‘You have to choose between trusting the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of members of the government. With due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold’.

–George Bernard Shaw, 1928

1. Introduction

Recently, nationalist comrades have been asking me for my opinion on the Occupy Wall Street protests. The question uppermost in their minds is: should nationalists support these protests? Or should they oppose them?

In order to answer that, we need, first, to look at another question: what is wrong with the Western world economies today? Why is there a financial crisis?

In day-to-day reporting of economic and financial events, we heard a lot of phrases which have become clichés. Among them are the following recommendations, on courses of action, which come from politicians, journalists, economists worldwide: ‘We must lower interest rates to stimulate spending’; ‘We must raise interest rates to cool down the overheating economy’; ‘We must raise interest rates to strengthen the dollar’; ‘We must increase government deficits to put more money in the pockets of consumers, to encourage them to spend’. This sort of language, and thinking, makes up the Keynesian school of thought which has dominated economic thinking in the West, and the world, for the past sixty or so years.

Before that period, though, classical economics was the dominant paradigm. Politicians, intellectuals, journalists, economists, bankers, businessmen, all spoke the language of the gold standard. (Marx wrote the first few chapters of his ‘Das Kapital’ on gold and currency). This article will be more or less about the same thing. However, some readers may find it disorienting, simply because they are so used to Keynesianism, which has become part of the air we breathe. Rest assured, the economics of the matter are very simple, and I myself have no economic training – what I am writing about here I have learned from contemporary popular authors and journalists on the subject.

2. Gold

Most of the financial crises in the past forty or so years can be traced back to one single cause: America, and the world’s, abandonment of the gold standard back in 1971. Under the old Bretton Woods system, the US dollar was fixed to the value of gold (the US dollar was worth 1/35th of an ounce of gold, which is another way of saying that the gold price, in US dollars, was $US35/oz.). In turn, the rest of the world’s major currencies – the pound, the franc, the deutschmark, the yen, the Australian dollar, and so on – were fixed to the US dollar (even the Russian ruble was fixed, surreptitiously, to the US dollar). The prevailing monetary system was one of a gold standard and fixed exchange rates.

The basis for the system was the understanding, among politicians and economists at the time, that gold was, simply put, money. The value of gold never changes, or, if it does, it does so incrementally that any change isn’t really noticeable at all. Which is why gold has been used for money for thousands of years. Nowadays, of course, we see the dollar price of gold rising or falling every day: but this is dollars fluctuating in terms of gold. Dollars fluctuate, gold stays the same. Dollars, in fact, have no inherent value – they are pieces of paper (or plastic) or digits in an electronic bank account.

So, how did the Bretton Woods gold standard system operate? The US Federal Reserve injected, or withdrew, dollars into circulation, every day, to make sure that the gold price stayed fixed at $US35/oz. Injecting huge quantities of dollars into circulation devalues the dollar: increasing the supply of dollars this way makes it less valuable. Conversely, withdrawing large amounts of dollars from circulation revalues the dollar, making it more scarce, and more valuable. (In other words, the value of a currency goes up or down with supply and demand, just like any other commodity). Before 1971, the Federal Reserve would pay attention to the market price of gold, and withdraw, or subtract, US dollars from circulation accordingly.

For example: suppose the market price of gold floated up from $US35/oz. to $US40/oz. Speculators would buy ounces of gold from the Federal Reserve for $US35/oz. and sell them, on the market, for $US40/oz., making a tidy $US5 profit each time. The Federal Reserve would see its stocks of gold disappear, and so start withdrawing dollars from circulation, until the market price of gold plummeted back to $US35/oz.

Conversely, suppose the market price were to drop to $US30/oz. Speculators would buy gold, at the market, for $US30/oz. and sell to the Federal Reserve for $US35/oz., again making a $US5 profit for each transaction. The Federal Reserve would create money – print money – and use that newly-created money to pay for those ounces of gold. By injecting currency into circulation this way, the Federal Reserve would be devaluing the dollar, and so, the market price of gold would slowly climb up to $US35/oz. again.

(At this point, the reader will ask: does the Federal Reserve need huge stocks of gold to maintain a gold standard? The answer is no: speculators won’t, under this system, exchange ounces of gold for $35 at the Fed’s ‘gold window’, unless there is a disparity between the market price of gold and the Fed’s target. That is, speculation and arbitrage won’t pay off. Historically, gold standards in Britain, the USA and other countries were maintained even with very small stocks of gold in the central banks).

A simple and elegant system, and all classical economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx understood it. From it, we can see that a rising gold price – from, say, $US35/oz. to $US850/oz. – is a devaluation of the dollar. That is, when it takes more dollars to buy an ounce of gold, it is a devaluation. And this is precisely what happened when Nixon ordered the suspension of the gold standard in 1971. Gold began the decade at $US35/oz., but by 1980, reached a peak of $US850/oz. In short, the US dollar lost an enormous amount of value – and so did the rest of the world’s currencies (which were mostly fixed to the US dollar).

In its train, the devaluation brought about massive inflation. When dollars buy less and less of an ounce of gold, they buy less of other things too. During the post-war gold standard years, oil stayed around $US2.90 a barrel (!) for thirty years, but, after the abandonment of the gold standard, rose to the then-ruinous price of $US35 a barrel. Other prices in the economy rose too, of course, and so did interest rates and unemployment. Needless to say, this inflation had political effects: the careers of Nixon, Heath and Whitlam were destroyed, the Western world saw political, moral and social upheaval and chaos – student radicalism, terrorism, riots, mass industrial unrest, and a general decline in morality (Keynes, famously, wrote that there is no surer way of debauching the morals of a nation than by debauching its currency). While the West was brought to its knees, the Third World was more or less wiped out. The seventies (especially in Latin America and Africa) was a decade of coups, revolutions, civil war, famine and chaos. The destruction of the Third World economies prompted millions of non-whites to migrate to the (comparatively more wealthy) Western lands – and they did migrate, first in the hundreds of thousands, then in the millions.

3. The 2000s and the Australian commodities boom
Given all this, why did America – and the world – abandon gold? America had been on the gold standard for almost every year of its existence, leaving it briefly only during the Civil War; but by 1971, it came under the sway of Keynesian and monetarist economists, who disliked the discipline of the gold standard. Nixon was told, by his economic advisors, that abandoning gold would have two beneficial effects.

The first was that, by injecting huge amounts of dollars into circulation, an inflation would result, and this would, in turn, bring about strong economic growth and low unemployment (monetarism).

The second beneficial effect was that, by abandoning the discipline of gold, the Federal Reserve could turn its attention to manipulating interest rates – lowering them, in fact. Low interest rates discourage consumers from saving their money, encouraging them to spend it instead (Keynesianism).

All of this sounds familiar to modern readers, and, in fact, none of these arguments have ever gone away. Today’s journalists, politicians, central bank chairmen (like Bernanke), economists, still rigidly adhere to these doctrines. (An accompanying argument for abandoning gold was a mercantilist one: without a gold standard, or fixed exchange rates, America could devalue its currency, thereby making its currency cheaper and bringing about an export-led boom, and ‘improve’ its trade deficit with Japan. Again, this is a doctrine which is widespread today).

Given the prevailing intellectual climate, the odds were stacked against the survival of the gold standard. America, in fact, began to wind it down in 1967, when the Federal Reserve stopped converting, on demand, gold into dollars, or vice versa, instead paying bonds which, the Federal Reserve promised, could be redeemed for gold at an unspecified ‘future date’. At the same time, the Federal Reserve began to engage in ‘pump-priming’ exercises, injecting large quantities of dollars into circulation, in order to bring about the economic boom that the Keynesians and monetarists had augured. Finally, it became too much for the Federal Reserve: it could not serve two masters – classical economics and Keynesian/monetarist economics – at the same time, and so opted for Keynesian/monetarism. In August 1971, with deep misgivings, Nixon suspended the gold standard, and the rest is history.

To flash forward from the 1970s to the present, we now see the underpinnings of the 2008 financial crisis. From 2000 to 2008, the US gold dollar price rose from $US250/oz. to $US1000/oz. – smashing the previous record high of 1980. This was a major devaluation. Among the accompaniments of a devaluation are inflation, and several economic pathologies. Commodity prices (oil, copper, zinc, aluminium, pork bellies, soy beans, land) start to rise, followed by prices in the service economy (waitressing, law, dentistry, bus driving, etc.).

In fact, during an inflation, there is a sequenced rise of prices through the economy. Inflation could be compared to the hot air filling up a balloon. It makes itself felt in one part of the economy before the other. During an inflation, when the commodity prices rise (and these are the first to rise), investors become convinced that there is a real profit to be had in those sectors. Land is a commodity, so is gold, so is oil. Rising metal prices in the 2000s triggered off a huge mining boom in Australia (not seen since the Poseidon nickel boom of the 1970s) and rising land prices, a real estate boom in the US and Australia. Unfortunately, all the investors in, for instance, mining, were tricked. Commodity prices may be going off the charts during an inflation, but, in the end, so are other prices (the cost of production, for instance), as well, and these will, eventually, wipe out any profit.

To use an international example. Suppose that prices for gold, copper, zinc, aluminium, lead and nickel rise to stratospheric prices in US dollars. In practice, Australia exports to the US, not to get US dollars, but to buy US goods with those dollars. Because of the weak US dollar, prices in the US rise and rise, and so all the US dollars earned by the Australian mining companies don’t buy as much of a US good any more. If the US dollar declines by 50% against the Australian, the Australian buys 50% less of a US car than it did before the 50% devaluation, because US car prices have risen.

This is what economists called ‘the money illusion’. Inflation, brought about by a currency’s weakness, deceive people into thinking that there is a boom – when really it was just inflation.

One of the other pathologies brought about by inflation is increased levels of investment and lending. Because a dollar is losing value, every day, holders of those dollars (banks and other institutional investors) want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. The declining value of the currency means that the currency becomes a hot potato, which has to be passed from hand to hand, lest the holder gets burned. Often, too, the holder of the currency will seek to abandon it and invest, instead, in hard assets – like gold, land and diamonds – whose value doesn’t change.

(Why doesn’t the value of these hard assets change? Because commodities such as land, gold and diamonds aren’t easily consumed, whereas commodities such as oil, coal, soy beans, wheat and pork bellies are. This gives investors additional incentive to invest in gold and land. Again, this is another reason why massive amounts of money were shovelled into mining and into real estate in the 2000s).

4. The meltdown of 2008

Under a system of floating exchanges, the value of the dollar – in terms of gold and other currencies – is completely uncertain. No-one knows what it will be worth, from one day to the next. Under a gold standard, a central banker is constrained by keeping the currency fixed to gold; under a floating exchange rate system, he can choose any target he wants – and that target can change from day to day. In the summer of 2008, the Federal Reserve abruptly changed course, and allowed the gold/dollar price fall from a (then) all-time high of $US1000 oz. to $US700 oz.

I remember, at the time, welcoming the drop in gold (and other commodity prices), because I believed it would signify the end of the inflation and a return to a measure of monetary (and financial) stability. But I didn’t appreciate (and the rest of the world didn’t) how highly leveraged so many investment banks (and ordinary Americans) were. They were flush with cash, ‘hot money’, during the inflationary investment and lending boom; now, suddenly, they found the supply of liquidity drying up. Dollars were now in scarce supply, and one of the signs of that scarcity was a falling gold/dollar price.

It is a terrible situation for a borrower to be in – to have borrowed huge amounts of dollars when they were cheap, and now, all of a sudden, having to pay them back when they were expensive. To illustrate this, imagine that everyone holding Australian dollar balances in bank accounts were to check their accounts, one morning, to find that 33% of the money in there yesterday had vanished: that is, the total supply of Australian dollars had shrunk by a third. The economic consequences would be catastrophic. Undoubtedly, with fewer Australian dollars in circulation, the dollar would become more valuable, and buy more, and so prices would drop across the board. But the old debts, from the time before the magical disappearance of 33% of Australian dollars, would remain at the old price level.

To return to the summer of 2008. At the height of the deflation, the Federal Reserve embarked on a new policy: paying interest on excess reserves. When one bank – say, the Commonwealth – sends a request to withdraw money from another (say, Westpac), Westpac has to make sure that it has sufficient cash, on standby, to accommodate that demand. That store of cash is called reserves. Banks keep these reserves close to hand, in their vaults, so to speak, and also deposit any excess reserves in special accounts with the central bank. In 2008, the US Fed introduced a policy of paying interest on those excess reserves, and at a favourable rate as well. This was disastrous for failing banks and investment funds, which, at the time, needed to borrow liquidity – and fast – from other banks in order to meet their commitments, which were quite substantial. Deflation meant that homeowners and other borrowers were unable to repay their loans, and so banks and other financial institutions which had lent, heavily, to these borrowers were, all of a sudden, in danger. When an individual, of course, needs a huge amount of money very quickly, he can try and sell his house or car. But, often, assets like cars and houses aren’t turned into cash very quickly – that is, they are not liquid. Failing banks were now in the same position in 2008. Unable to turn their assets into cash quickly enough, they needed to borrow liquidity – i.e., excess reserves. But the other banks which could provide that liquidity were less inclined to lend their money when more profit could be made by depositing it with the Fed and having it earn interest. One of the consequences was that the US stock market plummeted on the announcement of the Fed’s new policy in October.

Because of the rapid appreciation of the US dollar, the US economy in 2008 underwent a brutal, forced deflation. Oil fell from $US140 a barrel to below $US40, while the US Consumer Price Index went from 5.5% in the June quarter to 0% in December quarter to -2% in March quarter 2009. The US dollar also appreciated against currencies like the euro.

(It is worth pointing out that, up to deflationary spell in late 2008, the world’s currencies also lost enormous value. The Australian gold dollar price, for example, went from $AU550/oz. in 2004, where it had been sitting for years, to around $AU1300/oz.).

5. Measuring the market’s worth

The deflation of 2008 had a devastating effect on the capitalist economies. But how do we measure that effect?

One method is by looking at the value of the stock market. The DJIA is a measure which records the value of a random average sample of US capital – a chunk of the capital of America’s biggest employers and producers. If we were to go to a casino, gather up all the chips of the wealthiest gamblers there, place them in a pyramid, and then take out a chunk of that pyramid – then we would have the DJIA (in an American casino), or the All Ords (in an Australian), or the London FTSE, or the German DAX…

The way to record the value of that handful of chips is to divide it by the price of gold. In the 1970s, the DJIA bottomed, and bought only 1 oz. of gold; it recovered, under Reagan and Bush Sr., in the 1980s; it reached an all-time high of 42/oz. during August 1999, at the peak of the late-90s boom and the biggest bull market in the history of the world; in Bush Jr’s first term, from 2000 to 2004, it was at a comfortable 25/oz. In Bush Jr’s second term, it declined to 17/oz.; in 2008, to 11/oz.; and, during the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis, it bottomed at 6/oz. – where it had last been in the early 1990s. Similarly, Australia’s All Ords hit an all time high of 14/oz. in 1970, stayed at 1/oz. during most of the 1970s, climbed above 7/oz. for the Howard years, and is now around 2/oz.

This method of assessing a market’s value isn’t perfect, of course, and doesn’t give the whole story. But, contrary to those who say that the stock market represents ‘pure speculation’ with no relation to ‘the real economy’, the stock market’s value does correlate to economic growth, a rising standard of living and low unemployment: in a bear market (like the 1930s, or the early 1970s, or the late 2000s) the economy of the ‘real world’ hurts too, with these economic indicators going into reverse.

6. The present situation

One would think that 2008′s disastrous monetary episode would bring pause to the world’s central bankers and make them rethink monetarism and Keynesianism, but no. Bernanke’s response – an orthodox Keynesian/monetarist one – was to begin a program of ‘quantitative easing’, that is, pumping huge amounts of money into circulation. The Federal Reserve perceived, correctly, that the crash of 2008 was mainly because of the liquidity; so it reversed course, and began adding huge amounts of that liquidity. It overshot the mark, however, and the US dollar was again devalued to an enormous degree: the gold-dollar price climbed to over $US1900/oz. this year, beating all records. Even the Australian dollar is now worth more than the American.

In the meantime, the Obama administration undertook a Keynesian program of ‘public works’ spending (that is, spending on ‘jobs creation’ for mainly Afro-Americans) and deficit spending, which produced zero jobs. Obama has reacted to the failure of his policy by declaring the need for higher taxes (on ‘the rich’) to pay for more jobs programs which create no jobs. Obama and the Democrats are mentored by Jewish advisors, such as Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Robert Reich, Larry Summers and Paul Krugman, who can’t understand why the orthodox Keynesian formulas aren’t working.

In Europe, the Continent is seeing a ‘debt crisis’. Greece has brutally high tax rates – a 16% payroll tax on employees, 28% on employers, for example – which encourages tax evasion, and brings about economic stagnation. As a result, the Greek government is unable to pay the interest on its debt. The European bankers, which are heavily invested in Greek bonds, stand on the brink, possibly to the same extent that banks did back in 2008.

What if Greece were to leave the euro and return to the drachma? The results would be disastrous. Greece’s debt is denominated in euros, and, were Greece to return to the drachma, the drachma’s value would probably plunge against the euro. If it fell by 50%, and became a near-worthless currency (which it was before Greece adopted the euro), Greece’s euro-denominated debt would be worth twice as much.

The Keynesians and monetarists are suggesting this course, because they want Greece to print away its debts – that is, print billions of worthless drachmas and pay its debtors that way. It’s the oldest trick in the book, financially speaking, and one Weimar Germany used in its attempt to escape its Versailles debts, and Zimbabwe too (for its debts to the UK). (Probably, it was old in the days of ancient Egypt and Babylon).

To illustrate this with an example. The states and territories of Australia are on a system of fixed exchange rates. Tasmanian dollars exchange, at an equal value, to Queensland dollars; Northern Territory dollars exchange on equal value with Victorian dollars. In other words, Australia enjoys a monetary union not unlike that of the Eurozone. Were the New South Wales government to become bankrupt, it could, possibly, pay down its debts by leaving the union and inventing its own currency (New South Wales dollars) and, by resorting to the printing press, pay off its debtors in New South Wales dollars, in just the same way as the Keynesians and monetarists are advocating for the Greek government. But this course of action would be unwise.

One can see that, in 2011, the old way of doing things – Keynesian, monetarism, floating exchange rates, the ‘Bernanke standard’ (as opposed to the gold standard) – hasn’t worked; on top of that, the governments of Europe and America want socialism for the bankers and brutal austerity (spending cuts and tax hikes) for everyone else. Hence, Occupy Wall Street and the outrage – really a moral outrage – against bankers, financiers, politicians, economists and EU bureaucrats, who make up the ruling class of the Western world.

7. Greed

At this point, a critical reader may argue that, so far, I have been too far soft on finance capitalism and the ‘capitalist greed’ which got us into the present crisis. The way I have presented things here, it as though all the people who invested, so heavily, in banking, finance, commodities extraction (gold mining, oil drilling, etc.) and real estate were simply responding to the economic incentives of that time. These incentives were false, distorted, because of monetary policy, and in particular, the absence of a gold standard.

There are a large number of corollary causes of the 2008 financial crisis. One is the deregulation of American banking in 1999, which allowed ordinary deposit banks to engage in the risky enterprise of investment banking; the other is the proliferation of strange financial derivatives in the 2000s (such as Collaterised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps) which helped finance the sub prime mortgage boom. Then, in America and Australia, it was the generous capital gains tax treatments of property, introduced in 1997 and 1999 respectively, which encouraged heavy investments in that sector. As well as that, there were the infamous ‘mark to market’ accounting rules, in America in the 2000s, which led to banks and other investment institutions having their assets valued, for accounting purposes, on the basis of what they would fetch on the market at the time. (Because of the bear market at that time, those assets were valued at a very low rate indeed, which meant that, on paper, those firms appeared broke).

All in all, though, things wouldn’t have gotten to where they are now, had we not abandoned the gold standard in 1971.

It is true that there have been speculative bubbles occurring at the same time that the gold standard was in full swing. In the late 1920s, for example, there was a Florida land boom, which took place even though the US dollar was firmly fixed to gold at the rate of $20.67/oz. all throughout that decade. Bankers can always lend out of stupidity and investors can always borrow, and invest, out of stupidity. Sometimes these speculative bubbles can occur and have no relation to the wider economy as a whole (i.e., they come about regardless of what the fiscal and monetary policy is at the time); at other times, they are closely related to it.

As an example of the latter, there is the example of the US oil-producing states, such as Texas, which, in the 1970s, enjoyed economic success which was in contrast to the other states of the US at that time, because of the commodities boom. John Tamney, in ‘Governor Perry’s Speech Disqualifies Him for the Presidency’, 18/10/2011, writes:

Today’s Texas boom is merely a repeat of the 1970s when a cheap dollar money illusion similarly reared its ugly head.

Much like today there was a rush among Americans to Texas in the ‘70s as a nominally high price of oil turned the commodity state into a boomtown relative to other parts of the U.S. wilting under those same weak dollar policies that invariably retard investment in growth initiatives. Of course what Perry doesn’t remember is that with Ronald Reagan’s strong dollar ascendance in the ‘80s, the price of oil collapsed. And with the collapse of crude, so did the Texas economy decline such that its unemployment rate in the ‘80s was two percentage points higher than the national average. That U.S. taxpayers were forced to bail out so many bankrupt Texas S&Ls in the ‘80s was clearly a function of the money illusion luring lots of energy investment that logically went bust once dollar policy returned to a more credible course.

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/10/18/governor_perrys_energy_speech_disqualifies_him_for_the_presidency_99312.html

Of course, the oil boom in the South was the subject of the popular American early ’80s soap, ‘Dallas’. The mining states of Queensland and Western Australia today fulfil the role of Dallas, Texas, in today’s Australia. Should another sustained downturn in gold and other commodities occur, as it did in the early 1980s, Western Australia and the Australian mining sector as a whole will be in the same disastrous position as the Texans and Dakotans, and the Middle Eastern oil producers, at that time. They will become victims of a ruinous deflation, which can be just as harmful as inflation.

8. Occupy Wall Street and the Jews

Obviously, given what I have written here is correct, the solution to our present economic problems would be a return to gold. At present, the Federal Reserve adopts an interest rate target: it adds (or subtracts) currency from circulation in order to raise or lower interest rates. Most central banks around the world, including Australia’s Reserve Bank, and Europe’s European Central Bank, do the same. In order to restore a gold standard, the Federal Reserve could abandon its interest rate targeting, and simply keep gold fixed at a certain level – say, $US1600/oz. The rest of the world could peg their currencies to the US dollar, and the world would be back on gold.

