Troy Southgate | |
---|---|
Born | Troy Southgate 22 July 1965 London, England |
Education | University of Kent at Canterbury (1994–97) |
Occupation(s) | Far-right activist and publisher |
Years active | 1984–present |
Known for | Founding 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]
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, he and other ENM members founded the National Revolutionary Faction.[ citation needed ] 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. [3]
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]
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. [4]
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. [5] 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]
Southgate was influenced by Evola's view that feminism had led to a breakdown in what the feminine and masculine roles had to offer. [6]
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.
Giulio Cesare Andrea "Julius" Evola was an Italian far-right philosopher. Evola regarded his values as traditionalist, aristocratic, martial, and imperialist. An eccentric thinker in Fascist Italy, he also had ties to Nazi Germany; in the post-war era, he was an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant Right.
The Iron Guard was a Romanian militant revolutionary religious fascist movement and political party founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or the Legionary Movement. It was strongly anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic. It differed from other European far-right movements of the period due to its spiritual basis, as the Iron Guard was deeply imbued with Romanian Orthodox Christian mysticism.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, born Corneliu Zelinski and commonly known as Corneliu Codreanu, was a far right Romanian politician and the founder and charismatic leader of the Iron Guard or The Legion of the Archangel Michael, an ultranationalist and violently antisemitic organization active throughout most of the interwar period. Generally seen as the main variety of local fascism, and noted for its mystical and Romanian Orthodox-inspired revolutionary message, the Iron Guard gained prominence on the Romanian political stage, coming into conflict with the political establishment and the democratic forces, and often resorting to terrorism. The Legionnaires traditionally referred to Codreanu as Căpitanul, and he held absolute authority over the organization until his death.
Patrick Antony Harrington is a far-right British political activist and writer of Irish Catholic family origins, who has published pamphlets by the Social Credit advocate and former editor of the Liverpool Newsletter, Anthony Cooney, about prominent Catholic writers such as G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hilaire Belloc. He is currently general secretary of Solidarity – The Union for British Workers and a director of the Third Way, a think tank.
Political Soldier is a political concept associated with the Third Position. It played a leading role in Britain's National Front from the late 1970s onwards under young radicals Nick Griffin, Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland of the Official National Front. The term was used to indicate an almost fanatical devotion to the cause of nationalism, which its supporters felt was needed to bring about a revolutionary change in society.
International Third Position (ITP) was a neo-fascist organisation formed by the breakaway faction of the British National Front, led by Roberto Fiore, an ex-member of the Italian far-right movement Third Position.
Strasserism is an ideological strand of Nazism which adheres to revolutionary nationalism and to economic antisemitism, which conditions are to be achieved with radical, mass-action and worker-based politics that are more aggressive than the politics of the Hitlerite leaders of the Nazi Party. Named after brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, the ideology of Strasserism is a type of Third Position, right-wing politics in opposition to Communism and to Hitlerite Nazism.
David Wulstan Myatt, also known by the pseudonym Abdulaziz ibn Myatt al-Qari, is a British author, religious leader, far-right and former Islamist militant, most notable for allegedly being the political and religious leader of the White nationalist theistic Satanist organization Order of Nine Angles (ONA) from 1974 onwards. He is also the founder of Numinous Way and a former Muslim.
Traditionalism, also sometimes known as Perennialism, posits the existence of a perennial wisdom or perennial philosophy, primordial and universal truths which form the source for, and are shared by, all the major world religions. Historian Mark Sedgwick identifies René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Julius Evola, Mircea Eliade, Frithjof Schuon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Alexandr Dugin to be the seven most prominent Traditionalists.
The Official National Front (ONF) was one of two far-right groups to emerge in the United Kingdom in 1986 following a split within the National Front. Following ideological paths that were mostly new to the British far-right, the ONF stood opposed to the more traditionalist Flag Group.
The Third Position is a set of neo-fascist political ideologies that were first described in Western Europe following the Second World War. Developed in the context of the Cold War, it developed its name through the claim that it represented a third position between the capitalism of the Western Bloc and the communism of the Eastern Bloc.
The Nouvelle Droite, sometimes shortened to the initialism ND, is a far-right political movement which emerged in France during the late 1960s. The Nouvelle Droite is the origin of the wider European New Right (ENR). Various scholars of political science have argued that it is a form of fascism or neo-fascism, although the movement eschews these terms.
National-anarchism is a radical right-wing nationalist ideology which advocates racial separatism, racial nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and racial purity. National-anarchists syncretize ethnic nationalism with anarchism, mainly in their support for a stateless society, while rejecting anarchist social philosophy. The main ideological innovation of national-anarchism is its anti-state palingenetic ultranationalism. National-anarchists advocate homogeneous communities in place of the nation state. National-anarchists claim that those of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes while striving to be politically horizontal, economically non-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.
Jonathan David Anthony Bowden was an English far-right activist, orator, and writer. A member of the Conservative Party in the early 1990s, he later became involved in far-right organisations, including the British National Party (BNP). Bowden has been described as a "cult Internet figure" amongst the far-right movement, even several years after his death.
Franco "Giorgio" Freda is an Italian neo-fascist intellectual, author, revolutionary and political theorist. A major figure of the post-war far-right politics in Italy, Freda has been particularly associated with neo-fascism and revolutionary nationalism, advocating for a radical transformation of society along nationalist and revolutionary lines.
Massimo Scaligero was an Italian spiritual teacher and member of the UR Group, which gathered occultists and mystics. A mentee of Julius Evola, Scaligero espoused fierce antisemitic views which were combined with esotericism and anthroposophy into a system of "integral racism" with the aim to bring Germany and Italy closer together in the same way it would the spiritual and the biological.
Carlo Costamagna was an Italian lawyer and academic noted as a theorist of corporatism. He worked closely with Benito Mussolini and his fascist movement.
Derek Holland is a figure on the European far-right noted for his Catholic Integralism.
National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks and colloquially as Nazbols, is a syncretic political movement committed to combining ultranationalism and Bolshevik communism.
Authoritarian conservatism is a political ideology that seeks to uphold order, tradition and hierarchy, often with forcible suppression of radical and revolutionary enemies such as communists, Nazis, and anarchists. Authoritarian conservative movements and regimes have included Chiangism in China, Metaxism in Greece, and Francoism in Spain.