Street-Fighting Man: Two Books about Horst Wessel

The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel by Daniel Siemens, Translation by David Burnett, I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Die Fahne Hoch: Three Biographies of Horst Wessel by Erwin Reitmann, Fritz Daum and Max Kullak, Translation and Introduction by Klokke Van Aelst. Antelope Hill Publishing, 2022.

In the summer of ‘68 rocker Mick Jagger lamented that, “in sleepy London Town there’s just no place for a street-fighting man.” The same could not be said for Berlin Town forty years earlier where violent clashes between political factions were a near daily occurrence. The mayhem, previously confined to the streets and beer halls, escalated in January 1930 when a communist gang shot and fatally wounded a Sturmabteilung (SA) leader in what today would be described as a home invasion murder. The conventional narrative views the life of Horst Wessel (Wessel) largely as a prop for Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels propaganda campaign. But a closer look finds a fascinating tale of violence, sex, and political intrigue. What more could a compelling story need?

The books considered here treat the same subject in two very different formats. Prof. Siemens’ volume is an academic work written within the general liberal-left perspective of contemporary academe, but with enough objectivity to be largely led by the evidence. What really makes Siemens an interesting read is the new archival material he uncovered. Records of the Berlin criminal police from this period were seized by the Red Army in 1945. Later they were locked away in possession of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi). After the fall of communism, they were “lost” until Siemens discovered them while researching his book. Thus he is the first historian to include this material. At times the use of police reports gives his account the feel of the true crime genre.

Die Fahne Hoch includes three short biographies of Wesswl published in 1933 or 1934, and written a year or two earlier. Erwin Reitmann was a fellow SA man and knew Wessel personally. His account is heavily politicized. Fritz Daum’s piece is the longest of the three and is aimed at young readers. Max Kullak’s contribution is the shortest, but to me the most interesting. Kullak was also a SA man and is identified as Prof. Dr. Max Kullak on the back cover. This collection conveys the mindset of the SA during the late Weimar and early days in power of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP).  It also contains the lyrics of many SA songs. The material was translated and published by Antelope Hill Press. The company has received the seal of disapproval from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel was born in 1907 in the city of Bielefeld in the province of Westphalia. His father, Wilhelm Ludwig Georg Wessel, was an up-and-coming Lutheran minister. His mother also came from a family of Lutheran clergy. In 1913 the family moved to Berlin after Pastor Wessel received a prestigious post at the Nicolai Church (St. Nicholas). Siemens describes Rev. Wessel as a volkisch theologian — a Christian ethno-nationalist. Having grown up in a liberal Lutheran church in America during the 1960s it is hard for me to imagine such a theological orientation. One element of Lutheranism that has not changed, however, is its emphasis on music. So it is not entirely surprising that a pastor’s son became a songsmith for the SA. Pastor Wessel died unexpectedly in 1922 when Horst was 15. Though in somewhat reduced circumstances, the family was able to maintain a very respectable middle-class lifestyle with a residence on (ironically) Jüdenstraße.

Horst’s father had been a strong supporter of the German National People’s Party (DNVP) and the boy was a nationalist from an early age. According to Kullak, Wessel took a six-week summer training program with the Black Reichswehr at the age of 16. The Black Reichswehr was a semi-secret organization which received some government funding and acted as an axillary to the German army which was then limited to 100,000 men by the treaty of Versailles. At 18 he joined the Bismarck League, the youth wing of the DNVP. Besides being a political organization Siemens writes that the league was influenced by a back-to-nature movement. Young Wessel enjoyed being part of this co-ed group, but ultimately found it too bourgeois for his growing militancy.

There were a multitude of right-wing groups in Germany in the mid to late 1920s and a year later Wessel joined the Viking League. This was a serious organization, the successor to Organisation Consul, described by Wikipedia as “an ultra-nationalist and antisemitic terrorist organization that operated in the Weimar Republic from 1920 to 1922.”[1] It had an adult membership, most of whom were five to ten years older than Horst. Kullak suggests a generational divide within the German Right at the time. Those of middle age who had been established before the war wanted a restoration of the old regime. Younger men who either had fought in the war or remembered the war but were too young to have fought, wanted radical change.

In April of 1926 Wessel enrolled in Friedrich Wilhelm University to study law. According to Reitmann, Horst joined the SA in May 1926, while Siemens writes he joined the NSDAP in December in that year. At the time one could be a member of one organization, or the other, or both. So young Wessel left reactionary nationalism behind and joined the revolutionary Right.

Siemens states that the SA was then “made up of workers and the unemployed . . . as well as right-wing nationalist-minded bourgeois academics.” In Kullak’s account, however, Wessel’s solid secondary education and university study set him apart from his mostly working-class mates. He was a middle-class college kid and “there were not many of them in the SA at that time.”  Reitmann, Horst’s SA comrade, called his fellows “an uneducated, unpolished crowd.” No matter. In the SA Horst had found his calling. His enthusiasm and courage propelled him into a leadership position where he became known for his ability as a recruiter and motivator.

Berlin at the time was a stronghold of the far Left. Hitler appointed Goebbels, a Rhinelander, as the party’s regional leader to fight the Battle for Berlin. If the SA could control the streets of the capital, it would send a powerful political message. But it would not be easy. The Reds ruled the streets of the Friedrichshain District. Official police statistics report 318 incidents of “political rowdyism,” or street clashes in 1928. That number increased to 579 in 1929. Although bold, Siemens states that “Wessel was hardly a good fighter, despite having trained intensely.” He had a defensive fighting style, perhaps due to “a debilitation and deformation of the arm” cause by a severe fracture from an equestrian accident.

Wessel is probably best known as a musician and song writer. He had a good strong voice and played the piano and guitar. His Die Fahne hoch, later named the Horst-Wessel-Lied, became the official anthem of the NSDAP. Siemens notes the role of music in the movement. The SA met “at central locations, sang songs, and marched through the streets with the aim of impressing curious sympathizers as well as provoking political adversaries.” He explains that songs “reinforce the singers’ sense of identification with the cause.” The rhythm must be suitable for marching because “the liberating power of song comes from the rhythm.”

To carry the tune Wessel created a shawm band. Today’s American Right appears to be musically deficient. In addition, Horst was an excellent orator; after all, his father had been known for preaching rousing sermons.

Fate determined that 1929 would be the high point of Horst Wessel’s short life. Die Fahne hoch was first sung in the streets of Berlin in May. In August as sturmfuhrer, sturm 5 he led his group to the party congress in Nuremberg where this song was also sung.

Earlier that year Horst met Erna Jaenichen a 23-year-old prostitute, a year older than Wessel. The fact that he would became associated with a former prostitute led to the smear that he was her pimp. Siemens, the detective historian, could find no evidence to support this claim. Far more likely the idealistic young SA man rescued her from the streets. Wessel came to blows with Georg Ruhnke, Erna’s former pimp. Ruhnke claimed he bested Wessel. Biographer Fritz Daum disputes this claim, but in any case, Ruhnke left the couple alone after the fight. This theme brings to mind the movie Taxi Driver (1976) where Robert DeNiro saves the young prostitute Jodie Foster. Going back further we have St. George saving the fair maiden from a dragon, or perhaps Perseus saving Andromeda.

By November Erna moved in with Wessel who had by now left his family’s home and was living in a cheap rooming house. He had also left the university without taking his degree. He became a “worker” while devoting most of his time to the cause. While I am sure there were “benefits” to having Erna as a roommate, she did complicate his life. Siemens quotes one SA leader: “Everyone knows her, no one likes her.” They tolerated her for Wessel’s sake. Daum writes: “When his comrades . . . once did not speak of her with the respect he thought was due her, he reprimanded them and told them he would become engaged to this faithful girl. From then on they all treated the quiet Erna with the greatest respect.” While this was the official party narrative there is suspicion that Erna, a former member of the Alliance of Red Women and Girls, might not have been as loyal to Wessel and National Socialism as she appeared.  I imagine that Horst’s mother, the widow of a well-known conservative clergyman, would not have welcomed a match with a former prostitute, a girl without education or family. But by this time her son had largely reject bourgeois society, though he was not estranged from his family.

There are three versions of the events leading up to Horst Wessel’s murder in the winter of 1930. One: Horst and Erna got into a dispute with their landlady Elisabeth Salm. Did Frau Salm demand additional rent now that two persons were occupying the premises? Or was she afraid that Erna’s reputation would reflect negatively on her establishment?  Widow Salm claimed to be apolitical, but her late husband had been a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). She knew some members of the Red Front Fighters League. Did she ask them to come over to beat up Wessel and throw him out of the rooming house? But Horst and Erna had already agreed to vacate by the end of the month, so why go to extreme measures to stop a stay of only two more weeks? There is probably an element of truth in this account, but it is hardly the main story.

Two: The communist version printed in the Die Rote Fahne is that Wessel was shot in a dispute between two pimps over a girl. There was nothing explicitly political about the attack. This was pure libel on the part of the communist press, and the KPD leadership knew it. Although this version has been repeated endlessly since January 1930, including in a Wikipedia entry, it was certainly not the case. Wessel was not a pimp, and the gunman was not Erna’s former pimp, but he was a KPD member.