One effect of this would be a pruning of the (at present) gargantuan financial sector. Louis Woodhill writes that the financial sector in the US took up only 4% of GDP, or $US42 billion, back in 1970; now it takes 8 percent, or $US1.2 trillion in 2010. The reason why the financial sector has become bloated, and so many derivatives have appeared, is because of the uncertainty produced by the lack of a gold standard. For instance, a trucking company has to consider what the price of fuel will be in six months. In today’s world – where the price of oil regularly crashes, and then rises – a wrong guess on the price of fuel can have serious consequences. Which is why derivatives exist, to insure the trucking company against fluctuations, or lock in a prearranged price for fuel. Which means that derivatives can be a good thing. But surely it would be easier, and cheaper, to go back to gold and the ‘good old days’, when the oil stayed the same, despite decades of wars and upheavals in the Middle East?

So why can’t we return to gold? The answer is complex, but, in my opinion, it comes back to question of race and ethnicity.

Theoretically, anti-Semitism and anti-Islam are sophisticated ideologies. They both subscribe to views regarding Semitic (that is, Jewish, or Muslim) behaviour which stem from the beliefs of the respective tribes: Islamic behaviour comes from the Koran; Jewish behaviour from the Talmud, Judaism, Jewish religious and cultural history (or what Gilad Atzmon calls ‘Jewishness’). The classical anti-Semitic thesis is not that all Jews are evil and malign (although quite a few Jews, like the mass-murderers Beria and Henry Morgenthau Jr. (originator of the Morgenthau Plan) could be described as evil and malign): no, it is that when Jews predominate in a certain area (e.g., business, economics, politics, finance), their influence tends to be destructive – even when the Jews in question intend to do good (and there are plenty of well-intentioned Jews in the US Jewish élite).

A partial confirmation of this thesis can be found when one analyses the behaviour of Jewish-Americans who predominate in the US (and, increasingly, transnational) financial sector, and also at the highest levels of government (which are in charge of US fiscal and monetary policy, and financial sector regulation). Jewish-Americans tend to predominate as opinion-makers – in journalism, government, academia, and so on – when it comes to US policy on Israel and the Middle East but also on the economy and finance. (One only has to look, for instance, at how many ‘talking heads’ on a US finance television program are Jewish-American). It is these American Jews who really set the tone when it comes to US economic policy, and they have done so for years, just as they have in US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Yockey writes that Jewish-Americans have political dominance in the US, and that they achieved this dominance in 1933 (which he calls the ‘American revolution of 1933′) with the election of Roosevelt. But there was a second revolution, a kind of financial revolution, which took place in 1971.

For nearly two hundred years, American economic success had been founded on the talent, know-how and skill of Anglo-Saxon American men, and on the gold standard. America (and other gold standard countries, e.g. Britain) had gone off gold, temporarily (usually during a period of war), but had always returned to it. Classical economics reigned. Keynesianism and monetarism had always been around, in some form or another, but the sturdy Anglo-Saxons stuck to the old classical ideas for monetary policy (without ever, it must be said, fully understanding them). It was a case, so far as Anglo-Americans were concerned, of having the correct actions (i.e., maintaining a gold standard) but rather vague ideas as to how the whole thing worked.

In 1971, however, Nixon (counselled by the Jewish-American economists Herbert Stein and Milton Friedman) took America off gold, and monetary chaos broke out.

Something that a gold standard does is constrain central bankers to keeping the currency firmly fixed to gold: other than that, they don’t have much to do. In a floating, gold-less, world, however, the central banker adds (or subtracts) liquidity at his discretion, in order to ‘fight inflation’ or to ‘increase inflation’ and thereby ‘create jobs’. In other words, he relies not on a fixed rule (i.e., a gold standard) but on his own individual judgement. Which means that he, in order to make a success of things, must be a very clever and far-sighted individual. A genius, in fact. So, in the post-1971 era, we saw the rise of the Jewish genius central banker – Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan (the so-called ‘Master of the Universe’).

It has to be said, too, that Jewish-Americans, in the chaotic post-Bretton Woods era, did do some very clever, innovative things and devise some innovative financial products. But then, this is part of the perceived Jewish ability to make a buck in times of economic chaos. As Nathan Lewis writes, in his study of the Weimar-era hyperinflation:

The [German] middle class failed totally to respond to the inflationary environment with rational financial actions. The middle class was accustomed to investing in government bonds, and stayed with their bond investments until they were finally obliterated. Only a very small subset of individuals — mostly Jews by the sound of it, as one would expect given Jews’ better understanding of finance and speculation — moved their assets into inflation-proof vehicles such as gold or foreign currencies linked to gold. For the most part, the middle class was completely bewildered by the whole episode, never able to understand rationally what was happening to them. Their assets were stripped as they were sold to pay for food. Grand pianos, paintings, automobiles, high-quality furniture, expensive furs, jewellery, silverware and the like were sold for a few pounds of potatoes. The middle class seems to have been able to hold onto their houses, but beyond that they were scraped down to the literal shirts on their backs.

['Learning from Germany', at: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/101010.html]

The question is: were the financial innovations designed to shield investors from the effects of monetary chaos really necessary? The markets, and the economy, were, in many ways, stronger in the 1960s (in the US, Australia and the world) and it was in that period that we did without some of the novel financial practices introduced in the 1970s.

It is impossible to quantify how many people have benefited from monetary chaos and floating exchange rates, let alone which specific ethnic groups, e.g., Jewish Americans. Something we can be sure of, however, is that there would be tremendous intellectual resistance from establishment Jewish-Americans against the reinstitution of a gold standard. The majority of Jewish-Americans in business, finance, politics, academia, journalism, would put up a fight against a return to gold; each of these opposing Jewish-Americans would differ as to why gold is ‘wrong’; they would only agree that is ‘wrong’. (One can find a handful of Jewish-American commentators, of course, who do advocate a return to gold; but these are not establishment voices to the extent that Paul Krugman is, or Milton Friedman was). The classical anti-Semitic model of Jewish behaviour predicts that Jews don’t want to solve problems, they want problems to continue – the same problems that they helped introduce. We can see a partial confirmation of that thesis in our problems today.

Interestingly, some Jewish-American journalists, publicists and pro-Jewish/Israel activists (all the same thing these days) have accused some in the Occupy Wall Street movement of “anti-Semitism”. How much substance there is in this is difficult to say: one first has to define “anti-Semitism”, something these Jewish-Americans are reluctant to do. What I think exists, in the Occupy Wall Street movement, is an intuitive recognition that Jewish-American domination of politics, and finance, hasn’t worked. That is, as policy-makers, Jewish-Americans are guilty of wrong actions; as opinion-makers, wrong ideas.

9. Options for Australia
Can’t Australia return to a gold standard? In truth, gold standards only work for very large countries (or economic zones, e.g., the Eurozone).

Supposing that, for instance, the Australian Reserve Bank had maintained its currency at $AU550/oz. from 2004, while the rest of the world (Russia, China, America, Britain, the Eurozone) went on to devalue theirs. Australia’s currency would, more or less, be gold, and, in effect, become Australia’s most valuable export. All the rest of Australia’s industry would be crushed. At present exchange rates, one Australia dollar would have bought $US3.16.

Switzerland, in the 1970s, tried the same experiment: it kept its currency fixed to gold in the 1970s, while the rest of the world was floating, and devaluing, its currencies, but eventually gave up the exercise after the crushing of (the already very small) Swiss industry.

Strangely, Switzerland is now suffering from a similar problem. The Swiss franc is quite strong, relative to the euro, and so, at the margin, Swiss shoppers prefer to go to the neighbouring Eurozone country of Germany to pick up cheap bargains. Japan is suffering from a strong currency, relative to the US dollar and the euro, as well, and there is fretting, among Australia’s commodity producers, over the high exchange rate of the Australian dollar compared to the American.

This is why, when one country devalues dramatically, as the US has done, sooner or later, all the other countries in the world must devalue. Otherwise, the country has to suffer the horrible effects of deflation – when the rest of the world’s prices rise compared to the country’s own. (Such effects can be mitigated if the country lives in complete economic isolation from the rest of the world. Cuba, perhaps, qualifies, as does North Korea; but both countries are dependent on the outside world for aid, and that aid is given to them for free).

Only the big economic producers, with a big internal market, can cope with a gold standard: the USA, Russia, the Eurozone, China. Small countries, with a small currency area (that is, the economic zone in which the currency is used), such as Australia, Vietnam, Cameroon and Paraguay, cannot do it. If the US is on gold, it matters little if, for instance, Thailand or Peru or Iceland choose to devalue their currencies against the US dollar. But, if those countries were on gold, and the US was on floating exchange rates and devaluing its currency (as it has been for the past ten years), then those countries would be in trouble.

One option for Australia is to form a ‘Pacific Union’ with New Zealand and the Pacific countries, with one currency (similarly, it has been suggested, in the Scandinavian press, that Sweden, Norway and Denmark form a ‘Nordic Union’). In such a union, perhaps, a gold standard perhaps can be implemented, because the currency area is big enough.

In the interim, however, Australia’s best course of action would be to abandon interest-rate targeting and take up the policy of fixed exchange rates with a larger trading partner – e.g., Japan, which has, at the moment, a strong currency. The Reserve Bank would expand, or contract, the supply of dollars to meet the exchange rate target, that is, to keep the dollar fixed to the yen. (In just the same way, the Reserve Bank expands or contracts the dollar supply in order to keep the overnight interest rate fixed at, say, 4.75%).

10. Options for nationalists

Given all this, should nationalists be advocates for a return to gold and fixed exchange rates? The answer is: not really. The main problem is that the topic is mainstream, politically. Advocates for gold regularly have opinion-pieces published in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the mainstream right-wing press. They are also, too, part of the campaign – behind the scenes – for Republican candidates in the upcoming US presidential election. As well as that, one can detect, in the political mainstream, a growing unease regarding the present monetary system, a recognition that it doesn’t work and hasn’t been working for the forty years since the break-up of Bretton Woods. There isn’t widespread agreement that the gold standard is the way out of our predicament, only that the existing system needs to be changed.

Possibly, the world has been too long off gold ever to return to it: central bankers lack the experience of implementing, and maintaining, a gold standard, and perhaps they couldn’t do so today even if they tried. In any case, we are not returning to gold any time soon, but that is beside the point. Nationalists shouldn’t embrace tendencies which are part of the political mainstream.

Take environmentalism, for instance: in 2011, everyone is an environmentalist. Even the biggest multinational corporations want to be portrayed as friends of the earth and lovers of the environment. As anyone who works in an office for a big company knows, the cafeteria is decked out with separate rubbish bins for recyclable waste, organic waste and ‘landfill’, and all employees are meant to take care and put their rubbish in the appropriate bin. All of this would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

Supposing that a big nationalist party declared itself to be ‘environmentalist’, and ran on a green platform. The question has to be asked: why would anyone vote for a nationalist party on the basis of its ‘green’ credentials? Environmentalism and nationalism was a radical combination back in the days of Weimar Germany, and a vote-winner for the NDSAP (the NSDAP, perhaps, was the first green party). But now, everyone is a green, and if any voter wants environmentalist policies, they will vote for the Australian Greens, who stand more of a chance of getting elected than any nationalist party. Similarly, there are other popular Green parties in Europe (mainly on the Continent) which do a better job with environmentalism than any nationalist party ever could.

No, we need to concentrate on the racial and anti-immigration platform because, among other reasons, the political mainstream can’t pilfer it from us. As well as that, there are other policies out there which any mainstream politician or journalist would be reluctant to appropriate. One such policy would be, for instance, of all meat and other animal products (including leather), which the electorate would, for obvious reasons, reject outright. That is just one example. There are probably a few others which would serve our need for product differentiation – making nationalism radically different to anything else out there.

But, by all means, nationalists should study the topics touched upon in this article: economics, exchange rates, monetary policy, etc. The more familiarity they have with the present mainstream discourse on these subjects, the better.

The only difference between us, however, and the mainstream writers on these subjects is: we nationalists look for the deeper underlying causes of things. An everyday economist or journalist will look at what happened to the world once it left gold; a nationalist, on the other hand, should be asking why – what were the underlying racial (and spiritual) causes?

The world is stagnating after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.  The cowboy bandits of Wall Street, the architects of the GFC, perhaps the only accomplishment outside of growing their own portfolio, got off basically scott free.  Many are expecting Global Financial Crisis Mark II.  As every cloud comes with a proverbial silver lining, the silver lining around the clouds of the financial storm is the increased awareness of people that something is wrong, and something needs to be done.  Discussion about the flaws of our financial system are propelled by the sense of urgency and despair.  The “Occupy” movement is gaining traction and gaining support.  They may not understand the issues and have much of an idea of the cause of financial catastrophes, and some may be there purely to try and promote an even worse alternative, but they at least understand that morality has a place in economics.  That’s a start, a good start.

The mood has certainly shifted.  Misplaced optimism about a never ending housing bubble is all but gone and something else is happening which is even more foreboding.  The media is now openly stating that the boom is finished, and that things may well be on their way down.

An article in The Age¹ by the economics writer for the Sydney Morning Herald titled “Top Bosses’ riches are undeserved”1 doesn’t just call into question whether our top CEO’s are overpaid, but openly states they aren’t.  A bold move, for a mainstream publication.

Her argument is that in Australia, we have many Oligopolies, and that making a profit in an Oligopoly isn’t that hard.  Corner the market, and you have your customers hostage.

Our greatest period of economic growth and prosperity, a period when the standard of living was on the increase, rather than the current trend downwards, was during a period when high incomes were taxed quite thoroughly, and where CEO remuneration where closer to that of average worker than today.  Arguments that we NEED to pay our CEO’s exorbitant ransoms fall flat as soon as one realises that our current economy is in a miserable state.  The large quantities of money that CEO’s rake in and pull from our economy seems inversely proportional to the health of our economy.  Given the sick state of Western economies, we are clearly paying big amounts for nothing, yet CEO’s, like snotty school children stamp their feet down and demand more and more, lest they leave.

They know where the door is.

The arguments that they, Free Market ideologues, ‘too much Ayn Rand’ Capitalists and their assorted lick spittles put forward as justifications are nonsensical at best.

One argument is risk.  CEO’s deserve a Kings ransom because of risk.  Given that they shed jobs at an astounding rate, it can be hardly argued that they get paid because they ‘risk’ losing our jobs.  If the share price of the stock of the company can increase through out sourcing, off to India those jobs go. Also, during a bull market, making a profit and increasing your share price is a given, no risk there. The only personal risk is their career, their job.  But when the WORST case scenario is that you leave with hundreds of thousands, or more likely, millions of dollars, it can hardly be considered a risk. Many Australians would jump at the chance to take a risk, where the losing position is making enough money to be set for life.  Risk, hardly.  A CEO can run a company into the ground, lose hundreds or thousands of jobs and even commit fraud, and come out better off.  Ralph Norris has little to worry about.  A $16 million per-annum pay packet, and a taxpayer guarantee to back up the banks in case they fail.  He has risk, but it is the government which ultimately is stopping the banks from failing, through regulating them, and underwriting them with tax payers money.

Another popular argument is the importance of their job.  Well, when neurosurgeons, ambulance drivers and pilots get paid millions, I’ll take this argument seriously.

The fact is, our corporations, our businesses have been hijacked by a boys club, an inner circle of parasites who are merely using the economic instruments that others have built as a vehicle for bleeding our country dry.  We don’t live in an ideal free market economy, or even a Capitalist one.  We live in a plutocracy, where corporate interests have bought our politicians, and our supposed “free market” has been usurped for the benefit of a few crony sociopaths who masquerade as entrepreneurs and have suckered many others into believing that they are anything other than socialist crooks.

To go against this excess greed is not advocating socialism, or a desire to be like North Korea.  In fact, if anything, our corporations are replicating that philosophy here.  It is highly unlikely that North Korea’s leaders choose to be paid marginally more than their workers.  They no doubt do well for themselves, because they too, of course, deserve it, or so they would argue.  North Korea’s boys club is just as busy convincing their populace that their austere lifestyle is necessary, while they horde the excess for ourselves.  Sound familiar?  Profits are privatised and losses are socialised.

Why are there huge remunerations, and why aren’t ordinary Australians, who are supposedly now Howards “mum and dad” shareholders simply exercising their right to vote against this excess in companies they part own?  All working people are supposedly shareholders through their superannuation, and we are constantly reminded that we must have a strong share market and not interfere with super profits as it is in our interests.  But why don’t we do anything about it?  When you look at who actually owns the shares of these companies, it is generally large financial companies.  You may own parts of Australian businesses through your super, but it is your super fund which votes.   Quite simply, because shares are owned by similar large companies, they are the ones who exercise power, and they would benefit from voting for larger and larger remunerations, as it sets the industry standard which will apply to them.  If you are a high level executive of CEO of a company which owns shares in other companies, then voting for a pay increase in the companies you own, means an increase for you as well.

There are people who are worthy of being wealthy.  People who are truly entrepreneurs, who actually create a business and enhance the nation.  Australians are not succumbing to “tall poppy syndrome”, but are rightfully outraged at what is essentially hoarding through unproductive means wealth.  They are outraged that our nation, our livelihoods and futures are being stripped so someone who knows where their next thousand hot meals are coming from, and has already a lifestyle better than pretty much any human who ever lived, can get even more.

True entrepreneurs are people like Dick Smith, who has added to our business sphere, who has supported the nation which game him such opportunity.  Even now Dick Smith is still supporting the nation, arguing against our unsustainable population growth and supporting Australian made products by offering Australian made and owned varieties of popular foreign owned goods. Dick Smith is an example of the type of wealthy person we could use more of, people who’s personal wealth represents the wealth that that person adds to our nation.

1http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/top-bosses-riches-are-undeserved-20111101-1mttj.html?comments=302#comments

(In this essay, I shall be looking at the phenomenon of political correctness and cultural-Marxism, and one possible intellectual response to it, from the work of a French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. The issues involved can be potentially too abstract for some, so I shall resolve to bring them down to earth – into the nitty-gritty of contemporary political reality – as much as possible).

One of the most significant changes in the history of the Left was the adoption of politically-correct Marxism in the 1990s. Appearing, mostly, on university campuses, the new ‘P.C. Marxism’ or Leftism took the radical step of abandoning the old-fashioned worker’s struggle for socialism, instead focusing on the “oppression” of women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics and other minority and victim groups by the white, male Western culture. The new Marxism first appeared in the humanities departments (mainly literary departments) at the universities, and was inspired by French postmodern thinkers who were, even by academic standards, difficult to read and often incomprehensible. As the Jewish-British writer Loren Goldner (an orthodox, old-fashioned Marxist) complained:

The big debate on the American left in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s was about the “difference” of the “identity” of every oppressed group, with the notable exception of the working class as a whole, and that this difference was, in fact, just…difference.

Multiculturalism is in… To the pseudo-radicals of the academic intelligentsia, who have turned social class into a “text”, multiculturalism is the freeing of a “multiplicity of discourses”, a dissolution of the ostensible “phallologocentrism” of an ostensible “Western” cultural tradition… The purveyors of the post-modern “French disease” continue a frenzied production of self-involved books and posh academic journals which communicate nothing so much as a basic ignorance of real history and the pathetic belief that the deconstruction of literary texts amounts to serious radical political activity.

(Loren Goldner, ‘Multi-Culturalism or World Culture? On a “Left”-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown, 1991, at http://libcom.org/library/multi-culturalism-or-world-culture-left-wing-response-contemporary-social-breakdown )

Like a good many things from 1990s, P.C. Leftism went out of fashion with the Left – Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, Black Studies and other departments still exist on university, of course, but the Left realised, after a time, that postmodern political correctness diverted their energies from what should have been their true focus – communism, anarchism, and the ‘overthrow of capitalism’. (Whether or not such goals are achievable is another thing entirely. The reason why politically-correct, cultural Marxism appeared in the 1990s was because of the disillusionment, among the Left, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘back-sliding’ of China into capitalism. According to Marx’s theory, these two events shouldn’t have happened, but they did).

However, like a cancer, or a poisonous gas which has escaped its containers, P.C. Marxism lingers on. In Tuscon, Arizona, a Hispanic version of Queer Studies and Black Studies existed until recently: ‘Mexican-American Studies’, which indoctrinates Mexican immigrant high school students in Mexican and Latino nationalist propaganda. A liberal, Tom Horne, who was the state’s superintendent of education, opposed the program on the grounds that it created ethnic divisions and helped draft a law against them. So what went on in these classes?

“It’s propagandizing and brainwashing that’s going on there,” Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general, said this week…

To buttress his critique of the Tucson program, Mr. Horne read from texts used in various classes, which in one instance referred to white people as “gringos” and described privilege as being related to the color of a person’s skin, hair and eyes. He also cited the testimony of five teachers who described the program as giving a skewed view of history and promoting racial discord.

For the state, the issue is… some of the texts used in the classes, among them, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Occupied America,” which Mr. Horne said inappropriately teach Latino youths that they are being mistreated.

Teaching methods in the classes are sometimes unconventional, with instructors scrutinizing hip-hop lyrics and sprinkling their lessons with Spanish words.

The state, which includes some Mexican-American studies in its official curriculum, sees the classes as less about educating students than creating future activists.

“On the first day of school, they are no different than students in any other classes,” said John Ward, who briefly taught a Latino history class in Tucson. “But once they get told day after day that they are being victimized, they become angry and resentful.” (‘Rift in Arizona as Latino Class Is Found Illegal’, The New York Times, January 7, 2011).

Amusingly, ‘Mexican-American Studies’ was banned in Arizona – under an anti-racist law:

Under the law signed on Tuesday, any school district that offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people would risk losing 10 percent of its state financing.

“Governor Brewer signed the bill because she believes, and the legislation states, that public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” Paul Senseman, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement on Thursday. (‘Citing Individualism, Arizona Tries to Rein in Ethnic Studies in School, The New York Times, May 13, 2010).

So what is at the basis of ‘Mexican-American Studies’, and the entire identity-politics movement of the 1990s? The answer is: dialectics, and the German philosopher Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave.

‘Dialectics’ is not a mere subject for academic study by philosophers. As students of Marxism know, dialectics is at the centre of the communist ideology – which went on take over large parts of the world, and oppress, starve and kill millions. So what is it?

In the textbooks, it is explained as a form of argument: one starts with a proposition (thesis), engages in discussion with someone who has an opposing view (antithesis). Finally, an agreement is reached, where both opposing viewpoints are reconciled (synthesis) and blended into one another to form a new whole. Importantly, there are always left-over elements of the original thesis, but these are transformed and never entirely culled. They undergo a process of what Hegel calls sublation, or elsewhere, ‘Aufheben’, or overcoming.

This is, admittedly, quite abstract. Dialectics is easier to understand if we look at it from the point of view of the Marxist version of history. Capitalism appears, and enslaves the working class. The workers adopt socialist ideas, and revolt against their capitalist masters, and negate him and all his works. Finally, there is the overthrow of capitalism and the appearance of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The ‘sublation’ occurs when the capitalist’s technology is used – his modes of production. So capitalism, its technology, its methods, have not disappeared entirely – it has been ‘sublated’.

In the ideology of politically correct Leftism, it is probably Hegel’s famous parable of the Master and the Slave which has been the biggest influence. The parable is a strange passage, ‘On Lordship and Bondage’, in his master work ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit’ (1807). It is an answer to the question: how did slavery come about? What was the state of consciousness of the two parties, master and slave, at the beginning of slavery?

