Troy Southgate

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".

Far-right activism

Southgate joined the National Front in 1984 and began writing for publications such as ''National Front News'' and ''Nationalism Today''. According to ''Searchlight'' magazine, in 1987 he joined the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX).Adam Carter, "Troy Southgate – A Timeline", ''Searchlight'', January 2012, pp. 7–8.

In 1998, Southgate and other ENM members founded the National Revolutionary Faction. 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.

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. 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''.ref name="Macklin"> 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.

''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. Southgate later noted that “to say that we have been hugely influenced by Richard Hunt’s ideas is an understatement”. 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.

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''.

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.

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). 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.

According to ''Searchlight'', 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. 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'".

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. 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.

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". 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.

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. Along with like-minded musicians, he sought to diffuse the ideals of Mithraic paganism and Nordic folk myths into music-orientated youth cultures.

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.

*''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''
*''The World According to Fritz: E. F. Schumacher and the Perennial Philosophy''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Southgate, Troy
1965 births
British far-right politicians
Alt-right writers
Male critics of feminism
Living people
Politicians from London
National Front (UK) politicians
English fascists
Alumni of the University of Kent
People associated with the University of Kent
English nationalists
English magazine editors
English autobiographers
Publishers (people) from London
English expatriates in Portugal
British modern pagans
Far-right modern pagans
Neo-fascists
Strasserism