The third version on which both the police and the NSDAP agreed was that Wessel was the victim of a political assassination. Due to his political activism, Wessel had a target on his back. He had been doxed 1930 style, and had received numerous warnings from friends and threats from foes. On the evening of January 14, 1930 Horst was expecting a visit from two SA members. He answered a knock on the door and was immediately shot in the face by Albrecht “Ali” Höhler, a communist who joined the party in 1924 and a petty criminal associated with a Ringvereine, a gang dealing in stolen goods and prostitution. Siemens reports that during this time the “KPD had close ties to the criminal underworld.”

According to SA physician Leonardo Conti the 9mm slug knocked out the victim’s front teeth and destroyed most of his tongue, uvula, and palate. The bullet lodged in a cervical vertebra but missing the brain. A report the next day by the criminal police put it more bluntly: “His case is said to be hopeless.” Yet Wessel lingered for weeks before a fatal infection set in. Without modern antibiotics this was, unfortunately, a common occurrence. U.S. President James Garfield survived for two months with festering wounds before succumbing to his assassin’s bullets.

A family tragedy three weeks before might have contributed to Wessel’s death. His nineteen-year-old brother Werner died of hypothermia “on a Nazi-organized winter excursion” in the Silesian mountains. A blizzard hit while the outing was on the trail. They were either on skis or snowshoes, accounts vary. Four young people, three boys and a girl, became separated from the group, lost their way and froze to death overnight on December 23, 1929. Understandably, Horst was deeply affected by his younger brother’s death and his funk might have made him less careful regarding his personal safety.

Wessel died on February 23, 1930. Gauleiter Goebbels, who had visited Wessel several times in the hospital, spoke at graveside. Hermann Göring was also in attendance. The police, fearing disorder, wanted a small funeral without swastika flags. The casket was draped with a swastika flag, but piled with flowers so it was not clearly visible. Thousands came out for the procession, most in support, singing the Horst Wessel Lied. The communists were also out shouting abuse and throwing stones, but there was no major disturbance.

Meanwhile Ali Höhler, who had been identified as the triggerman, was smuggled out of the country to Prague with the help of Red Aid, the KPD legal-aid organization. But Ali decided to returned to Berlin, was arrested, and cooperated with the police, no doubt hoping for a lighter sentence.

The first Wessel murder trial later that year was a sensation in Berlin at the time. The two main defendants were Ali Höhler, who fired the fatal shot and Erwin Rückert who also had been armed and accompanied Ali. There were also several other accomplices, part of the gang that stood guard at the rooming house. The landlady Elisabeth Salm was charged as well. The defense made two contradictory claims, the shot was “fired inadvertently” and that Höhler had fired in self-defense. Reitmann describes the trial: “The defendants were shady individuals with criminal records . . . defended by Jewish lawyers.” The defense must have done a pretty good job, Höhler received the longest sentence of only six years, Salm only got eighteen months.

After Hitler gained office in January 1933 things changed. Horst Wessel’s life took on almost mythic status. He became the role model for German youth. The man who wrote “Comrades shot by Red Front and reaction; March in spirit within our ranks” had been shot down by the Red Front, a martyr for the cause. There was also payback, the NSDAP took revenged on whom they thought had gotten off too lightly. A second Wessel murder trial was held in 1934. Before that happened there were a couple of extrajudicial executions. Elsa Cohn, who someone labeled “the Jewish ringleader,” was convicted in September 1930, but fled before sentencing. In May 1933 she was found dead by the side of the road near the east bank of the Oder River. Ali Höhler, now serving time in Wohlau Prison, Silesia, was transferred to Gestapo headquarters for interrogation in preparation for the second trial. On the way back to prison in September 1933 he was abducted after his transport was stopped by SA men serving as auxiliary police. The body was discovered a year later by a mushroom hunter. Of the persons convicted as participants in the Wessel murder, two were extrajudicially executed, two were judicially executed, four died in prison, and four survived the war.

Some criticized Wessel’s mother Margarete for trying to profit from her son’s fame. She fought unsuccessfully to gain copyright to the Horst Wessel Lied, much to the annoyance of Goebbels.  She did receive copyrights to two of Horst’s unpublished manuscripts, one a political testament and the other a travelogue of trips around Germany and Austria. She also sold his papers to the Prussian State Library. I guess one should give the widow a break, having lost her husband and two sons. Horst’s kid sister, Ingeborg, helped promote her brother’s legacy, speaking to many school groups around Berlin. She went on to become a physician and married a physician. They had one son, born in 1942, and named after his famous uncle.

Erna Jaenichen’s life took a different course. She was with Horst when he was shot. She testified at the first trial that she and Horst were engaged. The myth arose that she was spying on the KPD for Wessel. She denied ever spying, but she had connections with both the SA and the Red Front. Perhaps she was playing both sides. After the trial she seemed to have dropped out of sight until 1933 when she married Georg Ruhnke, her pimp back in ’29! The marriage did not last. In 1935 she married a guy named Fiedler. Then, after another change of name and address, she disappeared from the historical record.

Both the Siemens book and the Antelope Hill book tell us something about the beliefs and values of the SA during the late 1920s and early 30s. One thing that stands out is that they saw themselves as revolutionaries, opposed to both bourgeois capitalism and Bolshevik Marxism. They believed in the socialism of National Socialism. For Reitmann, socialism equals “social justice.” Kullak writes that being a nationalist is not enough. One must also be a socialist which meant building a national community that included “every decent German.” He advocated for the national welfare that puts common interest before self-interest—very idealistic indeed.

While not an apologist for the SA, Siemens seems to have some ambivalence towards Wessel and his cause. He notes that despite their tough guy image the SA had “echoes of the Wandervogel movement . . . and of German Romanticism too.” Ambiguously, Siemens maintains that Wessel was a man “whose intentions, however honourable in certain respects were morally discredited by virtue of his actions.” Finally, “Horst Wessel and his contemporaries can perhaps best be described as violence-prone and cold romantics behind whose ‘objective’ façade was really a burning desire for community.” One could say that there was a certain “innocence” to the movement in the late 1920s and early 30s to the extent that the SA was taking it from the Red Front and police as much as they were dishing it out.

Although neither book uses the term ‘Strasserism’, it is clear that the left-wing of the NSDAP was strong in the Berlin region at this time. This points to the fact that there were several currents within the party. Historians, who should know better, often read the history of the Third Reich backwards, that its conclusion was inevitable.  The disastrous policy in the east that led to catastrophic defeat for Germany then metastasized, evolved, and avalanched to enervate and corrupt the entire West. Surely there can be no stepping over or ignoring the topics of National Socialism and World War II. They were pivotal events in Western history that still shape today’s world. The present wars in Ukraine and the Middle East both make reference to World War II. During the Balkan conflict in the 1990s the parties involved used their experience during World War II to justify their ethnonationalism. If one thinks World War II is over in Eastern Europe, consider Belarus. Independence Day, celebrated on July 3, marks the date in 1944 when the Wehrmacht was driven out of Minsk, and the countryside is peppered with monuments to every battle and partisan action from 1941–1945.

Siemens writes that he seeks to “historicize National Socialism.” By this I believe he means to emphasize the larger historical context when interpreting this ideology. Having a temporal perspective is a good starting point for analyzing National Socialism, and it is the best we can do for now.


[1] For another account of right-wing activism of the time see: Nelson Rosit, “Political Violence in Weimar Germany: Lessons for the Contemporary US,” Occidental Observer (Sept 7, 2021).

Update on Pending Free Expression Foundation Litigation

By FEF Staff

Sines v. Damigo, Eastern District of California Bankruptcy Court, Adversary Proceeding.

In the Sines v. Kessler case  – i.e., the lawfare case devised by Roberta Kaplan based on the chaotic Charlottesville Unite the Right events in 2017 – Nathan Damigo was among many defendants who, after trial and an appeal to the Fourth Circuit, were ultimately held jointly and severally liable for damages in excess of $3 million.  A host of legal flaws, both at the trial and appellate level, led to this unfortunate and undeserved result.  An impartial observer could easily conclude Mr. Damigo should not have been held liable for any amount.  Regrettably, that litigation is now res judicata, i.e., subject to no further appeals.

Mr. Damigo, however, in 2019 filed in the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of California a petition for a bankruptcy discharge as to this liability in 2019.  If he is granted that discharge, as he deserves, Mr. Damigo, a military veteran of limited means, would not have this huge damages award hanging over his head indefinitely as he tries to make a fresh start in life.