The parable describes, at the dawn of history, an encounter between two human beings who are complete strangers to one another. At first there reaction is one of mutual astonishment, that another like himself can exist, and both are thrown into a state of confusion. Then one, attempting to regain control of himself, attempts to gain control of the other. The two beings undergo a fight to the death – one is braver than the other, and more willing to risk his life, so wins. Then the winner becomes the master and forces the loser to work for him as a slave. But the good news is that the slave is forced to labour and produce products and then develops consciousness of himself, for the first time, during that labour, and his conquest of nature, through that labour. The master, in the meantime, develops a parasitic dependency on the slave for his products, and, worse, he needs the slave for recognition: he needs to be recognised as the master. But recognition from a lesser being – a slave – is insufficient. Eventually the institution of slavery passes away. As Francis Fukuyama writes, in his classic book, ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ (1993):

By Hegel’s account, the desire to be recognised as a human being with dignity drove man at the beginning of history into a bloody battle to the death for prestige. The outcome of this battle was a division of human society into a class of masters, who were willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves, who gave in to their natural fear of death. But the relationship of lordship and bondage, which took a wide variety of forms in all of the unequal, aristocratic societies that have characterised the greater part of human history, failed ultimately to satisfy the desire for recognition of either the masters or the slaves. The slave, of course, was not acknowledged as a human being in any way whatsoever. But the recognition enjoyed by the master was deficient as well, because he was not recognised by other masters, but slaves whose humanity was as yet incomplete. Dissatisfaction with the flawed recognition available in aristocratic societies constituted a “contradiction” that engendered further stages of history.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/fukuyama.htm

One can recognise, of course, the ‘dialectical’ overtones of the parable; and also see how it would apply to any ideology – Marxism, feminism, Black Power, Hispanic Power, and so on – which takes itself to be the ideology of the oppressed, the slave, the victim. (The academic, Susan Buck-Morss, wrote a paper, ‘Hegel and Haiti, for the journal Critical Enquiry, which argued that Hegel was influenced by the slave uprising in Haiti at the time – an uprising which saw the thorough slaughter, by blacks, of the white French of the island).

Identity politics, dialectics, Hegel’s parable, are all about defining oneself as a slave, as oppressed, and the question is, ultimately, about how one defines oneself philosophically. Is there, then, a philosopher who is anti-Hegel, anti-dialectic, anti-identity politics (as described above)? According to Gilles Deleuze, the answer is yes: Friedrich Nietzsche. In his influential 1965 book on Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’, Deleuze outlines Nietzsche’s position. I will quote from some of it here and show, in brackets, how the passages can apply to the problems we have considered already (all quotations are from Deleuze, pp.9-10]:

It is an exhausted force [e.g., Hispanic radicalism, Black revolutionaries] which does not have the strength to affirm its difference [e.g., its own individuality, its own sense of itself as a separate, self-contained race or ethnic group], a force which no longer acts but rather reacts to the forces which dominate it [e.g., the white man] – only such a force brings to the foreground the negative element in its relation to the other [e.g., the desire to revolt against, and destroy, the white "oppressor"]. Such a force denies all that it is not and makes this negation its own essence and the principle of its existence [e.g., the ethnic group defines itself only in opposition to its oppressor, the white man]. “While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside’, what is ‘different, what is ‘not itself’ and this No is its creative deed” (Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morals’). This is why Nietzsche presents the dialectic as the speculation of the pleb, as the way of thinking of the slave: the abstract thought of contradiction [e.g., the desire for revolution, for reconquista of land taken from the Mexicans by the white man] then prevails over the concrete feeling of positive difference [e.g., the white man's sense of individuality], reaction over action, revenge and ressentiment take the place of aggression.

[...]

The essential thing is that the identities of the oppressed – Black, Hispanic, and so on – in identity politics are, in effect, created in response to the white man and his activities. They do not exist independently:

Nietzsche shows that what is negative in the master [e.g., the presence of Blacks in America, Hispanics] is always a secondary and derivative product of his existence [e.g., the white man's founding of the American state]… Who dialectises the relationship? [i.e., who invents Hegel's parable?]. It is the slave, the slave’s perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave’s perspective. The famous dialectical aspect of the master-slave relationship depends on the fact that power is conceived not as will to power but as representation of power, representation of superiority, recognition by “the one” of the superiority of “the other” [i.e., when the slave triumphs over the master and delivers his comeuppance].

[...]

In other words, what the ‘oppressed minority’ wants, above all, is to be recognised by the white oppressor:

What the wills [i.e., the human beings] in Hegel want is to have their power recognised, to represent their power. According to Nietzsche we have here a wholly erroneous conception of the will to power and its nature. This is the slave’s conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. The slave only conceives of power as the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore makes it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of established values [i.e., becoming respectable, a 'success' in American, and Western, society]… The portrait of the master that Hegel offers us is, from the start, a portrait which represents the slave, at least as in his dreams, as at best a successful slave. Underneath the Hegelian image of the master we always find the slave [i.e., in his mind, the slave misrepresents his master, and imagines him to be only a version of himself].

Deleuze himself would be shocked by my interpretation of Nietzsche in this fashion: Deleuze was a Marxist and was one of the leading philosophers of the French postmodern Left. His philosophy of ‘difference’ was one of the influences on politically-correct, Marxist thought (only not as big an influence as Hegel). Contradictorily, though, he thoroughly approved of Nietzsche’s ideas – perhaps he was unable to see the implications of them for P.C. identity politics. (Deleuze died in France in 1995, and quite possibly he never encountered culture Marxism, which first appeared in American universities).

There is much in Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche – and in certain of his other books – for the nationalist intellectual to ponder. Quite possibly, the ideas could form the basis of a new intellectual defence of the white Western culture against the onslaught cultural Marxism and multiculturalism. This would be ironic, given Deleuze’s own political views, but postmodernism is full of ironies.

The Free Market. The ideological pinnacle of neo-liberalism, the idea which will give wealth to all, eliminate poverty, create every kind of good and service imaginable, cure disease, make the trains run on time, save the environment and bring unicorns back from extinction. It is touted as the economical panacea, the cure all for any social or economic woe which may come up. Supposedly, if we are to take its supporters at face value, the free market is the only moral way for people to earn wealth, the only successful financial ideology which can exist. Everything else is just godless socialism. Neo-liberalism, an ideology which puts the market above all, puts the market as the arbitrator of morality, as the determining factor of the future of society. It is essentially left wing liberalism or anarchism applied to money.

In 1776, Adam Smith, a Scottish economist published “The Wealth of Nations”, a book advocating the abolishment of government interference in matters of economic importance and advocated commerce and trade without barriers and without limitations (much in the same way the Liberals advocate movement of people without barriers of limitations). This ‘free market’ was to be controlled by the ‘invisible hand’, market forces which would keep unfettered trade, production and consumption in check. The ‘invisible hand’ would play the role which the government would have played in regulating the free market. Simply put, it supposedly works like this. Rather than have the government intervene on behalf of employees, setting minimum wages, minimum conditions and such, the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market would provide the same safety net. Supposedly, if there were no regulations regarding employment and employees were also as free in choosing where to work and negotiating conditions, then employers who offered sub-optimal conditions would find themselves unable to hire people, as people would be choosing to work with companies who offered better conditions. So the competition for labour between employers would see those who offered the poorest conditions unable to compete, and thereby having to raise the standard of their wage and benefits to attract the employees they desire. This is the ‘invisible hand’, an example of the mechanism by which neo-liberals believe their free markets would work. This is supposedly the force which will lift the 3^rd world out of poverty, as jobs go overseas offering these unfortunate peasants jobs which may pay $2 an hour instead of $1. Capitalists regard this as the free market improving the condition of life for these people, completely overlooking the fact that a slightly less evil form of exploitation is still nevertheless exploitation.

Another example which they put forward might run like this. A company which produces products at a great cost to the environment, would lose custom due to people boycotting those product due to the environmental damage their production entails. If customers who had freedom to choose between competitors, then people who value the environment would not purchase their goods. This comes at a financial cost to the company, and they may find themselves in a position where spending extra for ‘greener’ production would result in greater profits from greater sales. Under neo-liberalism, a company would be free to buy pristine old growth forest, and raze it to the ground for profits. Their solution to those who argue that the environment should be protected, is that citizens who value that forest are also free (should be free) to pool their money to purchase it and protect it. Don’t like the fact that a refinery is going up next door and going to drop toxins next to the school? Just get the parents to pool their money together to buy the land! Neo-liberals actually put forward these exact arguments without any sense of irony, sarcasm or shame.

Neo-liberalism also advocates abolition of government sponsored programs, programs such as social security and public health care which are tax payer funded. Again, they advocate that market forces can produce all that is needed. Jobs abound (there is no need to be unemployed) and people would find capitalistic ventures by which they can make a business selling help to those who need it. The education system need not be public and tax payer funded, but those who desire to educate themselves or their children should pay, and those who don’t make use of those services shouldn’t have to. It is to many an appealing argument. Why should someone who doesn’t have a car, pay for roads? Why should someone who doesn’t have a child, pay for primary schools? I work hard, why should the fruits of my efforts, the money I earn, be taken and given those who don’t? Neo-liberalism pushes personal responsibility head of social welfare. Only personal responsibility exists, and according to neo-liberalism, one only goes without because of their failures, and any tax dollars used to help them is theft from the hard working and creative. It’s a seductive train of though which appeals to peoples sense of entitlement, to their perceived superiority and self righteousness. Like Liberalisms obsession with social rights which must be absolute, neo-liberalism takes the same attitude towards economic rights. The liberal catch cry “take your hands off my body” (in regards to abortion) could just as well be a neo-liberal catch cry of “take your hands off my wallet”.

The free market, the idea that an economy and society can work with no regulation and provide optimal results is the fundamental principle which drives neo-liberalism, a dominant ideology in today’s world. Free-marketism is based on a number of assumptions which as we will soon find out, are simply not true. We are given simply examples of two stone age people trading food for manufactured tools as the archetypal form of free trade, with the insinuation that free markets today work with similar simplicity.

This hypothetical example is easily debunked. One of the fundamental assumptions is that people trade on equal terms. As two people reach a deal, advocates of neo-liberal free markets say that both people would reach a consensus which maximises the individual advantage of the trade for both as far as is possible. For two children trading collector cards, this may be true, but is it true for all cases? Is the employee just as free to negotiate as the employer? Practical experience which we are all familiar with shows that this scenario is just a day dream, a non-existent hypothetical example that we are given as what is supposedly the norm. For someone who’s job has been lost, who has a mortgage and children who need to eat, the negotiation of a contract for a new term of employment is less than equal. Does the prospective employee have the freedom to argue against the clauses in the contract which not only demand “reasonable overtime” where required, but also states that it will be unpaid? For the job candidate, its take it or leave it. It’s take the job or foreclosure. It’s accept the conditions grudgingly, or walk away without means to feed the family and watch a solution to the supposed skills shortage take it instead, because they have lower standards. The fundamental principle which supposedly guides the ‘invisible hand’ from employers having to accept lower and lower standards is greatly flawed. Unequal trade abounds and it is only through the pressure of trade unions or government laws, that one party doesn’t have the opportunity to completely and utterly subjugate another through the leverage they find in being owners of property and means of income.

Another example is a young person competing against a baby boomer investor buying a house. Is there equality here? The boomer has had the advantage of free education, relatively higher wages and having sold another investment property which they subdivided at great profit. They can easily outbid the younger person because of different histories, different economic conditions and different periods of time they experienced them. They were paid more for perhaps doing the same job, due to different environmental conditions. They had less competition for work, less expenses to remain socially competitive. Even the simple fact that someone has had more time to save up money creates and inequality. The point is that two people putting equal work mentally and physically do not end up with the same financial earnings. Chance and environment play a role, but does this mean the person who ended up with less is less deserving of the same property? It’s hard to justify an answer of ‘yes’, but this is the reality of our society. It can be argued, that the younger person should just settle for less, but anyone with even basic knowledge of our housing market knows that even ‘entry level’ properties are out of their range. Does government restriction on the release of land make the issue worse? To a degree yes, and perhaps by ‘freeing’ the release of land according to free market ideals might solve this issue, but land developers would simply create the artificial shortage themselves, instead of the government, as it is profitable to do so, and that is exactly what they would do.

Economic interactions and the factors which influence the means by which people can acquire capital through their efforts are complex, seemingly random and never exactly repeatable. Free market economics simply doesn’t take this into account, and instead, neo-liberalism blames the individual for any shortfall, rather than recognising the complex external environment, technological and social shifts which can greatly influence peoples financial outcomes despite the same input. Seemingly simply properties, like ones history, date of birth and location can give them great leverage or disadvantage over others when trading goods or labour on the market. To ignore this fact is to turn a blind eye to the chaotic events which prevent fair trade to occur. Events beyond peoples control leads to some having the ability to exploit others, and neo-liberalism provides no means of recourse to those who are economically exploited or powerless, as it assumes that their fate is their own responsibility, and that it is within their means and within the means of the free market to lift them out.

The fallacy of the informed consumer.

Earlier we mentioned the example of the customer who chose to boycott or avoid a product based on the environmental practices of the company. It may be employment standards that a customer is concerned in, or something more directly related to the product, such as their quality control and for the example of companies which produce food, hygiene and cleaning standards. A customer may be able to make an informed choice, if all operations relating to the creation of the product were transparent and all information available. With the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico from offshore oil drilling, someone may wish to use ‘market forces’ and their purchasing power to avoid buying fuel obtained from oil extracted from risky offshore drilling. Now, is the customer who is about to purchase petrol really able to determine which processing plant the fuel came from, from which shipment of oil? Is the customer seriously able to trace back the supply chain all the way back to the rig the crude oil was extracted from? A customer buying a sandwich is able to get the best deal, if they are able to compare every sandwich available for sale in the world. These might be extreme examples, but lets take more common examples. In a completely deregulated pharmaceutical market, how can you determine whether the paracetamol you are giving to your child was produced with quality high enough to avoid potentially harmful contamination? Are you as a customer, able to make this determination for yourself? For the invisible hand to guide companies towards social responsibility and sustainability, for the invisible hand to stop people from literally killing others and the earth for profits, not only must the population of ‘consumers’ be aware enough to realise what monetary value must be placed, but they must also know the complex web of interactions and processes which end up creating the product. Potentially possible but infeasible. People would end up spending their whole lives in research, in order to try and avoid business with those who could potentially harm or kill, or cause great social and environmental harm.

Witness the ‘cheap’ products from Chinese manufacture. The free market has led to manufacturing going offshore, but these goods can only be produced cheaply due to human exploitation and disregard for the environment. Practices which exist there would not be legal here in Australia, nor tolerated, but the distance of China, the lack of knowledge and information available of the true cost of manufacture means buyers here can’t make informed choices.

There is no complete freedom anyway.

Lastly, the rich corporate oligarchs who push neo-liberalism do not operate and CAN NOT OPERATE in a completely free, deregulated world. Corporations exists because of government law. Some form of state apparatus must exist for property rights, the very cornerstone of capitalism, to exist. Some form of law against theft must exist, and laws against fraud. Copyright law, which allows large record companies to operate cannot exist without state intervention and market regulation. In a true free market, an artist would not be able to ensure that they are the recipient of commercial sales of their work, but it is only because of government intervention that a music artist can ensure that the revenue stream from the sale of their art goes to them.

Without government intervention, the legal apparatus which enables trade to even exist, wouldn’t, and would leave behind a state of anarchy. Neo-liberalism never demands the removal of government, only the extraction of the state from affairs which affect the earnings of the wealthy, of those who have influence, of capitalists. When a government uses its power and funds to make a nation more appealing to investors, no free marketeer objects. When the government of the U.S. bailed out Wall Street due to their own mismanagement of an over financialised money market, neo-liberals did not object. Working class Libertarians who are also pro free market did, but quickly ditched the cause in favour of more dubious ones, such as rallying against science. Perhaps led to these causes by the very businesses which have hijacked the Tea Party and usurped the concern of Americans for the future of their country for their own purposes.

Complete government de-regulation would not allow neo-liberalism to exist. Bill Gates would be poor if not for government spending which developed computer technology or for government enforced copyright and patent law. How else can Microsoft make their money, without having monopoly over the sale of their own products? Hedge fund managers would be nothing if not for the legal structure which allows the financial entities that they trade to be recognised universally. Property developers need state sanctioned ownership of land to develop. So given that no neo-liberal truly argues zero government interference, from where do they draw the line where government regulation should stop? Why is government enforcement of property rights acceptable, but taxation not? On what moral basis?

The basis by which free markets have been portrayed has moral are flawed and do not seem to have originated as the conclusion from an objective study of humanity. Assumptions that parties can trade on equal terms, that the non monetary value of aspects of life such as clean air can be effectively factored in to consumption by consumers are simply absurd. Free market ideology suffers from the same fundamental form as anarchism. Without organised structure, the strong simply overpower the weak and there are no checks and balances on their actions. Nations and people exist or die on the whims of the oligarchs, the commons disappears and base human emotions such as fear and greed become primary social drivers. Look at our current economy as an example of what happens when fear and greed are its prime movers.

Opposing neo-liberalism doesn’t necessarily mean supporting a centrally controlled economy or extreme economic egalitarianism where everyone is equal, as many neo-liberals suggest. It is merely a recognition that existence is a constant compromise between freedom and co-operation. A prosperous society, which by definition encapsulates the ‘group’ category beyond the individual or his sole family, requires a balance between free enterprise, free trade, and state regulation and government projects. History has shown that the most prosperous period of the 20th century was not when neo-liberalism become dominant in the 1980′s, but when free enterprise and economic freedom was living alongside large government funded projects and regulation.

One doesn’t have to have unfettered free markets for a just and prosperous society. Economic dogmatism has caused much misery in the 20^th century, and with the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century starting in the economic train wreck that is the remains of the Global Financial Crisis, a crisis which may be nothing more than the prelude, the welcoming fanfare to a larger economic catastrophe. Th economy and the social and legal structures which a nation create to put economic theory into practice must exist to serve the people, rather than being a structure, a God which the people must serve, worship and sacrifice for. The neo-liberal experiment cannot solve issues such as environmental degradation and the decline of the west and its catastrophic demographic shifts. Its solution to global warming is a carbon trading scheme, a scheme which is designed to simply create another commodity which can be used to create another asset bubble and traded for profit. A strong nation needs a strong economy, but an economy can only serve its purpose by being a servant to the people, which means that the people must retain mastery over it, an ideal at odds with neo-liberalism, where the people relinquish all control over it.

]]> http://www.natalt.org/2010/11/30/free-market-fallacy/feed/ 0 http://www.natalt.org/2010/10/30/beware-the-faux-anti-globalists/ http://www.natalt.org/2010/10/30/beware-the-faux-anti-globalists/#comments Sat, 30 Oct 2010 09:55:22 +0000 admin http://oneilgraphics.com/natalt/?p=579

by Tom Sinclair

1. What every nationalist politician needs

We nationalists certainly have a radical program – if by radical we mean uprooting the tendencies and habits which have formed in the West over the past thirty years. The chief tendency, which we oppose is, of course, multiculturalism and mass non-white immigration into the West – a development foisted upon the Western nations by our own politicians, and welcomed by our media, intellectuals, economists, trade union and business groups. Disparate nationalist groups, from Britain to Russia to New Zealand to Canada, are all united on one thing: non-white immigration into the West must cease; and the non-white immigrants already here must be encouraged, through state policy, to return to the homelands of their forefathers.

That is, one could say, our key policy: and certainly the one which attracts the attention of the public. The masses are not really interested in, for instance, the BNP or the NPD’s opinions on global warming, industrial relations, or public health care: they want to hear about immigration. They will vote for a nationalist party for its positions on immigration, mostly because no other politician is brave enough to speak out against it, no matter his or private feelings on the issue, and every political tendency across the board – from the mainstream, liberal democratic parties, conservative and social democratic, to the radical Left – are all for multiculturalism and immigration. “Racists” have been purged, even from the conservative parties of the West, long ago. The likes of the BNP and the NPD, then, constitute an alternative to the mainstream political consensus.

It has to be admitted, however, that the policies of nationalists on non-racial topics which have little to do with immigration – e.g., trade union law, interest rates, financial regulation, recycling, old growth forest logging, maternity leave and the like – attract little attention from the public for another reason. That is, those policies are undeveloped – which is a euphemistic way of saying that nationalists don’t have any. There is very little consensus on these areas of policy in the nationalist world when they do come up for discussion.

The danger is that this locks nationalists out of mainstream political debate. Suppose that a representative for an Australian nationalist party were to do an interview on the current affair program The 7.30 Report. Kerry O’Brien, the host of the show, and a notoriously tough interviewer, would hammer that representative, relentlessly, on areas where the nationalists are weak: he would ask, ‘What does your party think of the ACTU’s latest Living Wage claim? Or increased financial regulation in the wake of the recent financial crisis?’. The representative would mumble some clichés about ‘true Australian worker’s socialism’ in response to the first question, and, in response to the second, perhaps blame the recent financial crisis solely on a single special interest group. All the while he would be hoping that O’Brien would turn the line of questioning back to the question of immigration. At home – in the living rooms across the country – the average Australian television viewer would be shaking his head: even though he may agree with that nationalist party about immigration, he can see, straight away, that the party – given its inability to formulate even the most basic positions on current political topics – is, in the jargon of the mainstream media, ‘unelectable’.

Is it so hard? Does a politician need to have a clear, fixed position on everything to be able to negotiate an interview, or hold a press conference? Does he need to be able to recite facts and figures on almost everything, at a moment’s notice? No: all he – and his party – needs are positions on three or four contemporary political issues. In an interview, at a press conference, on the campaign trail, he can adroitly steer the discussion towards one of those key issues, and then expound the party’s position on it. Enoch Powell made a political career on four issues: immigration; Britain’s membership in the EU; the conflict in Northern Ireland; and monetarism. For Pauline Hanson, it was Aboriginal welfare, Asian immigration, protective tariffs for Australian industry and agriculture, and rural and regional unemployment and under-employment (and socialist remedies for solving that problem). In the case of both Hanson and Powell, their ideology covered a broad range of issues. It should be noted that with his discussion of monetarism alone, Powell was involving himself in a discussion of one of the most contentious issues of the day, involving many mainstream, respectable politicians, economists, journalists and academics. He was not simply a ‘Send the Asians and Coloureds home’ one-trick pony.

And this is the main problem: to introduce the nationalist to mainstream debate – to open doors which have been closed to him because his opposition to immigration was not ‘respectable’.

The purpose of this article is to look at a particular issue which is of great relevance to Australia today, and to educate the nationalist reader who has little to no prior acquaintance with it: hopefully, then, a clear position can be formulated in his or her mind on the topic.

