GREEN ANARCHIST CLUTCHES AT STRAWS by Fabian Tompsett

Green Anarchist's 'response' to my essay Anarchism and the Militias, shows how worried they've become about our exposure of their roots in the far right. Unlike our policy of reprinting an offending passage in full, they are careful to only quote selectively from the two paragraphs we refer to. This enables them to omit all reference to the Japanese Aum cult, and in fact provide the flagrant distortion they accuse me of. I am of course aware that interested readers will track down the original sources to verify the claims I have made. It seems GA aims more at a passive readership who will accept whatever crap they come out with.

Those who read Anarchism and the Militias will realise that I criticise Christie as a publisher, rather than suggesting that he wrote Towards a Citizen's Militia. Regardless of Christie's alleged status as "one of Britain's most courageous anarchist opponents of fascism", this does not excuse his publication of Pennick's review of Kurt Saxon's Wheels of Rage, which appeared in the Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review (CPAR) No.5 (January 1980, p98 as this came out some time ago, I reproduce it in full here.) This is what GA deny is apologetics for fascism. In a subsequent book (co-authored with Paul Devereux), Lines on the Landscape: Leys and Other Linear Enigmas (London 1989) after reading of how the SS funded the Deutsche Ahnenerbe to carry out research into heilige Linien the German equivalent of leylines the reader is informed that:

"The last major German alignment researcher of the pre-war tradition was Kurt Gerlach, who wrote between 1940 and 1943. Gerlach, who was born in 1889 and died in 1976, was a playwright and novelist whose studies of the German colonization of Bohemia in the tenth and eleventh centuries led him to recognize that alignments were involved. These he either called Holy Lines or 'rays'. In 'Heilige' oder Zweckmässige Linien über Böhmen ('Holy' or Functional lines over Bohemia), 1942, Gerlach argued that Benedictine monasteries and other foundations of German colonization were in alignment with one another, and in geometrical relationships with key places in the landscape, such as the castle-cathedral complex in Prague (fig. 1.10). In other works, he discussed the role of alignments in the foundation of churches in Poland and Germany in the seventh and eighth centuries, as part of a technique of conquest. Gerlach's work was forgotten until 1976, when the Institute of Geomantic Research re-discovered Gerlach and issued English translations."

In the latest issue of The Ley Hunter (No.126, Spring 1997) Jeremy Harte takes up a theme previously developed in the London Psychogeographical Association's Newsletter (See 'Who Rules Britain', No. 7 Lughnassadh, 1994): "Kurt Gerlach attributed his schemes to a later period. His heilige linien connecting Benedictine monasteries in Czechoslovakia were originally laid out to cement the 10th-century German conquest of Bohemia by a framework of spiritual geometry. Gerlach compiled his work between 1940 and 1943, relying on maps which even as he worked were being rewritten to purge Czech names of places and replace them by others more attractive to settlers from the Reich." Thus Gerlach's work provided ideological support to the German colonisation programme, indeed the Insitute of Geomantic Research published these as Leys of the German Empire in 1981. Pennick was a founder and co-ordinator for this organisation for whom Christie ran an advert in the same issue of CPAR (p67).

And this leads precisely to my problem with Anarchism: it provides an arena where all sorts of nonsense is tolerated: "the tendency amongst some anarchist circles to accept any creed bearing the brand @ logo has lead them to find themselves cheek by jowl with apostles of the far right. In Britain this has most recently been seen in the Anti-Election Alliance, which regroups the Class War Federation, the Anarchist Communist Federation alongside Green Anarchist." It's not a matter of being "hostile to anarchism" as anarchism is simply another ideology amongst many. It's a matter of criticising and exposing what is passed off as anarchism and taking those people who are prepared to work with Green Anarchist to task for collaborating with such a far- right group.

Of course many anarchists sussed GA without the benefit of our pamphlets, or those of Stewart Home. This has prevented GA from dragging the anarchist 'movement' behind them as a whole. (This shows itself in the way that GA have been scrapping the barrel when searching for contributors even publishing material by the self-confessed Police informer Bob Black.) For those who still entertain illusions about anarchism offering an ideological vehicle for proletarian revolution, we have no doubt that our criticisms of GA as fascistic are far more valuable than Steve Booth ranting about how he finds the Japanese AUM cult "inspirational" (Into the 1990's with Green Anarchist, Green Anarchist Books, 1996 p154). What precisely is inspirational about using Sarin gas to murder passengers on the tube?

