All the revisionist, opportunist and social democratic
trends are going the whole length to assist the superpowers in their
diabolical activity to suppress the revolution and the peoples.
The support of all these trends for the allegedly new organisms
of the bourgeoisie has a single aim: to smother the revolution by
raising a thousand and one material, political and ideological obstacles
to it. They are working to disorientate and split the proletariat
and its allies, because they know that, divided and split by factional
struggles, the latter will be unable to create, either at home or
on an international plane, that ideological political and militant
unity which is essential to cope with the attacks of world capitalism
in decay.3
As we now know, the West
was indeed able to weaken communism to the point where it collapsed
altogether leaving the United States of America and its allies as the
virtually unchallenged imperial power in the world.
And divide et impera
is being used today by these same Americans and their allies to enable
them to set themselves up as the new masters of the world.
Consider the demise of the
Afrikaner people. When they were united under one all-powerful National
Party, neither terrorism from within nor pressure from outside was
capable of undermining their grip on South Africa. But the international
powers and their treacherous allies from within the ranks of
Afrikanerdom knew perfectly well how to engineer split after split.
First the Herstigte National Party broke away under Jaap Marais.
Then came the Conservative
Party under Andries Treurnicht together with a truly amazing number of
Afrikaner organizations, each priding itself on its originality and
creativity and each blissfully unaware of how it was furthering the
cause of its enemies who were sniggering at the Afrikaner people from
their luxury homes on the other side of the Atlantic: the Afrikaner
Weerstandsbeweging, the Afrikaner Vryheidsbeweging, the Boerestaat
Party, the Wit Wolve, the Freedom Front . . .
For one moment, in 1993, it
seemed as if Afrikaner forces were uniting under the banner of the
Concerned South Africans Group (Cosag). This same alliance also included
the leaders of the independent homelands of Bophuthatswana and Ciskei,
and the Zulu leader Buthelezi. So what was the response of the
international powers led by America from without and the traitor De
Klerk from within? They concentrated on the weak link: Buthelezi. By
offering him a powerful but toothless position in an ANC- (i.e.
American-) aligned government, by guaranteeing the position of the
Zulu king in a new ANC-dominated dispensation, and by providing other
inducements, the enemy was able to break him away from Cosag.
The next weak link was
Constand Viljoen of the Freedom Front. He, too, was given the
opportunity to participate in a harmless way in the new dispensation,
and he too swiftly ceased any meaningful opposition to the destruction
of his people. The rest were isolated and picked off one by one. What
better illustration could there be of the scenario envisaged by
Machiavelli in The Prince: ‘it is certain that when the enemy comes
upon you in divided cities you are quickly lost, because the weakest
party will always assist the outside forces and the other will not be
able to resist.’4
Consider American tactics
in their attack on Afghanistan. They used every trick in the book to
precipitate divisions in the ranks of their Taliban opponents - flagrant
bribery, showing favours to certain enemy groups but with strings
attached, discrediting individual leaders, and so forth. Writing in the
New Statesman, John Pilger remarked:
Read between the lines
and it is clear that they [the US] are not bombing large numbers of the
Taliban's front-line troops. Why? Because they want to preserve what the
US secretary of state, Colin Powell, calls the ‘moderate’ Taliban, who
will join a ‘loose federation’ of ‘nation builders’ once the war is
over. The moderate Taliban will unite with ‘elements of the resistance’
in the Northern Alliance, the bomb-planters, rapists and heroin dealers,
who were trained by the SAS and paid by Washington.
This is known as divide and
rule, a strategy as old as imperialism. It will allow the Americans -
they hope - to reassert control over a region they ‘lost’. Other
countries, such as Pakistan and the neighbouring former Soviet
republics, are being bribed into submission. The ‘war on terrorism’,
with its Rambo raids, is merely a circus for the folks back home and the
media.5
Look at the Muslims of the
world. Were they to unite, what a devastating power they would wield!
But they have been kept weak and divided by bribes, threats and by
skilful manipulation by a cunning and ruthless enemy whose strategies
their leaders could never comprehend were they to live for another
thousand years. Those who have oil and wealth are set at the throats of
those who espouse radicalism. Even the radicals are kept hopelessly
split. Thus American policy in the Middle East remains unchallenged and
Israeli and American soldiers slaughter the children of Palestine, Iraq
and Afghanistan with impunity.