2. Chile in the 1970s

The history of Chile in the 1970s is, in itself, intrinsically interesting to the student of politics. Chile, a Latin American country with a predominantly white population, went from a Chavez-style socialist banana republic to a typical Latin American style military dictatorship banana republic in the space of a years – albeit with a difference: Chile, under the military dictatorship, was the first experiment, in the post-war era, in what is now known as neoliberalism. After the military coup in 1973 that deposed the Marxist Allende, the Chilean military junta enjoyed – after imprisoning, exiling or killing thousands of Chilean communists – absolute power. Faced with a desperate economic crisis, the junta took the (uncharacteristic, for a Latin American ‘fascist’ government) the step of implementing structural reforms to the Chilean economy, which included deregulation, privatisation (Chile’s electricity grid was sold to the Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond), the privatisation of superannuation (or social security, to American readers), labour law reform, cutting of tariffs on imports and the like. The junta’s economic policy-makers were known as the ‘Chicago Boys’, having studied economics in the University of Chicago under the economists Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. This was the first instance in history of an authoritarian regimé applying neoliberal measures.

The results are controversial: those with inclinations towards neoliberalism use statistics to show that the Chilean experiment was a success – inflation and unemployment fell, economic growth rose, etc. – while the opponents of neoliberalism (a diverse array of Communists, socialists, Keynesian economists) use statistics to show that the Chilean experiment was a failure. What is certain is that Chile broke new ground: Australia, along with many other Western countries, embarked on widespread deregulation, privatisation, cutting of import tariffs, in the 1980s, a decade later (the Chilean privatisation of superannuation preceded the Australian). Furthermore, it is unlikely that the ‘Chicago Boys’ could have carried out their program without the complete control of economic policy given to them by the Chilean military: their policies met with substantial opposition, not only from the regime’s Communist opponents, but from organised labour and big business as well.

Communism is based on myths and personality cults. The case of Allende in Chile is no exception. Allende was, and continues to be, exalted by the radical Left as a superman figure, a sort of Marxist higher man bringing socialism to the masses, wooing them with his oratory, charisma and rare genius. In his personality cult, he is like so many Communist leaders before him: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, and lesser lights such as East Germany’s Honecker, Romania’s Ceauşescu and Albania’s Hoxha.

The BBC documentary series on Allende and the coup that toppled him – ‘The Other 911’, which is available on YouTube – even evokes, unwittingly, parallels to Hitler and his fall. Allende perishes, by his own hand (blowing his head off with a submachine gun given to him by Fidel Castro), in a fortified presidential palace, besieged by soldiers from the outside, defended by a small, but ideologically determined, praetorian guard of Chilean Communists. The females are evacuated as the palace is besieged (bombed by Chilean air force jets) and Allende, to the last, makes heroic addresses over the radio to the Chilean people, mourning the end of the Chilean socialist dream. The similarities between Allende’s last days, and Hitler’s, are obvious – even if the Left is not willing to acknowledge them.

The circumstances leading up to the Chilean coup, and the aftermath, will not be covered here, interesting as they are. The objective is to look at the main myth about Allende’s Chile: that he had introduced valuable ‘social reforms’, that it was a kind of ‘socialist paradise’. At the time, Allende’s Chile was upheld by the radical Left – like Chavez’ Venezuela now – as a model to the world, as a path, towards ‘democratic socialism’ and ‘development’ worth emulating. In contrast, Pinochet’s Chile, when the ‘Chicago Boys’ ran rampant, was a time of great poverty, misery, inequality, etc. My intention here is to expose the myth: not by measuring statistic against statistic, but by showing how everyday life was, in Allende’s Chile, would be unbearable – in terms of personal freedom, comfort, and the efficiency in the provision of services – even to the most radical of Leftists in the West today.

The question is: why is this of relevance to nationalists in the West?

In the year 2009, Communists have, by and large, infiltrated the environmentalist and anti-globalist movement, and are bending both to Communist purposes. And they are not troubling to define their terms and substantiate their claims. They speak of themselves as anti-capitalist, without defining precisely what capitalism is, or, moreover, what their alternative to capitalism is (at least to the general public – at bottom, they want Soviet-style Communism).

Now, many nationalists are eager to join forces with the anti-globalist movement, or at least, find common ideological ground. Because of their ideological and theoretical vulnerability – in short, their not having a position on these subjects – they can easily be seduced by the arguments of the anti-globalist/anti-capitalist crowd, and end up endorsing a kind of hazy socialism or communism without thinking of the implications of their statements (against greedy bankers, corporations, excessive economic growth and personal consumption, neoliberalism (however neoliberalism is to be defined). So they need to be shown what the consequences are – in a country such as Allende’s Chile, in which the government provisions ‘social justice’ and ‘social reform’, and is run by ‘the workers’. However Communists don’t seem to concern themselves too much in relation to the Ethnic/Racial Heritage of its workers and this is one of the major contrasts between it and Nationalism.

Perhaps the difference between the nationalist and the anti-capitalist/anti-globalist is that the nationalist has only a very vague idea of an alternative to ‘capitalism’ (however capitalism is defined) while the anti-capitalist/anti-globalist (who is, more often than not, a secret Marxist, or a radical environmentalist who wants to take the world back to the pre-industrial age) has a very clear, well-thought out plan. To the Marxist, the ‘anti-capitalist’ world of the future will be a lot like Honecker’s East Germany, or, at the least, Chavez’ Venezuela or Allende’s Chile.

The anarchist is, on the other hand, halfway between the Marxist/environmentalist and the nationalist in terms of vagueness. His idea of the future is one where property is abolished and where businesses are ‘run by the workers’ (syndicalism); or, better still, one where no-one has to work. How people are meant to survive without working – which, in the anarchist doctrine, is considered to be degrading and dehumanising – is not quite explained. All the same, the anarchist does, unlike the nationalist, have a consistent position as to what the alternative to capitalism is. Some Nationalists have flirted with using ideas from Social Credit and we do not discredit the possibility but it has never really been tried and tested too much.

While history has, most definitely, rejected Marxism, it has not rejected socialism. Indeed, socialism has, across the Western world, enjoyed something of a revival during the current recession (socialism in general always does well during a recession). At one point, then, the nationalist – if he wants to stay relevant – will need to come up with an answer to the question: socialism, for or against. Being vague in this area – while being extremely detailed on immigration (or rather, anti-immigration) policy will not do.

3. How it was

So, given the importance of the subject, what was everyday life in Allende’s Chile like? Rather than looking at statistics – which certainly do not give a full picture – we shall examine small bits and pieces, as it were, of Chilean-style socialism in action. (The quotations here are from an account by a Chilean economist, Daniel L. Wisecarver, who is quite biased against socialism, and definitely in favour of neoliberal formulas, but who has some quite hard to come by information).

We shall begin here with a description of the quite bizarre practice of setting ‘fair’ and ‘socially just’ prices by the government in Chile:

By the end of the Allende government, more than 3000 prices were explicitly fixed, primarily by DIRINCO (the Directorate of Industry and Commerce). It is quite clear that the process of price fixing could only be negotiating sessions (when interested firms were allowed to participate) and that the post of price fixer had to be one of the most remunerative employments in all of Chile. The printout lists of fixed prices, including such items as “chalet type” dog houses and woollen gloves for infants, served as inventories of goods that had at one time been available for purchase… [Even after the Junta took power] some specific price fixes were remarkably detailed, particularising the name and type of product, the distributor’s name, and the place sold. For example, in July 1974, maximum prices were set for retail sales of RANN brand detergent, imported by the Center for Purchases of the Ancud Chamber of Commerce; or the retail price of soybean oil from the Netherlands imported by Domingo Coro and Son… [Wisecarver, Daniel L., ‘Economic Regulation and Deregulation in Chile 1973-1983’, in ‘The National Economic Policies of Chile’, ed. Walton, Gary M., Jai Press, 1985, pp. 154-156]

Such a policy had consequences:

One of the most dramatic and visible effects of [Allende’s] price controls and economic policy was the generalised scarcity of most goods in formal markets, the emergence of well-developed black markets, and long queues. In fact, it is now part of Chilean folklore that, upon seeing any queue, people lined up, sometimes for hours, without knowing what was for sale but buying whatever it was in the maximum quantity allowed. [Ibid, p. 154]

Wisecarver gives examples of, of all things, socialist and interventionist policies in buses:

Some of the regulations that existed in 1973 and 1974 were truly spectacular. For example, children could be transported only in yellow buses, so much so that owners of yellow buses were at times able to convince the police to give traffic violation tickets to parents who took more than their own children to school in the family car. Or if any organised group wanted to charter a bus (or drive its own) for a weekend outing to the beach, it was first necessary to get permission from the Sub secretary of Transportation, with at least three days’ anticipation. In fact, no bus could go anywhere, anytime, for any purpose without express authorisation. And one of the many crucial decisions reserved for the Subsecretary of Transportation, one which required careful study and consultations with other ministers, was the color and fabric of the uniforms that bus drivers were to wear in the coming year. [Ibid, p.161]

On a more mundane level,

The authorities fixed the number of buses and the frequency of runs; the frequencies were uniform, regardless of the day of the week or the hour of the day, and were monitored by the police. To help enforce required time schedules, bus drivers were prohibited from taking rest periods in bus terminals… The Ministry of Transportation also set quotas on the number of buses that could be brought into Chile, their make, model, size, country of origin, etc. Most of these restrictions and controls were codified [in a decree]… which also required that the Subsecretary of Transportation ensure that there appear no unfair competition from similar transport services, specifically not from artificial cost reductions. Hence, all bus fares were fixed.

[Ibid, p. 161-162]

Price-setting and regulations gave the government officials in charge enormous privileges, and the right to be inefficient in providing a service:

It is necessary to mention the state’s ex-entry in this sector, ETC (the collective transportation enterprise), a firm which ran annual deficits on the order of US $10-15 million. At the outset of the current government, this public firm possessed approximately 35% of Chile’s buses, its own set of exclusive routs, its own replacement-parts factory, and more than 5000 employees. ETC was well known for its free “social” routes and for having its vehicles broken down in the shop up to half the year. [Wisecarver adds in a footnote] These routes often turned out to exist for the exclusive benefit of a variety of government officials, their employees, and their related social groups. [Ibid, pp. 164, 199]

As for taxis:

The number of autos that could be employed as taxis was strictly controlled by the Subsecretary of Transportation, the Traffic Director, and indirectly by the union of professional taxi drivers. Each municipality was assigned a fixed quota of taxis which were identified with special license plates, and the taxi plates were naturally worth several times the value of the car itself. The monopoly enjoyed by these taxis permitted them to provide poor service (they might agree to take a customer to certain places only if it was convenient). The only “control” exercised over those drivers who were lucky enough to be cabbies took the form of fixing legal taxi rates. [Ibid, p. 164]

Wisecarver gives an account of the practices of Chile’s longshoremen and dock workers, which makes bizarre reading. He first describes the activities of the unions:

In Chilean ports before 1981, there were a total of 77 separate unions up and down the coast, with as many as 17 in any one port. These groups had total monopoly control on moving any cargo within the ports; they determined the number of workers on each crew and fixed their remunerations as a function of the type of cargo. Every worker had his precise job and could and would do nothing more; no one not explicitly named to each task could work. In practice, the system degenerated to such a point that work crews doubled true labor requirements and, of course, the wage bill was correspondingly duplicated [i.e., workers would be paid for two jobs despite only doing one]. One of the major concerns of workers during half of each shift was said to be finding the most comfortable place to sleep. [Ibid, p.173]

Strangely, the Chilean port workers lived in a kind of feudal, hierarchical society, where unions had complete control over the workers’ lives:

The social structure that grew up around the port workers’ monopoly was, if anything, even more remarkable. There were at least five categories of workers:

1. Stevedores – These were the truly high-class workers, the ones with the legal monopoly to work, granted by the possession of an official ID (identity) card issued by the authorities.

2. Supplentes – These were the first-round substitutes for the stevedores, logically but not necessarily the first ones in line to receive the coveted (and lucrative) ID card. The suplentes were the first ones called to work if there were insufficient stevedores.

3. Pincheros – These “helpers” were a large group of lower class (at least in the port hierarchy) workers who might one day hope to be granted stevedore status. Meantime, they waited in the ports for any jobs that might be handed down to them by the higher-ups.

4. Medio Pollos [‘Half chicken’] – These were lower-class pincheros.

5. Cuarto Pollos [‘Quarter chicken’] – Lower-class medio pollos.

For every ship that had to be loaded or unloaded, the stevedores would be called in to determine work crews and costs. Only the stevedores had the legal right to employment, and therefore they were the only ones directly paid. They would then dole out jobs to their pincheros, who in turn would distribute tasks to medio pollos and cuarto pollos. The stevedores collected all the wages and passed them along, after deducting a sort of “commission”, to those below them who had participated in each specific job. At the same time, the union leaders collected a separate round of contributions from all the workers in order to finance the unions’ network of social benefits – housing, schools, health, etc. This network was sufficient to maintain the support of the lower-level workers for the union leaders and hence to maintain the pecking order within the ports. [Ibid, pp. 173-174]

Wisecarver mentions that, under these arrangements, workers were effectively controlled in where they wanted to work and live: ‘Anyone wishing to move and be able to work in a different port had to receive explicit authorisation from the authorities and respective unions’. [Ibid, p.175]

On the topic – of workers being paid for more than they actually worked – Wisecarver writes amusingly:

When the time arrived (1981) to change the legislation and eliminate the monopoly, the card-carrying stevedores reportedly “worked” between 400 and 600 days per year and earned more than $US2000 per month, substantially more than annual per capita income in the entire economy. Such statistics were of great use in stifling potential opposition to the new law among nonparticipants in the ports. [Ibid, p.174]

Finally, we shall look at a topic which has the most relevance to conditions in Australia at the present: Chilean labour law. A kind of guild socialism existed:

Consider the case of “professional colleges”. These colleges were basically highly specialised unions formed to protect the interest of the profession practiced by their members; each College, along with its legal faculties and responsibilities, was created by its own law. Without being a registered, paid-up member in good standing with the relevant college, regardless of professional qualifications, one could not work as a lawyer, public administrator, architect, librarian, accountant, newsman, doctor, nurse, pharmacist, professor, etc. The specific laws gave colleges the right to set fees charged by their members as well as standards for their work, prohibit the public sector from hiring nonregistered professionals, prohibit non-members from offering professional services to the general public, ensure that only dues-paying professional were registered, and so forth. [Ibid, p.186]

In general, the Chilean labor law was based on an ideological worldview akin to that of Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and the modern Australian union movement:

Starting with publication of the 1931 Labor Code, legislation governing labor relations blossomed into a network of some 70 fundamental labor laws by the end of 1973. Aside from the numerous statutes granting special privileges, two general types of legislation might be considered. On the one hand, for individual contracts, lawmakers acted as if employees were gullible and naive while employers were shrewd and ruthless. Therefore, in order to protect the former from the latter, it was necessary to legislate hours of work (normal and maximum overtime), wages (minimum at least), work conditions, length of vacations and when they could be taken, and so forth and so on – nothing was left to change or negotiation. [Ibid, p.187]

One consequence of the Chilean system was that unions played an increasingly politicised role – just as they did in Britain and Australia in the 1970s:

Over time the unions began to acquire more and more economic and political power, particularly those that could associate themselves with important, protected industries. As the unions became more extensive, and with state intervention in the economy becoming continually more generalised, any labor problem quickly became a political problem, one that was most readily resolved by granting union demands. Given the ubiquitous state intervention, once the firm or industry had granted union requests, it could turn to the state for a compensating favor of some sort – a price readjustment, higher protective tariffs or tighter import restrictions, a tax exemption, whatever. It was a neatly closed, if totally distorted, system. [Ibid, p.188]

4. Solutions

We have only covered part of Wisecarver’s article: not included are agriculture, railroads, air transport, maritime shipping, electricity, telephones, water, fuel, finance and banking…

To Wisecarver, what matters the most is greater ease, comfort, efficiency and freedom of personal choice in day-to-day living. Wisecarver looks at Chile, sector by sector, and recounts what to him are the happy results of a policy of deregulation. For example, he enthuses that:

Before deregulation the route between Santiago and Valparaiso/Vińa del Mar was served by two firms which were characterised by old, uncomfortable buses and somewhat less than reliable service. By the end of 1982, there were 12 firms covering the same route. Nowadays, at any time of the day, one can, for example, take the subway to the outskirts of Santiago, wait no more than 15 minutes, and get on a new, modern, air-conditioned bus, arriving at one’s destination within two hours The fare was lower in nominal terms than it had been five years earlier. And passengers to the coastal cities and sea resorts were not the only beneficiaries; daily rates for swimming pools in Santiago also fell. [Ibid, p.164]

Less electricity brown-outs, better phone coverage, less theft of cargo at the docks, less wasteful employment of government workers who do little to no work, better customer service in taxis and airlines… The list goes on and on. Life was bad under socialism; after the downfall of socialism, and the rolling-back of many of Allende’s splendid ‘social reforms’ (and the ‘reforms’ by the administrations prior to Allende) life improved – even if it became less ‘socially just’, more ‘inequitable’, more prone to ‘dog-eat-dog competition’ and ‘capitalism’. In other words, Chile approached the standards of ease, comfort, efficiency that we have become accustomed to in the West. Today’s Left, in Australia and elsewhere, could not abide life in Allende’s Chile – or Castro’s Cuba, or Chavez’ Venezuela, or Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. (And lest one object that such ‘standard of living’ concerns are trivial, it is undoubtable that the rather dismal and grim existence in the Eastern European and Soviet regimes in the 1980s hastened the demise of Communism in that region).

That question – of whether life under Allende-style socialism is better (or worse) than under deregulation – is one we will avoid here. The question which should be asked, and which we rarely hear, is, ‘How on earth do we get deregulation?’. That is, how does a country, politically, go about getting these things?. The surprising answer is: to a large extent, not through liberal democracy.

In Australia, the remuneration of almost every single occupation is fixed by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC), which in turns makes it decisions based on claims put forward by Australia’s small, but powerful, trade union movement and the reckonings of a special ‘judiciary’ whose job it is to decide what is a ‘living’ wage, a ‘fair’ wage. Competition is outlawed: one cannot offer to work for less than the specified award rate (that is, the minimum rate for each and every occupation). Under the Liberal government of 1996 to 2007, some competition was introduced: workers were able to negotiate their own agreements, called Australian Workplace Agreements, outside the award system. The agreements were vehemently opposed by the union movement, and one of the first tasks of the Labor government elected in 2007 was to abolish them and tighten up laws against competition in the labour market further.

That is what one expects of the Labor Party, which is a centre-left party completely funded and controlled by trade unions. But the Labor government, once elected, did introduce competition into the wheat export market, in a move which would have delighted Wisecarver. Before 2008, Australian wheat-growers had to sell their wheat through a government board, the Australian Wheat Board (AWB). Because it had the monopoly – it was the only entity which had the legal power to sell – it could charge a ‘fair’ price, a ‘just’ price, for wheat exported overseas. Australian wheat-growers were forbidden to sell wheat at anything less than a price determined by the AWB. Why, given its adherence to deregulation, privatisation, liberalisation, individual choice, etc., did not the Liberal Party abolish the monopoly? The answer was because it was in a political coalition with the National Party, an agrarian socialist party, for its entire time in office. The Labor Party, which was not bound by such an alliance, and therefore not in need of propitiating a small special interest group, had no trouble at all in abolishing the monopoly – despite the vociferous opposition of rural socialists such as the senator Bob Katter. (One beneficial effect of the policy, and one which was intended, has been to open the export market to farmers prepared to sell their wheat at below the ‘socially just’, ‘living’ rate set by the AWB).

And there is the answer: under a representational liberal democracy, which, by design, represents small sectors of the Australian population, and not the nation as a whole, as an entire unit, deregulatory measures cannot be enacted on a large scale without offending some special interest pressure-group which demands that a government-enforced monopoly be upheld as long as possible. Furthermore, a democratically-elected political party often lacks the political power to take a policy of deregulation, liberalisation, etc., to the limit. To be consistent with regard to its stated beliefs, the Liberal Party ought to have abolished the entire award system, and the minimum wage; possibly, it could have done this in 1996 or in 2004, when it won crushing majorities (in 2004 in particular, it attained, for the first time, a majority in the Senate). But it did not. The reason why is that the Liberal Party had to contend with a pluralist liberal democracy. It is no coincidence that the policies of Chile after 1973 were enacted after the suspension of Chile’s liberal democratic constitution and a wide-reaching internal military campaign against the Chilean Left.

Advocates of neoliberalism do not often recognise this: they sneer at ‘big government’ and politicians and statesmen in general, and excoriate the state. They call for a ‘limited government’ which protects individual liberties against ‘tyranny’, that is, socialists in the legislative chambers. How that protection is to be achieved – through the diminution of the functions of government, and the excising of power-politics and national-minded statesmen from government – is never explained.

Some neoliberal theorists do recognise the conflict – between a competitive liberal society, and liberal democracy – presented here. In a pamphlet (‘The Conflict between Democracy and Economic Reform’, Political Notes no. 77, The Libertarian Alliance, 1993), Adriana Lukasova examines three governments which, in her view, successfully enacted neoliberal measures: the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile; the Thatcher government in Britain; the post-war occupation government in Germany in 1948. These governments were authoritarian (the occupation government in Germany was an Allied-installed dictatorship) and imposed their measures against the wishes of pressure groups such as the trade union movement, big business and the Left. Lukasova approvingly quotes the Chilean finance minister of 1981, Rolf Luders:

The Chilean tradition shows that governments endowed with strong authority, which have simultaneously guaranteed the exercise of economic freedom and of private initiative, have presided over the periods of greatest progress in the history of the country. (Lukasova, ‘Conflict-‘, p.2).

The formula is expressed, in some academic writings on the subject, as ‘Strong state, free economy’. Lukasova writes, of Britain in the Thatcher period,

In 1982 police were equipped with weaponry, police vehicles, communications devices, protective body armour and crowd control equipment. A system of national co-ordination was devised. The police National Reporting Centre, based at Scotland Yard, became a permanently available facility – to provide some of the benefits of a national police force without the odium of establishing one. (Ibid).

Again, the terms need to be defined: does a ‘Strong state’ equate a state with a large, well-equipped police force and army, and a secret police with special powers to carry out surveillance and arrest people without due process? France and Germany traditionally have had very powerful state security services: yet the French government is notorious for caving in whenever a large union demonstration against some unpopular ‘free-market reform’ takes place. President Sarkozy was elected as a neoliberal, but, in the end, gave in to the ‘French consensus’ – that is, sectional-group pressure – to abandon his proposals and stay with the same old French socialism and welfare-statism.

The same can be said of the term ‘free market’, or ‘free economy’. How are they free? No-one is free to buy or sell whatever they like and at any price. Otherwise, there would be, considering the large number of deviant consumers for them, a trade in child pornography or heroin.

