Supporters and friends of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum will recall that in January this year we became a fellow organisation of the Hestia Society for Social Research.¹

One of the problems with being based in the Antipodes is that we tend to be relatively isolated from the affairs of the rest of the West; this is true even in the era of the internet. The tyranny of distance can have its benefits, mostly in that the cultural advances of liberalism are often delayed here, though the delays do tend to be shorter with each passing year. Yet with this distance (and Australia’s essentially laid-back culture) also comes a kind of provincialism where the shenanigans of the social and political vanguard overseas are observed at arms length. The result is that we rarely play a significant (or any) role in shaping those developments, and many of the prominent actors abroad tend to view us as parochial at best, or largely irrelevant.

Thus, we note with some interest (but limited comprehension) that recent schisms within the neoreactionary online universe appear to be settling into a new status quo. We say ‘limited comprehension’ because we have played no role in the recent disturbances and have no vested interest in any internal conflict within the Sidestream.² Our policy has always been one of default-benevolence to kindred groups within the Orthosphere and other camps of the Dissident Right. For this reason, and the additional fact that none of our members felt qualified enough to comment on those disturbances, we withheld reporting about them here. Indeed, as a sign of good faith and in an attempt to promote the work of what we assessed as promising advocates of contemporary reactionary thought, this year we broke with tradition³ and included two quotes from neoreactionary texts: one from the work of Bryce Laliberte⁴ and another from Michael Anissimov.⁵

Nevertheless, we learn from the recent broadcast of “Ascending the Tower”⁶ that the Hestia Society appears to be formalising its operations after a period of unfortunate infighting among some prominent personalities within the online neoreactionary community. The fact that a new equilibrium is being established is of course a positive thing, and we welcome news that our compatriots on the other side of the Pond are planning for the future. We wish them all the best in their upcoming projects and endeavours and look forward to the year ahead.

– SydneyTrads Editors

Endnotes

1. Editorial, “The Hestia Society for Social Research” SydneyTrads (27 January 2015) <sydneytrads.com> (accessed: 30 May 2015).
2. Sidestream is a term we use to denote the general milieu of philosophical tendencies on the Right which fall outside the mainstream political and cultural taxonomy.
3. The objective of the “Quote of the Week” section on the SydneyTrads website is (and has always been) to extract interesting texts from the published work of authorities who (a) students of politics would not otherwise encounter at modern universities, and (b) encourage young reactionaries to read literature instead of relying on online materials that tend to be shallow in comparison. The two Quotes referred to here were from ‘eBooks’ (see nn 3 and 4 infra). Although we acknowledge that this mode of publication is becoming more common, and will likely be the medium of large scale publication in the near future, it nevertheless represents a form of publication which (a) renders the dissemination of literary information far more vulnerable to centralist intervention (i.e. the marvellous efficiency of the ‘delete key’ making the logistically difficult and imperfect censorship of physical book-burnings a thing of the past), and (b) is fundamentally conducive of literary mediocrity. For more on the later point, see the prescient commentary of Alexis de Tocqueville which we published in “Quote of the Week” on 18 May 2015.
4. Bryce Laliberte, What is Neoreaction – Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization (Amazon Digital Services, 2013) pp 43 and 44.
5. Michael Anissimov, A Critique of Democracy: A Guide for Neoreactionaries (Zenit Books, 2015) pp 77, 79, 81.
6. Podcast, “Ascending the Tower” Social Matter (28 May 2015) <socialmatter.net> (accessed: 30 May 2015).

SydneyTrads is the internet portal and communication page of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum: an association of young professionals who form part of the Australian independent right (also known as “dissident right” or “outer right”).