Third positionism

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Third positionism is a name given to a peculiar subspecies of political wingnut movements which attempt to mix neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and right-wing ultra-nationalism, with whatever economic and social issues of the political left they want to throw into their toxic stew, including anything from neo-paganism, feminism, animal rights, and radical environmentalism, all the way over to old-left ideologies such as anarchism and Marxism, and nearly-forgotten archaic economic ideas such as Distributism and Social Credit.

Several groups fall into this category - this includes the Official National Front (now defunct) in the U.K. and its offshoots (still active), and the American Front (now defunct) in the U.S. Tom Metzger, despite his heavy use of crude racist cartoons and rhetoric that most third postionists would distance themselves from, has often been described as a third positionist. More recently groups cut from the same stuff have started using terms like "national anarchism" and "national Bolshevism" to describe themselves. A new political party was formed in 2010 in the United States called American Third Position. Another example from the Internet, which is widely believed to be a stealth parody yet is a good illustration of what Third Positionism is, is a website purporting to be the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party".

Thankfully, they haven't gotten anywhere. Let's keep it that way.

This leaves open the question of why somebody would simultaneously mix up a stew of neo-Nazism with left-wing social and economic views. (Yes, we are aware that some conservatives claim that all Nazism and Fascism were left-wing. They weren't, but Third Positionism is an aberration.) This probably could be a subject for much psychological and sociological analysis, or perhaps these people are so alienated from society they are willing to believe in anything as long as it is way off the deep end. Or perhaps they're just plain nuts. For a more nuanced political analysis of this phenomenon, look to the original National Socialist German Workers Party of the 1930s - one faction led by Hitler was merely interested in raw power, hatred, and putting their genocidal and militaristic fantasies into practice. The other faction led by the Strasser brothers took the "Socialist" part of the party's name seriously and espoused a left-wing working class revolutionary stance in addition to extreme nationalism. The Strasser faction was violently purged by the Hitler led faction not long after Hitler's rise to power, in the "night of the long knives" (and as Jello Biafra correctly noted, "In a real fourth reich you'll be the first to go", which is something would-be Third Positionists may want to think long and hard about.) Third Positionism, then, is more or less to neo-Nazism what Strasserism was to the original Nazism. Note the similarity of "national anarchism" and "national Bolshevism" to "national socialism".

It should be noted that if one is truly interested in the ultimate fusion of wingnuttery and moonbattery, it would be best to join the Lyndon LaRouche cult and forget about Third Positionism.

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