In January 2020, Roberta Kaplan, the attorney who was the mastermind for the Sines v Kessler lawfare, stated as follows: “We absolutely can and will bankrupt these groups. And then we will chase these people around for the rest of their lives. So if they try to buy a new home, we will put a lien on the home. If they get a new job, we will garnish their wages. The reason to do that is because we want to create a deterrence impact. So we send a message to other people that if you try to do something like this, the same thing will happen to you. And it already has been a deterrence. We’re seeing lone shooters now; we’re not seeing the kind of massively organized conspiracy we saw in Charlottesville. And I think that’s in large part due to our case.” Allen Wexler, “Roberta Kaplan Takes White Supremacy to Court,” Moment Magazine, January 6, 2020,

True to this vengeful vow, the Sines v. Kessler plaintiffs have filed an adversary proceeding in Mr. Damigo’s bankruptcy case seeking to prevent his discharge of the Sines v. Kessler damages award on the ground that his conduct was “willful and malicious” and therefore not subject to bankruptcy discharge. Through Mr. Allen, Mr. Damigo has vigorously opposed this attempt.  So far Mr. Allen has filed three complex and lengthy legal memoranda on this issue. A  hearing is scheduled for late July 2025.

Jacobs, et al.  v. Catlin, et alU.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

The distribution of flyers, pamphlets, and similar literature has long been protected by the First Amendment. These protections apply even if the distribution is anonymous and even if the contents of the flyers or pamphlets would be regarded as offensive by many. The sheriff’s office and related state authorities in Douglas County, Georgia, however, have flagrantly ignored these protections, arresting Philip Matthew Jacobs and his wife Hilary on bogus “littering” charges for distributing flyers critical of Jewish power and influence and threatening Michael Weaver with a similar arrest.  Adding to this outrageous and unconstitutional conduct, Mr. Jacobs was physically assaulted while in jail and both of the Jacobs were required to post $30,000 bond — $60,000 total for “littering.”

Such imperious governmental lawlessness must not be ignored or tolerated.  It must be defied, and Glen Allen, Randy Sheppard (FEF board member), and Fred Kelly are doing just that.  In March 2025, they filed a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights) First Amendment claim and other claims on behalf of Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs and Mr. Weaver against 13 Douglas County law enforcement and related persons.  In late May 2025, the government defendants responded with a lengthy motion to dismiss. The FEF lawyers responded to that motion with an amended complaint and a motion for preliminary injunctions. The case involves many complicated legal issues and will certainly be expensive and hard-fought, but it is an important case and deserves the support of everyone who cherishes the rule of law and our First Amendment freedoms. Ignoring governmental abuse only invites further governmental abuse.

Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church v. Proud Boys International, David Kuriakose, and OthersDistrict of Columbia Superior Court, Now on Appeal to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Conspiracy allegations are a primary weapon used in lawfare cases to entangle political adversaries in lengthy, complex, and expensive litigation. Unfortunately, all too often such allegations are effective. The lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia Superior Court on behalf of the Metropolitan African Methodist Church by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights against numerous members of the Proud Boys, International is an example of abusive, lawfare use of conspiracy allegations.

The basic facts were as follows.  In December 2020, after Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections, a huge rally was held in the District of Columbia to show support for Trump. Many groups attended;  members from the Proud Boys International were among them. Unfortunately violence and rowdy behavior broke out and at some point certain Proud Boys jumped over a fence around the Metropolitan AME Church and destroyed a Black Lives Matter sign. Almost immediately the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights brought suit on behalf of the church against dozens of Proud Boys they identified from the voluminous videos, photographs, and media articles that were available of the Pro-Trump rally. They did not, however, sue David Kuriakose at this time.  Kuriakose was a Proud Boy who happened to be walking in the general vicinity of the church when the other Proud Boys jumped over the fence and destroyed the BLM sign. No evidence linked Mr. Kuriakose to the vandalism except that he was nearby and was a Proud Boy. He adamantly denies knowing about or approving the vandalism.

This did not keep the Lawyers’ Committee from adding him as a defendant over three years later. At this point Kuriakose appealed to FEF for help (no other attorneys would help him) and Glen Allen agreed to represent him. Allen immediately took the offensive, filing an Anti-SLAPP motion (i.e., Anti-Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation; a streamlined procedure for dismissing lawfare suits aimed at foreclosing the exercise of First Amendment rights) based on Kuriakose’s Statute of Limitations defense. Allen’s anti-SLAPP motion was denied by the trial court but Allen has now appealed to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. Briefing begins in Mid-August 2025.

Gancarz, et al. v. Capito, U.S. District Court for Western District of Washington.

In 2021 an  Antifa / anarchist named David Capito, a.k.a. Vyacheslav Arkangelsky, a.k.a.  Richard Smith, using a false identity, infiltrated a Patriot Front group in Washington State. Deceptively gaining the confidence of the Patriot Front members by pretending to share their outlook, Capito was able after several months to illegally gain unauthorized access to confidential information regarding many Patriot Front members. He then sent this fraudulently and illegally obtained information to a leftist organization that published it. It was then used to doxx many Patriot Front members. The consequences of the doxxing in many cases were quite severe,  including loss of employment and  physical and social harassment.

In July 2023, Glen Allen, together with local counsel, filed a complaint against Capito in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on behalf of four of the Patriot Front members who were harmed by the doxxing plus one of their spouses, alleging claims of fraud, invasion of privacy, and violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.  Effecting service on Capito proved a major challenge, as he changed his name yet again, changed his residence repeatedly and used false addresses, and basically went into hiding. Eventually the Court permitted publication by service, i.e.,  by notices in a local newspaper. In June 2025 a group of lawyers calling themselves the Civil Liberties Defense Center filed a motion to dismiss and a separate motion under Washington’s version of the anti-SLAPP law. Essentially Capito is contending  through his attorneys that he had a First Amendment  right to infiltrate Patriot Front because, he claims, Patriot Front espouses odious views.  Mr. Allen,  together with local counsel, is preparing a response to this preposterous contention plus a response Capito’s  separate motion to dismiss.

Just as proponents of the rule of law and robust freedom of expression should not tolerate  malicious and arrogant violations of their rights by the government,  so too must they defy thugs such as Mr. Capito. We must raise their cost of inflicting their unlawful and malicious activities on others.

IN CONCLUSION, as these cases – and there are others waiting in the wings —  hopefully illustrate, FEF has a full plate of important pending First Amendment cases as it continues to make progress to becoming a force to be reckoned with in the legal arena. In addition, FEF continues to perform many other functions, including mentoring law students and young lawyers, responding to email and telephone inquiries, developing a network of sympathetic lawyers around the country, and fundraising to keep FEF solvent. As always, FEF greatly appreciates the moral encouragement and financial sustenance it receives from its donors and supporters.

‘Guardians of Heritage’: A Clarion Call for European Identity

Cross-posting a review of a recent book published published by Arktos.

Alexander Raynor

Alex Raynor reviews Guardians of Heritage: The Iliade Institute’s Call to Action, which passionately champions the preservation and revitalization of European identity in an age of globalization and cultural homogenization.

In an era marked by rapid globalization and cultural homogenization, Guardians of Heritage is a thought-provoking manifesto that seeks to rekindle the flame of European identity. This compelling work by the Iliade Institute presents a passionate argument for the preservation and revitalization of Europe’s rich cultural heritage.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past decade, the Iliade Institute is the new torchbearer of the European New Right (ENR) in the 21st century. They continue the legacy of great thinkers like Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Giorgio Locchi, and, especially, Dominique Venner — to whom this book is dedicated.

The book is divided into three main sections: “Roots,” “Being in the World,” and “Becoming.” Each chapter builds upon the previous, creating a cohesive narrative that explores the multifaceted nature of European identity and its significance in the modern world.

Roots: The Foundation of Identity

The authors begin by addressing the fundamental question of human identity, challenging the notion of “abstract man” prevalent in modern liberal discourse. They argue convincingly that our biological, familial, and cultural roots are integral to our sense of self and cannot be discarded in favor of a universalist ideology.

The book’s exploration of biological belonging is particularly nuanced, acknowledging the role of genetics in shaping human characteristics while also emphasizing the crucial importance of cultural transmission. This balanced approach helps to steer clear of reductionist arguments while still recognizing the reality of human biodiversity.

The section on family lineage is especially poignant, highlighting the importance of intergenerational bonds in preserving cultural heritage. The authors make a compelling case for the family as the “bridge that links nature and culture,” a perspective that offers a refreshing counterpoint to increasingly atomized modern societies.

Being in the World: Living European Values

The second part of the book explores how European identity manifests in daily life, from our relationship with nature to our political and economic systems. The authors present a vision of Europeans living in harmony with their natural environment, advocating for a form of ecological thinking rooted in local traditions and landscapes.

Their critique of consumerism and the commodification of culture is particularly incisive. By contrasting the ethos of “being” to “having,” the book challenges readers to reconsider their priorities and embrace a more authentic mode of existence aligned with European values.

The discussion on technology is notably balanced, recognizing both its potential benefits and its capacity for alienation. The authors propose a thoughtful approach to technological progress that maintains human agency and cultural continuity.

Becoming: Shaping the Future of Europe

 

The final section of the book is perhaps its most inspiring, outlining a vision for Europe’s future that is rooted in its past but not bound by it. The authors call for a “conservative revolution” that seeks to reinvigorate European culture and identity in the face of globalizing forces.