And look at those other
great enemies of the new capitalist order -- the various ethnic and
racial ‘nationalist’ groups that are supposedly so resurgent in Europe,
America and elsewhere. Here it is not even necessary for the New World
Order to expend any effort to engineer splits: these dolts are falling
over themselves to find reasons to fight each other rather than the
enemy. I have met people from the British National Party in Hull,
England, who regard people from the British National Party in Grimsby,
England, with hostility merely because of the (largely fictional)
traditional hostility between the two neighbouring towns (separated by a
river and a few miles of fields). No American bribes here - we’re simply
dealing with cretins.
There are, of course, more
substantive divisions between these ethnic and racial nationalists. When
they are not fighting each other because they find one leader more
compelling than another leader, they are fighting each other because
they choose to justify their politics in different ways. When they’re
not bickering about whether to invoke Hitler, Odin, Satan or Jesus
Christ (Catholic, Protestant or Christian Identity flavours - take your
pick) then they’ll bicker about whether they’re too conservative or too
socialist.
Consideration of ‘strategy’
provides further opportunities for them to fight each other (extreme
versus moderate is not the only source of division here - they can have
hours of fun damning each other because they disagree with various
alliances or pronouncements) - and if by some miracle they manage to
miss all of these wonderful opportunities to render themselves totally
irrelevant through splits and divisions then they can always use the new
opportunities afforded by the Internet to go and abuse people in other
countries who agree with them entirely about everything but who are
nevertheless good fodder for an argument merely because they happen to
live in another part of the world . . .
And then they wonder why
they have remained utterly marginalized since the middle of the last
century! To compare these simple fools with the military strategists in
the Pentagon is ludicrous. They have no hope against such a foe. They
are a lost cause. They are like the simple Celtic tribesfolk who,
confronted with the canny legionnaires from Rome, merely rolled over,
falling for every trick in the book, and allowed themselves to be robbed
of everything.
This, then, is the scenario
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We have a shrewd imperial
superpower, the American-dominated New World Order, with vast financial,
technological and intelligence resources and phenomenal planning and
strategic experience at its disposal. Against this we have a huge number
of weak and divided nations and groups with little, if any, ability to
counter the strategies used against them by their enemies. How, then, is
the New World Order to be opposed? What is to be done?
Expose the
‘left-right continuum’ as a fraud!
One of the most pernicious
and pervasive aspects of divide et impera is the ‘left-right’
distinction. At a single stroke this creates an apparently arbitrary
division in the ranks of anti-Establishment activists and sets them at
each other’s throats.
The ‘left/right’
distinction owes its origins to the seating plan implemented on 5 May,
1789 in the French National Assembly. The clergy and nobility, who
tended to oppose change, sat to the right of the speaker and the
commons, who tended to favour change, sat to the left. However, many
people who are opposed to change today are classified as ‘left wing’ -
we could cite, for example, Fidel Castro who, despite his image as a
‘left-wing revolutionary’, nevertheless enshrined his version of
socialism in Cuba’s constitution with the words ‘The revolutionary
process of socialism cannot be reversed’.6
He is merely one of the more recent of numerous ‘left-wing’ luminaries
who have sought, by one way or another, to fossilize their favoured form
of social order and guard it against reform. By contrast, Hitler, often
regarded as the epitomy of the ‘extreme right’, was scathing about the
conservatism of the ‘right-wing’ parties of his day:
The parties of the Right
have lost all energy: they see the flood coming, but their one longing
is just for once in their lives to form a Government. Unspeakably
incapable, utterly lacking in energy, cowards all -- such are all these
bourgeois parties and that at the moment when the nation needs heroes --
not chatterers.7
Sometimes it is asserted
that what distinguishes ‘left’ from ‘right’ is that the ‘left’ favours
state control whereas the ‘right’ favours minimal state intervention.
