INTO THE ECO-FASCIST SEWER WITH THE FIFTH ESTATE

The fact that David 'Cakehead' Watson deliberately set out to smear me and others critical of Green Anarchist is evident from his text "Swamp Fever" published in The Fifth Estate; why Cakehead wanted to do this is something it would be pointless for me to speculate about. His modus operandi can be illustrated by the following quote: "In fact, the crux of the Neoist argument is simply a barren, unexamined defense of industrialism and mass technics. The Neoists naively believe that "Syndicalism shows that it is possible to have a complex industrial society without hierarchies," presumably not only at a 1930s level of development contemporary with the Spanish Revolution but with the technology of the 1990s…." Watson takes a sentence which he attributes to ‘the Neoists' (the term was used by Green Anarchist to lump together all their enemies, and used in this way it is meaningless) from The Green Apocalypse, treating this anthology of material as if everything within it is a 'Neoist' production. Richard Essex who edited The Green Apocalypse reproduced the texts I helped him collect together without necessarily knowing where they originated (a number of them were mailed anonymously to me and others). The unattributed text Watson quotes from above is anarchist in tone, both Richard Essex and I make it clear in The Green Apocalypse that we are not anarchists, and thus by attributing to us views (as 'Neoists', and Richard Essex is not and was not a 'Neoist') we do not hold, Cakehead Watson knocks down a straw 'man'. I find the statement he quotes above every bit as idiotic as he does, and my guess is that I view other elements of this leaflet (such as the slogan 'Anarchism Is Freedom' emblazoned across the bottom) with more hostility than either Cakehead or his anarcho-chums at The Fifth Estate.

Since Cakehead Watson is apparently incapable of dealing with my actual views, he resorts to chicanery and lies, and not unconsciously but in a 'knowing' 'post-modern' sort of way. He writes: "The Neoists also produced and disseminated leaflets calling for death camps and praising Pol Pot, forgeries claiming to be from Green Anarchists.…" As well as reproducing a large number of documents, The Green Apocalypse contains responses to much of the Green Anarchist material it reprints. Cakehead Watson chooses to reiterate a number of Green Anarchist slurs already reprinted and responded to in The Green Apocalypse, such as the one quoted above, I do not intend to waste my time by repeatedly explaining how satirical leaflets (those mentioning death camps and Pol Pot) attributed to a non-existent Green Action Network are not an example of 'forgeries claiming to be from Green Anarchists.' It should be stressed that Watson's use of the capitalised plural term 'Green Anarchists' can be explained as a typo, or as a deliberate attempt to ensnare careless readers. To date Watson has refused to clarify his position on this. Yes, the Green Action leaflets parody the rhetoric of Green Anarchist, but for them to pass as forgeries it would be necessary to substitute the name Green Action (the name used on the leaflets) with that of Green Anarchist (a name NOT used on the leaflets).

And having claimed these leaflets are forgeries that I attributed to Green Anarchist (when they are actually attributed to the non-existent Green Action Network) to discredit Green Anarchists (sic) as eco-fascists, Watson proceeds to treat one of them as providing straightforward insight into my opinions by asserting that Murray Bookchin 'is cited approvingly by the Neoists in Green Apocalypse.' And this from a leaflet that he fails to mention is entitled The Sordid Truth About Stewart Home and in which it is ludicrously claimed that I have sex with animals and Murray Bookchin is one of my pen names. Thus the notion that either I or 'the Neoists' (whoever they are) cite Bookchin with 'approval' completely distorts what's actually going on in this text. It seems to me that Watson attempts to conflate 'the Neoists' with Bookchin, despite the fact that his ongoing dispute with this anarcho-bore is of little interest to me or any of my acquaintances, precisely because he (Cakehead) believes: 'it belongs to the great leader to make even enemies far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category, because in weak and uncertain characters the knowledge of having different enemies can only too readily lead to the beginning of doubt in their own right.' (the quote comes from Hitler's Mein Kampf).

Now let's wind back to Watson's false claim that: "The Neoists also produced and disseminated leaflets calling for death camps and praising Pol Pot, forgeries claiming to be from Green Anarchists. Of course, Home explains after the fact in Green Apocalypse, it's "clear to anyone who reads the text carefully" that it's a satire; the fact that some recipients of the flyer believed it to be authentic "demonstrates that the general level of intelligence in the world today is sorely lacking, and it is precisely this situation that makes GA's ideology dangerous"—which of course if the Neoists are as smart as they pretend to be they'd have to have known all along. Thus Home attempts to hold GAs responsible for the slanders he perpetrated on them." Moving on from Watson's highly selective quotation (so selective he has to fragment my sentences to create the impression he requires) and place the term intelligence in context. What I wrote was: "This leaflet was attributed to the Green Action Network, not the Green Anarchist Network. While readers were meant to draw parallels between the ideology of the spurious organisation Green Action and Green Anarchist, it ought to be clear to anyone who reads the text carefully that they are not being presented with the actual views of any existing organisation; the fact that a number of people, including Quentin McDermott a researcher from the tv programme World In Action, believed the leaflet to be genuine, merely demonstrates that the general level of intelligence in the world today is sorely lacking…" At the time I wrote this Green Anarchist worked closely with and published articles by Larry O'Hara who repeatedly asserted World In Action was a front for M15 (British Intelligence).(1) Therefore when I use the term intelligence after citing the name of a researcher from this programme, I am alluding to this and the intelligence services, not to the intellectual capacities of ordinary men and women (which I believe to be very high). If Watson had read carefully through all the material he claims to be reviewing (including the Green Anarchist paper), he would have understood that I was ridiculing the police, the media and the spook mania of Green Anarchist and their friends. But in the end whether Watson did or didn't understand this doesn't matter, since it is his positions on the question of 'intelligence' (in either both or at least one sense of the word) that are reactionary, not mine.