These are some of the problems with the formula, ‘Strong state, free economy’. A more accurate formulation would be: ‘The state that says no’. That is, a state run by a small group of men and women who stay focused, at all times, on the national interest, and have the political strength to resist the demands of small, but highly vocal, political pressure groups. Such a state can ignore the union movement, and the industrial-relations judiciary, when introducing competition in the labour market; it can ignore the Marxist category of environmentalists and the indigenous rights lobbies in proposing sustainable development of the country’s gas, coal and minerals where it benefits the national (not international) interest; it can ignore the Bob Katter’s when deregulating agriculture; it can ignore General Motors when it asks for a $US70 billion bail-out (wasted on a company which is going bust anyway), it can ignore big business demands to increase the migration program to 300,000 per year, or developers demands to constantly expand cities and strip away every green belt. Such a state is a rare thing indeed, and rarely appears in a liberal democracy.

That state – one that says no – is one, by definition, that should appeal to nationalists. After all, a nationalist is someone who puts the well-being of the nation first and foremost. And surely it is no good for the nation when, for instance, 1.8 million Australians on welfare are unable to obtain work because, under the award system, the minimum wage rates for every occupation are being kept artificially high by a small special-interest minority, and so less jobs are created than would exist under a fully competitive system?

Many politicians confuse the special interest group for the people who make up the nation. The trade union movement, for instance, can mobilise large numbers of activists to demonstrate against an Australian government, in short notice; and, given its wealth, can mount extremely effective public relations campaigns using advertisements and other forms of propaganda and outreach. The politician, on the cusp of putting forward some proposal to reduce union powers to strike, or to bring about competition in one sector of the market, will look at those large masses of people and think, erroneously, ‘The Australian people are against me’. And often the battle can get ugly and involve actual violence, between unionists and ‘scabs’, and unionists and the police – as during the Australian maritime workers’ dispute of 1998, or the coal miners’ strike in Britain in 1984. In the liberal model, the state has the monopoly in coercion: that is, only the state has the legal right to arrest people, fine them, prevent them from entering certain premises, use some form of restraint and violence against lawbreakers. In a country politically dominated by large, violent trade-union movements, those functions are usurped: the state loses its monopoly, and unions can carry out coercion, commit acts of violence, at will. Given the seriousness of such conflicts, the politician can again mistake the actions of a small but powerful and well-organised group for the popular will, and hold back on introducing legislation for fear of starting what seems almost like civil war.

This is a problem in liberal theory: the constitution, the state structure, is there, in the liberal model, to protect individual freedom. What happens, then, if a small, well-organised pressure group use that freedom to push through legislation in parliament that violates that individual freedom – to work at a certain job at a certain rate, or to supply wheat on the international market at a certain price, or to prevent a rural land-owner from chopping down trees on his own property (in order to protect his house against a fire outbreak)? The answer is that freedom needs to be protected against such groups. Which is why a government, run on nationalist principles, needs to rule with a guiding hand, a firm hand.

Not serving the interests of such groups means that one is serving the interests of whole: which is what nationalism is all about. So, paradoxically, nationalists are, in this regard, advocates of a liberal society – perhaps the last defenders of liberalism in a socialist and environmentalist world. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that Nationalist Alternative is very much against unrestricted Free Market Fundamentalism which is Capitalism in its most terrorizing form. Genuine Nationalism is also intrinsically against Globalization too. This is because Nationalism wishes to preserve the identity, culture, and heritage of people and their Nations.

by Michael Kennedy

Anyone with a worldly outlook and an independent mind would be acutely aware of how the media play a pivotal role in determining for other people what is to be considered an issue and what isn’t. The media set the tone of discussion. If the media brings something up, it must be an issue. If they don’t, it mustn’t be important. So some obscure issue which has always been around suddenly becomes ‘water cooler’ discussion because of its appearance on the front page. Yet a slowly unfolding revolution is considered worthy of being ignored, because the media choose not to focus on it. We take the view that it’s not what newspapers, television or mainstream press which dictates what important, which problems we must tackle, but it’s our own judgement and position.

One issue which has been glossed over, mentioned but never explored in the depth it deserves is the housing crisis. While the global financial crisis gets in depth coverage and the ‘crisis’ with Lindsey Lohan gets valuable airtime, this crisis is perhaps felt far more keenly by Australians is only time to time mentioned with no one seeming to even consider that it is a problem that we as Australians should consider resolving. The state of housing affordability in Australia has truly become a crisis. A financial crisis because of vast amounts of credits pumped into an unsustainable asset bubble which will cause economic problems when it pops, and a social crisis, as young Australians seeking to start a family and construct the very social fabric of the future of this nation find they are unable to do so.

Historically house prices have always oscillated but have always, with the exception of periods of economic recession and depression, been affordable to the working class. Yet in the 21^st century, we saw housing reach new levels of unaffordability, during an economic BOOM. During a period of time when working hours were increasing, when the economy was growing rapidly, market forces were conspiring not to give Australians the opportunity to use their hard earned wealth to secure a residence, but to use property as a vehicle for profiteering.

The Generational War

The housing market as it is now, is generationally skewed, with the older baby boomer’s standing the most to gain from overinflated prices, and the most to lose from housing becoming affordable. For many younger “Generation X” and “Generation Y” Aussies, there is a clear sense of anger over the fact that they cannot achieve the Australian dream that their parents could. For many Australians who had working class parents, who paid off the ¼ acre block in the suburbs, they grew up and studied and worked hard to be able to afford the same. Now with many having gone through the education system, worked the entry level jobs they find that these very same houses, which were paid off by brickies, labourers and office clerks are not out of reach to young professionals. The houses which sold for $10,000 many decades ago, or even those which sold at $150,000 only two decades ago are now well over half a million. The property owners, who would still profit from selling the house at half its current ‘market value’ refuse to take anything less than the overinflated and grossly unfair market value. For these baby boomer’s using property to fund their retirement, they are borrowing, and that’s putting it nicely, money from a future generation. To put it more aptly, they are utilising the fact that housing is a basic necessity to set sale terms which are completely unreasonable.

The baby boomer generation claims that ‘hard work’ gave them their status, when in reality it is nothing more than the sheer luck of being born at a time when housing which was suitable for family life could be afforded on one wage. These conditions simply do not exist now, and younger Australians are being blamed for this inequity. It is supposedly the reluctance of “Gen X” and “Gen Y” to work hard or start small, according to these self righteous children of the hippie era, which is to blame for their predicament. But the truth is vastly different. The current generational inequity is the result of nothing more than the timing of economic and social change, with the older generation finding itself on the favourable line of the divide, and the younger ones drawing the short straw. Canberra University’s National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling showed that during the financial boom of the 2000′s, the one which most people missed out on, the divide between rich and poor grew further, with this divide having a generational angle too.

People over 65 increased their home equity by an average of $80,000 in the 10-year period – four times as much as for people aged 15 to 34. ⁱ

How has the government sought to address this, to ensure that hard working Australians are able to secure basic shelter? By giving home owners grants which did nothing apart from line the pockets of real estate agents, property speculators and investors. This divide is turning into anger between generations, turning children against parents, parents against children and reinforcing the worst form of individualistic, me, me, me trains of thought. Unfortunately, the growing anger baby boomer’s and the older generation is justified, as while they have profited immensely, obscenely, they are showing no regard at all as a collective demographic for the plight of the younger Australians who are doomed to worked well past 65 in order to fund the baby boomer retirement.

The Population War

Another contributing factor is the insane, reckless and poorly though out mass immigration policy. Hard as it is for new infrastructure and public transport to be put in place, as full as our roads, trains, hospitals and schools are, as competitive as the job and housing market are, the government nevertheless ramped up immigration, doubling and trebling it in the past decade or two. In a big ‘up yours’ to the Australian people, it completely ignored these concerns and opened up the country to ‘skilled workers’, without even mentioning how they would look after those who were here. The population grew immensely and Australia experienced the fastest population growth. Yet no plans were made to house these people, and no mention of how Australians would be ensured space and opportunity to make a workable life in this country. The government just didn’t care, and many Australians are finding life less and less workable. Aaron Gadiel from Urban Taskforce Australia says that local councils are indifferent to the plight of home buyers and that

“Every credible independent report on the housing shortfall has found that the planning system and the restrictions imposed by local councils are front and centre to blame for the current situation we find ourselves in.” ⁱⁱ

The Speculators War

The third aspect is property speculation. Financial opportunists using property to further enlarge their asset base have pushed Australians out the market even further. People who already own a house, in a act which is nothing more than pure greed, buying up other properties for the sole purpose of profiteering. Buying an already overpriced quarter acre block in the suburbs for $550K, only to tear the house down, erect 3 units and sell the units at $400K each. People who are up in arms over a few cents per litre extra on the price of petrol and demand the blood of oil companies become silent and overlook this vastly more insidious gouging. The economic divide is growing, as people who already own multiple properties and obtain income through rent and subdividing the land, use this leverage to obtain even more properties, to drive up the price and push out first home buyers. It really is just greed and avarice which compels people who own multiple properties, who are aware of the housing unaffordability crisis to continue with this socially destructive practice for the pursuit of filthy lucre. The Liberals, in their true style helped kick off the speculative bubble, with Peter Costello in 1999 saying

“Work for a living and we’ll tax you at close to 50 cents in the dollar; speculate and we’ll only take 25 cents. Not only that but, as a special deal – while stocks last – we’ll pay half your speculating costs.” ⁱⁱⁱ

Halving the capital gains tax rate and negative gearing has been a boon to those who least need to enter the so called property market, those who already own a property. Meanwhile, first home buyers were given a first home buyers grant, which only served to allow buyers to leverage themselves even more applying for easy credit, and bidding up prices and succumbing to the spruiking of the only “profession” that doesn’t require an education, the Real Estate Industry.

Yet such greed is rewarded through tax benefits such as negative gearing and lauded in economic circles. Financial analysts perversely call unaffordable housing a “strong market” and celebrate its further “growth”. From a nationalist viewpoint, any economic condition which weakens the social make up of the nation, which undermines the ability of people to secure a future for themselves is to be avoided, regardless of how profitable it is to the already rich, already well off social class.

What has the government done about this? It opened up property investment to the foreign market and we saw real estate agencies spring up whose sole purpose was to sell properties to Chinese nationals.

Nationalist Alternatives war against the housing crisis

We are unashamedly against greed and profiteering. Every other party treats this issue with kid gloves. The Liberals wouldn’t dare upset cashed up investors and the boomer’s, and besides, they champion market forces and value them over the welfare of the nation. Labor has been completely inept and uncommitted, showing that they care not one iota for the many Australians struggling to afford just an extra bedroom for a child, or those facing the prospect of never being able to afford to live in a house which doesn’t belong to someone else. The Greens have said nothing, but while they might fight on behalf of Australians against speculators, they wouldn’t dare fight on behalf of Australians for population control. Without addressing the immigration issue, any effort made is worthless. Socialists just don’t care as the issue doesn’t affect trans-gendered lesbian indigenous people in Africa fighting against imperialism.

We at Nationalist Alternative are wholly committed to affordable housing. It IS a right, just as clothing, food, medicine and education are a right. It is just as detestable in our opinion to use the market to price a vital product such as housing out of peoples reach for profit, as it is to auction food to the highest bidder for profit and leave others hungry. There is quite simply no excuse, nor any good reason for such a crisis to occur. The free market has failed, free markets being an abstract ideology that in real life is unworkable. Australia needs a government which as the courage to do its job and govern for the welfare of the nation.

Quite simply, housing should be MADE affordable. That’s not to say that the government should pay for peoples housing, but the cost of constructing a house is still affordable and within reach. It is the price of land which has lost all control. As land costs nothing to produce, it is entirely reasonable to expect Australians to pay fairly for construction costs. Such a demand even today would not be unreasonable, but it is not reasonable to expect one to pay $800K for an empty block in a traditionally working class suburb by Altona.

Nationalist Alternative is committed to ensuring that our economy serves US. There is no room in our society for practices which destroy our social conditions, even if they are of benefit to the few. Australians have fought and died to protect their nation, worked hard to pay taxes to their country, worked hard to build it up from arid sands into one of the best countries on earth. This work should not be in vain. Those who work to secure a future should not see their efforts destroyed.

Part I of Nationalist Alternative’s Economics Series
“A Consideration of Value and Money in Society”

by Michael Kennedy

On what ‘Value’ means

Money can be seen as a representation of the inherit value of human labour, thought and of raw materials. Money itself is a conceptual tool created in order to quantify the value of goods and services which are traded. Currency can be considered as the form that money takes, whether dollars, pounds, beads, gold or poker chips.

Understanding the relationship between money and conceptions of value is vital in understanding broader economic trends, and the impact that those trends have on society.

Monetary value exists quite simply because there is a desire or a need for something that is not freely available. This object or service can only come about through labour, manipulating materials or from the minds creative process. Food has value to us because it is useful to us, it sustains life, stops hunger and is enjoyable. Its monetary value however comes from the fact that food is not freely available. It must be grown, transported, picked, cooked, stored etc. That is, in order for food to be available someone must use their intellect, labour and their materials. Air on the other hand, is so freely available and abundant, that nothing at all needs to be done to have it. Therefore, despite the fact that one would die faster without air than without food, air might have value to life, but monetarily it is worthless. A portion of air does not represent any labour or thought and the materials are too abundant to require any labour or thought to acquire. Though the gases that air comprises of do have value, you cannot sell air. The only air that is sold, is air that has been manipulated, either filtered air or compressed air and the value is increased because of the processing and addition of a storage container.

The three sources of value:

There are three common sources of value. Intellect, labour and materials. Intellect is the thought processes which either create new tools or objects, new structures, or the process by which materials are manipulated to create objects which are useful to people. Labour is the manipulation of matter and energy to provide goods and services of value, and materials is the matter and energy used and the final products.

Money is a means of exchange, essentially an intermediary between objects of value. While bartering goods is essentially identical to paying for goods with money, bartering has limitations. Namely that it is harder to value objects and services consistently and fairly and that bartering requires one to store the goods they are bartering with, and hope the providers of goods and services they require will accept their goods as payment. A child care worker for instance, would not be able to barter his or her services with a plumber who has no children. A farmer who grows fruit seasonally would come across difficulties because essentially he or she only has wealth so long as the fruit keeps.

Money becomes the intermediate storage of value, and it becomes the promise of goods and labour in the future. The farmer with seasonal fruit can offload the fruit, acquire money which essentially is a store of value, and then exchange that value stored in the money for goods and services at a future point in time, at his discretion. In these simplistic scenarios, we highlight that money, or more specifically, the currency, has a fixed value and that money is a tool used to encapsulate that value by representing value in a specific quantity of currency. So a shirt sells for $60 because $60 is the quantity of money (in dollars) which the seller believes represents the value of the materials, the labour put into the materials and the intellectual effort expended in order to create the shirt. The profit margin is really nothing more than an over valuation of the labour and intellectual effort behind the product or service. This is an over valuation which the customer is willing to accept and which the seller can use to expand their wealth and their business capabilities.

To go back to the barter example to make this point clearer, if a farmer with oranges was to trade his fruit with an apple farmer who for some reason REALLY wanted an orange, the orange farmer would be able to get more apples than usual for the trade. This might seem irrational but is in fact perfectly logical because valuation is a personal judgement that varies from person to person. As we by nature will seek the most desirable outcome, we are willing to spend large quantities on drugs if we are addicted to them, because the ‘cost’ of not having the next fix is greater than the cost of getting the drugs. Someone with an expensive drug habit, even if it is alcohol has made the decision that the experience of drinking, or avoiding abstinence is worth a large portion of their labour.

The example mentioned previously regarding the shirt shows an idealistic scenario where the buyer is aware of the true value of the shirt and is free to make the decision. In reality, this is rarely the case, as corporations collude to restrict choice, as they obscure knowledge about the product and monopolies arise which can essentially create a scenario where the customer cannot have any say in judging the worth of the product or service being supplied by the monopoly. Microsoft for instance, by engaging in monopolistic practices, has managed to dominate the PC market by making sure it is the ONLY software company distributing operating systems pre-installed on PC’s. Ignorance of alternatives leaves people with the false conclusion that the prices charged are necessary, and Microsoft’s advertising and PR statements, by creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about other products create in peoples minds a distorted and incorrect framework by which they judge the value or the worth of the product. This can occur at smaller levels too, with small businesses, agents and independent sellers taking advantage of the poorer bargaining position the buyer is in. There are many examples as such, i.e., any product advertised by creating fear in the customer that choosing a competitors product will lead to undesirable outcomes or any product sold at extraordinarily high prices because it is in shortage. A housing market bubble created due to shortages, or perceived impending shortages is another clear example.

The issuing of money

Much has been said about how central banks can seemingly issue money from thin air. Many point to this as some form of global scam, or sleight of hand. While the conditions by which the money is issued, and the quantity issued is certainly open to criticism, the fact that the money supply is increasing and that money comes seemingly from thin air is perfectly logical.

In any growing society, valuable goods and services are created. People are born, and with them come the capacity for labour, invention and the creation of new goods and services. Materials are extracted from the earth, processed and used to manufacture goods which are of greater use than the raw materials that comprise them. Human labour combined with materials creates useful products and services of value where none existed before. The fact is, the vast quantities of food produced, cities, technology, knives, clothes, automobiles, roads, statues, toothbrushes, art, and music all seemingly came out of thin air. Settlements were built where little else existed. A deposit of copper ore has limited value to people because of its limited usefulness, but processing that copper ore can create electrical cabling which is of far greater use. This ore is dug from the ground, turned into wire, and this copper wire enters the economy. This wire which did not exist as part of the economy is introduced into the economy.

As money is a representation of value and wealth, as the wealth increases, extra money must be issued into the economy to be used as an intermediary. The money is backed by the goods and services within the economy, which theoretically can increase indefinitely. Therefore, the mental tool used to represent the value within the economy, money, must be able to keep up. Currency appears to be issued from thin air because from casual observation, items enter the economy from thin air. Having currency backed by gold only backs one object with theoretical value, with another object of theoretical value of which there is a finite amount. The confusion comes from a lack of distinction between money and currency. Money is an intellectual construct whereby value can be quantified and where a trade can be carried out in two stages, where an employee provides labour for the economy, receives money which is a promise of access to future goods and services and then later uses that money to redeem those goods and services. Currency is the physical, or paper or electronic representation of money, the actual dollars used, or the actual gold. Currency does not need to have intrinsic value and only really has value because of a universal recognition that this item can be used to trade valuables for other valuables. Gold is no exception, though it is more useful than paper notes, but not because gold bullion is useful, but because gold is useful in the manufacture of electronic components. Gold however has been considered valuable in the Old World universally and historically, for quite a long period of time. Gold is the only precious metal available in alluvial form and which can be extracted from the ground in a metallic state instead of an ore. This, and it’s lustre, malleability (useful in making jewellery) and long standing reputation as a precious metal, a symbol of wealth and status has ensured that gold remains valuable.

The concept of value extended

If human beings were so simple as to only require goods, services and materials then we could fairly easily qualify what goods are of value and what aren’t.You could rely on a vast centrally planned economy like in some Communist examples (Chile) to describe and set an enormous array of prices, in one document for any conceivable good, service or material. In reality, the situation is far more complex. People need more than just bread, water and shelter and certainly people want more than just mere survival. People desire status, entertainment, desirable surrounds, security, social bonds, contentment, among many other things. In a simple economy, money acts as an intermediary for trade between tangible goods and services. As an intellectual construct it serves this purpose, but psychologically speaking the distinction people draw between the value of a potato grown from the ground, and the value of a house which has a view is somewhat vague. The monetary system is quite simply not suited to deal with the complexities of the human mind and the way the mind assigns value.

So far, we have looked at wealth creation through the introduction of goods and services into the economy which did not exist. However, as we have become accustomed to using money as a panacea to assign value, we have also used money to represent other more ambiguous forms of value.

The house by the beach cost a fixed quantity of money to build, however upon being sold, the price paid does not reflect the actual value of the house, but rather the perception of value. If beach front property becomes more popular, then people can be convinced that is of greater value. To a degree this is true; however it is not true in the same way that cotton in the form of a shirt is of greater value than a cotton plant. The former is temporary, a mental construct from based on perceived changes in value due to competitive pressures or social standing, the latter represents an increase in value to the economy which is tangible and usable.

So the increase in housing cost as witnessed in the early years of the 21^st century led to the following scenario. A fixed item, in this case the house, demanded a greater proportion of goods and labour in order to acquire it even though the house in question essentially remains unchanged. This is a different scenario to the once off profit made when an item is given a fixed value. Someone purchasing a house for $250,000 and then selling the exact same property in the roughly the same condition for $450,000 would claim they have ‘made’ $200,000 dollars. But wealth is created through the intellectual and physical labour of people, and the creation of goods. Earlier it was discussed that food grown, ore extracted and services rendered enter the economy from ‘thin air’. Here we have another value which enters the economy from thin air, the perception of the increase in value of an item of static value. However, unlike goods and services, which you can see, touch, buy or at least make measurable use of, this value is purely theoretical.

What ‘wealth’ is created here? The answer is none, though modern economic systems allow one to use that wealth and convert it into goods and services. In this scenario someone hasn’t made wealth, but rather appropriated money, the promise of future goods and services, without inputting the equivalent value of goods and services back into the economy. This is essentially how people can ‘make a living’ without working, and many people who are taken in by this allure of ‘wealth creation’ do not understand that there is no wealth creation, but rather it is appropriating wealth which existed elsewhere. The financial systems in place, have allowed such a transaction to take place. So the seller sells the house and the buyer is put into a position where they must input more into the economy than was originally required. As this increase in value also is considered an increase in value of the total value of the state, an asset bubble can lead to additional money being issued into the economy and in wealth being stored in property. Given this situation, the bubble must be maintained to prevent economic problems caused by the re-evaluation of the asset in question, and as the bubble cannot grow indefinitely, the conditions for an inevitable crash are created.

The important point is that people do not draw distinctions between a micro-economy growing due to the creation of wealth, and a micro-economy growing to people perceiving a rising value. As money is missed into the economy to accommodate for the inflating value of static items such as properties, or shares in a company who’s performance has not substantially altered, this money is backed by very little other than the whims of the market. With nothing more than a change in opinion, this value can disappear and the value that entered the economy, also disappears. The money that was issued to facilitate these transactions remains, so we are left with more money representing an economy of less value. The value of the currency adjusts accordingly and inflation occurs.

No free lunch

To illustrate the following point, assume there are two nations on an island. Nation A enjoys a high standard of living. The people who live within this nation are relatively productive, civilised, tend not to commit many crimes and create a pleasant society. Nation B has a lower standard of living. Nation B has higher crime, greater disparity between rich and poor, is dirtier and has less developed infrastructure. The people in nation B are just as productive as nation A, but tend to maintain and accept, a much lower standard of living. Whereas people in nation A expect low population densities, people in nation B are more tolerant of crowding. People are free to move from one nation to the other and the two nations trade with each other. People in nation A earn more than nation B.

