As I wrote two years ago in "Two Ways of Looking at Fascism":

"In Europe and elsewhere, far-right politics is indeed largely a response to capitalist globalization, but this response is more complex than a simple backlash. For example, the Patriot/militia movement in the United States denounced 'global elites,' the 'new world order,' the United Nations, international bankers, etc. But their attack on government regulation, as People Against Racist Terror has pointed out, dovetailed with 'the actual globalist strategy of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to end all environmental and labor codes that restrict untrammeled exploitation.' In India, Hindu nationalists have denounced multinational capital and globalized culture, but the movement's dominant approach has been to seek a stronger role for India within the context of global capitalism. The BJP-led coalition government of 1998-2004 promoted privatization, deregulation, foreign investment, consumer credit growth, and expansion of the information technology sector. These policies are tailored to India's rising upper and middle classes, eager to participate more effectively in the global economy -- not historical 'losers' trying to gain back their old status by attacking the forces of change."[See original article for citations.]


Whatever the reasons that drive them, the discussions on AlternativeRight.com and related organs merit close attention. To assume that the traditionalist Right is isolated, intellectually stagnant, or stuck in the past would be a dangerous mistake.
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby Searcher08 » Sat Dec 12, 2015 2:20 pm

slomo » Fri Dec 11, 2015 1:42 am wrote:Does this count: living in ground-zero city hit by an epidemic where a generation of men were wiped out by a wasting infectious disease?


Talking with survivors of that was harrowing, absolutely devastating. Many of the people I was with socially were from the next generation of survivors.
My own life has had a close resemblance to many aspects of Dallas Buyers Club... Peptide 'T'......
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Re: The “Alternative Right"

Postby General Patton » Tue Dec 15, 2015 11:37 am

http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/got-metapolitics
So there was no Grand Soir finale. By joining their forces in the two regions that the Front National was about to win, the phony Left and Right ensured that FN got none. The "Fascist Menace" was defeated; Democracy was saved! Everybody can now tune out and get ready for Christmas foie gras, undisturbed by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris.

Ahead in six of the 12 mainland regions after the first round, FN lost everywhere after the second.

Image

The same scenario happened last March for the departmental elections (on the difference between the départements and the régions, read this). FN was leading the first round with 43 départements out of 96 in its favor, and finally got none, even in Marion Maréchal Le Pen's Vaucluse where she lost by a whisker.
The One-Party State

Last week, I warned about a possible "Houellebecquian Moment," in reference to Michel Houellebecq's last novel, Submission, in which all parties vote the Muslim Brotherhood into power to avoid Marine Le Pen's victory at the 2022 presidential election.

But why take a fictional scenario in the future when you just have to look at what's actually happening in Europe right now?

To prevent the "Swedish Democrats" party from threatening the government's stability, the mainstream Left and Right formed an alliance by which they ensured that Swedish Democrats will not be allowed to disrupt the majority, whatever the election result might be.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been in office for more than 10 years now. At first leading a Left-Right coalition, she's now freewheeling, with few complaining about the absence of alternative.

The situation we're in now is that of the One-Party State. Even when there is a party outside the mainstream, it is, despite itself, the unifying force of the regime, with the "menace" it represents forcing the other parties to gather and form a permanent, immutable ruling class.
What this means for Donald Trump

It's important to look at different countries at the same time, because there's a discernible pattern in all these situations.

In February, the Republican primaries will begin, with a growing gap between the popular support for Donald Trump and the rejection of his candidacy by the Republican establishment.

Trump's adversaries seem to think that they can tame The Donald and, one way or another, finally defeat him before July, if necessary by having only one last candidate running against the 69-year-old, golden-haired Bruce Wayne.

But what if he gets the nomination anyway? Well, it's hard to imagine that Jeb, Rubio, Rand et al. will kindly step aside, swallow their pride and all make common cause with Trump to avoid a third Democratic victory in a row. Actually, it's much easier to think that they will do all they can to sabotage Trump's campaign, even if it means supporting Hillary.

If he doesn't get the nomination and decides to go full independent, it is unlikely that he will manage to defeat two adversaries at the same time, despite his Roman centurion allure.

As entertaining as Trump's campaign has been so far from my side of the pond, I find it unlikely that the establishment will let something as unexpected as that to happen, especially in light of Trump's recent statements, which Marine Le Pen herself found excessive.
Do elections matter that much anyway?

Yesterday, in a Facebook statement, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen declared that there was no plafond de verre (glass ceiling) and that next time, FN will get the 50 percent + 1 that is necessary.

It's not as if FN was exactly a new party. It was founded in 1972 by Marion's grandfather, only one year after the modern Socialist Party, and exactly 30 years before Jacques Chirac's UMP, which was renamed this year by the man who hijacked it, Sarkozy.

In modern democracy's history, there is, to my knowledge, no case of a party that finally managed to take over after half a century of repeated failure. It's like with a girl: if it doesn't happen reasonably fast, it never will.

Sorry Marion, but there actually is a Glass Ceiling, and it is descending everyday as a result of demographic and cultural change. The more time flies away, the less likely it is that FN will finally step into office, even with a better turnout rate (it was almost 60 percent for this second round, a little less than ten points up from the first round... and still, it was not even close).

The question is: does it really matter?

Last September, I sent Counter Currents' editor Greg Johnson a 1888 Le Figaro column by French writer Octave Mirbeau. Ann Sterzinger translated it, and it is now available for English-speaking readers (for some reason, Greg didn't credit me; I have an idea why, but it's fine, as long as good ideas spread).