And true to form Watson, who is a smear merchant, doesn't address the fact that I wrote what I wrote (not just here but elsewhere too) after Green Anarchist and their friends accused me of being an undercover cop (and twelve years after they started making this claim they have yet to produce any evidence to substantiate it – indeed, Larry O'Hara still circulates material in which he asserts he won't produce the evidence he has because I am trying to provoke him into doing just this!). Likewise the claim that Quentin McDermott mistook Green & Brown Anarchist for something issued by a genuine anarchist group originated with Green Anarchist and their friends. I don’t actually know if this is true or not but in order to make a joke I repeated this assertion (without necessarily believing it; the veracity of this allegation is not something that particularly interests me). All those I've spoken to who received this leaflet understood it to be satirical, and aside from Green Anarchist the only UK based political organisation I know of who've denounced it as disinformation is a splinter group from the fascist National Front called Final Conflict. I'm aware of this because Final Conflict placed an article about Green & Brown Anarchist being Searchlight black propaganda on the web and a third party pointed it out to me. My understanding is that Final Conflict have some form of relationship with Green Anarchist’s chum Larry O’Hara and that he may have passed the leaflet on to them, I certainly did'’t directly furnish Final Conflict with this material and it is curious that what they have to say about it should reinforce smears O'Hara has been spreading about me (he has spent years claiming that I am connected to the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, which he and Green Anarchist claim is a front for British Intelligence).

Watson calls me a 'pomo poseur' (actually he uses the plural poseurs as a part of his ongoing contribution to the fabrication that there was a Neoist ‘group’ to which I belonged in the nineties) but offers no suggestions as to a better way of dealing with the accusations and threats of violence (ranging from beatings to bombs) I was subjected to by Green Anarchist and their friends than my use of humour. The Neoist Alliance never existed and never pretended to have any real existence, it had no members and consisted of whatever I wrote or did in its name, much of which was intended to parody political sects. Thus I harboured no pretensions of the Neoist Alliance (even the name was a joke) playing any organisational role in revolutionary activity, whereas  Green Anarchist did (despite the fact that the only role they could have played would have been counter-revolutionary). Despite this, Watson writes: "Ironically, the Neoists accuse others of a sinister Bakuninism, but they themselves, with their explicit, stated program of scission, misinformation and scandal against anyone they disapprove of, resemble Nechaevite gangsters out to establish their own "invisible dictatorship." "Belief is the enemy," they declare, a conundrum they consider none other than "a watchword of the revolutionary movement"; and their flyers and texts attempt to scandalize by proclaiming, "End social relations," "Overthrow the human race," and the notorious fascist slogan, "Long live death." "Only the Neoist Alliance has grasped the necessary conjunction between nihilism and historical consciousness," they remind their bludgeoned reader. Their provocations can be singularly cowardly, as when they published a flyer falsely attributed to Salmon Rushdie announcing an event to burn the Koran in order to defy islamic fundamentalists…"

Yes, Richard Essex writes of the phrase 'belief is the enemy' as a 'watchword' of the revolutionary movement (surely this is a conundrum along the lines of 'everything I say is a lie': from a 'phrase' to a 'watchword' and a 'belief' in 'disbelief' - come on Cakehead are you really so thick that you think this is a one-dimensional rather than a complex statement, something which is simultaneously both self-reinforcing and self-refuting?) but he has nothing to do with the Neoist Alliance. Likewise, the programme of the Neoist Alliance was regularly changed and usually lifted wholesale from other places, such activity is best understood as a species of 'pataphysics'. And next Cakehead comes up with 'the notorious fascist slogan Long Live Death!': Does he really expect anyone to believe that the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1848 (who were chanting this ridiculous formulation on Parisian barricades nearly a hundred years before the Spanish Falangists took it up) were fascists? Contra to Watson, fascism didn't emerge as a distinct ideological formation until the early part of the twentieth century. And in invoking the slogan 'Long Live Death!' from the Green Apocalypse, Cakehead is up to his hackneyed tricks; having claimed I fraudulently attributed the leaflet Green & Brown Anarchist to Green Anarchist in order to discredit them (which is untrue, it parodies their ideology but is attributed to the Green Action Network), he immediately reverses his position and reads it as a straightforward exposition of my own views (which it isn't). Likewise, the spurious press release (purporting to come from Rushdie's literary agents rather than Rushdie) and announcing a burning of both The Bible AND The Koran was intended not to defy 'islamic fundamentalists' (I sent it to fifty non-Muslim literary critics) but to bamboozle the British literary establishment (whose support of Rushdie was often wrapped up in unconscious racism); and this was not done under the aegis of the non-existent Neoist Alliance.

