Action Zealandia within the Context of the Right

I have been invited to submit an article for the Action Zealandia website, on the context of A-Z vis-à-vis the New Zealand Right. What I know of A-Z is entirely gleaned from reading the website. I know nothing of those involved, its structure and contacts. This notwithstanding the allegation that I am the ‘mentor’ of A-Z, a predictably half-witted assumption that has been made by several academics and journalists who are unable to articulate their case against A-Z because they have none.

I was active within Rightist groups from 1975 to early 2005 and left organisational efforts because of the decline in quality of the Right in New Zealand. If I was the right age group I would apply without hesitation for A-Z membership, as it is the only worthy organisation to have emerged in New Zealand for decades, with due acknowledgement to Dominion Movement for paving the way.

Where Not to Tread

A-Z is sensible to have formed specifically as a ‘youth’ movement, while at the same time eschewing elements of youth subcultures such as the skinheads, which with a few individual exceptions, have proved a liability wherever they have aligned with the Right. While it is unfortunate that skinheads are often among the few who will stand in public, on the streets, not only the posturing image but also the lack of a genuine political motive is self-defeating for any organisation that accepts them in significant proportions. For the extreme Left associations with the histrionic, the gender-confused, the mentally-ill and the filth-ridden are the basis of their membership, and this does not matter because they will receive positive reporting from the media regardless, since their aims converge with the Establishment.

The skinhead basis of New Zealand’s two former primary Rightist organisations, National Front and Right Wing Resistance, ensured that nothing of an ideology would develop, and hence nothing to give either group stability, while the gang mentality became a factor, with both seeing one another as rivals. The passing of NF and RWR is a positive development. Neither sought causes on which to act, but solely symptoms, and not even primary symptoms.

A-Z has thankfully not followed an anti-Muslim formulae, and does not emerge from such a milieu. Because of the serious intent of DM, that project was targeted by both media and state authorities despite never, as far as I am aware, having been involved with anything of an Islamophobic character. Paradoxically, those projects that are Islamophobic, such as Right Minds NZ, New Conservatives, and Investigate magazine, each avidly pro-Israel, were left unmolested. While Patrick Gower, Paul Spoonley, Marc (Jews-are-indigenous-to-Palestine) Daalder et al strained to see connections between NZ Identitarians and Brentan Tarrant as part of an extreme Right worldwide genocidal conspiracy against Muslims, left unsaid were the Zionist entities that promote and fund the likes of Tommy Robinson and Geert Wilders. (See: Bolton, ‘Islamophobia: Trojan Horse Amidst the Right’, Arktos Journal, https://arktos.com/2019/04/26/islamophobia-trojan-horse-amidst-the-right/).

What should be realised is that if the Right is intrinsically ‘traditionalist’, then that implies a kinship between all traditionalists – from Muslim to Maori – ‘against the modern world’ (to paraphrase René Guénon). What actual kinship do Muslims, for example, have with the Trotskyites who organised ‘antiracism’ rallies in the aftermath of the Christchurch Mosque shootings? What pure hypocrisy. While the Right is called ‘white supremacist’ this is a projection from the Left and Liberalism, which aim to impose a universalism over the world in the name of ‘progress’ and on the assumption that every hill, jungle, desert and river tribe aspire to the ‘benefits’ of Late Western capitalism. The Right is trying to kick the universalistic dogma into the dustbin of history, not glory in its imposition on others.

Hitherto the Right was largely shaped by the media; prior to the internet. The internet has been a double-edged sword, but has enabled the creation of an alternative media, despite increasingly frenetic efforts at deplatforming. The drawbacks of the internet are (1) the amount of junk that proliferates, that might be difficult to filter for those starting their interest in genuinely heretical views; (2) the feeling of security it gives to the proverbial key-board warriors who can become as histrionic and stupid as the usual Leftist, with words of bravado or the neglect of any sense of civility and reasoned comment; (3) the substitution of real communities and real actions for those of the virtual kind.

