Article: Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction

Graham D. Macklin, "Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction" ("Patterns of Prejudice",
39 [3], September 2005: pp. 301-26):

www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/00313220500198292

Abstract: "Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a 'national-anarchist' groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist 'anarchist' agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move 'beyond left and right', transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism.

"Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident 'national-revolutionaries' who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization."

Excerpts: "This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism's cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. [...] Even [Southgate's] assimilation of Noam Chomsky's scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [...] In order to 'change society completely' the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy [... .]

"NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism's humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as 'infected' with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism. In its place Southgate has propagated a 'third position' anarchism based not on 'moral' rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the 'natural order' from which every group with 'insurrectionist potential' could unite to destroy 'One World' tyranny with a 'primal bloodlust'. [...] Southgate's view of 'Traditional Anarchy' is suffused with [Julius] Evola's advocacy of 'self-rule by an elite' and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by 'genetics' that, despite its alleged 'anarchism', looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial 'kingship'. [...]

"To liberate Europe from the all-encompassing 'blanket cosmopolitanism' of American-led consumerism, not to mention the 'occupying force' of its military presence in Europe, Southgate advocates relinquishing 'the very idea of the West'. [...] The increasing ability of groupuscules like the NRF to absorb and mirror left-wing and environmental causes, effortlessly refracting their concerns about globalization and liberal democracy through their own antisemitic and racist framework, creates a dangerous conflation between ecology and anti-immigration as a way of restoring the 'organic balance' of nature."

In January 2005, Southgate founded the French "Nouvelle Droite"-inspired "New Right" group in the UK which defines itself as "opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism and fight[ing] to restore the eternal values and principles that have become submerged beneath the corrosive tsunami of the modern world".

This article offers extensive bibliographical references to related literature.

Graham D. Macklin is now a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Institute of Design, Culture and the Arts at the University of Teesside.