Their emphasis on community-building and education as key strategies for cultural preservation is particularly noteworthy. The book offers practical suggestions for fostering a sense of belonging and transmitting cultural knowledge to future generations.

The authors’ vision of a renewed Europe as a “continental power with a special calling” is ambitious and thought-provoking. It is a revisitation of geopolitical propositions, like those from previous ENR thinkers, arguing for a civilizational empire as opposed to the petty nationalisms of yesteryear. While some readers may find this perspective challenging, it undeniably offers a compelling alternative to the prevailing narratives of European decline.

Final Thoughts

 

Guardians of Heritage is a tour de force of cultural introspection, offering a passionate defense of European identity that is both timely and contentious. It remains a vital contribution to the ongoing dialogue about European identity. Its willingness to tackle thorny issues head-on, even at the risk of controversy, is commendable in an era often characterized by intellectual timidity.

The authors’ call for a “conservative revolution” is perhaps the book’s boldest proposition that will undoubtedly resonate with those who feel lost and hopeless in this rapidly changing world. Much in the same vein of thought as the German Conservative Revolution movement of the interwar period, it raises complex questions about the nature of progress and the feasibility of reclaiming past cultural paradigms in a globalized age.

Guardians of Heritage is not a book that will leave readers unmoved. It is a clarion call, a philosophical gauntlet thrown down in the public square. Whether one emerges from its pages inspired or incensed, the intellectual journey it offers is undeniably profound.

In an age where discussions of identity often devolve into reductive sloganeering, this book offers a nuanced, if provocative, exploration of what it means to be European. It challenges readers to grapple with their cultural inheritance, to question the prevailing winds of globalization, and to consider the price of forgetting one’s roots.

The authors have crafted a work that serves as both a mirror and a window — reflecting the anxieties and aspirations of many Europeans while offering a view into a possible future shaped by a renewed sense of cultural confidence.

Ultimately, the book’s true value lies not in the answers it provides but in the questions it provokes. It compels us to ask: What aspects of our heritage are worth preserving? How do we maintain cultural distinctiveness in an interconnected world? And perhaps most crucially, how do we honor our past while building a better future?

Guardians of Heritage may not be the final word on European identity, but it is certainly a powerful opening statement in a conversation that will shape the continent’s future. It challenges, provokes, and ultimately enriches our understanding of the complex tapestry that is European heritage.

Purchase Guardians of Heritage here.

Spiro Agnew’s Surprising Embrace of Antisemitism

Spiro Theodore Agnew began his career as a respected establishment figure, but after his resignation as 39th vice president of the United States his post-political career took an interesting anti-Zionist turn.

Agnew began life in Baltimore in 1918 as the son of Theodore Anagnostopoulos, a Greek immigrant who ran a local diner, and Margaret Akers, a Virginian with deep American roots. He attended Johns Hopkins University, interrupted his studies to serve as an Army officer in France during World War II, earned a Bronze Star, then completed a law degree at the University of Baltimore in 1947.

By the end of the 1950s, Agnew had risen from the Baltimore County Zoning Board of Appeals to electoral success, becoming County Executive in 1962 and Maryland’s governor in 1966. As governor, Agnew combined reformist initiatives such as a graduated income tax with pointed rhetoric denouncing the antiwar movement and the liberal media, a combination that impressed Richard Nixon’s campaign strategists.

Nixon chose the little known Marylander as his running mate in 1968. Agnew’s blunt television attacks on Vietnam War protesters, journalists, and “radical liberals” electrified portions of the electorate and yielded the era’s most memorable insult directed against politicians critical of the Nixon administration, “nattering nabobs of negativism.” He cultivated the image of champion of the silent majority while privately shifting rightward, ready to defend administration policies with a ferocity that sometimes overshadowed the president himself.

Re-elected with Nixon in the 1972 landslide, he seemed positioned to inherit the Republican mantle should Watergate consume the Oval Office. Instead, Agnew’s own scandal led to his downfall.

While Senate hearings probed the Watergate break-ins, federal prosecutors in Baltimore uncovered a cash-for-contracts network dating to Agnew’s time as county executive. Witnesses described envelopes filled with bills exchanged in his state-house office and, astonishingly, in the Executive Office Building after he became vice president. Insisting the allegations were “damned lies,” he nevertheless negotiated a plea of nolo contendere to a single felony count of tax evasion on October 10 1973, paid a $10,000 fine, and resigned, becoming only the second vice president in American history to leave the post mid-term. Gerald Ford soon replaced him, and Watergate rolled on.

The fall was both personal and public. Friends recalled that Agnew now spoke of betrayal and conspiracy, convinced that powerful enemies had forced him out so he would not succeed a wounded Nixon. Among those adversaries he named were “Zionists.” These accusations of a Zionist conspiracy soon leached into public discourse. In 1976 Agnew re-emerged with a political thriller titled “The Canfield Decision”, whose plot hinged on a Jewish media cabal sabotaging an American vice president.

During his promotional tour, he told the Washington Star that half of individuals in the “ownership and management policy posts” of the national impact media are Jewish, a power that had produced a catastrophic U.S. approach to Middle East governance. During an appearance on NBC’s “Today” program in 1976, he expanded the charge: “I feel that the Zionist influences in the U.S. are dragging the United States into a rather disorganized approach to the Middle East … there is no doubt that there has been a certain amount of Israeli imperialism taking place in the world.” Such remarks caught the attention of organizations skeptical of Jewish influence, while mainstream Jewish leaders naturally denounced Agnew’s statements. Benjamin R. Epstein, then-national director of the ADL, excoriated Agnew’s comments as “irresponsible anti‑Semitic statements maligning American Jews and the American press.” Epstein also accused him of “parroting the Arab propaganda line” and remarked that “this comes as no surprise in light of his activities on behalf of Arab petrodollar countries seeking to invest in the United States.”

Similarly, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, declared: “Spiro Agnew has disgraced himself once again with his despicable statement, so redolent of the venom and slander we have come to expect from the anti‑Semitic lunatic fringe.”

The former vice president’s comments were more than isolated flashes of pique; they signaled a durable ideological pivot. Agnew’s hostility toward world Jewry led him to court the oil wealth of the Arabian Peninsula to bankroll his anti‑Zionist pursuits. He would soon begin to broker American construction and engineering contracts in Saudi Arabia. The most revealing artifact of that relationship surfaced in 2019 when reporters located a ten-page letter dated August 25, 1980, in his personal papers.

Addressed to Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the document requests “an interest free, two million dollar loan” that would be channeled through a Liechtenstein account so Agnew could continue his fight against the “Zionist enemies who are destroying” the United States. Agnew also congratulated Fahd on a “clear and courageous call to jihad” after Israel declared Jerusalem its capital.

After that letter was published, Agnew largely disappeared from headline politics yet never retracted his assertions. Agnew would occasionally do interviews throughout the 1980s where he repeated charges of Zionist media control and dual loyalty among American Jews. Agnew spent his remaining years shuttling between California and Maryland, consulting for foreign clients, battling tax authorities, and publishing a memoir in which he laid out his side of the story regarding his fall from grace. When he died of leukemia in 1996, obituaries noted the remarkable arc from war veteran to governor to vice president to convicted felon.

Despite President Nixon’s candid remarks of Jewish influence in American politics (see also here and here), his administration featured a remarkable cadre of Jewish officials occupying high-level national security and advisory roles—among them Henry Kissinger (National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State), Leonard Garment (White House Counsel), Herbert Stein (Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers), and speechwriters like William Safire and Ben Stein, along with influential informal advisers such as Max Fisher.

One of Nixon’s most consequential decisions was authorizing Operation Nickel Grass, a massive emergency airlift of over 22,000 tons of military supplies to Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. This decisive intervention prevented Israel’s potential defeat by replenishing its frontlines and offsetting Soviet support for Arab forces.

Yet even the presence of Jews in prominent positions in the Nixon administration and Nixon’s historic gesture on behalf of Israel did little to shield Nixon and Vice President Agnew from mounting criticism and pressure from both the media and political opponents.

While the Jewish officials from the Nixon administration pursued relatively unblemished political paths afterward, the “fall-goyim” in Nixon and Agnew paid the ultimate price—spending the remainder of their lives as targets of negative coverage and historical censure.

Time and again the Nixon and Agnew experience reveals the enduring axiom: with Jews you lose.