GA attempt to justify themselves by accusing me of passivism simply on the basis that I took exception to People Against Racist Terror (PART) for glorifying the stalinist Abraham Lincoln Brigade. GA would rather gloss over the reactionary role played by the Stalinists in Spain in the 1930's, including their murder of a large number of anarchists. GA merely want to flatter anarchists into supporting them and avoid any real issues. The passivism charge is, of course, as absurd as the suggestion that I "supported Robert Faurisson, the convicted French holocaust denier" or even admitted as much in Sucked. In an article entitled 'The Faurisson Affair' I criticise La Guerre Sociale: that they "allowed themselves to be drawn into a liberal campaign does them no credit, but neither does it imply Nazi collusion anymore than outrage over the murder of Move activists implies support for their anti-abortion position." GA have even suggested that I was involved 'in' Guerre Sociale. This is simply a lie. Whilst I participated with Guerre Sociale in the International Discussion Bulletin, it was made clear that the bulletin was "not the mouth peice of a particular group, or an amalgamation of groups, but a forum of discussion of various issues that arise from the class struggle." ('Collective statement of groups in the International Discussion Bulletin' signed by Authority, Groupe de Travailleurs pour l'Autonomie Ouvriere, Guerre Sociale, Pour Une intervention Communiste, Solidarity (Manchester), International Discussion Bulletin No.1 Second Series, September 1981). In fact I consistently rejected ultra-left support for Faurisson. Far from developing a critique of anti-fascism, it has only ended up nuturing sympathy for neo-nazism exactly as I predicted and is shown by the career of Pierre Guillaume.

I shall not here deal with GA's ruminations about Tony Wakeford as Stewart Home has dealt with them in 'Don't Give Up the Day Job' in Disputations on Art, Anarchy and Arseholism (1997, published by Sabotage Editions, BM Senior, London WC1N 3XX, price £3.75). What I want to deal with is how Green Anarchist's position on holocaust denial is ill considered and indeed racist. When GA describe Faurisson as a "convicted French holocaust denier", it's puzzling why they now suddenly give credence to the judicial system of the French state. But key to understanding this is how the French state has passed laws about denying the Nazi holocaust, whilst preserving a studied silence about the Black Holocaust that depopulated Africa for nearly four hundred years in order to supply slaves for the plantations of America: "The total number of slaves imported is not known. It is estimated that nearly 900,000 came to America in the 16th century, 2.75 million in the 17th century, 7 million in the 18th, and over 4 million in the 19th perhaps 15 million in total. probably every slave imported represented, on average, five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The American slave trade, therefore, meant the elimination of at least 60 million Africans from their fatherland." Armet Francis: The Black Triangle.

More specifically, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed to wipe out the entire Black population of Haiti as part of his reconquest of the island after the revolution there. This population, composed of former slaves, had overthrown the slave-owners during the French Revolution. Bonaparte's scheme also included replacing them with new slaves brought from Africa. Thus the genocide he proposed was not simply based on race, but was an attempt to destroy the consciousness of a mass of working people of their ability to transform the world. Fortunately it was defeated by the Haitians.

French law allows for the prosecution of those who deny the Jewish holocaust of the continental Nazi regime, yet stops short of similarly condemning New World Negationism, the denial of the mass murder of Native Americans and Africans in the European New World colonies. Thus far from showing that GA have an authentic concern about holocaust denial and how elements of the ultra-left were drawn into it, all that is shown is that GA are happy to go along with the French state's institutionally racist differentiation between various historical holocausts if it serves the construction of a smear. Indeed these spurious accusations simply serve as diversions from the exposure of their hideous right wing agenda.

Since the collapse of the state's show trial of the GA 'editors', GA have discovered that despite their manipulation of the Gandalf Defendants Campaign, they now have less support than before the trial. E.g. SchNEWS who were prepared to testify for them in court have now removed all reference to them from their website and described them as "rightwing idiots". Counter Information have also issued a statement particularly attacking Steve Booth's offensive article 'The Irrationalists'. Here Booth argued in favour of attacks on the public such as the Oklahoma bombing and the AUM sarin attack where a deadly poison was spread through the Tokyo public transport system.

In the wake of the three nail bombs attacking locations symbolic of the African-Caribbean, Bangladeshis and Gay communities, it might be hoped that Booth had reconsidered his misanthropic call for such attacks. Yet in place of contrition, his latest letter to the Autonomy Centre Edinburgh is simply full of ignorance and lies. Booth pretends that anyone who opposes his eco-malthusianism is a pacifist. He slips from 'by any means necessary' to 'for any excuse possible' to justify wiping out 95% of the population. While he drones on about how wide the 'circle of guilt' is (i.e. how many people he feels it is justified to murder), his colleague, Glen Parton, argues for a postmodern nomadism of "small villages scattered through a wilderness environment" ('Humans-in-the-wilderness', GA #54, Spring '99). He claims that the wilderness carrying capacity of the continental US includes perhaps 10 million human beings amongst other animal life. His eco-malthusianism is clear when he proposes "We must open our minds to images of this idyllic past, and to mature concepts that are orientated towards the fulfilment of these images." (ibid).

It is clear GA's smear campaigns are now not only contributing to their isolation but also to their own disintegration. All Paul Rogers can come up with in his abusive attack on former Gandalf prisoner Noel Molland is a series of personal remarks which reveal more about Rogers own psychology than anything else. His laughable suggestion that Molland is a 'grass' boils down to Molland seeking advice from his lawyer when Rogers issued an inflammatory leaflet in the name of the Gandalf defendants without consulting all of them. GA is now regarded as a sick joke by everyone seriously involved in animal rights issues as well as by class struggle anarchists. Fabian Tompsett

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