The actions of individuals without a sense of restraint make group discipline difficult to maintain, thereby rebounding on whatever organisation to which an individual might identify. The media and their academic drones are permanently poised to pounce on anything that might be used to smear the Right however tenuously.

One of the worst features, albeit the one that can be the most easily controlled, but which through either laziness, carelessness, or some weird notion of ‘freedom of expression’, is too often left to fester is the website forum. Here it seems that all and sundry are permitted free reign to vent bile, threats, insults, tantrums and hatred, which are abstracted by the opposition and from which a pig’s breakfast can be made by the smear-mongers as though such forum quips represent the continuum of Rightist ideology from de Maistre, Spann, Burke, Carlyle, Vico, Jung, Lorenz, or Spengler…. Since the Antiright is itself ideologically and intellectually bereft, including its ‘academics’, and since journalists are instructed to dumb-down their material to the level of a fourteen-year-old readership, they rely on word-bites for their smears.

A-Z has maintained a reasonable, and usually excellent, standard of comment on its forum, and uses the opportunity to intelligently explicate its outlook.

However, the over-riding advantage of the internet, if discipline and quality are maintained, is the ability to inexpensively create one’s own media which can have a relatively large outreach. Prior to this, the Right relied on the distribution of printed material that necessarily had a very limited readership, leading to the other primary factor: the need to attract the attention of the news media to convey that message to a wider audience. Hence, one was reliant on an organ of the enemy. Obviously, the media was going to retard that message beyond recognition. The best that could be hoped for was some small element of the message to reach the public, and within that public some very few to see past the distortions, and to think further. Even here, in order to attract media attention gimmicks were required, presenting matters in a more extreme manner than what one might personally believe. And again, what quality does one recruit by gimmickry and contrived extremism? This was the unfortunate circumstance of the view that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, which of course it is not.

A-Z is correct to eschew communication with the news media no matter how tempting. This is not a matter of ‘hiding’ from accountability, but a recognition that journalists are constitutionally unable to comment on such matters with objectivity and balance. Paradoxically, the more you remain silent, the more fixated they become. The task is to continue creating one’s own quality media, via internet, broadcast and print. Again, A-Z has stood out with its striking visuals.

Overview of the NZ Right

Ideologically, A-Z also stands unique within the New Zealand Right. This largely concerns A-Z being a youth movement, and the nature of the current epoch. While the basic premise of white defence as a political movement relative to Asian immigration traces to the early Labour movement in New Zealand, as it does in Australia, USA, Canada, and South Africa, and is therefore implicitly anti-capitalist, as well as to the war veterans associations; within the context of the Right, there are also antecedents within the banking reform movements. This brings a convergence of opposition to plutocracy that was evident in sections of the Labour movement and the Right simultaneously. In Labour, there was John A. Lee as the primary focus, who appealed to the grass roots of Labour, with the top hierarchy willing to sell-out and compromise. However, the impetus for Labour opposition to usury came from outside the Labour Party, with the broad support that Social Credit received during the Great Depression.

Post-war, the Right did not start to coalesce until the betrayal of the war generation became manifest with the scuttling of the Empire. The prompting for a movement came from the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) in Britain, whose leader A. K. Chesterton, a journalist noted as a Shakespeare expert, also had expertise in exposing the role of international finance and the USA in destroying the European empires for the sake of free trade, or what is now called globalisation. The LEL had an active branch in NZ. When in Britain the LEL united with other groups to form the National Front the LEL NZ branch transformed into the NF’s NZ affiliate. Around 1969 these pro-British influences remained apparent with the formation of the NZ branch of the long-running Crown Commonwealth League of Rights, based in Australia. This was premised on Social Credit and a commitment to the Crown. Other groups were formed on similar premises. Support for South Africa and Rhodesia was a primary motive for the Right at a time when there was widespread goodwill among New Zealanders for the Whites in those nations. There were many small groups dedicated to low key educational activities, such as the NZ-Commonwealth Alliance, and the at times flamboyant Southern Africa Friendship Association, under the leadership of Lt. Col. Elderton and Major Barry Wilcox. Often these individuals remained affiliated with the NZ National Party. The groups were largely composed of World War II veterans, one of the most notable being Ron Keen, a motor mechanic who had fought in Italy, and was an impressive ideologue. Ian Bing, a Chinese businessman with an immaculate pronunciation of English, brought the works of Spengler and Yockey to NZ. His newsletter Perspective 21^st Century, began each issue with a commentary entitled ‘White Man Think Again’. Essential Books operated from Hamilton for years, providing books on an array of subjects that politically educated several generations of Rightists