Globalist Gorefest: Delineating the Dark Dimensions of Death, Deviance and Dismemberment in the Ethnically Enriched Yookay

“Like something out of a horror film.” It was Whites who invented film and all the complex, fragile technology needed to record and reproduce it. But it’s Blacks and non-Whites who excel at creating real scenes of carnage and cruelty, at committing crimes that are indeed “like something out of a horror film.” I’ve written many times at the Occidental Observer about stale pale Britain being un-staled and un-paled by energetic ethnic enrichers. Here are some examples of how they’ve brought horror-films to blood-soaked, flesh-destroying life:

• The Black son of Rwandan “asylum-seekers” who stabbed and slashed little White girls at a summer dance-club, killing three and horrifically wounding many more

• The Arab son of Libyan “asylum-seekers” who blew White children to pieces at a pop-concert in Manchester

• The five Blacks and one Albanian “asylum-seeker” who raped and tortured a White schoolgirl for hours, before stabbing her to death and slitting her throat as she pleaded desperately for mercy

• The five Pakistanis who stabbed, soaked in gasoline and incinerated a White schoolboy whom they’d kidnapped at random from a street in Glasgow

• The two Blacks who kidnapped a White woman, soaked her in gasoline and burnt her to death in a churchyard in the English Midlands

• The two non-White Muslims who sexually abused a White schoolgirl, then murdered her and dismembered her body before possibly disposing of it as “kebab meat”

• The Afghan “asylum-seeker” who stabbed two White women to death in Yorkshire, laughing and spitting on the corpse of one of his victims

• The Afghan “asylum-seeker” who threw flesh-eating alkali on a woman and her children in London, inadvertently destroying half his own face in the process

• The Sudanese “asylum-seeker” who raped and shattered the skull of a woman in Leicester. The woman luckily survived and described the attack as — wait for it — “like something out of a horror film”

Now I’m going to write about another non-White and another crime that thoroughly merits the dark description of “like something out of a horror film.” And this crime was dark in three big ways:

Butt-buddies before barbarism: two White gays with their Black future killer (image from BBC)

It was a gruesome double murder that shocked people across the nation. Yostin Mosquera, who had made extreme sex videos with Albert Alfonso, killed Albert, 62, and his ex-partner Paul Longworth, 71, in London before dismembering their bodies, placing them in suitcases and travelling 115 miles (185km) to Bristol. Police believe he intended to throw them off the Clifton Suspension Bridge after also stealing Albert’s money.

On Monday, Mosquera was found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court of murdering both Albert and Paul in July last year. Here we look at how events unfolded from the perspective of those closest to what happened.

Warning: This article contains details that some may find distressing, including violence and descriptions of a sexual nature.

“He could have committed almost the perfect murder,” Det[ective] Insp[ector] Neil Meade says. “He didn’t need to dismember them, he didn’t need to take them to Bristol. But he did what he did.”

It was Wednesday 10 July and England had just qualified for the European Championship [soccer] final with a last-minute goal. The Mall in Bristol’s upmarket Clifton village was showing the game and as the final whistle blew, the pub started to empty. It was a warm night and people were milling around outside. Roughly an hour earlier, Roger Malone and his son Giles were outside The Mall watching on as a man struggled across the road with two large suitcases.

“There was some activity going on with a tall man in black clothing and a hat covering his face,” 92-year-old Roger said. “Obviously this case was very heavy, this powerful guy was struggling with it.”

The man was Yostin Mosquera, a Colombian who unbeknown to Roger and Giles had killed Albert and Paul in their London home two days earlier, and dismembered their bodies. They were the only other people who lived at the address, with “nobody else” due to come home and find them. Mosquera could have flown back to Colombia, from where extradition would have been difficult. But instead he placed their heads in a chest freezer and their torsos in the red and silver suitcases he was dragging along the Clifton pavement.

He had hired a red van which had taken him from Shepherd’s Bush to Clifton.

Seeing Mosquera struggle Giles joked: “What have you got in there? A body?”

“Of course there was a deathly hush,” Roger said. “The guy didn’t reply.”

Roger and Giles say they briefly spoke to Mosquera over a mix up with their taxis. Mosquera was then driven to the Clifton Suspension Bridge — just 0.2 miles (321 metres) down the road. The distance was so short, the taxi driver says he questioned whether it was really worth the fare. The prominent landmark is well-lit with CCTV all over it, and when the taxi driver dropped Mosquera off, something red was leaking from one of the suitcases.

Mosquera, who is now 35 years old, said the liquid was oil, wiped it away and walked onto the bridge. CCTV showed him peering over the side into the Avon Gorge below, before being challenged by bridge staff and a cyclist. That cyclist was Doug Cunningham, who is a Spanish speaker. A statement from him read to the court said: “He [Mosquera] said he was from Colombia and he was trying to find a hotel. I asked him if the bridge staff could open the suitcase and he said ‘no’.”

But when a torch light revealed more of the red liquid, Mosquera broke into a run. He was chased by Mr Cunningham, who filmed his escape as he ran down Burwalls Road into the night. Bridge staff quickly called police to the scene, but they were not prepared for what came next.

“Opening those suitcases had a massive impact on those people,” Det Insp Meade said. Officers discovered not one, but two torsos — dismembered and decapitated. As Bristol woke up the following morning to news of the horrific discovery, Det Insp Meade was already investigating who the victims and suspect were, and how and why the suitcases were on the bridge. “My reaction was ‘this is big’,” he said. “At the time we knew that we had bodies that had been cut up. That’s really rare — that’s really rare in Avon and Somerset, that’s really rare nationally.”

On one of the suitcases, police discovered a luggage tag with an address that would lead them to Shepherd’s Bush in London. The address was that of Albert and Paul, and when Met Police officers got there they found blood in every room. Also found at the house were video recordings of numerous extreme sex sessions involving Mosquera and Albert.

One of them also showed Mosquera stabbing Albert to death — all caught in graphic detail by four different cameras. Det[ective] Ch[ief] Insp[ector] Ollie Stride, from the Metropolitan Police, said: “I remember I was sat in my office when one of the officers came in… he was white as a sheet.

“At that point it became quite obvious that it was going to be quite a traumatic thing to watch… it absolutely proved to be one of the most harrowing videos I’ve watched in my career. One moment they’re engaging in sexual activity together and the next moment Yostin is stabbing him and murdering him right in front of our eyes.”

He added that Mosquera looked as if he was “revelling” and “celebrating” Albert’s murder within seconds. “He’s dropped Albert on the floor and the next thing he does is dance and sing.” (“Suitcase killer ‘could have staged perfect murder’,” BBC News, 21st July 2025)

Let’s repeat the words of that police officer: “[W]e had bodies that had been cut up. That’s really rare — that’s really rare in Avon and Somerset, that’s really rare nationally.” He’s right. It is rare in what is still a White-majority country. So are the odds that a member of the small Black minority would be responsible for it, let alone a Black from Colombia? The odds would be very small indeed if leftist lies about race were correct. They aren’t, of course. Some races, like Blacks, are much more likely to commit horrific crimes like those. You could call Mr Mosquera’s death-dealing and dismemberments a “globalist gorefest.” Just as globalism has meant that thousands of White girls in England continued to be raped, tortured and prostituted by gangs of non-White paedophiles from far-off Pakistan, so it meant that two White homosexuals in England were slaughtered and chopped up by a Black psychopath from far-off Colombia.

Dark dimensions

Yostin Mosquera’s skin-color is the first of the dark dimensions of the crime. Next you’ve got the darkness of the crime itself: death, dismemberment, body-part-laden suitcases dripping blood, chest-freezers containing severed heads. Finally you’ve got the darkness that the mainstream media imposed on crucial aspects of the case. The BBC and Guardian will never discuss the higher average psychopathy and lower average intelligence of Blacks, and will never explain how these things contribute to the grossly disproportionate criminality of Blacks right across the West.

And they won’t explore the richly ironic symbolism of a psychopathic Black leaving blood-dripping suitcases on a marvel of White engineering. The Black Yostin Mosquera put the Clifton Suspension Bridge into the headlines, but Blacks like him are utterly incapable of building structures like that. Blacks excel at savagery; Whites excel at civilization. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol is a marvel of engineering and ingenuity based on designs by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59), who combined White genius at abstract thought in mathematics and physics with White prowess at molding and manipulating the material world. Like Claude Shannon, Brunel was a single White individual who gave more to STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics — than all Blacks who ever lived.

White marvel, Black psychopath: Clifton Suspension Bridge and Yostin Mosquera, the Black killer captured on CCTV there (images from Wikipedia and Bristol Police)

But the BBC and Guardian will never explore the ironic symbolism of a typically White marvel of technology being the background to typically Black violence and depravity. Not to mention Black stupidity and chaos: recall Mosquera’s farcical attempts to dispose of the body-parts and how one of the suitcases he abandoned had a “luggage tag with an address,” allowing the police to quickly and easily identify the victims. Nor will the BBC and Guardian ever give further details of the “extreme sex” that preceded Mosquera’s crimes. The dedicated deviance and depravity of the Glorious Gay Community (GGC) are not something that leftists want to be widely known. It would detract from the leftist portrayal of gays as saintly victims, endlessly and undeservedly suffering the bigotry and cruelty of the straight White majority.

England’s new patron saint

But it wasn’t straight Whites who brewed up those butt-busting bugs known as AIDS and monkey-pox, then set those bugs to ravage the GGC. Gays did that all on their ownsome. The gays Albert Alfonso and Paul Longworth did it all on their ownsome too when they invited a Black psychopath into their lives from poor, corrupt and violent Colombia. They were blind to Mosquera’s psychopathy and blind to the anti-White resentment and hatred he probably also harbored. Those things are very common in Blacks and other non-Whites, but the mainstream media don’t discuss them. Instead, the media feed them by endlessly portraying non-Whites as the saintly victims of White racism and violence. In Britain, the anti-White, Jew-dominated elite portray the Blacks of the “Windrush Generation” as the heroic builders of modern Britain, as though they dragged our benighted islands out of the Stone Age.

