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]
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 |
Far-right activism
editSouthgate 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
editBlack 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]
Views
editSouthgate, 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]
Bibliography
editSouthgate 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.
- Tradition and Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate
- Hitler: The Adjournment
- Nazis, Fascists or Neither: Ideological Credentials of the British Far Right, 1987-94
- Otto Strasser: The Life and Times of a German Socialist
- Adventures in Counter-Culture: Politics, Music, Film and Literature
- Further Writings: Essays on Philosophy, Religion, History & Politics
- Behold the Hammer! Nietzsche Under Scrutiny
- Imperator Romanorum: Henry the Fowler, Otto the Great & the Rise of the First German Reich
- Intellectual Gallery: A New Collection of Writings
- The Bishop of Hippo: Life and Thought of Saint Augustine
- Runic Sex Postures of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc (with Zbigniew Boguslawski)
- The Tribe Abhorr'd: Hilaire Belloc and the Jews
- From Lightning: Corneliu Codreanu, Horia Sima and the Story of the Romanian Iron Guard
- Aesthetic Dawn and Other Romantic Verses
- Political Soldier: The Life and Death of Ernst Röhm
- Eagle of Saladin: The Life of Gamal Abdel Nasser
- Judas in Paris: The Remarkable Life of Alfred Dreyfus
- The World Through a Monocled Eye: A Detailed Exposition of Julius Evola's Men Among the Ruins
- Contra Principem: Frederick the Great and the Anti-Machiavellian Riposte
- The Self Unleashed: Max Stirner and the Politics of the Ego
- Beyond East and West: Ayatollah Khomeini & the Iranian Revolution
- Jewish Mysticism: From Pagan Antiquity and the Hebrew Prophets to the Kabbalistic Renaissance and Beyond
- Anti-Zion: A Novel
- Thinking Our Way to God: Romantic Philosophy and the Coming of Absolute Idealism
- Black Nemesis: A Critical Life of Thomas Sankara
- Hogwash & Balderdash: Peculiar Rhymes for Extraordinary Children
- Pendulum of Faith: The Lives of Douglas Hyde
- In Search of the Absolute: German Idealism in Light of Politics, Philosophy & Spirituality
- Return to Evola: A Fresh Look at Revolt Against the Modern World
- To Walk Among the Angels: The Mystical Life and Work of Emanuel Swedenborg
- Truth Dressed as a Lie: The Unmentionable Life of Arnold Spencer Leese
- Surviving Kali Yuga: A Contemporary Reading of René Guénon's The Crisis of the Modern World
- Beneath the Shade of the Lightning Tree: Georges Bataille and The Dawn of Acéphalic Man (with Von Sanngetall)
- The Spirit Unbound: Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom
- Quest for the Numinous: The Sacred Mysticism of Rudolf Otto
- The Book of Emptiness: Learning from Japanese Philosophy
- Modernity Under the Microscope: Byung-Chul Han's Damning Critique of Contemporary Society
- Roots in the Sublime: Frithjof Schuon's Traditionalist Interpretation of the Great Religions
- Beyond the Decline: Rudolf Steiner's Visionary Critique of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes
- Existentialism Beyond Sartre: The Life & Ideas of Gabriel Marcel
- Nishitani on Nihilism: Western Philosophy through Japanese Eyes
- Chronicle of the Soul: History and Consciousness According to Rudolf Steiner
- Where the Thames Flows into the Shinano
- Gold Among Lead: Riding the Tiger with Julius Evola
References
edit- ^ a b c d e f g h i j 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.
- ^ a b c Adam Carter, "Troy Southgate – A Timeline", Searchlight, January 2012, pp. 7–8.
- ^ Daniel Foggo, "Neo-nazis join animal rights groups", Sunday Telegraph, 16 June 2001
- ^ Adam Carter,"Packaging hate – the New Right publishing networks" Archived 26 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Searchlight, 1 March 2012
- ^ 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.
- ^ Jim Green (17 February 2006). "Revolt Against the Feminists: The Traditional Woman according to Julius Evola". New Right. Archived from the original on 7 October 2007. Retrieved 31 July 2023.