“Your community action ideas are all well and good, but what can nationalist organisations do in their own right? Is there a role for revolutionary nationalists during this era of populism, or do we just sit and watch and wait?”
That, in a nutshell, is the gist of the response I’ve had from a number of serious, long-standing nationalist activists to the proposals thus far in my What Is to Be Done? series. Very sensible questions, which deserve and need a serious answer, so here it is:
The rise of the populists pushed nationalist parties off the electoral turf which the mainstream parties’ old conspiracy of silence over immigration and its woes had handed us on a plate. The loss of this space to the populists led to electoral collapse, which resulted in turn in demoralisation, exacerbated internal divisions, a shortage of new recruits and organisational atrophy.
Griffin, Le Pen, Voigt, Fiore - all led parties which were answered, and blocked, by the development of populist safety valves. It is time for a realist, constructive way forward.
With the old electoral road effectively blocked, genuine nationalist parties have tended to suffer from a lack of direction and a resulting lack of realistic ambitions and targets. The shift from real life activities and meetings to online ‘political entertainment’ and generally anonymous chatter has only compounded the problem.
This is good for the key figures in online nationalism; people who are not constantly having to reach into their own pockets for transport, leaflets, papers, election deposits and to fund their organisation’s real-life infrastructure, have disposable income. When just a handful of people buy one of the new breed of ‘nationalist influencers’ a coffee, or pay to ask a question or to get a public ‘thank you’, it’s of no real benefit.
But when thousands of people are chipping in every month, and when all their main platforms are monetised, these people are laughing all the way to the bank. Especially as their overheads and workload are a fraction of what it would cost to run a genuine organisation.
Some of these people are making tens of thousands of pounds a month – and apart from the occasional special appeal there’s nothing being done to which they are expected to contribute accordingly. Instead of ploughing some of their gains back into the Cause, they can upgrade to a new BMW whenever the fancy takes them.
The punters also benefit. They are able to assuage their guilt at their inactivity by ‘doing their bit’ online. Liking and sharing social media posts and videos are much easier and generally safer than walking around the streets wearing rosettes and carrying clipboards and leaflets. It’s particularly attractive to Generation Autism, who are terrified of leaving their bedrooms and having to interact in person with real people.
The online simulacrum of nationalism is thus great for the grifters, the lazy, the cowards and the incels. The only things it’s not good for are the Cause and our people.
The question, then, is what can replace the blocked parliamentary road as the stimulus and to provide goals for genuine IRL nationalist parties and organisations?
They are certainly needed. If the field of ideas is left to the populists, patriotic sentiments and people will be perpetually used and abused by various devious vested interests. Without the analytic powers of ideology, informed criticism and educated idealism, they will be manipulated into fighting the enemies of our enemies, rather than contesting for our own collective interests.
In any case, you can’t be a community leader at the age of 23. Teenagers and young men can protect their community, they can – if they develop real-life skills – do heavy physical work for their community. They can serve, and even entertain, their community. But they cannot lead it. That’s a role for men and women at least a decade older.
Older people will not readily take order from impetuous youngsters, so there’s no point even trying things that involve that. As respecters of the God-given and natural order of things, we must remember that, for the younger generation, political idealism and activism go hand-in-hand with their central role at the heart of the community’s expressions of physical presence and power.
Further, it is absolutely natural for young men to want to change the world, generally by being active with people like themselves. Having children and interacting with other parents eventually broadens their horizons and changes their possible fields of operation. But, in the interim years, political activism is something to which young people will constantly be drawn, and in which those who remain single will tends to stay. Nationalist strategy must therefore be geared to ensuring that this activism has achievable and measurable goals, and is not self-destructive.
It is vital that involvement in movement activism doesn’t restrict options in later life, any further than is unavoidable on account of bigoted totalitarianism of the liberal-left. It is the duty of those leading and advocating for nationalist movements to encourage their followers to avoid own goals – an own goal being something you do voluntarily which tends to cut you off from normal people and to help our opponents to demonise nationalism.
It is also an unfortunate fact that there are a considerable number of us who are sufficiently ‘demonised’ already that our presence in many community action programmes would only be a source of danger and potential division.
This is true not only for those of us already ‘exposed’ as “dangerous far-right extremists”, but also some thousands of mainly younger people who have been sucked into loud-mothed pseudo-nationalist ‘parties’ online.
They may think it was all anonymous but, given the level of infiltration and surveillance of these operations, and the ease with which their data is now harvested, many of these good-hearted but naive enthusiasts will in due course find themselves to be politically ‘toxic’ to normal people.If these people want to play an active role in future, involvement in non-electoral, issues-driven campaigning is likely to be the only outlet available.
There was a time when the primary role of each generation of nationalists was to spread their ideas. For decades, active nationalism was largely confined to passing samizdat pamphlets and rare books from hand to hand, meeting occasionally in the back rooms of smoky pubs, just to waken and educate a few so that they would ‘know the score’ and be able to turn to hand the torch on.
Even only a couple of decades ago, the primary focus of most nationalist movements, even in elections, was to try to give people advance warning of where things were headed, to try to wake people up to the dangers coming down the line.
All that has now changed. Huge numbers of our people are already awake. Those who don’t see, or profess not to see, the problems and threats which surround our people right now probably never will. There are far more people who understand the danger, but believe that “it’s too late, nothing can be done”, than there are those who could still be woken up.
The primary job of revolutionary nations, then, is no longer to “wake people up”, but to find ways to enthuse, organise and empower some of the vast numbers who already are.
This is fortunate, since the growing intolerance of the liberal Powers That Be is overwhelmingly and largely unavoidably focussed on silencing discussion of the problems they have created. Advocating and preparing positive responses, therefore, it not only the wise and constructive thing to do, it is also very much safer.
How, then, is this to be done? The first thing to acknowledge is that, while we can make informed guesses, we really cannot know what the future holds. All we can know for sure is that it will be awash with threats to be met and pregnant with opportunities to be seized.
What do we need to fend off those threats and to grasp those opportunities? Organisation, equipment and skills. Alertness to opportunities and the will to exploit them.
And lots and lots of hard work in real life initiatives. What sort of initiative is exactly what we must explore in the next part of this series but, for now, there’s spring sunshine coming through my window and I’m going out to seize the day.
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