CasaPound

Lately CasaPound has been getting more notice on the US hard right, with several mentions at AltRight (the most recent, a mocking one) and Counter-Currents.

Personally, I find CP an interesting outfit – I’m sympathetic to its identitarianism, its rejection of race-hatred, its tactical creativity and its critique of capitalism, but I reject its simplistic, Duginesque anti-Americanism and I’m not ready to sign up for il Duce‘s fan-club.

In any case, a recent interview with Casa Pound leader and founder Gianluca Iannone at Identitaria.es is worth reading.

For example, responding to the interviewer’s questions regarding CasaPound’s embrace of the identitarian slogan “0% Racism, 100% Identity,” Iannone said:

Casa Pound does not accept [the theory of] the Clash of Civilizations, as propounded by Huntington and Fallaci; we do not accept the models of the Anglo-Saxon right. We believe in the spirit of Mediterranean fascism. For us, the defense of our identity does not involve the negation of the identity of others. Our enemy is not any other race or culture; the true enemy is an economic and social system which has as its goal homogenization and exploitation on a global scale.

See here for an interview with Iannone in English from last year and here for one of my previous posts touching on the group.

OK, OK…

… so I admit that, when it comes to politics, I’ve been sulking pretty much since November 6th, not having really come to terms with the re-election and all that it portends.

But, after today’s inauguration speech, I guess it’s back to work.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

“What threats have replaced [Communism for you]?”

Today, the communist threat, collapsed for 20 years, has been replaced by another deadly utopia: Globalism, new internationalist ideology and materialism that has the sole aim to maximize the profits of big capitalists at the expense of the Nations and their peoples.

“There is too Islamism and its martyrs. All these ideologies have in common to undermine the foundations of the Hellenic-Christian civilization and to substitute another, which is not ours.

I noticed this translation of an interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen at the Right World news portal. Although the translation is at times awkward, it is still readable and worth a look.

(The piece was lifted in turn from the English language Pravda, which occasionally has something interesting, but more often reads like a Russian – and crazier – version of the NY Post. See, for example the article “revealing” that the claims of Soviet involvement in the Katyn Massacre were just part of a “wave of libel and slander against Soviet power… meticulously fabricated by revisionists…” or check out US political coverage along the lines of The Ku Klux Klan once again controls Indiana. On second thought…)

Paris versus the Monoculture

Starbucks in Montmartre?  No thanks!

From Paris Pride:

With the support of the Bloc Identitaire.

Holiday Thoughts

I don’t share the European New Right’s ultimately simplistic and reductionist anti-Americanism, which so often comes across as mere snobbery, but, watching the coverage of the Black Friday madness, I find it harder to argue against.

As Zentropa Iberia reminds us, quoting George Clemenceau:

The United States is the only nation which, miraculously, has gone from barbarism to decadance without the typical interval of civilization.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(ZI lifted this in turn from Cloaca Maxima.)

“Not My President”

The shrill and obnoxious triumphalism of the victors, celebrating the historic defeat of the historic American nation (or what remains of it) which the election of Obama represents, reflects an important truth which should show the way forward for a populist right.

For mainstream Republicans, concerned over nothing but winning elections, the lesson, of course, is that they should try to look more like Democrats in the hope of putting together enough votes to eke out short term victories.

Initial separatist responses are healthier but so obviously unrealistic as to be quite unhelpful as a discourse around which to build the sort of alternative movement necessary to resist the current regime, while avoiding cooptation by and ultimately transcending the GOP.

In this regard, the campaign being waged in France by the Bloc Identitaire and related organizations against Socialist President Francois Hollande is of interest.

Identifying 3 key issues – giving the vote to foreigners, legalization of illegals, promotion of gay marriage and adoption – the BI’s posters and demonstrations proclaim “Hollande is not my President”.

The time when Americans were a people, divided ideologically perhaps, but still one people in a meaningful way, has passed.  As the commentators and celebrants have made clear, Obama is not my president.

Acknowledging this reality and organizing around it seems like a good first step.

Looking Forward

Some of us are often accused of always “crying wolf.”

But it is worth noting that one day the wolf came. – Pat Buchanan

For a relentlessly pessimistic but irrefutably clear-eyed look to the future, see Pat Buchanan’s The Coming Age of Austerity.

Still, in spite of the power of his words, there is an oddly passive – even defeatist – feel to this piece. Perhaps because he cannot conceive of politics beyond the boundaries of the two-party electoral system, Buchanan ignores the possibility that the process of societal collapse he envisions might call forth resistance.

Americans have a tradition of populist struggle against the elites. Every political act and word needs to be focused on the effort to re-kindle this. Mere hand-wringing counts for nothing.