INTRODUCTION

by Troy Southgate "The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing; to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats IT may sound hard to believe, but there was a time when ordinary people had more control over their own lives and inhabited a world in which the vast majority of individuals were able to live in close-knit communities with their own kind, pursue a more rural existence away from the shallow environs of the average shopping mall, hunt or grow food for their own consumption, make conversation and music in a society without television or computer games, and even pass on traditional values to their own children without the pernicious influence of Establishment schools and the mass media. So what went wrong? Between 500 and 850 CE, not long after the despised Roman occupation of Britain came to an abrupt end, the incoming Germanic tribes settled down and gradually began to add their own flavour to the island. Before long, it became comparatively decentralised and was eventually broken up into seven distinct kingdoms. Things were far from perfect, of course, but as a result of this crucial balance of power the Angle, Saxon and Jutish tribes were able to enjoy a large degree of self-determination. When the Normans arrived in 1066, however, the newly-created English nation was transformed into a land of serfs and, as the Domesday Book proves beyond any doubt, ruthlessly exploited for its valuable resources and things were never to be the same again. By the time the Middle Ages came along, imperialistic adventurers like Edward I and other monarchical warmongers across Europe were borrowing huge amounts of money from Jewish financiers and plunging the country into mounting debt. But whilst Edward himself found a convenient excuse to deport these usurious individuals from England's shores, thus saving himself from almost certain bankruptcy, by the sixteenth century events were changing dramatically as the Protestant Reformation swept away the existing socio-economic infrastructure and inevitably caused thousands of people to be expelled from the monastic hospitals, religious almshouses and other places of refuge which, at that time, were maintained by the Catholic Church. According to the radical social commentator, William Cobbett, prior to the Reformation the word 'poverty' had not entered the English language. Along with the great religious changes of the sixteenth century, came the artistic flowering of the Renaissance and the less positive values of the humanist Enlightenment. Whilst Christianity had served as the prevailing current in England for many hundreds of years, the new ideas sweeping into England from the rest of Europe now positioned man firmly at the centre of the universe and therefore it was inevitable that spirituality - let alone Christianity - would rapidly decline and be replaced by the materialistic values of a new mercantile order. These profound changes, which led, in England, to the seventeenth-century Civil War and the triumph of Cromwell's parliamentarians over the monarchy of Charles I, soon paved the way for the French Revolution. In 1789, the French monarchy came under attack from a resentful bourgeoisie and Louis XVI fell victim, like many others, to the diligent blade of the guillotine. Once the pseudo-revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century came to power, the lives of ordinary French people soon worsened and the transient values of the brutal regime were shown to be entirely false. Indeed, following the inauguration of a new ruling class the organic ties of the past were completely extinguished as racial, cultural and spiritual bonds were considered obsolete and thoroughly discouraged. This, of course, was the first step towards the globalisation process of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the ideas of the French Revolution went on to lead to the growth of many destructive ideologies such as nationalism, communism and liberal-democracy. Meanwhile, back in the British Isles, an explosion of scientific technology allowed a combination of aristocrats and nouveau-riche to harness the indomitable force that led to the Industrial Revolution. This resulted in the displacement of the country's rural communities, as millions of people left the land and moved to the expanding cities to work in the soulless mills and factories. This strategy of mass enslavement saw people forced down mines and up chimneys to make profits for the fatcats at the helm. By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the gap between rich and poor had widened considerably and, if you found yourself at the wrong end of the class spectrum, you inevitably ended up in the workhouse. The capitalist disease had spread across Britain, and the world, like a cancer. Throughout this period, wealthy banking families like the Rothschilds and others were able to seize control of the purse-strings of various European countries, as well as to foment wars and revolutions for their own ends. Various protest movements attempted to fight for justice and better conditions, but in 1917 the communists took power in Moscow and were hailed as a powerful 'alternative' to capitalism, despite going on to murder and repress hundreds of millions of people in both Russia, Eastern Europe and the Far East. The reality, of course, is that whilst capitalism exploited ordinary people for private gain, communism was simply a form of state-capitalism administered by a new ruling class. To make matters worse, communism provided the capitalists, as well as the national-capitalists of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with a new impetus and thus smoothed the way for the victory of liberal-democracy and the economic trading bloc known as the West. The rest, as they say, is history. What you are about to read is designed to give you a taste of what life could be like in decentralised, National-Anarchist communities. Bear in mind, however, that this is only a very brief outline and that we have provided a series of reading lists to help you explore the various topics in more depth. Once you have acquainted yourself with our position on various issues, you will find information relating to how you can get involved with the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM). Our job is to offer you a vision of a brighter future. If you like what you see, you can help us make that future a reality. Further reading: John Burnett, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820's to the 1920's, Routledge, 1994. William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, Pan Books, 1988. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Penguin, 2009. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, Inner Traditions, 1995. Charles Levinson, Vodka-Cola, Gordon & Cremonesi, 1980. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Oxford University Press, 1991. Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford University Press, 1971. Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, The Noontide Press, 2008. Tomislav Sunic, Homo Economicus: Child of the Postmodern Age, 1st Books, 2007. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Penguin, 2002. Nesta Webster, The French Revolution, The Noontide Press, 1992.