Black martyr Stephen Lawrence, England’s new patron saint

The same anti-White, Jew-dominated elite has decreed that Stephen Lawrence, the teenaged son of Windrush Blacks, should be England’s new patron saint. But the death of Stephen Lawrence wasn’t “like something out of a horror film.” He was stabbed twice in a brief encounter with a gang of White youths. He might easily have survived the encounter and, like all Blacks in all Western nations, he was always at far greater risk of death at the hands of his own race. The martyr-cult of Stephen Lawrence pretends otherwise. It’s based on a lying inversion of racial reality, falsely portraying gentle, harmless Blacks as endlessly and obscenely threatened by violent, hate-filled Whites. The cult is very well-funded, very well-publicized, and has disseminated its hate-inciting anti-White propaganda in the following ways:

Stephen Lawrence Day, an annual memorial for the martyr created by the so-called Conservative prime minister Theresa May and strategically placed on 22nd April, the day before commemoration of England’s national saint St George and Shakespeare’s traditional birthday.

The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre, which works to demonize Whites and sanctify non-Whites at De Montfort University in the ethnically enriched city of Leicester, where Muslims and Hindus are now re-enacting the tribal feuds of their highly corrupt, violent and rape-friendly homelands.

The Stephen Lawrence Memorial Centre, which works to demonize Whites and sanctify non-Whites in ethnically enriched south-east London, where Blacks murder, rape and rob all other races at vast disproportionate rates.

A Damehood for the martyr’s mother Doreen Lawrence, who now sits in the House of Lords lecturing the White British on ethics and policing. Dame Doreen comes from the highly corrupt, violent and rape-friendly island of Jamaica, which has more murders each year than Britain, despite having a much smaller population. If murders committed in Britain by Jamaicans and extra-judicial murders by the Jamaican police were added to the stats for Jamaica, the discrepancy would be even greater.

• The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in 1999, initiated by the half-Jewish Home Secretary Jack Straw and starring the fully Jewish anti-racism activist Dr Richard Stone. The Inquiry condemned the British police as “institutionally racist” and, like the George Floyd hysteria in America, led to reduced policing of Blacks and other non-Whites, followed by an entirely predictable increase in murder and rape by non-Whites.

Mary-Ann Leneghan and Kriss Donald, two White children horrifically murdered by ethnic enrichers and long ago forgotten by the mainstream media

As for the White teenager Mary-Ann Leneghan — well, who’s she? Nobody, that’s who. At least, she’s nobody to fiercely feminists leftists and the mainstream media. Unlike Stephen Lawrence’s, her death was indeed “like something out of a horror film” and her death revealed the truth about Black psychopathy and criminality. Which is precisely why her death was long ago forgotten by the Yookay’s media and elite:

[The surviving victim] described how she and Mary-Ann [Leneghan], her friend of 10 years, had been abducted and forced into the boot of a car as they sat in the car park of the Wallingford Arms in Reading, Berkshire on May 6 last year [2005]. She said they were taken to Room 19 of Abbey House Hotel in the city where they were beaten with a metal pole, ordered to strip, forced to perform oral sex, raped, and had boiling sugared water thrown on them.

She said the pair were shown guns and a knife, constantly told they were going to be killed and heard that they would be taken to Prospect Park in Reading. During the first day she hardly flinched as she recounted the graphic details without being hidden by a screen. But today she wept as she told how, as she was raped by a man wearing white jogging bottoms, another man said: “We are ready to go now, let’s leave these bitches now, come on let’s do it.”

She told the jury that she understood this phrase to mean “the final stage, that we were going to die, that they were going to kill us.” She said she, together with Mary-Ann, was taken out of the boot of the car and forced, stumbling and wiping blood from her head, across the park. She said the pair had been ordered to kneel on the ground side by side and were told to put pillow cases over their heads by two men, one wearing a bandana over the lower half of his face and the man with the white jogging bottoms.

With the six defendants just feet away Mary-Ann’s father sat with his hand over the mouth as the girl continued. Asked by prosecutor Richard Latham QC, what happened next she paused for around 30 seconds before looking straight ahead at the jury and saying “she [Mary-Ann Leneghan] was stabbed”. The court was told that the knife-man had been the man with the bandana and asked where on Mary-Ann’s body the man had put the knife she said: “Her upper body, her chest, her breasts, everything. She was asking ‘please not there, please not there’ whatever area she was referring to, and crying and pleading,” she said.

She told how the man with the bandana got angry saying words to the effect of “shut up”. She said that Mary-Ann then fell in a ball on the ground but the stabbing did not stop. “He got more angry because she wouldn’t sit up, he was telling her to sit up because he wanted to slit her throat… He was stabbing and then she fell,” she said. “They said something about wanting her to die slowly,” she added, before she broke down in tears. … (Friend weeps over Mary-Ann murder, The Daily Mail, 20th January 2006)

The murder of Mary-Ann Leneghan was another “globalist gorefest” created by the insane and evil immigration policies of our anti-White, Jew-dominated elite. It was also a meteor-murder, something that flashed through the headlines and bulletins, then vanished for ever from the mainstream media and the minds of leftists.

But away from the mainstream and away from leftism, there are many people who haven’t forgotten Mary-Ann Leneghan and all the other victims of the “globalist” war on Whites and the West. It’s now obvious everywhere from Spain to Ireland that the true White West is finally rising against the hostile elite that has been waging a one-sided war against it for so long. When the rising is over and the hostile elite overthrown, the trials of the White traitors and their Jewish masters will begin.

Esau’s Tears

 

2794 Words

Many of the great works of counter-Semitism from the past fifty years are splendid attacking books. They lay out their cases against Jewish power and subversion and let the reader decide how to respond. Some of the most famous of these, of course, are Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and Igor Shafarevich’s Russophobia. Less common are defensive works of counter-Semitism, ones that exonerate White gentiles from the demonization often found in Jewish historiography. Albert Lindemann’s 1997 book Esau’s Tears is once such work since it shields European peoples from the collective guilt with which leftist historians—many of whom are Jews—continually smear them. Lindemann also humanizes many notable anti-Semites from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus clearing their names and the names of the people who followed them.

This is not to say that Lindemann champions anti-Semitism or makes apologies for it; rather, he strives to make two major points. One, that many ideas and episodes from history which today would be labeled anti-Semitic were in fact perfectly reasonable, based in truth, and the result of demonstrably bad Jewish behavior. Lindemann never fails to present Jews of the past feeling this way as well, thereby qualifying them as anti-Semites by today’s utopian standards. And two, that such pushback against the Jews did not and does not inexorably lead to mass murder. This is the thesis which many leftist historians wish us to swallow, and Lindemann strikes out against it:

How we interpret history is always powerfully influenced by the concerns and values of our own age, but it is finally misleading and unjust to single out and indignantly describe, for example, the racism of nineteenth-century Germans (“proto-Nazis”) without recognizing how much beliefs in ethnic or racial determinism were the norm in most countries and were to be found among oppressed minorities, Jews included, as much as oppressive majorities – how they were, in short, part of a shared intellectual world, a zeitgeist – but did not lead to mass murder in every country.

Jewish historian Salo Baron coined the term “lachrymose theory” to describe “the eternal self-pity characteristic of Jewish historiography.” In German, this is known as Leidensgeschichte (“suffering history”), and is often employed not to present a balanced, disinterested narrative of past events but to prevent future suffering by ignoring Jewish culpability and vilifying gentiles. This “denunciatory theory” of Jewish historiography could easily walk hand-in-hand with Baron’s “lachrymose theory,” since it brands gentiles with the stigma of eternal guilt (the absolution of which can only be achieved of course through philo-Semitism). Resisting both theories is the hill upon which Lindemann makes his stand. In his sights are three popular volumes of Jewish history from three Jewish polemicists—The War Against the Jews by Lucy Dawidowcz (1975), Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred (1991) by Robert Wistrich, and Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen. These works, as Lindemann rather politely puts it, have “a tendency to a colorful and indignant narrative, accompanied by weak, sometimes tendentious analysis.” In dispelling the blatant anti-gentilism of these authors, however, Lindemann never wishes to exclude Jews from his readership. He never explicitly ceases to strive for rapprochement. A major theme in Esau’s Tears emerges which warns Jews that a hostile, polemical, and frankly dishonest approach to history will only give real anti-Semites more ammunition to hurl at Jews.

Lindemann’s central conceit springs from the Book of Genesis. Twin brothers Esau and Jacob vie for their father Isaac’s affections, which Jacob—the younger of the pair—deceitfully swindles from Esau. Enraged and heartbroken, Esau forces Jacob to flee into Mesopotamia, where he gives rise to the Jewish people. Esau, on the other hand, gives rise to gentiles. It is said that anti-Semitism will cease only when Esau’s tears stop flowing. I don’t think Lindemann—who himself is not Jewish—could have selected a better title for a work which counteracts the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish historiography. Gentiles have tears too, and as with their innocent Old Testament forebear, they often spring not from fantasies or psychoses, but from the palpable misdeeds of Jews. An eye for an eye, a tear for a tear.