The first obvious point is that citizens of nation A are much less likely to move to nation B, than vice versa. The second one, is that due to the better quality of life in nation A, nation A is of greater value, that is, the home environment is of greater value because it is more desirable. This form of intrinsic value is often unmeasured and disregarded, and not considered as the measurable value held in the economy is, particularly in the “modern” Western World.

A contemporary real life counter example is the small Asian nation of Bhutan, where a former King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck coined the phrase “Gross National Happiness” in 1972. This index is a collection of various measurable and qualitative factors such as political, social and mental wellness, among others. While all these factors essentially become qualitative when factored into an index, it can be argued that the intrinsic value in living in such a society would increase or decrease more or less in line with such an index. This index is considered so important, that the new constitution adopted in 2008 states that government programs must be measured by the happiness they produce, and not by the economic benefits that might arise.

Recently, this index has been falling, paradoxically due to economic growth. British economist Sir Richard Layard who has specialised in the Nation’s happiness index states

“There’s a lot of evidence that a rather cohesive societies often experience falls in psychological well-being when they go into economic take-off.”

While this might appear counter intuitive, what is happening is that the intrinsic value in their social structure, their culture and way of life is being sacrificed at the expense of more immediate economic value. This is occurring largely due to increasing commercialisation, which may be beyond the control of Bhutan’s government. Value in one area (the economy) is growing at the expense of value elsewhere (value of culture, of the traditional lifestyle). In the economic sphere, there appears to be growth, but at the other side of the equilibrium is the loss of quality of life, the loss of happiness and contentment, something often ignored. Has the overall value of the nation increased? Or has the wealth and value of the nation simply been transformed and moved elsewhere?

Back to the example of nations A and B, people running companies in nation A might realise that people in nation B are working the exact same jobs, and being just as productive, yet willing to accept a much lower wage. Companies in nation A then engage either in off shoring and outsourcing, or recruiting citizens of nation B to live and work in nation A. The citizens move to nation A and allow the companies to increase their profits. A familiar scenario for anyone who lives in the western world. The government of nation A exclaims that this is good for the economy, as companies are making more money and driving up the stock market and the population generally agrees.

However, gains such as these don’t come for free. Someone has to pay, somewhere, somehow. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Citizens of nation B move to nation A to certain areas and those areas start to become more and more like the areas found in nation B. Working conditions in nation A lower as its citizens have to compete with nation B Like the equilibrium discussed earlier, the apparent economic gains made by nation A, are mitigated by the loss of quality of life, of the peoples well being and happiness. This loss then directly translates into financial terms, as some suburbs lose value, as peoples wages lower, as lack of job security prevents people establishing loans and so forth.

The value of the area drops, and the value, or quality of life drops as well. Job security drops as jobs disappear overseas and competition for jobs and space increases. Crime increases, wages are lowered or curbed, forcing citizens of nation A to compromise their quality of life. Essentially, to allow economic gain in one area of the nation (within the companies balance books), a cost has been borne elsewhere, amongst the citizens of the nation.

At its most basic level, a financial transaction has taken place. The quality of life that one would normally expect to afford for their particular income is lowered, as the income which others can gain, is increased. Because the correlation between these two is abstract, a direct link is rarely made and people just see it as social progress. The economic progress experienced by some is made possible by others accepting corresponding regressions. Value has been transferred from one entity (the community) to another. The problem with this transaction is that it is usually done without the full understanding of the community, or their consent.

Another example would be changes to urban planning to allow for greater population density. While greater population density can lead to savings in building infrastructure, these savings are negated by the lower quality of living in high density areas. Subdividing property can seem to increase the value of land, but the increase in density leads to additional costs.

Good economic policy must look not merely at dollars and cents, but the total value of the nation which goes far beyond things which are held as being traditionally of monetary value. Changes in living conditions, in the demographic make up of the country, in the quality of life actually have very real economic impacts in ways which are overlooked.

Looking at the bigger picture

If you only look at the dollars and cents of any national economy, you are only looking at a portion of the equation. By only looking at a portion of the equation, what can appear to be a boom in reality isn’t when non-fiscal ramifications of economic policy are taken into account. These aspects are usually the most important to people, as a good economy is only useful in that it provides a better standard of living. To have economic growth and greater profit at the expense of living standards is counter productive. Taking as an example, the off shoring of employment to other nations where a lower standard of living is maintained, and thereby lower wages, might appear good policy in terms of direct measurable metrics, it comes with a sacrifice which negates any financial advantage. From a nationalist perspective, this arrangement is undesirable as it is a transfer of opportunity out of the nation into another nation for the benefit of what is usually a handful of individuals.

The economic systems and conventions that a nation adopts should first and foremost be those which allow the nation the greatest opportunity to improve living conditions. The economic system and conventions, much like the concept of money itself, must remain tools which serve the people, rather than systems requiring the servitude of the people.

“The economy is not an end in itself. It is an element in the life of societies, among the principal ones but only one element”
http://www.developments.org.uk/articles/bhutan-where-happiness-outranks-wealth/

http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=40,8113,0,0,1,0

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/11/14/consumed5_mmr_1
“Bhutans falling Happiness Index”

This is the program of Nationalist Alternative, an Australian nationalist organisation which is primarily an activist movement, but constituted like a political party.

Nationalist Alternative aims at finding, and developing, an alternative to the excesses, social unrest, greed, despair and arrogance of liberal democracy and universalism.

The primary aim of Nationalist Alternative is to reaffirm Australian cultural and national identity and restore the sovereignty and independence of the Australian nation.

It is the belief of Nationalist Alternative that the modern liberal democratic state uses abstract concepts it deems absolute for all people, and then presumes at imposing its rules, from the top down, upon populations that have little in common culturally or ethnically. It classifies all human beings according to function and income, thereby stripping all particularities of differing people to one common denominator.

Such a state – where people are mere economic cogs – is declared by liberal democracy to be a “country”. It is a mere social construction, where the profit motive and economy is king, a marketplace only. It consists of constantly conflicting interests, ethnic tensions due to irreconcilable cultural values, alienation, unhappiness and no real consensus amongst its disparate constituents.

A nation, in contrast, is a living community, in which its values and heritage are inseparable from the philosophy of its rulers, and where the tools of politics and economics serve the cultural objectives of its people, not the oligarchs of world finance. As human beings we inherently want more than function and income. We want a place in a community, a culture that affirms the values we feel to be true and an organic base from which to build for a better future.

A nation is not a constructed concept but a ‘positive’, i.e., a factual description of the natural order of things since humankind’s earliest beginnings, which progresses from the family, familial clans, tribes and ties of kinship bonding the larger ethnic group as a homogenous people.

A nation can only be legitimately defined from people with a pre-existing bond who recognise that a higher order nation exists among them.? Contrast this with standard practice in liberal democracies, where the nation is defined from above by institutions and the population is coerced into accepting their national definition.? This disempowers people and does not allow people to identity or attribute their own national identity based on kinship and close cultural ties.

The Australian nation is the natural grouping of the Australian people, a living cultural entity, bonded by their common Anglo-Celtic-European cultural, ethnic, linguistic, spiritual, behavioural and biological heritage. This concept of the nation stands in contrast to that of the liberal democratic one, in which atomised citizens compete against billions of other unremarkable, non-distinctive other atomised citizens. This conception of the nation uplifts the people, providing hope, and helping them see beyond purely selfish pursuits, as they are now part of a culture, working for the health of that entity as well as fulfilling their personal lives.

Nationalist Alternative seeks to:

* Preserve true human diversity, plurality and difference, in the face of that which seeks to destroy it namely universalism, liberalism, imperialism and radical egalitarianism, enforced through human rights totalitarianism that is rampant in the ‘undemocratic’ liberal democratic state;

*Resurrect a national-communal based society with an economy harnessed as a tool to further the needs of the Australian people but is not an end in itself;

*Replacement of ‘universal’ values with cultural values specific to the individual nation concerned;

* Practice delayed gratification for future generations:

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”;

to this end, we reject only living in the present, the worship of hedonism and personal pleasure as ends in themselves, and posit that sustainability of bio-diversity whether animal, plant or human requires protection and preservation of environmental, ethnic and cultural diversity now.

* Nurture a social consciousness which includes consideration of future generations and a long term outlook which extends beyond individual election periods and individual life spans.

*Further, we actively resist policies brought about by the practice of universalism, radical egalitarianism and human rights totalitarianism. For example, the policies of unlimited Chinese and Indian immigration into Australia; the undeniably massive flow of unwanted non-white migration into nearly all Western nations; the suppression of free speech by Orwellian political correctness and associated vicious ‘anti-vilification’ censorship laws; the globalisation of the world’s cultures into one Mc Culture, collapsing of hundreds of spiritualities into one or two religions only; the imperial march of humanism and enforcement of the ‘liberal democratic’ political system on peoples that reject it; the enforcement of the? ‘free market/laissez-faire? fundamentalist’ economic system everywhere. All of these agendas are pushed by the universalistic doctrines of capitalism and communism with their ‘open borders’, one world, one size fits all globalisation ideologies.

2. Why White Australia failed

It should be stated from the outset that any Australian nationalism must be for Australians: if we are nationalists, we must be nationalists for the country we live in, die in, enjoy prosperity and opportunities in, receive benefits in, enjoy the environment in and take advantage of by the mere fact of living in. This may be obvious – the concept that nationalism is local – but it needs to emphasised, simply because Australia has so many non-Australian (white) Europeans who are politically active on behalf of their own countries. In this country we have the strange phenomenon of what we call ‘expat nationalism’: that is large numbers of immigrants, who are biologically white, and come from Europe (mainly Eastern and Central Europe) who, even though they have lived in Australia for two, or even three, generations, have more nationalistic feeling towards their home countries than their adopted motherland If it is announced on the news that Ruritania has annexed a portion of Lower Slobenia, thousands of Ruritanians – of all ages, and both genders – can be guaranteed to organise a massive rally through the city streets, marching, banging drums, waving flags (of their home country) and generally agitating on behalf of the cause of their home country Ruritania, displaying more zeal, zest, initiative for the problems of that country than any Australian political problem.

Unfortunately, the influx of the (biologically white) European immigrants into Australia in the 1950s and 1960s helped pave the way for the arrival of the later, non-white immigrants from Vietnam, China, India, Lebanon, etc. How? Simply, Australians got used to living, side by side, with immigrant communities that would not – and perhaps could not – assimilate, having their own ethnic press, radio. These were Diaspora communities which could not fit into the Anglo-Celtic mainstream. (We have heard, on more than one occasion, Greeks calling the Anglo-Celtic Australians ‘white’, as if they – the Greeks – were not white). The arrival of these (irreducible) immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, opened the way for the arrival other, self-isolating, self-segregating immigrant groups in the 1970s and after – immigrants who, this time, were non-white. Those sections of the Eastern and Southern European migrant communities, who were vociferous champions of ‘multiculturalism’, i.e., anti-assimilationism and Diaspora-ism, removed the ideological defences against mass, non-white immigration.

At present, a great many of our fellow Europeans from Southeast and Eastern Europe realise the folly of those earlier policies they had adopted so eagerly. As decades rolled on a slow realisation dawned that they, the immigrants from Europe, were used as the shock troops for the advancing non-white immigrants who followed on their heels. It slowly became apparent that the multicultural engineers cast them out in preference to the “new cause celebre” – the Vietnamese boat person, the Chinese, the Muslim, the Sudanese refugee. Now that these ‘real’ minorities were arriving, the Italian, Greeks and Yugoslavs were to be no longer embraced – after all, they are “just” white people from the continent Europe, like the Anglo-Celts.

Perhaps the realisation of these facts is why there was a noticeable amount of Italian, Greek, Polish and other non Anglo-Europeans amongst One Nation’s membership despite the media painting it as purely Anglo-Saxon. It is why the Europeans in Australia are reacting to the changes wrought by immigration and multiracialism in the Australian society which they have adopted as their own. That society has changed dramatically from the Western, Christian nation that they emigrated to.

Now, Nationalist Alternative welcomes members from Eastern and Southern Europe: in our experience, South-Eastern European nationalists in Australia – Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, etc. – often display a greater energy and vigour than many Anglo-Celtic ones (and it goes without saying that immigrants from Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, etc., are infinitely preferable to immigrants from Bangladesh and Vietnam). And all Australian nationalists can learn from the experiences of the excellent nationalist groups in Europe (such as the Magyar Garda in Hungary, Forza Nuova in Italy, Golden Dawn in Greece, etc.). At the same time, any form of Australian nationalism has to champion the cause of the dominant ethnic minority which developed it over at least 157 years from (1788 until 1945), who happen to be Anglo-Celtic, Anglo-Saxon. Just as Argentina – a country which is, more or less, a European colony in the middle of South America – owes its culture and institutions to South-Western Europe (in particular, Italy and Spain), Australia owes its to North-Western Europe, in particular, the British Isles. Australia is, culturally and ethnically, a Commonwealth country – like South Africa, New Zealand and Canada. So while Australia is a white country – along with Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Greece – it is more accurate to say that it is defined largely by its Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic character and further shaped by struggle and history since 1788 into a uniquely Australian identity. To some extent at the turn of the last century many Anglo-Saxon Australians were still beholden to, and happy to take orders from, an overseas entity, namely, ‘Imperial Britain’ over an independent nationalist Australia. But nationalism must be local.

It was the failure to recognise this fact, in combination with the ‘White Australia’ policy. The creators had admirable intentions towards protecting its European populace but which unwittingly became instrumental in helping the spread of the multiculturalist and then multi-racial virus and dismantling barriers against non-white immigration. How? It boils down to the psychology of identity, and the perhaps even unconscious but deep seated biological prioritised imperative of family that in tribes that forms ethnicity, and then race. (A biological linked concept of identity most liberals deny outright, believing only in environment as a factor in development of identity). Ben Chifley, Arthur Calwell and the other great Australian politicians were the architects of the post-war immigration policy, which led to many thousands of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians, etc., into the country simply on the basis that they were white. These post-war White Australia proponents believed, instinctively, that all white men, all members of the white race, were brothers, which indeed on a racial level we are. And we know now, after many decades of expatriate nationalism, and agitation by certain prominent elements of for instance Greek- and Italian-Australian communities for more and more ‘multiculturalism’ in Australian life, how that turned out. The results have been so bad in Australia that a pure and strict doctrinal application of white nationalism has been shown not to work, simply because it is not true that at a deep seated biological level, the umbrella of race by and large trumps tribe or ethnicity: a fanatical expat nationalist will always feel a greater allegiance to his home country than the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Celtic Commonwealth of Australia. (It was only in the 1950s that large numbers of non Anglo whites started to arrive – i.e., ?after 160 odd years of nation building and nation-defining events). The expat nationalist, in order to ensure the survival of his Diaspora group, will reject any assimilation, and champion immigration on principle. ?(The dreadful irony is that often the European expat’s home country – e.g., Greece, or Italy – is drowning under a flood of non-white, non-European sub ethnicities like Turkish, Arab and African immigration).

It may well be that the timing of the immigration was decisive. That is to say, multiculturalism really attained prominence after the Second World War, in Australia at least. Before then, expatriate nationalism was not encouraged. In America, a great flood of immigration, from South-Eastern Europe and Russia, took place around the turn of the century. The American racialist author, Lothrop Stoddard, and others denounced it, and as a result, anti-immigrant laws were passed in 1924 (which were only dismantled in 1965). What is noteworthy about the American example is that immigrants were very much forced to assimilate – i.e., schooling in the English language was compulsory. America did a much better job of remoulding those white European immigrants, making them adopt a more Anglo-Saxon identity, than Australia did in the 1950s and 1960s: the result is that the fourth- or fifth-generation Italian or Polish American is more American, and more Anglo-Saxon, than Italian or Polish. In Australia, the European immigrants were more or less left alone, not forced to conform or assimilate, and even encouraged, especially in the Whitlam and Fraser years, to form diasporas and see themselves as being apart from the Anglo-Saxon host population. Which is why expat nationalism has been handed down, from generation to generation).

What are we basically enunciating here in regards to assimilation? In contrast to liberalism’s homogenized world of fractured cultures and peoples, Nationalist Alternative advocate a diverse, harmonious heterogeneous world of homogenous peoples, each rooted in the nation’s culture and soil. So in any given nation whether an ‘old world’ nation or newly formed one, longevity, harmony and strength arise from its collective inhabitants, pulling in the same direction not apart, being dedicated to their particular nation foremost. This includes the truism that independence and sovereignty only exist when decision making is made entirely by the nation not by overseas and external forces. This does not in the least mean pure isolationism or lack of co-operation and dialogue with nations and cultures different from ours. Hence, whilst we do not want an assimilated world or global melting pot of human sameness, homogenous nations implies homogeneity and assimilation within those nations, not just across race and ethnicity but of course culture.

Assuming existing homogeneity in the first place, if you have chosen to travel to a new land where you intend to live in, raise children in, be protected in, then you also have duties to that national community which you desire so much from. Anything else places one in the realm of purely a selfish individualist, concerned about himself or at best his immediate family only. Such an individual is merely an economic migrant happy to cherry pick whatever community he visits, and move on after a few years. Such behaviour is similar to a corporation that discards a region when it is no longer the cheapest cost base from which to manufacture from. Without dedication to your own nation and its associated culture and territory, the seeds of disharmony, the conflicted loyalties, start to threaten the long term survival of a truly independent, sovereign nation of people.

Nationalist Alternative is against the bastardising of culture and identity and prefers to foster a national identity in which assimilable elements can participate in, and in which there is an expectation, and reason to become part of.

As well as that, we have the strange cultural phenomenon, perhaps unique to Australia, of the ethnic ‘car hoon’. The ‘car hoon’ is a lout who spends all day hot-rodding his car, driving it around like a maniac and doing burn-outs, playing ‘doof-doof’ (loud thumping techno and hip-hop) music with super-bass speakers. He wears a uniform of track-suits, baseball caps, gold chains, his main hobby is body-building, and his nationalism consists of rioting whenever international tennis competitions (with players from his home country) are in town, or at the time of the FA World Cup (he of course barracks for the team of his own country). In this subculture again, which is maybe unique to Australia, we see white (for some reason predominantly South-Eastern Europeans) joining with non-white descendants of other immigrant families, the two groups, white and non-white, essentially dressing, talking and behaving like each other. Biologically white Greeks, Italians, Serbs, Croats, etc., and non-white Lebanese, Turks, end up becoming transformed into the one amorphous sub-cultural type – they even speak English with the same accent. This is a disproof of at least ‘absolute’ white nationalism – the notion that whites, instinctively, will feel solidarity with one another against the non-white and a cultural affinity which transcends nationality and ethnicity.

This is a strange phenomenon which could possibly not occur anywhere else except in a multiculturalist context. In the European mainland, one does not come across the subculture mentioned here. Certainly, there is boorishness in Europe – soccer hooliganism, the ‘chav’ phenomenon in Britain, and so forth – but not the multiethnic, expat nationalist ‘car hoon’, replete with gold chains and the rest. Italy, for instance, has its share of boors (as does Britain and Germany): but it is also one of the fashion and style capitals of the world, and, historically, one of the centres of Western European culture. It could be argued that what is really distinctive in Western painting and music is mostly Italian. As well as that, Italy is one of the richest countries in the world, and both Italy and Greece are two of the richest countries in Europe. A massive class divide (as well as cultural divide), or, more accurately, a gulf, exists between the Italians and Greeks of mainland Europe and the Italian and Greek immigrants here. If the Diaspora populations of Southern and South-Eastern Europe were magically transported back to the homelands of their grandparents, they would feel out of place. At the same time, however, these immigrants do not feel a sense of belonging to the Anglo-Saxon culture, hence the hostility and resentment to the ’skips’ (that is, Anglo-Australians), the ‘whites’, exhibited by these groups. The immigrant diasporas, then, feel caught between two worlds.

The source of this sense of diffusion lies within the multiculturalist ideology itself. Multiculturalism is, if anything, a series of metaphors: a country must be like a ‘rainbow’ of many colours (and none predominating); a ’smorgasbord’ with a wide range of ethnic delicacies. It is regarded, by today’s politicians, journalists, academics, that Australia consists of so many different ethnic groups, and that the Anglo-Saxon founders are henceforth relativised, one group among many, no longer the top dog, only one more face in the multi-coloured crowd. Token differences must be preserved – ethnic groups are encouraged to stage their own cultural festivals, folk dances and the like. But, because no one group can be allowed to achieve eminence, no one colour in the rainbow can be allowed to stand out, all groups must be placed at the same level, in terms of value. That is, all groups must be equal. And that has the side-effect of belittling, even destroying, those cultures. Italians, for instance, cannot be encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a country which has made supreme achievements in the field of painting and music, for example (e.g., the operas of Verdi are at the same level of value as Hmong folk music). So multiculturalism, in its drive for relativism and equality, ends up giving a token version of the different nationalities and ethnicities around the world.

At the same time it suppresses the expression of a genuine deep primary culture of the original dominant people. If it is obvious? that assimilation on a global scale results in the death of diversity due to one huge melting pot of forced conformity, then multiculturalism is not the solution but the problem. By creating an all-encompassing superficial ‘rainbow’ culture and by demanding that it should be imposed say everywhere, true diversity disappears, as there is eventually not one place in the world where one culture is allowed to be the primary one – it must always be the skin deep smorgasbord. It is little surprise that many people upon returning from visiting ‘world’ cities likes Sydney, New York, London, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver often remark that ‘its just another big city’.? These cosmopolitan cities all have their little Chinatowns, Little Italys, Irish pubs, Little Indias and ‘great shopping’ zones. Experiencing one is increasingly not too different from another and each time you receive a ‘taste of all cultures’. Surely a trip to a mostly homogenous part of highland Scotland, hinterland Germany, jungle Cambodia or mountainous Peru is special because it is original and one experiences the virgin culture of the people that reside there. Should we inform Tibet or Iceland that they are culturally deficient and that, in order to correct this (lest they be racist), they should zone a little Chinatown, Little Italy, Irish theme pubs and shopping malls?

It is also interesting to note the stark observation that so-called ‘anti-racist’ activists never seem to demand non-white countries legislate multiculturalism and multiracialism – just those with currently majority white populations.

To conclude: whilst inter-white solidarity is something we strive for, especially given the low percentage of Europeans left in the world, it is essential to recognise the fact of the strong biological urge for ethnic or tribal identity and thousands of years of separate heritage amongst Europeans. We can then work as ethnic nationalists who must bond together in a pan European (co operative) stance to protect our common bond of race whilst still able to preserve our particularity and differences.

Nationalist Alternative, in addition to being Pan-European in its position, internationally calls for an end to ‘petty nationalism’ whereby various European nations or ethnic groups are pitted against each other – such as Irish versus English, or Macedonian versus Greek, or Croatian versus Serb. There are European examples of political co-operation that we agree somewhat with, in its attempt to both protect the separate European identities, and not degenerate into petty nationalism.