Inevitably, age took its toll. A few younger individuals established projects such as the newsletter Pointing Right, the magazine Heed, and the New Force/Nationalist Workers’ Party. This latter group formulated an ideology and drew its antecedents from the early Labour movement. It found inspiration from the ideology being developed by a young generation of activists and thinkers in Australia, at the time named National Alliance (later National Action), who warned of the approaching menace of China, while questioning the anti-Soviet preoccupation of conservatives. However, the NWP was hide-bound in attempting to draw support by cultivating a relationship with the news media that was a no-win situation, the other alternative being to remain unknown. This had a warping impact on the NWP’s ideology, which became Americanised in its increasing focus on ‘white nationalism’, while its well-developed policies on a range of issues that remain relevant, were given the silent treatment.

With the passing of the generation around the League of Rights and NZ Commonwealth Alliance, and the withdrawal of younger activists, the continuum of the Right was broken. In particular, there was no longer an ideological cadre. It did not exist in subsequent versions of the NF, nor the RWR, and a few other groups of short duration and indiscernible impact. The disconnect ran from the demise of the NWP in the early 1980s until the emergence of Dominion Movement, and subsequent A-Z; that is, over three decades of ideological wasteland. This shows the necessity of an ideological cadre as the first aim, which endures regardless of organisational vicissitudes.

Ideological Antecedents in Nouvelle Droite

However, it would be incorrect to say that DM/A-Z are a resurgence of even the best of prior projects. Whereas most demanded that the attachment to Britain and British values be maintained, and there was a focus on anti-communism and the USSR, albeit while often maintaining a healthy distrust of the USA, I believe A-Z derives from a different milieu with a different world-view; albeit one that necessarily acknowledges the British component to the NZ nativist heritage. It is, as the smear-mongers correctly discern, New Zealand’s manifestation of Identitarianism. This having arisen in Europe and spread worldwide, is a response from a new generation to the ’68 Generation’, the latter having succumbed to the inanities of Leftism, Critical Theory, psycho-humanistic fads, consumerism, and pseudo-rebellion in the service of globalism. A new generation wearied of bourgeois liberal inanities, defined by global commerce and mass entertainment, Hollywood, and MTV, hedonism and alienation. Identitarianism in turn traces to Nouvelle Droite. That movement was aptly founded in France in 1968; apt because that was the time and place where the Establishment’s pseudo-revolt culminated in mass rioting by a generation that had been manipulated by those against whom they imagined they were fighting. (Masses of befuddled useful idiots, repudiated by the USSR and the French Communist Party as bourgeois nihilists, nearly toppled President Charles de Gaulle, who happened to be the primary obstacle to U.S. foreign policy. Such is the world of the pseudo-revolt of the New Left and its current derivatives). Apt also because we are still living with the consequences of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ and the legacy of 1789 France, Diderot, de Sade, Robespierre, Marat, et al; the ideological precursors of Jacinda Ardern, Paul Spoonley, Golriz Ghahraman, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

The New Right (the antithesis of the Whig liberalism that is often called ‘New Right’ especially in the Anglophone states, and particularly by inept academics) confronted the New Left at every ideological level, and showed how the latter was a sham. The Left have no answer and responds with ad hominem. Generation Identity, as it has been called in Europe, continues that legacy. From its extension out of Europe, the Motherland, the movement has reached across the Atlantic, and over the Pacific to the Antipodes. That, I presume to think, is the heritage and mission of its New Zealand manifestation, Action Zealandia.