Lindemann proceeds by disclosing one inconvenient fact after another to underscore his point. Jews in history were not relegated to ghettos; they lived there on their own accord to keep apart from gentiles. Jews in history were not forced into usury, liquor trades, and criminal activity because no other vocations were open to them; they did such things because they wanted to and didn’t care so much about the harm they caused peasant gentiles. And yes, even in Russia, they were able to own land, they just chose not to work the soil themselves. Often, Jews in history were poor because the overwhelming majority of gentiles around them were also poor. And the ancient and medieval ones were not so innocent. Lindemann gives us examples of ancient Jewish oppression of Christians and pagans, as well as some frankly hateful language from the Talmud (for example, “The best among the gentiles should be slain”). The Book of Deuteronomy, Lindemann points out, can reasonably be seen as sanctioning genocide, and many Jewish thinkers throughout history expressed views which today would seem racist, supremacist, or chauvinistic. In comparison, Jews were treated better in official Church doctrine than were Muslims or heretics. Lindemann never lets gentiles off the hook for their bad behavior, but simultaneously never ceases to remind the reader of the many long periods during which Jews and gentiles got along reasonably well.

Esau’s Tears offers a brief history of the Enlightenment, which, due to the premium it placed on egalitarianism and fraternity, got the ball rolling for Jewish emancipation in Europe. Not surprisingly, many Enlightenment thinkers, most famously Voltaire, were irked by Jewish intolerance and separatism. That the Ashkenazi Jews in France were rude and lacked manners didn’t help (the Sephardim, on the other hand, were much better behaved and so faced fewer obstacles to citizenship). Also not surprisingly, those Frenchmen who had the most experience with Jews—such as the National Assembly delegates from Alsace—were the ones most bitterly opposed to granting them equal rights. In an ironic twist, Lindemann reports that after the Jews won their equality . . .

[m]any Alsatians insisted that Jewish vices, far from disappearing under the new laws, had actually gotten worse in their province. Jews had not taken the opportunity to assume honest physical labor but had pursued with even greater success their old ways of usury and exploitation.

In another ironic twist, Sephardic leaders in France often staunchly resisted equal rights for the Ashkenazim “due to their low moral character.” This is one of many instances in Esau’s Tears of Jews behaving anti-Semitically and having good reason to do so. Most commonly, it sprang from the embarrassment and discomfiture many assimilated Jews in Western Europe felt when confronted with their Eastern European brethren whose morality, hygiene, and manners left much to be desired.

In eastern Europe things were much worse due to the millions of Jews that had recently become subjects of the Tsar by the mid-nineteenth century. These teeming Ostjuden (eastern Jews) comprised by far the largest concentration of Jews in the world and put Russia in a state of crisis almost right away with their exploitive relationships with the peasants. Lindemann pre-dates John Klier in exonerating the Tsarist government regarding the pogroms of the early 1880s. And when discussing the more violent pogroms which occurred in places like Kishinev in the early twentieth century, Lindemann mordantly recalls that Jewish revolutionaries had been disproportionately responsible for the assassination of leading Russian officials and police officers leading up to those events, including that of Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian Minister of the Interior. Lindemann touches on the Jewish tendency to exaggerate atrocity, such as when Ukrainian insurrectionist Bogdan Chmielnicki rose up against the Poles in 1648, and targeted not only Jews, but Polish nobility and the Catholic Church. Jewish Leidensgeschichte has it that at least 100,000 Jews were massacred, but modern historians, including Paul Johnson in The History of the Jews (1987), seriously doubt this. Lindemann also points out that while this was going on, Europe was embroiled in equally brutal wars, and it “is open to serious question if Jews suffered in substantially larger numbers than others caught up in the raging battles.” And in a drily humorous moment, for those who complain about Jews being cooped up in the Russian Pale of Settlement during this time, Lindemann reminds us that the Pale was forty times larger than the modern state of Israel.

No review of Esau’s Tears would be complete without addressing the mileage Lindemann gets out of Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish novelist and British Prime Minister from the late nineteenth century. The zeitgeist of the age was, in effect, race- or ethnic-realism. Very few people—least of all Jews—denied that different peoples had differing ingrained capabilities and temperaments, both negative and positive. (Linemann thankfully does not deny it either.) Anyone who offers nineteenth-century racial determinism as exhibit A in favor of the inevitability of Nazism will have to come to grips with Disraeli, whom Lindemann describes as “the most influential propagator of the concept of race in the nineteenth century”:

In his novel Coningsby, Disraeli depicted a vast and secret power of Jews, bent on dominating the world. His noble Jewish character, Sidonia (whom Disraeli let it be known was based on Lionel Rothschild), describes race as a supremely important determinant (“all is race; there is no other truth”). Race, he argued, had always been a central factor in the rise of civilization, and western civilization could not have flourished without the Jewish race.

Lindemann even quotes a Rothschild who in private correspondence flatly blamed anti-Semitism on Jewish “arrogance, vanity, and unspeakable insolence.” A paragon of such insolence is nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz who despised Germany despite living there. He once claimed that Jews who convert to Christianity are “like combatants who, putting on the uniform of the enemy, can all the more easily strike and annihilate him.” Lindemann makes it plain that such destructive attitudes were not terribly unusual among prominent Jews and that the oft-exaggerated notion of Jews as culture destroyers “reflected an undeniable reality.” Lindemann reports how Jews often weaponized the press against Christians or goyim in general while taking great umbrage at even the slightest criticism of Jews. And then there’s all the scams and boondoggles Jews have been involved in, epitomized by the Panama Canal scandal which occupied French headlines in the 1880s and early 1890s.

Investigation into the activities of the Panama Company revealed widespread bribery of parliamentary officials to assure support of loans to continue work on the Panama Canal—work that had been slowed by endless technical and administrative difficulties. Here was a modern project that involved large sums of French capital and threatened national prestige. The intermediaries between the Panama Company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews, with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another.

The fiasco caused thousands of small investors to lose their fortunes, to say nothing of the 5,000 Frenchmen and 20,000 Afro-Caribbean laborers who lost their lives in the tropical heat for nothing.

So, the anti-Semites were often correct, or at least were not thrashing about in fantasies, when they accused Jews of clandestine misdeeds or bad behavior. And the more Ostjuden there were in a particular region, the more misdeeds and bad behavior there were to complain about—usually. The bulk of Esau’s Tears covers these as well as the anti-Semites who used their powers of analysis and pattern recognition to call attention to them. Most importantly, Lindemann humanizes these individuals, warts and all, and in almost all cases exonerates them from the blood guilt with which the denunciatory school of Jewish history wishes to stamp them. For a history of anti-Semitism from 1870 to 1939, one can do no better than Esau’s Tears.

Lindemann goes high and low, and far and wide, in his assessment of anti-Semitism. In the 18th century, Johann Gottfried von Herder established the idea of volkgeist, or, spirit of the people, which famed composer Richard Wagner made use of in the next century when discussing Jews in music. French researcher, Paul Broca was a man of the Left whose data forced him to conclude that racial differences exist, quite against his intentions. Where zealots such as Wilhelm Marr—the man who coined the term anti-Semitism—and Georg Ritter von Schönerer saw Jews through a racial lens, religious men such as Adolf Stoekel and Baron Karl von Vogelsang saw the behavior of Jews as a threat to Christianity. Otto Böckel, a popular demagogue known as “the peasant king,” tirelessly spoke out on behalf of the German lower classes, who often suffered as a result of Jewish predations. Meanwhile, anti-capitalist theoretician Eugen Dühring wrote about the “cosmic evil” in Jews. Above them all were top-flight intellects such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Houston Stewart Chamberlain who lent great credibility to anti-Semitism and were respected by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Then of course there was Karl Lueger, the immensely popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna prior to the First World War. Lindemann refuses to defend Lueger on all accounts, but points out that his anti-Semitism was often little more than red meat for his base and may not have been entirely genuine. Vienna’s Jews were not materially harmed during his tenure and in fact thrived when this supposed enemy of the Jews ruled the roost—as did many others. The only notable anti-Semite that Lindemann discredits is Edouard Drumont whose popular writings he dismisses as “inconsistent scribblings.” Still, Lindemann credits Drumont as the muck raking journalist who exposed the Jewish role in the Panama Canal scandal.