However, this does not work either. Powerful state structures have often
existed under supposedly ‘right-wing’ regimes, such as those of Hitler’s
Germany, Botha’s South Africa or even Thatcher’s Britain. And whereas
Marxists are often mocked for their supposed commitment to state
control, it should not be forgotten that their ultimate aim was the
‘withering away’ of the state (a phrase originating with Engels, not the
slower and more befuddled Marx as is often falsely asserted):
The government of persons is replaced by the administration
of things and the direction of the processes of production. The
state is not 'abolished,' it withers away. It is from this standpoint
that we must appreciate the phrase 'a free people's state' -- both
its temporary justification for agitational purposes, and its ultimate
scientific inadequacy -- and also the demand of the so-called anarchists
that the state should be abolished overnight.8
As Lenin pointed out in
speaking of the state ‘withering away,’ and the even more graphic and
colorful ‘ceasing of itself’, Engels refers quite clearly and definitely
to the period after ‘the state has taken possession of the means of
production in the name of the whole of society’, that is, after the
socialist revolution.9
And if this does not
scupper thoroughly the notion of the left as ‘statists’, what are we to
make of those ‘left-wing’ anarchists who write such things as this:
The State is the
negation of Humanity. It is this in two ways: the opposite of human
freedom and human justice (internally), as well as the forcible
disruption of the common solidarity of mankind (externally). The
Universal State, repeatedly attempted, has always proved an
impossibility, so that as long as the State exists, States will exist
and since every State regards itself as absolute, and proclaims the
adoration of its power as the highest law, to which all other laws must
be subordinated, it therefore follows that as long as States exist wars
cannot cease. Every State must conquer, or be conquered. Every State
must build its power on the weakness or, if it can do it without danger
to itself, on the destruction, of other States.
To strive for international
justice, liberty, and perpetual peace, and at the same time to uphold
the State, is contradictory and naive.10
Sometimes it is asserted
that what distinguishes ‘left’ from ‘right’ is that the so-called
‘right’ upholds notions such as the nation, patriotism and race, whereas
the ‘left’ decries these notions in favour of one united world. How
strange, then, that the ‘left-wing’ and ‘communist’ regime of North
Korea should describe its leader’s views on nation and ethnicity in the
following terms:
Kim Jong Il . . . said that
the basic indexes of a nation are homogeneity of bloodline, a common
language and a common territory; in particular, that bloodline and
language are the most important in defining a nation, and that a nation
is a solid group of people who are united with homogeneity of bloodline,
language and territory.
He went on to say that the
Korean nation has long lived in one territory, inheriting the same
bloodline and speaking the same language, and it is a nation with a
history of 5,000 years and with a splendid culture, and that
expatriates, too, belong to Korean nation. A nation is a cohesive group
of people that was formed historically and the largest unit of social
life. A nation is not formed or broken up easily by a change in the
social system. The formation of a nation conditions the appearance of
social classes and strata. Even in a classless society the nation still
exists. If one’s bloodline and language are same, one belongs to one and
the same nation, even though one’s ideology, ideals and territory are
different. This is his outlook on the nation. . .
Kim Jong Il emphasizes
that, according to the Juche-oriented outlook on the nation,
independence is the core of a nation’s life and existence.
As a man without
independence can be likened to a dead man, so a nation which has lost
its independence cannot exist or develop. This is common knowledge.
Therefore the question of a nation’s destiny is directly linked with
that of the nation’s independence. The nation’s independence is its
essential nature and life and soul. The destiny of a nation is
determined by whether the nation is independent or not and by how it
realizes and defends its independence. In order to live and develop
independently, every nation defends its national character, traditions
and spirit and desires its unity. In this way, the spirit of national
independence runs through the Juche-oriented outlook on the nation. This
is Kim Jong Il’s view. To promote the national independent spirit, one
should posses national dignity and revolutionary pride. If one lacks
national dignity and believes that one’s nation is inferior to others,
and if one lacks pride in the revolution, one cannot truly live
independently and one is unable to defend national independence and
dignity. This is also part of Kim Jong Il’s faith. . .
Since national nihilism and
flunkeyism towards big powers are deep-rooted among them due to the
imperialist policy of assimilating colonies and obliterating their
national culture, small countries must pay special attention to
enhancing a sense of national dignity and revolutionary pride, he
emphasizes.
Flunkeyism is an attitude
peculiar to slaves serving and worshipping great powers and developed
countries, and nihilism means looking down upon one’s own country and
nation and despising them. If a person falls for flunkeyism, he is a
fool; if a nation is servile to great powers, the country will go to
ruin: and if a party is subservient to great powers, it will make a mess
of the revolution and construction. This is what he teaches Government
and Party officials. The flunkeyist tendency of the ruling class of the
successive feudal dynasties hindered national development greatly, left
after effects and, in the end, ruined our country.11
What are we to make of the
supposedly ‘right-wing’ regimes of Europe and America that pursue the
erosion of national boundaries, the creation of supranational
quasi-states such as the ‘European Union’, the interests of
multi-national corporations and the process of ‘globalization’ to foster
the interests of big business? And what are we to make of the converse
phenomenon: the ‘left-wing anti-globalization protestor’? Clearly,
‘right’ and ‘left’ cannot be conceptualized in terms of nationalism
versus internationalism.