The key passage, in my opinion, is this one:
Above all, remember that the fellow who seeks your vote is, by that fact alone, a dishonest man. Because in exchange for the job and the fortune you push him up toward, he promises you a heap of marvelous things that he will never give you, and which aren’t in his power to give you anyway.


The visionary importance of this 127-year-old statement shouldn't be underestimated.

There is, in most right-wing movements, a naive belief — to be charitable — in representative democracy. As I noted two years ago when criticizing Marine Le Pen's mainstreaming, I asked:

One can wonder what the next step in this normalization process is before Front National can not only have a candidate in the second round, like Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, but in the presidential palace, and whether the party will still be remotely national when it happens (if it does).

That, of course, is if one believes that actual power lies in public office. Ironically, right-wingers seem to be the last democrats. Only on the Right can one still find this naive belief that the President, or Prime Minister, has a kind of control panel in his office where from everything bad in the country can be solved with a simple tap of the finger.


Where are the Gramscians?

Since the beginnings of representative democracy, the parties and politicians that stood on the Right won many times, and in some cases managed to retain power for decades.

But in retrospect, this was largely an illusion. In 1789, the Right, in the French Revolutionary Constituent Assembly, consisted of men who wanted to uphold absolute monarchy. In 2015, right-wing politicians and parties simply argue that they would do a better job than the Left at maintaining what yesterday's Left established.

On the other hand, radical left-wing movements like the Trotskyites and the Maoists never won a single election. But their influence on culture, and as a consequence on politics, has been absolutely tremendous.

Most ideas that are considered self-evident now, including by people who see themselves as die-hard right-wingers, were fringe positions at first, but those who pushed them forward managed to capture the minds and hearts of philosophers, novelists, filmmakers, singers, journalists, advertisement creative directors, until everybody, including right-wing politicians, thought they were as natural as breathing air and drinking fresh water to live.

In the New Right in continental Europe and the Alternative Right in the Anglosphere, there has been much talk on "right-wing Gramscism," i.e. the need to first wage the metapolitical battle before winning the political war. But these praiseworthy intentions have been muted everytime there was an election around. (And with the perpetual campaign that is modern democracy, that meant most of the time.)

I often compare this cognitive dissonance to the situation of a desperate guy who claims that "he doesn't care about this girl" but rushes to his phone whenever she sends him a lame SMS (did I hit too close to home?). Laudable statements such as "We're not going to vote ourselves out of our current predicament" don't hold long before a call to "get down in the arena" is made.

Meanwhile, the radical Left keeps pushing its pawns on the checkboard, regardless of the elections' results. The radical Left cares about elections of course, as we should (firstly because it gives more audience to alternative ideas, as Trump's campaign indicates), but it doesn't let elections define its agenda.

So it seems that with FN's latest defeat, and Trump's likely coming one, it is time to be serious about metapolitics and "Gramscism." That is, really serious.
Getting the "Culture War" right

Does it mean that we should stop being interested in politics at once and pick up a guitar and a mic to start "nationalist" rock bands? Should we write "traditionalist" novels? Should we sing along the "right-wing" equivalent of "We are the world?"

Well, not quite. Everyone has to do what he's good at, and stick to it. I'm a journalist and a political analyst, and if I tried to write a novel, there would be embarrassing passages like "While sipping his mocha latte, he was contemplating postmodern decadence."

When I think of how Alex Kurtagic's work inspired me, what comes to mind is more his "Masters of the Universe" speech at the NPI 2011 conference than his novel, Mister.

There is actually a misconception in right-wing circles about how culture influences politics. Art and culture are efficient in changing politics when they are pursued for their own sake, and not when they're political propaganda reframed in an artistic, or more often pseudo-artistic form.

That was the problem pointed in some comments to a Radix piece praising a French all-female band of questionable artistic quality, Les Brigandes.

In a long comment, one of our readers noted:

Some of this is fun, but it's not art. It's counter-propaganda. It's Alt-Right acting like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore.

Les Brigandes are okay, but their songs are formulaic.

Btw, we need to remind ourselves that the Libs won the 'culture war' not because they were BLATANTLY political. Most people tune out obviously political stuff.

Notice that nearly everyone in communist nations got tired of commie propaganda and were really listening to Western pop and watching Hollywood movies. It's like even Christians prefer entertainment to church stuff. And in Nazi Germany, most Germans could take only so much of propaganda. Propaganda can be effective but once in a while, not 24/7. Too much makes one bored and even allergic to that stuff. Propaganda gets dull fast.

The reason why Libs were effective in culture was not because they were blatantly PC and propagandist but because they won over the hearts and minds of the most talented writers, film-makers, musicians, etc. Therefore, the fans of such artists came to associate talent with 'leftism'.

It was by INDIRECT MEANS that so many young people came to lean toward the 'Left'.


For an intellectual and political movement, the task is neither to get obssessed about elections, nor to create so-called "culture" that anyone outside the movement will instantly reject as propaganda.

It is, rather, to develop an inspiring, positive and forward-looking worldview that will, with time, attract thinkers, artists, scientists, journalists and eventually politicians on our side.

It is this worldview, not electoral cheerleading or half-baked songs, that will bring talent and creativity aboard.

Vote if you feel the need to, write poetry if you're so inclined, but by all means, have a vision that addresses the six basic questions I asked at NPI's last conference:

Who are we?
What do we want?
Why?
Where are we headed?
How are we going to attain our goals?
And when will we be able to attain them?

If you do that, intelligent and creative people will eventually notice, and take interest. They'll sing your songs and write your novels for you.
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