At this year's Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, held in Golden Gate Park in mid-March, there was plenty of discord among the 6,000 or so anarchists in attendance. [...] But also lurking at the book fair was a handful of little-noticed anarchists of a different sort — so-called "national anarchists," who advocate racial separatism and white racial purity. They're also fiercely anti-gay and anti-Israel. Calling themselves the Bay Area National Anarchists (BANA), they envision a future race war leading to neo-tribal, whites-only enclaves to be called "National Autonomous Zones."
"We are racial separatists for a number of reasons, such as our desire to maintain our cultural continuity, the principle of voluntary association, and as a self-defensive measure to protect each other from being victimized by crime from other races," BANA co-founder Andrew Yeoman told the Intelligence Report. [...]
"It's an extremely diverse group," said Yeoman, with no hint of irony. "We have ex-liberals, ex-neo-cons, we have Ron Paul supporters, we have ex-skinheads, we have apolitical people that have been turned on to our causes."
Although national anarchism in the U.S. remains a relatively obscure movement, made up of probably fewer than 200 individuals in BANA and a couple of other groups in northern California and Idaho, organizations based on national anarchist ideology have gained a foothold in Russia and sown turmoil in the environmental movement in Germany.
[...] most anarchists are less interested in smashing the state than in learning to live outside it.
[...] In 2003, "the Anarchist People of Color had a well-known meeting in Detroit in which they prohibited white people from entering," Yeoman recounted. "It was seen as this progressive thing not to allow white people into their meeting so they could pursue their black agenda or whatever. I really saw that as a huge contradiction between behavior that was allowable for certain kinds of people but not people of my descent."
[...] More recently, BANA members have started carrying a black flag with the letter Q in one corner. That's a reference to Yeoman's claim that his ancestors rode with Quantrill's Raiders, a notoriously violent pro-Confederate guerrilla outfit that battled for control of the border state of Missouri during the Civil War.
[...] White nationalists taken with this kind of scenario have long proposed creating white homelands or what have been called "Pioneer Little Europes." The "PLE" movement encourages white nationalists to consolidate their presence in white neighborhoods, creating a communal atmosphere whose insularity will repel ethnic minorities. H. Michael Barrett, the originator of the Pioneer Little Europe idea, has engaged in discussions with national anarchists about the shape of his plan. For his part, Yeoman conceded that BANA's National Autonomous Zones are similar to PLEs, but he claims BANA's enclaves will be superior because residents will be selected far more carefully.
"A PLE has all the problems inherent with an open-door hippie commune in the 1970s, with the free-love mentality," Yeoman said. "We're what a PLE would be if it had higher standards."
[...] That attitude — the willingness to seek out recruits from other political sectors, many of them non-racist — is what has many observers worried about the potential for national anarchists and their small but growing movement. [...] The movement, PRA concluded, could become the new face of the radical right.
Source: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intel...e.jsp?aid=1058
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