At the same time, it is arguable that those globalist forces, who would like to see a ‘one’ world grey- or brown-coloured race and one world culture, realise they need to proceed down that ‘melting pot’ path in slow steps and therefore would prefer it if Caucasians throw out the rich diversity of difference that exits amongst our sub tribes in Europe, the multitude of cultural and ethnic particularities – i.e., the Celt, Slav, Teuton, Anglo, Latinii or Italian, English, German, Russian, Greek, etc. Arguably even some current national definitions in Europe today are too broad; like the category “French”, for example, which includes Franks, Bretons, Corsicans, Normans. All of these groups were compounded, in the French Revolution in 1789, as French by mere citizenship alone, which is in accordance with the civic-state definition of nationalism, which regards any person as being a member so long as they possess citizenship. By forcing the diverse Caucasian tribes to only identify as white and ignore our close but separate histories and cultures, they then have the European peoples conveniently boiled down to just one category, having extinguished all other differences.

For those opposing global one-ness or same-ness that classification leaves humanity only three categories away from the one brown universal man, when those factors also combine all Asian and African differences into the simplistic ‘yellow’ and ‘black’. There are approximately 192 different countries in the world, and many more ethnicities. Acknowledging that fact preserves the diversity of genes, culture, spirituality, and is vastly preferable to three categories only.

3. Old World and New World considerations: the New World tribes

What of assimilation: can it occur? The answer is, in Australia, it already has. The colonies of the West, such as America, Australia, Argentina, were formed by an assimilation, a fusion, of Western immigrant identities. The first settlers in America were British, French, German, Scandinavian, Swiss; their respective national identities, over time, dissolved, and re-formed into a new, distinctly American one. Likewise, the Argentineans (a country made up Spanish, Italian, Irish, German immigrants) and Australia itself (Irish, Scots, English, Welsh). Indeed, the new type of American, Argentinean and Australian is also genetic, biological: there are peculiarly American facial features, for instance, which make Americans distinguishable from, for instance, British or Australians. The result is that the phenomenon of an expat ‘Norwegian nationalism’ in the US, or a ‘Welsh nationalism’ in Australia, is absurd, at least before the advent of multiculturalism, for the reason that Scandinavian-ness, or Welsh-ness, has long ago disappeared. Australia’s cultural roots, and genes, are in the Commonwealth Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Celtic nations. For that reason, an immigrant from Britain or New Zealand, or a white refugee from South Africa or the former Rhodesia, will find it easier to ‘fit into’ Australian life than an Italian or Bulgarian. Each country has its biases – Argentina towards Southern Europe, South Africa, Australia and Rhodesia towards North-Western Europe. This fact needs to be acknowledged.

(Which is not to say that a future Polish or Hungarian immigrant to Australia could never become ‘Anglo-Saxonised’ and then further uniquely ‘Australianised’: the American example, from around the turn of the twentieth century, shows that this process can occur. But the process is impeded by the ideology of multiculturalism, which, as explained above, actively encourages the European immigrant not to assimilate to the culture of the host population, and belittles the host culture itself).

Given that, it would be understandable if the ideology of Nationalist Alternative were to be only located in the rich veins of Australian nationalist tradition of Henry Lawson, Alfred Deakin, William Lane, Jack Lang, and the rest. But Nationalist Alternative wants to up to date, even cutting edge, with today’s (Western) political thought: for that reason, much of the Nationalist Alternative ideology is based on the ideas of certain contemporary European thinkers though not solely, as shall be explained below. So called ‘Bush’ nationalism has its roots in the Australian nationalism of around the turn of the 20th century. The advantage of the ideas of the Nouvelle Droit and thinkers related to the Nouvelle Droit (such as Guillaume Faye), is that – unlike Henry Lawson – they are more contemporary, and tackle contemporary problems. No one is doubting that the analysis of Australia’s problems (e.g., the threat posed by Asian immigration to the Australian way of life) by the likes of Lawson, was, in its essence, correct. ?

In fact much of the writings and social analysis of Australia’s early nationalist thinkers is timeless – such as of capital using immigration and indentured labour against the Australian working and middle classes.

In fact as far as symptoms like say immigration are concerned, the position advocated by early Australian nationalists of demographic extinction of the Australian ethnicity due to one particular immigrant group over all others – Asian migration – continues statistically to be accurate. However, it is argued by some that we should only shout and scream about Islamic migration, because Asian migrants supposedly ‘integrate better’, keep their heads down, work hard and are ‘nicer’ in their social interactions with others. However, in terms of the long-term survival of the nation, the immigrant groups who are not overtly different and anti-social (i.e., become involved in crime and other socially destructive activities), constitute the greater danger.

Observations of ‘niceness and hardworking’ whether true or not are mostly irrelevant, because as nationalists, we oppose not the mere fact of the existence of other non European people groups, but the causes like capitalism, which in its universalism and greed seek to destroy, in pursuit of profit, the preservation and dignity of the bio-diversity of humankind. Universalism will ultimately result in no distinct people groups and cultures – ?whether Asian, African or European. That is, a future scenario where a people, the Australian people, is outnumbered, holds no societal positions of decision making or authority and is reduced to a bossed-about minority. This does not uphold the principles of autonomy and global plurality whatsoever.

As far as symptoms go, injustice is injustice, whether that iniquity comes in the form of an aggressive ‘in your face’, difficult-to-assimilate migrant group, or a more socially amenable group that appears to integrate. Both result in the same end.

Nationalist Alternative uses modern nationalist and racialist European theory to look at the same problems from a different angle then that of just the early Australian nationalists, though as mentioned, we acknowledge their ongoing relevance.

4. Nationalist Alternative’s basis in the European New Right

The presuppositions behind the ideology of Nationalist Alternative are based on the thinking of the European New Right – a group of (mainly Continental) European intellectuals whose ideas are very much compatible with the contemporary nationalist struggle in the West.

A few paragraphs from Tomislav Sunic’s ‘Against Democracy and Equality: the European New Right’ (2004, 2nd edition, Noontide Press), will summarise some of the key New Right concepts:

The [European] New Right argues that, with minor exceptions, both modern liberalism and Marxism wish to impose on all nations the idea of equality, human rights, democracy, and economic progress. To counter this globalistic and universalistic trend, spearheaded by the Soviet Union [the first edition of this book was published in 1990] and America, the New right urges all nations, and particularly European nations, to disengage themselves, culturally and politically, from both superpowers, from both liberalism and Marxism, and join in the common fight for the “cause of the peoples”. In other words, instead of vague belief in universal human rights, the New right stresses the primacy of national rights; instead of abstract and elusive dreams of egalitarian democracy, and the myth of eternal economic progress, the New Right espouses the return to the “roots”, and the foundation of organic societies. [Sunic, p. 112].

Going further in this vein, Sunic writes:

For the New Right and its “ideologue” Louis Rougier, the organic community is the only valid reference for someone’s rights, whereby a person’s rights can be enhanced, measured or curtailed only by the degree of a community’s generosity or the lack thereof. To the advocates of universal human rights, the authors of the New Right oppose a view that each person is first defined by his birth, heritage, a country of origin, and the value system inherited from his community. De Benoist wittily remarks: “I see a horse, but I do not see horsehood”… Similar view were once jokingly expressed by the conservative Joseph de Maistre in his sharp critique of liberal democracy in France. he wrote that during his travels had seen “Poles, Russians, Italians, but as to man, I declare have never seen him”. [Sunic, Op. Cit., p. 142]

So a person – at least, politically – is defined by the community he lives in:

De Benoist argues that man can only define his liberty and his individual rights as long as he is not divorced from his culture, environment, and temporal heritage. “[Man] does not live on Sirius, he does not live on a lone island, or in the kingdom of the blessed, but here and today, and in a very specific society”. [Sunic, Op. Cit., p145]

So why does the New Right oppose immigration and multiculturalism? The answer, paradoxically, is that it causes racism:

Krebs [Pierre Krebs, a prominent New Right author] writes that contemporary racism and violent nationalism usually occur in multi-cultural and multi-racial societies, notably when a dominant and larger ethnic group feels that an alien minority or smaller ethnic group threatens its national and historical identity. Accordingly, a large nation coexisting with a smaller ethnic group within the same body politic, will gradually come to fear that its own historical and national identity will be obliterated by a foreign and alien body unable or unwilling to share the same national, racial and historical consciousness. When negative forms or racism and racial exclusion occur, they can basically be traced to the individuals and peoples who feel more and more alienated from their former communal bonds. Krebs implicitly argues that in multi-racial and multi-cultural environments, abstract human rights will make very little sense. Indeed, such environments may become eventually harmful to all ethnic and racial groups coexisting with each other… Consequently, according to Pierre Krebs, and Hans Eysenck, the aberrant and inevitable aggressive behavior that usually accompanies racism is in part a response of a stronger group to the prospects of impending uprootedness. [Sunic, Op. Cit., p. 136]

5. The Human Rights Cult

The New Right strives, intellectually, against two kinds of totalitarianism: human rights, or humanitarian, totalitarianism; and monotheistic totalitarianism.
The cult of human rights is pro immigrant: much of the non-white immigration into the West is the consequence of humanitarianism. The first wave of Vietnamese boat people – all 48,000 of them – arrived on Australian shores in the late 1970s, and were taken in and made citizens, all in the name of “humanity” (the Asian nations of Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, being less “humane” than we, rejected them). Now the Africans – and the Iraquis and Afghanis – are the new victim class; humanitarian liberals insist that these people be allowed to emigrate here in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Today, socialist priests, immigration lawyers and social workers agitate for more and more immigration from the Third World, in particular, from Africa, in the name of humanity.
No-one is allowed to dispute with multiculturalist humanism. Many nationalists have been fined, and even sent to jail, on the grounds that something they have written or said has offended the ‘dignity’ and ‘human rights’ of minority groups and has ‘hurt their feelings’. The most recent example, reported in the mainstream media, is Brigitte Bardot, who has been fined (yet again) for denouncing the ritual slaughter of animals by Muslim immigrants living in France. These are the self-appointed anti-racist watchdogs, with (largely undefined) powers to fine, and even imprison, Westerners who ‘offend the feelings’ of immigrants. One of the most notorious is the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
The human rights ideology, and the accompanying totalitarian repression of anyone who disagrees with it, has its origins in the French Revolution. In the ideology of the Jacobins, the community or tribe with unique ethnic and racial characteristics has been replaced by ‘Man’, or, the ‘Citizen’. The end result is a progressive political system, which recognises the equality, the sameness, the rights of all human beings (which are human rights, not the rights of a particular group, i.e., the Corsicans, the Bretons), eradicates all racial, ethnic and even linguistic differences. As de Benoist writes, in his essay ‘On Identity’:

The current denunciation of demands for identity, in the name of the “Republic” or of globalization is a repetition of the Jacobin assimilation discourse, which saw the will to maintain traditional identities as equivalent to a refusal of “progress.” The arguments against “communitarianism” used nowadays are exactly the same that were used earlier to oppress
minorities or to eradicate regional cultures and languages. The paradox of this fight against particularities lies in the fact that, historically, it has always been waged in the name of a connection that is just as specific, but was presented as universal, and relied on its alleged universality to legitimate its designs for assimilation or domination. It is obvious in the Republic’s fight against regionalisms. As Savidan notes, “Brittany’s identity has not been negated in the name of the Ile de France, but in the name of reason, progress, freedom, equality and the universality of the Law.”

Further, in the same essay, he writes:

Refusal to recognize identities has been especially prominent and constant in the “republican” tradition of French Jacobinism… It redefined the nation as a post-communitarian space, i.e., as a political space based on the normative principle of cultural and ethnic homogeneity. The idea of “citizenship” lost its specific substratum (one is always a member of a given society), and was given a “universal” dimension. From this perspective, every polity implies a clean sweep; each attempt to reaffirm a particularity becomes a secession attempt. To be “republican” would mean to refuse differences, at least their political visibility, i.e., their recognition in the public sphere… I.e., the “Republic” can only be based on the omission or the negation of communities.

Sunic expands on this process of ‘de-ethnicisation’ as defined by de Benoist:

De Benoist argues that the proclamation of the same rights for all peoples leads in the long run to deprivation of each people of its own specificity. “People exist”, writes De Benoist, “but a man by himself, the abstract man, the universal man, that type of man does not exist. For De Benoist, man acquires his full rights only within his own community and by adhering to his national and cultural memory. He writes: “The category of ‘people’ cannot be confounded with language, race, class, territory or nation alone. A people is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate. It is a reunion of inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who, on the basis of the sense of common adherence, develop the will to pursue their own history and give themselves a common destiny”. [Sunic, op. cit., pp. 140-141.]

Sunic adds:

For the authors of the New Right, culture and history are the “identity card” of each people. Once the period of assimilation or integration begins to occur, a people will be threatened by extinction – extinction that according to De Benoist does not necessarily have to be carried out by physical force or by absorption into a stronger and larger national unit, but very often, as is the case today, by the voluntary or involuntary adoption of the Western Eurocentric or “Americano-centric” liberal model. [Sunic, ibid].

It should be added that the “Americano-centric” liberal model is of French origin: privileging ‘Man’, the ‘Citizen’, ‘Humanity’, the ‘Rights of Man’, before the race, tribe, ethnic group, even the nation itself. Indeed, they are the one and same:

The implicit message of the Declaration of human rights involved the assumption that universal human rights precede the narrow communal or national rights and that the American-adopted legal principles could be valid for all peoples on earth, regardless of their national origin. Berard notes that the American and French Declaration, by intending to be universal, in fact became the most pernicious expression of Western… ethnocentrism. The Declaration posits that what is viewed as self-evident by Western peoples, must also be self-evident for non-Western peoples. The end result is the loss of one’s cultural and national memory. Berard writes: “Historically, human rights are the ideological expression of Jacobinism. They become today the expression of Western ethnocentrism (”occidentalo-centrisme”) – the underlying discourse of the new international order. [Sunic, op. cit., pp. 139-140].

6. Monotheism

Another source of the modern-day equality cult, the New Right thinkers argue, is monotheistic universalism: that is, religions like Judaism and Christianity. Sunic writes:

Although egalitarian experiments were known to have taken place very early in history and about which there is scant information, it was with Judaism and, later on, Christianity that we can trace with more consistency the genesis and the gradual consolidation of the modern egalitarian belief…. A number of authors of liberal, socialist, and conservative persuasion maintain that the modern ideal of equality significantly owes its rise to early Jewish prophets. Thus the French author Gerard Walter, in his book ‘Les origines du communisme’, maintains that the roots of the modern egalitarian ideal and the belief in brotherhood and democracy, can best be traced to Judea and early Jewish scriptures. In a similar vein, the American scholar Emanuel Rackman, in his piece “Judaism and Equality”, writes that Judaism derives human likeness from the fact that God created only one man from whom all humanity is descended. [Sunic, op. cit., p. 119]

The New Right subscribes to Carl Schmitt’s famous dictum, ‘Political concepts are secularised theological concepts’, that is, political ideas have their roots in religion. Sunic writes:

For Carl Schmitt, who was already discussed in previous chapters, the “political theology” of liberalism and socialism continues to borrow from Jewish and Christian eschatology, albeit by bestowing its discourse with a more secular flavour. This view is shared by the New Right which also concurs that the ideal of equality, human rights, constitutionalism, and universalism, represent the secular transposition of non-European, Oriental, and Judeo-Christian eschatology. [Sunic, op. cit., p. 123].

So, in the New Right view, the modern day fanatics of equality, democracy and liberty are secularised Christians or Jews (it is no coincidence that commentators have observed the influence of messianic, Christian thinking in the discourse of George W. Bush, who, as we know, believed in democracy and freedom (or ‘moxy an freem’, as he pronounced it) as if it were religion, and sought, like an evangelical, to spread it around the entire world):

The New Right asserts that the belief in equality rests more on the principles of social desirability inherited in secular forms from the Judeo-Christian scholastic, than on the facts established by scientific analyses. According to Pierre Krebs, the contemporary theories of the egalitarian mythos deliberately associate a pseudo science (historical materialism [e.g., the Marxist theory of history] with a messianic catechism (the universalist dogma), which are in turn implemented on each level of society…. In the process of this “levelling”, argues Krebs, the role of heredity, the role of national consciousness, the importance of popular and ancient mythology and religion is significantly neglected. [Sunic, op. cit., p. 133].

7. The New Right and Islam

Islamic immigration is a problem in Europe, and it is fast becoming a problem here in Australia and for that reason, nationalists should pay attention to it. However, it should be stated that, unfortunately, if a nationalist starts speaking in a hostile fashion about the spread of Islam, certain other nationalists will react in a knee-jerk like manner and accuse him of “neoconservatism”. If that said nationalist is only concerned with Islam and blind to problems such as (non-Islamic) immigration, societal decay, consumerism, etc., then quite possibly that nationalist is just solely practising ‘Islamophobia’. Given that Islam is a religion that one can choose, just like Christianity, it may not even be a real nationalist at all. In the Middle Eastern world historically, nationality is not defined by ethnicity or race, but by belong to a particular religion – i.e., Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism – or a particular sect within that religious groups.

We would also add that we do not see Islam as ‘the’ major threat to Western civilisation but one of many and also do not recognise as a counter to it, the ‘war on terror’ pushed by the neo cons. We should also add that we do not see Islam as the only threat, the major threat, to Western civilisation, but one of many; and that we do not recognise, as the counter to Islam, the ‘War on Terror’ pushed by the neoconservatives. The neoconservative response to Islam is to impose the capitalism and secular humanism of the liberal democratic state model on Arab states like Iraq.

Given that both Islam and neoconservatism are universalist, we are opposed to both; but we would rate the neoconservative model, which currently has nearly all European ethnicities entrapped within its confines, as the higher threat. It is exactly the oppressive chains of liberalism that has stifled a vibrant European and Australian identity, through the messages, implicit in the political discourse and the media, that European and Australian identity do not exist, or if they do, are not relevant.

To the extent attacks on Islam are allowed and seemingly encouraged by the present system, a nationalist should realise that it is only the defence mechanism of one absolutist system, liberal democracy against another, Islam. Having said that, nationalists should make use of any ‘free kicks’ given to them, so to speak, and use them for nationalist ends, and not those of those representing the status quo. Therefore, opposition to Islam (which is, in theory, a religion any ethnic group can adopt) can also be used to resist Arab migration. The Australian public generally consider both to be one and these same, and so some ethnic awareness, and an acknowledgement of the need to defend Australian culture, arises. Nationalists need not let the right-wing conservatives frame and own the debate; by not participating at all in the attack, sanctioned by the liberal media, on the ’soft target’ of Islamism, nationalists allow conservatives to appropriate the cause, to diffuse public sentiment against immigration and divert it, confining to the safe grounds of ‘civic nationalism’.

Given the above qualifier on Islam, it must be explained, then, why a) opposition to Islam stems naturally from acceptance of New Right doctrines; and why b) there should be opposition to neoconservatism as well.

Firstly, though: why? Why should it be a subject for a New Right attack? Because it is a universalistic, monotheism and thereby totalitarian creed making it more than just another ethnic group, but one? Islam for most of its variants is a Sunic writes:

De Benoist attempts to uncover the roots of totalitarianism… in the Bible and the Judaic religious legacy. As we already observed in our previous chapters, for De Benoist the precondition for a non-totalitarian world is the return to religious polytheism and the abandonment of Judeo-Christian eschatology. For him, biblical monotheism is by definition a religion of totality, which excludes all opposing “truths” and all different value judgements. It follows, according to De Benoist, that all countries that are attached to the biblical message show a latent proto-totalitarian bent. He writes:
‘ Each egalitarian and Universalist ideology is necessarily totalitarian, because it aims at reducing all social and spiritual reality to a single model. Thus, monotheism implies the idea that there is only one truth, one God, one type of man that could please God. The Bible places on the scene one “God only” (Deut. 6.4) who is also a “jealous God” (Deut. 6.15). Jesus says: “Those who are not with me are against me”. Henceforth, to be against God, means to be for the Evil. And against the Evil everything is permitted; genocide, torture, Inquisition. It is only with Judeo-Christianity that totalitarianism appears in history, at the moment when Yahveh, makes the massacre of infidels his primary task (Deut. 13.9); when he declares to his people: “you are going to destroy all peoples which the Lord, your God, will deliver to you” (Deut. 7.16)’ . [Sunic, op. cit., p. 176].

Now, as many (ex-Muslim) authors have chronicled, Islam takes universalism to extremes. In ‘Leaving Islam: apostates speak out’ (Prometheus Books, 2003), Ibn Warraq quotes the Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in his Muqaddimah: ‘In the Muslim community, the holy war is religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the (obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force’. [Warraq, p. 425].
Warraq’s book is an eye-opener, mainly because it is a collection of essays from ex-Muslims who have the ‘inside scoop’ on life, and the attitudes, in Islamic societies. One thing that emerges from the book is that there is no such thing as a ‘moderate’ Islam, any more than there is such thing as a ‘moderate’ communism.
The defenders of Islam like to say that Islamic fundamentalism is not the ‘true’ Islam of the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran; in the same vein, the Liberal defenders of communism like to say that ‘Communism (in the Soviet Union and elsewhere) wasn’t Marxism’. It is true that Marxist-Leninism did differ on a few points of doctrine, but: surely the citizens of Red Russia, China, etc., who had Marx and Engels rammed down their throats 24 hours a day, would have noticed any glaring contradiction between the Soviet-style system of communism and that preached in the works of Marx? The answer, as we know from history, is that they did not. And the same is true for Islam. The practices in Muslim countries which so many Westerners, accustomed to a high degree of personal freedom, are in the vast majority of cases sanctioned by the Koran: they are not a ‘deviation’ or ‘distortion’ or ‘perversion’ of the Islamic doctrine. If it were otherwise, liberals in Islamic countries could cite verse and chapter of the Koran and the Hadith (commentaries on the Koran) against the ‘religious police’ who arrest young Iranian men for ‘Western’ spiky hair-dos or young Yemeni couples caught holding hands; or the Saudi courts which prosecute adultery with cruel vehemence while ignoring rape.

It would be all very well if the Muslims restricted such practices to their own countries: but the massive numbers of Islamic immigrants into the West – five million in France, one million in the Netherlands, and so on – are intent on doing the same thing. This is so well known to nationalists that there is no need to recount, at great length, how Islamists attempt to spread similar practices in the West when they emigrate here. It shall suffice to quote from Guillaume Faye, from a talk delivered in Moscow on May the 17th, 2005:

Islam is again on the offensive. With single-minded persistence, its totalitarian and aggressive religion/ideology seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve already suffered three great assaults by Islam, which today stretches from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The first of these offensives was halted at Portiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third [in the form of the present invasion and colonization] is now underway [and virtually unopposed]. Islam has a long memory and its objective is to establish on our continent what [the leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the ayatollah] Khomeini called the “universal Caliphate.” The invasion of Europe has begun and the figures [testifying to its extent] are alarming. The continent, including Russia, is now occupied by 55 million Muslims, a number that increases at a 6 percent annual rate. In France, there are at least 6 million. Like those in Belgium and Britain, these French Muslims are starting to demand a share of political power. The government, for its part, simply refuses to take seriously their objective of transforming France into an Islamic Republic by the year 2020, when the demographic weight of the Arab/Muslim population will have become determinant. Meanwhile, it is financing the construction of Mosques throughout the country in the hope of buying social peace; there are already more than 2,000 in France, nearly double the number in Morocco. Islam is at present the second largest religion in France, behind Catholicism, but the largest in the numbers of practitioners.[The republic's president] Jacques Chirac has even declared that “France is now an Islamic power.” Everywhere in the West there prevails the unfounded belief that there’s a difference between Islam and “Islamism,” and that a Western, secularized, that is, moderate, Islam is possible. There’s no such thing. Every Muslim is potentially a jihadist. For Islam is a theocracy that confuses the spiritual with the temporal, faith with law, and seeks to impose its Shari’a [Islamic law] on a Europe whose civilizational precepts are absolutely incompatible with it.