Finally, there are
political movements in the world today that defy any attempt at
classification on a ‘left/right’ continuum. Where on this spectrum are
we to place the follower of Islam who denounces America and its
influence on the world today? Where are we to put the environmentalist?
The National-Anarchist? The National-Bolshevik? The Eurasian?
The ‘left/right’ political
distinction is a cynical ploy to divide the people and set them against
each other so that they do not unite against the single main enemy of us
all: the Establishment. As Eduard Limonov remarked: There’s no longer
any left or right. There’s the system and the enemies of the system.
Work with sectarians in
subtle ways!
Those who oppose the
Establishment cannot meaningfully be divided into ‘left’ and ‘right’ but
they can usefully be divided into sectarians and non-sectarians. These
are not opposing camps but rather groups of people who need to be
managed in different ways.
Non-sectarians will seek to
form a broad alliance against the Establishment. They will work
alongside anyone with whom they can reach broad agreement on strategy.
They will minimize the significance of theoretical differences and
concentrate on what unites - on opposition to the Establishment - rather
than what divides.
Sectarians will oppose the
Establishment from a narrow theoretical position. They tend to work
alongside those who share their own theoretical position and to oppose
anti-Establishment activists whose theoretical positions diverge from
their own. They tend to emphasize and play up the significance of
theoretical differences and concentrate on what divides the enemies of
the Establishment rather than the common cause. They easily serve as
unwitting tools of the Establishment.
It is my experience that by
far the majority of anti-Establishment activists are sectarians - often
extreme sectarians. This has important implications for
anti-Establishment strategy and alliance building.
The first implication is
that non-sectarians need to unite and to create their own organizations
and strategies. If they do this then there will be a core of
anti-Establishment activists who are relatively immune from the
divide et impera tactics of the Establishment.
The second implication is
that non-sectarians need to create propaganda to convince
anti-Establishment activists of the advantages of non-sectarian
activism, of the dangers of divide et impera, and of the
importance of building alliances with anti-Establishment activists from
a variety of backgrounds. If they do this then they will be able to
recruit more non-sectarian activists and thus increase the number of
activists who are relatively immune from the divide et impera
onslaught.
The third implication is
that great subtlety is needed in working with sectarian activists. It is
tempting to turn one’s back on these people and to regard them as too
dogmatic for alliance-building purposes. Given their numbers and their
sheer importance, this would be a serious strategic error and one that
would in itself tend to reinforce the success of the Establishment’s
divide et impera approach.
Generally speaking, the
principle that should be employed should be to work towards a grand
alliance of non-sectarian activists but a series of small, often
single-issue alliances with sectarians. These small alliances might even
be as limited as non-aggression agreements or agreements to discuss
differences. They need to be entered into with the utmost sensitivity
and subtlety and with the greatest attention possible given to
situation-specific factors. If you go along to an anti-globalist
demonstration organized by communists and announce yourself as a
‘third-positionist nationalist’ you will find that the organizers will
not think ‘we are anti-Establishment and you are anti-Establishment,
therefore we can work together’; rather, they will think ‘you are right
wing and we are left wing, therefore we are the deadliest enemies’ - and
another victory for Establishment divide et impera will ensue.
Great care needs to be
taken to listen to sectarians rather than to preach. Often it is
possible to absorb much of value from sectarian activists while
rejecting their dogmatism. I have cited above, Hoxha’s striking insights
into imperialist strategy - these insights are of enormous value despite
the fact that they come from a man whose sectarianism and dogmatism were
legendary. It is often the case that those from a Marxist background, in
particular, can contribute much in the field of strategic insight while
remaining quite immune to exhortations to adopt a non-sectarian
anti-Establishment approach.
The general strategy, then,
in dealing with sectarian anti-Establishment activists should be to seek
out areas where joint anti-Establishment activity can be carried out
while perhaps gently trying to persuade sectarians of the value of
working with those who do not necessarily share the finer nuances of
their own preferred theories.
Be sparing in the
use of theoretical justifications and keep your eye on the ball!
Anti-Establishment
activists have an overwhelming need to justify themselves. They have to
explain in the greatest of detail why they are opposed to the
Establishment. This is quite understandable but the problem is that they
are a diverse bunch, they have very little in the way of central
organization, and thus the number of different justifications (some more
convincing perhaps than others) almost equals the number of
anti-Establishment activists! The result is rampant sectarianism and a
bitterly divided anti-Establishment movement that accomplishes very
little.