Watson rants on and on, which is what I've come to expect from staunch defenders of eco-fascism and all things counter-revolutionary (like Larry O'Hara or Paul Rogers). He writes: "GA anti-tax posters, dating from the period of the early 1990s British poll tax revolt, are also cited, since 'anti-tax agitation is a favoured tactic of the extreme right'—as if anarchists wouldn't have something to say about taxation, perhaps even to rightists, who also (we have to hope) have some latent human capacity to change sides, and become authentic radicals." But once again Cakehead Watson is refining Green Anarchist's lies for them since the posters in question are nothing to do with the poll tax and pre-date it. In The Green Apocalypse, I write (and not once but twice, since I quote myself from one text in another when dealing with Green Anarchist's claim that I have four basic lies about them): "The item in question doesn't mention the poll tax, and it would be bizarre indeed if Green Anarchist were still disseminating propaganda material on this issue long after the community charge had been abolished... As a campaigning issue, anti-tax agitation receives more attention from broad swathes of the American far-Right than any other topic; US extremists claim that liberal politicians tax the rural middle class and then spend the money on the inner cities in order to ''buy' the votes of the urban poor (the racial content of this argument is made more or less explicit depending to how close the groups and individuals utilising it are to the conservative mainstream). On the other hand, the fierce resistance to the poll tax in Britain arose precisely because it was a way of taking money from the deprived inner cities and redistributing it to suburban and rural toffs. The fact that Green Anarchist are seeking to confuse the sharp class distinctions between those who agitated against poll tax, and the ongoing campaign by far-Right extremists against tax as an alleged subsidy for the poor, demonstrates the way in which they create an ideological vortex or sucking pit."

Watson's failure to provide a credible summary of the arguments to be found in The Green Apocalypse can also be illustrated by his claim that: 'Around the time of the Persian Gulf War, everyone in the dispute agrees, Green Anarchist founder Richard Hunt went over to an explicit right-wing or ecofascist position.' While I have argued that Hunt was a founder of Green Anarchist, reprinted in the documents section of The Green Apocalypse are materials in which the current editors of the publication implausibly deny this. Watson seems to agree with some of the arguments I have made about the right-wing nature of Hunt's ideology but the word 'explicitly' is misleading. My view is that Hunt's positions have always been right-wing regardless of the fact that he still claims to be a part of the political left. Likewise, from material reprinted in The Green Apocalypse, it is clear that the public line of the current editors of Green Anarchist is that Hunt held left-wing views prior to the Gulf War, before inexplicably turning fascist overnight. This position appears to have been adopted because in texts such as Green Anarchism: Its Origins And Influences, the current editors of Green Anarchist use Hunt's theories as an ideological framework for their ongoing activities.

And after these smears, Watson turns to Green Anarchist and gives them an easy ride. That said, in order to maintain any credibility as an 'opponent' of eco-fascism (he is in reality its defender in its Green Anarchist manifestations), he had to be mildly critical of their support for neo-Nazi bombers and the random murder of tube passengers by the Aum cult. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not Cakehead Watson or a member of The Fifth Estate collective; personally I much prefer being a 'pomo poseur' to an apologist for eco-fascist scum like Green Anarchist.

Footnote. 1. These claims by O'Hara and his friends about World In Action are dealt with in 'Anatomy of a Smear' included in The Green Apocalypse, so since this is material Watson is 'reviewing' he should have been aware of the following from it: "Another form of distortion can be found in the fact that the Bomber tries to link perfectly valid criticism of spook mania in Green Anarchism Exposed, to the issue of whether or not what Larry O'Hara has to say about Searchlight in the pamphlets A Lie To Far and At War With The Truth is valid. This is absurd, since between them O'Hara and GA have insinuated that far more than simply Searchlight moles are working for the 'secret state.' Reviewing Turning Up The Heat: MI5 After The Cold War by Larry O'Hara (Phoenix Press, London 1994) in Lobster 28 (December 1994), Robin Ramsay observes that not only does O'Hara: 'conclude his pamphlet with a long list of journalists and the agencies from which he suspects them of receiving material, on p. 37 he proposes renaming the television program World In Action, as MI5 In Action (MI5IA); he sees MI5 "pulling its strings." But he offers no real evidence and, after making such a serious charge, he concludes the paragraph with this: "Hard evidence and leads to follow up on MI5IA I'd be grateful to readers for." This is inviting ridicule.' "

Stewart Home, London September 2006.

Watson's Swamp Fever smear

An earlier reply to Cakehead's Swamp Fever

More on Green Anarchist