8. The New Right and neoconservatism

The doctrine of neoconservatism is well-known, and derided by all – even the Rolling Stones have written a song about it. It is an ideology cobbled together by a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals, journalists, publicists and shady types mainly from America: Kristol, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, Friedman, Pipes, Sharansky, Feith, Frum, Abrams, Wolfowitz, Perle, to name a few. Bush Jr. and John McCain are the most famous political proponents of neoconservatism.
So what is it, in the New Right analysis, that makes neoconservatism so bad? The answer is, its messianic devotion to the cause of American-style democracy, liberalism, freedom, equality, the rule of law (its law), peace, which, in turn, sanctions the use of extreme force, ending up in extreme cruelty, against the countries which do not, in the neocon view, adhere to these noble precepts. Few people can deny, at this point in time, that the democratic crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan, have turned into a disaster for their respective peoples (the benefits from living under “democracy” aside); no-one can deny that the Iraqi and Afghani wars are being waged for what Bush, the neocons and their supporters see as the highest good. The two are not unrelated, as shall be argued below.

One of the biggest influences on New Right thinking is Carl Schmitt, who defined the political as the choosing of enemies:

Using Hobbes as a reference, Schmitt argues that the notion of the political consists in distinguishing between the foe and the friend (hostis vs. amicus). But whereas Hobbes transposes the state of nature to the realm of individuals and states, Schmitt enlarges the same concept by adding to it global significance. In Schmitt’s “state of nature” the subjects are individuals, countries, empires, nations, classes, and races. The process of depoliticization, undertaken by both Marxists and liberals in an effort to create a war-proof world, is a dangerous illusion that runs counter to human historical development. Human history it its entirety is primarily a history of perpetual struggle between foes and friends – the ocean of wars in the parentheses of peace. [Sunic, op. cit., p. 57].

Neoconservatives are portrayed, in the media, as warmongers who desire war for its own sake: but, in fact, they urge war for the sake of peace – and freedom, democracy, liberty, equality. (In other words, they are against politics, as Schmitt defines it). Such a war – a liberal war against the warmongers (like Saddam Hussein) – must take on, by necessity, a vicious character:

Should man – who is by definition a political being – refuse to use the political, he then also renounces his own humanity. And to those who use war in order to stop wars, Schmitt responds, “To curse war as a crime against humanity, and then to require from people that they wage war and that they will kill in war and let themselves be killed for the sake of war to end war, is a manifest deceit”. [Sunic, op. cit., p.59].

Suppose we were to live in a world in which politics had been abolished altogether: would that mean the end of war?

No, continues Schmitt; the decision would be reached to proclaim total war against those recalcitrant individuals or “warmongers” who refused to join this depoliticised polity. But this time, however, the war would be total and of titanic dimension, waged, naturally, in the name of eternal principles of justice and peace. The war against war will thus be conducted, as the definitely final war of humanity. Such a “necessary” war would be particularly intensive and inhuman because the enemy is no longer perceived as a person with a sense of justice, but rather as an “inhuman monster” who needs not only be repelled, but totally annihilated. “The adversary”, writes Schmitt, “is no longer called enemy, and consequently, he is placed aside humanity as an enemy of peace… as an outlaw. Another pacifist vocabulary takes shape, which ignores war, but [knows} only of executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacification, safeguarding of contracts, the international police, measures to protect peace...". [Sunic, op. cit., pp. 58-59].

The same applies when one’s enemy is declared to be “evil”: which is what Bush Jr., Blair and the neocons do regularly: Slobodan Milosevic is evil, Yassir Arafat is evil, Sheik Yassin of Hamas is evil, Saddam Hussein is evil, Osama bin Laden is evil, and now Ahmedinejad is evil. By declaring one’s enemy to be evil, one is sanctioning the most vicious treatment against him – and the civilian population of the countries from which they came. One cannot show any mercy to an individual, or political group, or country which is judged to be supremely wicked.

This is the main consequence of the moralisation of politics – the introducing an element (morals) into a sphere of activity which should be kept free of such things. In justifying his keeping the two separate, De Benoist writes in his essay, ‘On Politics’:

Politics cannot be subjected to morality, and even less confused with it, because they are not from the same order. A political command has nothing to do with a moral duty, with a “commandment” (Gebot) in the Biblical sense; it is only an order (Befehl). Similarly, political action does not depend on “truth” and “falsity.” To make a political decision, whether
by voting or by a governmental act, is to create the necessary conditions for achieving a concrete objective, not to state a truth. Finally, Socrates to the contrary notwithstanding, morality and politics cannot be identified because what is morally just, from a personal and private viewpoint, is not necessarily synonymous with what is politically good from a collective and public viewpoint. Thus, a political choice concerning the common good cannot be decided according to principles of private morality; it is different from a personal moral choice. As Freund writes, “morality and politics do not have the same goal. The former responds to an internal requirement and concerns the righteousness of personal acts, each one assuming fully the responsibility of its own behavior. Politics, on the other hand, responds to a social necessity, and whoever takes this road expects to take charge of the global fate of the collectivity.” [De Benoist, 'On politics', p. 16].

So why is neoconservatism more important, and more dangerous, than neoliberalism? Why is Islam a greater threat than the monotheistic creeds, e.g., Christianity? The answer is: both are political, by Schmitt’s definition. No-one can deny that there are Christians in the West engage in odious activities: there are plenty of Christian groups in Australia who work to bring in shiploads of African refugees, in the thousands, in the name of Christian love and humanity, making no distinction between white and non-white (both are equal in the eyes of God). But the days of Christians seeking to take over the world, to spread their creed by force, are over: whereas Islam never stopped. And the difference between Islam and Christianity is that the former raises the distinction between believer and un-believer to a political intensity: that is to say, it makes war on unbelievers. The same goes for the neoconservatives. The neoliberals believe in markets, freedom, competition, free trade and the rest, and more than a few of the neoliberal think-tanks endorse open borders and mass immigration (finding themselves, oddly enough, at one with the socialists on that issue); but they do not believe in spreading their ideas by force (indeed, they are a pacifist bunch), unlike the neoconservatives. Neoconservatism believes in force, war, to bring about liberal democracy: in other words, it is political.

9. Where we differ from the New Right

We may have given the impression, by this point, that Nationalist Alternative agrees with everything the European New Right believes in; but that is not the case. For one thing, De Benoist is a communitarian, federalist and regionalist because he opposes France’s traditional oppression of ethnic minorities such as the Basques, Bretons, Corsicans, Germans in the Alsace-Lorraine province.

Indeed, nationalism itself is a Jacobin plot designed to crush the rights of minorities:The arguments against “communitarianism” used nowadays are exactly the same that were used earlier to oppress minorities or to eradicate regional cultures and languages.

The paradox of this fight against particularities lies in the fact that, historically, it has always been waged in the name of a connection that is just as specific, but was presented as universal, and relied on its alleged universality to legitimate its designs for assimilation or domination. It is obvious in the Republic’s fight against regionalisms. As Savidan notes, “Brittany’s identity has not been negated in the name of the Ile de France, but in the name of reason, progress, freedom, equality and the universality of the Law.” The assimilation of republican values with “universal” values should not fool anyone. The attitude, which opposes the “Republic” to “community” identities, is only a linguistic trick… To proclaim that republican identity should prevail over all others is a way of saying that the connection to the
nation supersedes any other connections.

As Alain Touraine noted, “The goal is to eliminate differences and real social and cultural identities, and to place the relation to the nation above everything else.” Implicitly, it is a zero sum game where anything granted to specific identities would take away from the “Republic.” Common law is not perceived as what exceeds and includes duly recognized distinctive identities, but as what permits ignoring or eliminating them… All it takes to get out of this dilemma is to understand that the nation with its necessary common law can also recognize different identities, it can (re-)build them, instead of ignoring or destroying them. [De Benoist, 'On Identity', p. 35-36].

All this is true enough of France: but what of Australia? One cannot claim that the Australian national identity is (like the French) a construction of universalist egalitarians, bent on repressing inter-ethnic differences and identities. Our country is (prior to the mass immigration wave) ethnically homogenous: there are no Australian equivalents of the Basques, Bretons, Corsicans. Indeed, the Western colonial nations were all largely ethnically homogenous with the national identities of America, New Zealand, developing fairly recently, in countries which (before white settlement) could not be said to exist as such, i.e., as nations.

Secondly, De Benoist takes a soft stance on the number-one ethnic issue in France (and Europe) today: mass immigration from Africa and the Middle East.

When questioned on it in a 2003 interview, De Benoist evades it and descends into waffling:

T&P: In your opinion, is communitarianism an effective response to the problem
created by the introduction of millions of non-Europeans into Europe? Indeed, isn’t community important because it is a function of its specific place and time? For instance, there exist communities that are more rather than less dynamic, especially in terms of natality. Given the failure to integrate non-Europeans, the utopia of a Reconquista, and a communitarianism cloaking a demographic time-bomb, isn’t this
enough to make one pessimistic?

AdB: First, let me say that whenever men fail to find a solution to their problems, history finds one for them. Second, history is always open (which doesn’t mean that anything is possible). Finally, in posing a problem in a
way that has no solution, it shouldn’t be surprising that one is condemned to
pessimism. Today, in Europe there are 52.2 [sic] million Muslims (25 million in
Russia and 13.5 in Western Europe), a majority of whom are of European stock
[Note: This statement is not credible to me.]. The rest, as far as I know, are neither Black nor Asian. If Europeans are less demographically dynamic, it is not the fault of those who are. If they no longer know what their identity is, again this is not the fault of those who do. In face of peoples with strong identities, those lacking such an identity might reflect on why they have lost their own. To this end, they might look to the planetary spread of market values or the nature of Western nihilism. In an era of
general de territorialisation, it might also be useful to think of identity in ways that no longer depend on locale. For my part, I attach more importance to what men do, than to what they presume themselves to be. . . [Terre et Peuple 18, (Winter Solstice 2003), at http://foster.20megsfree.com/468.htm].

Now, politically, such an attitude is disastrous: the indigenous French do not want to waffling and evasions on the immigration issue, and they certainly do not want soft soap. Unfortunately, de Benoist has garnered himself the reputation of being a pedlar of soft soap, which has led to Guillaume Faye’s split from the Nouvelle Droit and GRECE. Indeed, Faye takes a more martial approach to these questions, which is more in line with the thinking of Nationalist Alternative and most Western nationalists.

Secondly, there is the question of the source of egalitarianism: does it stem from Judaism and Christianity? There are two objections to this.

The first is that, according to scholars of Judaism and Jewish culture and history, such as Kevin MacDonald, Michael Hoffmann III, and Jewish writers like Israel Shahak and Israel Shamir, one of the chief characteristics of Judaism is the distinction that religion makes (especially in the Talmud) between Jews and non-Jews. That distinction is, to put it mildly, radically inegalitarian: and certainly the Jewish God, Yahweh, is not the god of all peoples (especially not the god of the Christians, Christianity being a religion which, according to these authors, Judaism vehemently opposes).

The second is that the most radically inegalitarian society that the West has ever experienced – Europe in the Middle Ages – was a Christian one. The Europe of that period was based on a caste system, where everyone’s place, everyone’s role – as a serf, monk, merchant, warrior, ruler – was defined for them by God.

That is, the social, political and economic structure, which was non-democratic and hierarchical, was divinely ordained: an Evolian would say that it was ‘Traditionalist’. Compared to then, we live in very democratic, egalitarian and liberal times; so how it is it that liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism have made their furthest advances the more belief in Christianity has receded?
It could be argued, it is true, that today’s Christianity is radically egalitarian, especially in regard to immigration and race. One can find plenty of examples of Catholic and other Christian priests in the West who work ceaselessly to bring impoverished non-white immigrants from the Third World to the West to live here, permanently, to have those refugees enjoy a ‘better life’.

Immigration is seen as a kind of wealth-redistribution: if one cannot redistribute the wealth of the Western countries to, say, the African nations, then one must bring the peoples of those nations to the West to enjoy that wealth. This is a way of making people equal. (Jean Raspail, in his
classic novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), had one character remark that such
priests had, in their ideology, replaced the Kingdom of Heaven with the Kingdom on Earth, here and now, to be achieved by redistributing the West’s wealth to the Third World – a deed which was to be accomplished chiefly by encouraging the Third World to migrate to the West).

10.The pros and cons of populism

All Australian nationalists accept that Australia’s cultural identity, and even the existence itself of the Australian Anglo-Celt/Anglo-Saxon/European biological stock, is endangered by immigration: to judge by the immigration policies of the Australian governments of the past few decades, the intentions of our liberal democratic masters seems to be to turn Australia into a Malaysian-style republic – one third Malay, one third Chinese, one third Indian. Sydney has been hit by a massive wave of Chinese immigration; Melbourne, Indian. (If the multiculturalists have their way, Sydney will
be renamed New Shanghai, Melbourne New Mumbai, and Australia itself will be
renamed the Republic of Chindia). The question is: what do we who care for this
country to do about it? Do we go ahead and form a populist political party? Do we, being an English-speaking, mostly Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic nation, biologically and culturally, follow the BNP model?

Ultimately, daydreams by some of a direct revolution aside, it is arguable whether one can succeed in nationalist politics without the vehicle of a political party, if only in conjunction with other, extra-parliamentary forms of political activity: namely, the struggle to get one’s message across in the political domain, ?in the street (through demonstrations and community building grassroots activities), as well as in the intellectual domain. A political party is very effective in organising large numbers of nationalists for political activity, of raising large sums of money for activism,
advertising and the rest.

And, for our repatriation policies to succeed, we need the powers that reside in the self-governance of one’s territory: the South African strategy – where leaderless mobs rampage through immigrant areas, trying to persuade them to
leave the country through force and terror – is not open to us. Eventually, then, as long as the liberal democratic system presides, it would be good for Nationalist Alternative or any nationalist group to start contesting winnable council seats in conjunction with extra-parliamentary tactics (e.g., building a strong local community presence).

The electoral path is always difficult for nationalists: even One Nation, at the height of its popularity, had trouble getting the requisite 500 signatures (from party members) to register itself as a party competing in federal elections. So we have a long way to go, as do the other Australian nationalist groups (which have, so far, only constituted themselves as unregistered political parties).

The question is one of tactics: should we follow the Nick Griffin approach?
Nick Griffin, and the BNP, are controversial topics in nationalist circles. One only has to look at Griffin’s champion of Churchill, his mimicking of Churchill’s ‘V for victory’ sign. Churchill, in traditional British nationalism, is seen as a villain, not a hero. Churchill bankrupted and ruined Britain financially during the Second World War, made Britain into a vassal of America and thus removed Britain’s status as a world power; his actions were instrumental in the decline, and break up, of the British Empire – the most far-flung Empire the world has ever seen. On top of that, Churchill
appeased Stalin, helped, along with the Americans, Stalin win his war (through
generous Lend-Lease aid) and handed over half of Europe to communism (including
Poland, on whose behalf the war was supposedly fought).

In short: Churchill, as a politician, was a failure: a statesman aims at increasing power for his State, not throwing it away, or rather, giving it away, as Churchill did. All this thinking is very “Nazi” in Griffin’s view, no doubt, but nevertheless, it is the cold, hard truth.

On top of that, foreign policy aside, can one name one accomplishment of Churchill’s while he was in office? (And remember, he was prime minister, not once, but twice).Churchill’s enemy Hitler had his autobahns, his Strength through Joy leisure cruises, youth labour brigades, Munich Olympics, Nuremberg rallies… Churchill, on the other hand, did hardly anything. He was a negative – a man defined by his opposition to something, not by his deeds.

But Griffin’s championing of Churchill is a clever tactic, in Britain at least. After all, the British liberal democratic establishment venerates Churchill – Churchill, the ultimate British Antifascist, the man who was prepared to destroy an empire (his own)to prove a point, the man who united the British cause with that of the progressive, humanist Soviet Union. By flashing the ‘V for victory’ sign, and waving the Union Jack (and the St George’s Cross) wherever he goes, Griffin seizes the enemy’s own weapon and turns it against them. Like the seafarers of old, who painted eyes on the
bows of their ships (to ward off evil spirits), Griffin’s watered-down, respectable, establishment form of nationalism (so redolent of the flag-waving ‘Britpop’ music movement in the 1990s) repels the enemy – who always seek to pin the label ‘fascist’,‘Nazi’, ‘anti-Semite’ on the British nationalist. Likewise, Griffin’s incorrigible philo-Semitism and Zionism (a tactic Nationalist Alternative rejects) can also be viewed (and is, in establishment quarters) as a cynical stunt.

The same goes for the philo-Semitism of the other Euro-populist parties – the Front National, the Danish People’s Party, the Dutch Party for Freedom.
Suppose that Griffin placed a large ‘Free Ernst Zundel’ icon on the BNP website: how would that help the cause of British nationalism, and the British themselves? The answer is, it would not. Zundel is a supremely important figure in German nationalism, but not in British. The truth is that Britain’s geopolitical decline and drifting into the American sphere of influence (which began in the 1930s, but was sealed by Churchill) did not affect British life in an immediately obvious way: not its culture, traditions, sense of decency, the warmth, friendliness and good humour of its people. It was the reverse immigration from Britain’s non-white colonies, acquired as the result of its own past imperialism (and not the United States’ newer imperialism),
and the decade of Blairism, which changed that, turning the British into the country of over-paid, binge-drinking, depressed, complaining yobs that they are today. And Blairism, and multi-cultism, is a recent phenomenon which have little, to do with the events of the war. So why go on about Zundel, or Churchill’s perfidy?

While the BNP does still have some measure of co-operation with German nationalists, it recognises that the problems of the British must be solved by the British themselves; and that British nationalists cannot expend time and effort on solving Germany’s problems for it. (Indeed, German nationalist groups like the NPD never worry about the British, or French, or the Danes or any of Germany’s ‘European brothers’).

At the same time Australian nationalists must reject any appeals to or pacts with Zionism, which, as a cursory examination of the Jewish community ethnic media reveals, opposes, through various channels and representative organisations, white ethnocentrism and European ethnic nationalism in western nations.

Indeed in many cases, such organisations are strong proponents of multiculturalism, and helped craft the racial and vilification laws in Australia that limit freedom of speech and the battle of Australian nationalists in promoting the Australian identity.

As for being ‘philo-Semitic’, we simply advocate being ‘philo’ Australian only, and reject culture pandering to non Australian, non European movements.
Griffin justifies the BNP’s ideology on the grounds that its new-found ’sensibility’ and ‘respectability’ has been the cause of their electoral success.

Now, we unsure that they have been that successful, electorally: the council seats they have won make up less than 1% of the total. But we believe that the BNP’s policies can be justified on grounds of economy: their activists save more time, more effort, by tackling purely British problems which are part and parcel of recent British political history. Ernst Zundel, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, and all the other subjects which Western nationalists devote so much time and energy to, are not as relevant to the British cause as the large amount of time given to them.

On top of that, the nationalists who have competed in elections (and managed to win seats) have had some measure of success in stemming the immigration tide through legislation. One only has to look at Italy’s Northern League and the Danish People’s Party, which have managed to get anti-immigration laws passed. If centre-right liberal democratic parties have been forced to pass these laws (in order to satisfy their far right coalition partners), so much the better for the people of Italy and Denmark respectively.

What is being argued for here is not “pragmatism”, “revisionism”, “opportunism”
(which the likes of Griffin so often get accused of), but economy. This boils down to the principle, each nation for itself. Here, the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Celts and fellow Europeans who have become Australian are on their own and need not look for, or at least depend on, Britain, Germany, Russia for wholesale import of tactics or help.

Self sufficiency and tactics that will work in local conditions is what is needed.However: it is not the case that populism is the right way for nationalists to proceed forward. Populism, after all, means doing what the ordinary person, the average person, the man in the street (who is not a politician, or a journalist, or an intellectual) wants: populism aims at breaking down the distinction between the political class (who are separate from the people) and the people – that is, bringing politics to the
level of the people, or, more accurately, the little man. Which is why the rhetoric of the populist BNP resembles that of the tabloid Daily Mail, which shares the same concerns as the BNP on immigration, Islam, etc. Unfortunately, the BNP ideology is pitched at the same intellectual (and cultural) level of the Mail, going no further – and at times, it resembles that of a disgruntled, old unreformed Tory, always moaning about the EU, youth gangs, immigration, political correctness gone mad and the like…

The correct relationship between the Australian people – who still possess some spark of nationalism and racialism, despite years of multi-culti brainwashing and conditioning – and a nationalist party resembles that between the working-class and a communist party. The Leninist ideology is that a communist party is made up of people who are not of the working-class, but who instruct the working-class, direct it, lead it, educate it; the goal is to foment class consciousness in the workers, and eventually lead them in a revolutionary uprising against capitalism.

In the same way, a nationalist party needs to foment national consciousness in the Australian people, and lead them in a revolutionary uprising against the multi-cultist liberal democratic, capitalist system. That revolution may be drastic and immense or a sudden big electoral breakthrough – both unlikely in apathetic recreational Australia – or more likely a slow breakdown in people’s allegiance to the current system and realignment along new lines. An Australian rebirth if you like. The Australian people want race-based immigration policies, but don’t know how to about getting them: indeed, many
of them are too terrified by political correctness to stand up to Islam, Chinese immigration, Indian immigration, and the destruction of Australian culture and the Australian way of life.They need a nationalist organisation that will remove that fear, show them the way and lead them forward.

We nationalists should put trust in the people, and in Australia, the Australian people. The Cronulla riot, for incident, was a completely spontaneous expression of Australian nationalism and racialism – celebrating and defending the values of Australian culture against Lebanese immigration and Islam. The media tries to link the Cronulla riots to nationalists, but really, Cronulla happened without our help.

The incident resembles the spontaneous Chinese peasant risings against wealthy
landowners in rural China in the 1930s – which occurred any prompting or direction from the Chinese communist party, which, at the time, devoted its energies to fomenting a proletarian uprising in the cities (it took Mao Tse-Tung to see the revolutionary potential of the Chinese peasant movement).