Those who justify their
anti-Establishment activism in terms of the economic theories of Engels
and Marx are likely, for obvious historical reasons, to experience the
utmost difficulty in working with those who justify their activism in
terms of the racial theories of Adolf Hitler. Those who justify it in
terms of Islam or Christianity might have problems with those who are
inspired by the paganism of Ye Olde England. Those whose
anti-Establishment activism is inspired by a theory that envisages the
ideal world order as characterized by a powerful nation state might have
difficulty in working alongside those whose preferred theories espouse
the minimization or abolition of the state.
Clearly, it is in the
interests of the Establishment to foster and exploit such theoretical
contradictions. It follows that it is in the interests of the opponents
of the Establishment to avoid or minimize them.
Much can be gained, in this
respect, by justifying activism in terms not of any particular theory
but rather in terms of the abhorrent nature of the Establishment and the
need for people from different theoretical backgrounds to unite against
the common enemy.
Look at the world that
these people have created for us! Every three years, globally, more
people die from starvation-related causes than were killed in the entire
Second World War.12 Over 123 million people
were killed in 149 wars between the end of World War II and 1996 alone
and with America and Israel becoming more murderous with every year that
passes the end to this kind of barbarism is nowhere in sight.13
We could cite the spiraling AIDS figures in Africa and Asia (as I
write these words, the incidence of HIV infection in Botswana is
exceeding 35%), and the decadence and lax immigration controls that
will surely import this scourge into Europe in a matter of time. We
could point to the sham, media-controlled two-party ‘democracies’ of the
Western world that serve only to legitimize the spread of American
imperialism and American values throughout the world and to render
impotent any effective challenge to America’s new empire.
By concentrating on the
nefarious nature of the common enemy, and deliberately marginalizing
theoretical justification and discussion, non-sectarianism can be
encouraged and the damaging nature of sectarianism can be exposed and
decried.
Unite around
achievable strategies and objectives
All too often
anti-Establishment groups and individuals feel that if they simply exist
this is sufficient and that there is no need to engage in any form of
planning. Such people are characterized by a tendency to rationalize
their complete lack of activism and their complete lack of strategic
planning by a sort of tired fatalism. They will lament their lack of
resources and the stupidity of people in general and will see themselves
as serving simply to symbolize (some would say fossilize) a particular
viewpoint in the general marketplace of ideas. As Guardians of the
Fossils, these people are very adept at defending the theoretical
niceties of their own version of The True Faith, and will savagely turn
against those who do not share The True Faith, even if those they turn
against happen to be enemies of the Establishment. In short, the
Guardians of the Fossils, as archetypal sectarians, are generally
excellent targets for divide et impera.
Some Guardians of the
Fossils are sufficiently motivated to wish to give the appearance of
having a strategy without actually worrying about its finer details.
They are characterized by a tendency to produce pie-in-the sky
strategies that either involve completely unrealistic assumptions or
millenarian-type strategies that delay the need to do anything at all
until some remote date or event such as the collapse of the entire New
World Order throughout the world. Once again, the emphasis on theory
rather than action leads to a sectarianism that makes these people
vulnerable to divide et impera.
Unity around simple,
achievable strategies and objectives pushes preoccupation with
theoretical niceties to one side and focuses on areas where
anti-Establishment activists from different backgrounds can work
together in a rewarding way. If two people or two groups from very
different theoretical backgrounds can co-operate to achieve a goal that
is useful to both of them, this increases the resource base of both
groups and widens the armoury of strategies open to each.
Expose their filthy
tricks at every opportunity!
It is one of the principal
tasks of all those with influence within the anti-Establishment movement
to expose the strategy of divide et impera. International, national and
local leaders, writers and ordinary radicals all have a role to play in
educating themselves and others about this strategy, how it has been
used in the past, how it is currently being used, and how to counter it.
The simple act of drawing attention to it can reduce its effectiveness
by creating an awareness of the importance of unity and the dangers of
bickering and disunity.
Much is at stake. The
technological resources of the New World Order are such that if it
achieves hegemony over all the earth it will be difficult or impossible
to reverse the situation. A global concentration and entrenchment of
imperial power will ensue that will dwarf every other tyranny that the
world has ever known.
NOTES:
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