Lindemann concedes that the historical record is filled with vulgar no-accounts and charlatans who climbed aboard the anti-Semitism bandwagon after failing in other endeavors. But for over a century, the anti-Semites with talent, energy, convictions, and discipline had reacted rationally to real problems and were by no means drawing a straight line to the Nazis. Indeed, Lindemann points out how the diversity of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism makes drawing such a line very difficult. After all, there were plenty of racists who were not anti-Semitic, and quite a few anti-racists who were. And what to make of anti-Semites who assailed Jews from the standpoint of religion or socialism or conservatism? Furthermore, Lindemann demonstrates that despite the breathtaking variety anti-Semitic thought and policy prior to the Nazi era, there were two aspects in which there was almost no diversity at all. One, from the leadership of all anti-Semitic movements outside of Russia or Romania, there were no calls to violence against Jews. And two, all of them, with the possible exception of Lueger, rarely succeeded in making anti-Semitism stick with the people. Before the First World War, anti-Semitism never gained much of a foothold in Western or Southern Europe, or in Hungary. Yes, its presence was stronger in Germany and Austria due to their larger Jewish populations. But even in these places it never enjoyed prolonged mainstream popularity. It was only in Romania and Russia where it was so common that it did not need demagogues or ideologues to prop it up. According to my reading of Lindemann, the tepid success of anti-Semitism resulted not only from European forbearance, but also because assimilated Jews and the Sephardim were in general better behaved and more respectful of their gentile hosts than were the pushy, ill-mannered Ashkenazic Ostjuden who often ruthlessly pursued money or revolution.

In his first chapter, Lindemann suggests that “the notion of the anti-Semite as underdog is one that needs to be given serious analysis.” This is because the highly influential historians of the Jewish denunciatory school continually dehumanize and demonize the anti-Semites of history as if framing a case of first-degree murder in a court of law, with the victim, of course, being the martyred six million. Exculpatory evidence is downplayed or ignored, and goals other than the impartial search for the truth are pursued. In the latter chapters of Esau’s Tears Lindemann condemns Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, of course, but still humanizes the man. He points out what so many of us know today—that Hitler and the Nazis were in large part a reaction to the widespread atrocities of the Soviets, a people that the denunciatory school of Jewish history rarely smears with the same vigor it exerts when smearing the Nazis and their innocent anti-Semitic predecessors. Perhaps this is because a highly disproportionate number of these Soviet criminals were Jews themselves.

If Esau’s Tears tells us anything, it’s that nothing good can come out of this, except for perhaps more anti-Semitism.

The Criminality of Hope Not Hate

In Britain, there is an influential organisation, mainly composed of superficially British people with some foreign blood, who despise the native British and spend their substantial financial resources attacking any Briton who follows the science or who stands up for his ethnic interests. They have the manipulative name “Hope Not Hate.” One of their number, Harry Shukman, spent 2023 infiltrating assorted British “far right” organisations: a social club called the Basket Weavers, a network of “race scientists” including myself. Hope Not Hate people, covertly record them, send dossiers to their employers, pressure their employers to fire them; in effect they try to destroy the very lives of those who dare to disagree with their Woke agenda and even the conservative newspapers in the UK take them seriously.

This is despite the fact that they openly lie. During the unrest in the summer 2024, after the Southport Massacre, the media reported the hoax list which their leader, Nick Lowles, retweeted on what he said were planned far-right riots. It was hoax, something which Lowles later confessed, so only “anti-racists” turned up, and “anti-racist” images dominated the newspapers the following day. Lowles also tweeted, knowing it wasn’t true, that an immigrant had been subject to an acid attack, which potentially breaches the Public Order Act 1986.

However, as with any tyrannical group, their lust to find new people to victimise has taken them too far; as without victims they cannot justify donations or, indeed, their existence: for them, the “far right” is eternal. From fighting chaps with some extreme sympathies, they started attacking old-school conservatives and using very legally questionable tactics, some of them related to spying on me and my friends. When the net of people a group can bully and attempt to destroy, is cast so widely then it could be “Any of us next.” It is at this point that people feel that they have no choice but to risk fighting back.

As this emerged, in a Channel 4 Documentary late last year and then in Shukman’s book on the matter Year of the Rat, Trump was elected. Suddenly, Hope Not Hate were strapped for money and had to put their staff on temporary contracts. It seems possible that they were massive beneficiaries of USAID via some of their donors, and Trump had cancelled this. So, at the same time, they were weakened and they had managed to overreach themselves and force people to retaliate against them. The results, for those of us who value freedom of inquiry, have been delightful. At the beginning of July, their leader, Nick Lowles, was forced to resign and looks like this may only be the beginning.

On 6 July 2025, a website called The Restorationist published an extremely in-depth article entitled “How Long Can the CPS Ignore The Criminality of Hope Not Hate?” The CPS is the Crown Prosecution Service. It decides whether allegations of criminal conduct are convincing enough to warrant being taken to trial. It presented detailed evidence of criminal conduct by Hope Not Hate, including targeted harassment and unlawful surveillance. But, significantly, it highlighted the devious way in which they abuse charitable status. Hope Not Hate has two arms, both of which are called Hope Not Hate. One is a charity (Hope Not Hate Charitable Trust), which has the legal restrictions imposed on all charities, and other is the sole beneficiary of this charity (Hope Not Hate Limited).

As a charity, Hope Not Hate is banned from doing anything political. As a beneficiary of a charity, it can do what it likes. Yet the charity and the beneficiary are the same people and have many of the same personnel. As the authors of the piece, one of them a barrister, noted: “The political work is carried out beyond the reach of charity law, but financed entirely through tax-advantaged donations raised under the pretext of charitable purpose.” The authors present the case that Hope Not Hate may be guilty of misconduct under the Charities Act, due to this arrangement. In the wake of the piece in The Restorationist highlighting this, Nick Lowles resigned as head of the charity. This was accompanied by a number of other resignations or reshufflings.

However, the group’s alleged greatest crime, and what may be their doing, takes us back to Harry Shukman, whom we met earlier. He presented himself, including to me personally, as “Christopher Morton,” and was trusted because he possessed a British passport in that name. He was supposedly born at Ploughley in Oxfordshire on 20 April 1992 (Hitler’s birthday; how amusing). However, there is no such birth registration, though Harold Shukman was born at Ploughley in Oxfordshire on 20 May 1992. In other words, Shukman may have had a fake passport, the possession of which is a serious criminal offence. He could not have changed his name by deed poll, as one cannot change one’s date of birth.

In a follow-up article for The Restorationist,“Hate Not Hope: The Psych Ward Strikes Back,” the passport was examined in greater depth. In the interim, Hope Not Hate, in the person of a former “researcher” called Gregory Davis, had contacted the employers of one of the earlier piece’s authors and had told that author that he ran a pornographic Twitter account, which they would publicise, and was harassed by various bots. The author wrote back refuting their attempted libel. In the follow-up piece, the author, along with various technically-minded colleagues, conducted a detailed analysis of the passport. It was found to very probably be a genuine passport, issued by His Majesty’s Passport Office. Accordingly, it was either obtained via some kind of elaborate fraud, another serious criminal offence, or Hope Not Hate has sympathisers within, or is even a component of, the British Secret Services, which seems unlikely considering that sleuths have uncovered what they have done so easily.

At the time of writing, the investigation continues, though it has clearly seriously rattled Hope Not Hate, hence their petulant and desperate response to one of the authors of the original Restorationist piece on them. By resigning as head of the charitable arm, Nick Lowles, who is, surely extremely Machiavellian (hence his justification of lying; he is as Machiavellian as the “far right” dictators he condemns—the people who justified murdering Jews or Communists for some “greater good”) must have known that he was signalling weakness, which you should never do when you are under attack. Childish lying with the hope of intimidating, as engaged in by Gregory Davis of Hope Not Hate, is another signal of weakness. We can only hope that, as this develops, this nasty, bullying enterprise is completely destroyed, allowing England to take the first few tentative steps back towards being a free country.

The Restorationist’s charges:

Like Searchlight before it, Hope Not Hate has departed from the legal and ethical boundaries of charitable activity, and is abusing a dual legal personality for cynical ends. We are of the view you have been operating in the realm of criminality for some time. Your organisation’s documented conduct towards a long series of libel victims raises several legal concerns, including the following: 

  1. Blackmail contrary to section 21 of the Theft Act 1968, via threats to employment or reputation.

  2. Harassment and Stalking under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, via coordinated targeting of individuals and reputational interference.

  3. Surveillance Without Mandate, risking breach of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.

  4. Unlawful Data Processing in breach of UK GDPR Article 6(1) and DPA 2018, using OSINT tools without consent or lawful basis.

  5. Malicious Communications under the 1988 Act, section 1, including false and distressing material.

  6. Computer Misuse under the 1990 Act, sections 1 and 3ZA, relating to unauthorised access and automated surveillance.

  7. Use of a False Passport by at least one employee, potentially two. We have undertaken technical analysis of an unredacted copy of what appears to be an ICAO-compliant false passport, linked to your organisation. This raises immediate concerns under s.4 of the Identity Documents Act 2010, which prohibits the use or possession of false identity documents with intent to deceive. If this passport was fabricated without lawful authority, obtained from HM Passport Office fraudulently, or used for overseas travel, it constitutes a criminal offence. If it was issued or facilitated by a British government official, it raises grave constitutional questions about the use of covert powers to support or shield political activity under the guise of charity. We are pursuing FOIA disclosures from both the Charity Commission and Channel 4 to clarify the document’s origin and oversight.