Troy Southgate

Last updated

Troy Southgate
Born
Troy Southgate

(1965-07-22) 22 July 1965 (age 60)
London, England
Education University of Kent at Canterbury (1994–97)
Occupation(s) Far-right activist and publisher
Years active1984–present
Known forFounding national-anarchism

Troy Southgate (born 22 July 1965) is a British far-right political activist and a self-described national-anarchist. He has been affiliated with far-right and fascist groups, such as National Front and International Third Position. He co-created the think tank New Right alongside Jonathan Bowden and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Front Press. Southgate's movement has been described as working 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". [1]

Contents

Far-right activism

Southgate joined the National Front in 1984 and began writing for publications such as National Front News and Nationalism Today.[ citation needed ] According to Searchlight magazine, in 1987 he joined the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). [2]

In 1998, Southgate and other ENM members founded the National Revolutionary Faction. [3] In 2001, Southgate and the NRF were the subject of a Sunday Telegraph article, in which the NRF was accused of being a neo-Nazi organisation infiltrating animal rights groups to spread fascism. [4]

Southgate's national-anarchist ideology has been described as an opportunistic appropriation of aspects of leftist counter-culture in the service of a racist, far-right ideology. [1] His formulation of it was influenced by Richard Hunt a founder of Green Anarchist who had been expelled from the group for his embrace of far right views in the early 1990s to form the group Alternative Green. In the late 1990s, Hunt published a book-length expansion of his earlier pamphlet The Natural Society, entitled To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core. [5] [3] According to scholar of fascism, Graham Macklin, To End Poverty argues

that poverty in the ‘periphery’ is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the ‘core’. This ‘progress’ represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and ‘biologically unhealthy’ population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards ‘total social breakdown’. Hunt's panacea is to return to ‘the original affluent society’ of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a ‘peck order’ of ‘respect and influence’, bound by ‘kinship’, that would re-establish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism. [3]

Alternative Green would later merge with Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective, which was formed in 1989 to discuss "European identities, autonomies and initiatives" and which emerged from the fascist National Front's "cultural" association IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic), and had been publishing Hunt's material. Southgate encountered Hunt's writings in Perspectives, leading to a re-orientation of his ideas and the shaping of his idea of "Traditional Anarchy" based on decentralised communities. [3] Southgate later noted that “to say that we have been hugely influenced by Richard Hunt’s ideas is an understatement”. [6] According to Macklin, writing in 2006:

This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of ‘folk autonomy’ rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization... Alternative Green and its ‘overriding aversion to the Capitalist system’ was therefore an ‘ideal platform for formulating practical strategy’ to oppose capitalism. Alternative Green was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a ‘sincere’ alliance of ‘anti-system’ protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe... The furore led to Hunt's further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate's frequent contributions to Alternative Green, his views have not permeated further within the far right. Denounced as a ‘fascist’ Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green. [3]

Hunt fell ill and relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green to Southgate. After one issue under his editorship it was suspended and replaced with a new publication entitled Terra Firma. [3] [6]

Black Front Press

Black Front Press was established in 2010 by Southgate to print his biography of Otto Strasser, and has subsequently become a publisher of historical, political, philosophical and esoteric texts. [7]

Views

Southgate, who graduated in history and theology from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1997, comes from a non-religious background—although he converted to Catholicism in 1987 and was in that same year, according to Searchlight , associated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). [2] Southgate later joined the International Third Position (ITP), believing it to be ‘the legitimate heir to the National Revolutionary Movement in Britain’, though he eventually broke with it in 1992, accusing its membership of gross financial impropriety, hypocrisy, racial miscegenation and of practising a ‘bourgeois’ form of reactionary ultra-Catholic fascism incompatible with the ‘revolutionary’ nationalism that, he claimed, they had betrayed. [1]

According to Searchlight, [2] in 1998 Southgate was partly the subject of a smear piece by former colleagues in the ITP, in the booklet Satanism and its Allies – The Nationalist Movement Under Attack, published by Final Conflict, and linking him and others that left the ITP to Satanism, with which he has never been involved. [8] Graham D. Macklin refers to this slander as an "attack" due to leaving the "staunchly Catholic ITP" although he points out that it was only later, after the original publication of the booklet, that the ITP decided for some reason to produce an update that "singled out Southgate as a 'Satanist' and 'pro-faggot'". [1]

Southgate, to further his ideology of "revolutionary nationalism", subsequently formed the English National movement, which denounced Hitler and Mussolini as "reactionary charlatans" whilst praising fascists he felt had represented the Third Position more sincerely, such as Otto Strasser, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and José Antonio Primo de Rivera. [1] Around this time he began to justify British ethnic homogeneity, which he claimed was "not racist", by recourse to the European New Right concept of Ethnopluralism. [1]

Southgate rejected Catholicism in 1997, and gravitated towards the extreme-right interpretation of traditionalism espoused by Julius Evola, particularly Evola's "spiritual racism", and synthesized this with Carl Jung's notion of the collective unconscious in order to push the idea of a "primeval Aryan psyche". [1] The multiplicity of his influences led to his espousing an idiosyncratic form of palingenetic ultranationalism that divorced itself from the "artificial" concept of the nation-state. [1]

Southgate subsequently incorporated green-anarchism into his perspective in order to counter the 'corrosive influence of urbanism and decay', and embraced neo-pagan and heathen groups. [1] Along with like-minded musicians, he sought to diffuse the ideals of Mithraic paganism and Nordic folk myths into music-orientated youth cultures. [1]

Bibliography

Southgate has edited in excess of 100 books, chiefly through Black Front Press, but the following is a list of titles published under his own name.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Graham D. Macklin (September 2005). "Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction" . Patterns of Prejudice. 39 (3): 301–326. doi:10.1080/00313220500198292. S2CID   144248307.
  2. 1 2 3 Adam Carter, "Troy Southgate – A Timeline", Searchlight, January 2012, pp. 7–8.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Macklin, Graham D. (2005). "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction" . Patterns of Prejudice. 39 (3): 301–326. doi:10.1080/00313220500198292. ISSN   0031-322X . Retrieved 15 May 2025.
  4. ↑ Daniel Foggo, "Neo-nazis join animal rights groups", Sunday Telegraph, 16 June 2001
  5. ↑ Connor, John (March 2004). "Two Decades of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist's first twenty years". Green Anarchist . No. 71–72. Retrieved 15 May 2025– via The Anarchist Library.
  6. 1 2 Sunshine, Spencer (2008). "Rebranding fascism: national anarchists" (PDF). The Public Eye. Vol. Winter 2008.
  7. ↑ Adam Carter,"Packaging hate – the New Right publishing networks" Archived 26 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine , Searchlight, 1 March 2012
  8. ↑ Anton Shekhovtsov (2011). "Far-Right Music and the Use of Internet: Final Conflict and the British National Party Compared". In Paul Jackson, Gerry Gable (ed.). Far-Right.com: Nationalist Extremism on the Internet. Ilford: Searchlight. pp. 35–46.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.