It is the opinion of most patriotic voices in Russian alt-media (remember, hardcore Russian patriots are still not allowed on mainstream media in Russia) that while the special operation in Ukraine is all well and good, there is no good explanation for why Ukraine was lost in the first place. How could the Kremlin let a country split evenly between a pro-Russia and pro-West vote for multiple election cycles suddenly, almost overnight, be turned into a hostile, armed to the teeth Israel on the border of the greater Slavic world?

It may be hard to believe, but Russian used to be the unopposed majority language in Ukraine. Not only did most people speak Russian, but most city people didn’t know Ukrainian or thought it was simply a quaint provincial dialect of country bumpkins. The number of Ukrainian speakers declines even more when you factor in that many so-called Ukrainian-speakers were actually “surzhik” speakers — which is a Russian/Ukrainian mixed vernacular. Me, a Russian-speaker, I can easily understand surzhik without skipping a beat. But propa’ Western Ukrainian, well, I have to really concentrate and hold my breath while I listen to make any sense of it.

Multiple polls in Ukraine showed a majority favorable opinion of Russians and a shared sentiment of belonging to one civilization. Even now, the numbers aren’t bad, but we will have to see how many Ukrainians harden or drift towards more anti-Russian positions as a result of a protracted conflict on their territory.

So where are we now? Well, tens of thousands of Ukrainians, who by all rights ought to be pointing their rifles at NATO, are now hunkered down in Donbass instead, and about to be shelled repeatedly into surrender or oblivion by the Russian forces.

Even before the first shot was fired, the situation that had developed in Ukraine following the coup d’etat of 2014 can only be characterized as a complete, abject and miserable failure of Russian foreign policy. And it only got worse year after year following the seizure of power and the beginning of the anti-terrorist operation in the Donbass. Here, the failure is inexcusable, but easily explainable. The Kremlin, in its hard-boiled cynicism, thought that they could just bribe politicians and oligarchs in Ukraine to keep the situation from getting too out of control. They never switched strategies and they never really did anything to neutralize the West’s far more effective color revolution + mass propaganda strategy. Incompetent corrupt fools like Victor Medvechuk were tasked with keeping a Russian toehold in Ukraine.

You must have heard about Medvechuk, yes? He was paraded around in chains recently by the Ukrainian secret police and plastered all over social media:

He was no doubt captured days after the beginning of the operation and only recently brought out by the SBU as a propaganda piece and a bargaining chip in prisoner negotiations.

Now, Victor’s been around for awhile, serving under Leonid Kuchma, who everyone knows was an ardent supporter of Russia and then Victor Yanukovich, another ardent Russian nationalist and die-hard patriot. SARCASM ALERT — SARCASM DETECTED.

I should warn you, I can’t help but slather the sarcasm onto my commentary when it comes to the “pro-Russia” faction in Ukraine, so keep an eye out for it as we move along. But sarcasm aside for now, let me state things plainly: this guy was your typical sleazy Eastern European political apparatchik and a deal-fixer who may or may not have been close to Putin (his daughter was baptized by Putin, making her his goddaughter, but so what). Most importantly, he was paid millions to be of use to Russia in Ukraine. He used to be a part of Yanukovich’s operation and he eventually bankrolled and ran the post-Yanukovich “Opposition Party — For Life” bloc, which eventually put up Yuriy Boyko as their “pro-Russia” candidate in the latest elections that Zelensky handily won.

Now, this was well and truly a big-brain move. Medvechuk and friends chose a man who had been around the cesspit that was Ukrainian politics for almost two decades — a man with several corruption and embezzlement scandals under his belt from his time managing the quasi-state oil company Naftogaz and the Fuel and Energy Ministry of Ukraine and a physiognomy that just screams SLEAZY in all-caps to represent them and the pro-Russia position in Ukraine.

10/10 optics, what else can I say?

Back in the day, when tensions with Russia were not as high, I remember what a big scandal it was when then President Yanukovich stepped in and quashed the anti-corruption investigation of his minister and close ally Boyko. Most Ukrainians were somewhat united in their exasperation at the never-ending corruption surrounding literally all of the post-Soviet Ukrainian administrations and the nonstop looting that was going on at the time. The constant corruption was one of the driving forces of the Orange Revolution and the ascent of Viktor Yushenko and his pro-NATO, anti-Russia government and then again with Euromaidan and the calls for Yanukovich to step down. At the time, the main narrative that fueled these color revolutions was the anti-corruption platform. This was popular at the time. The pro-Western faction managed to conflate being “pro-Russia” (or at least not being explicitly anti-Russian) with being corrupt. Being pro-West and Liberal came to mean standing for a corruption-less Ukraine free of the control of Russian oligarchs and the communist-era leftover nomenklatura.

So, to reiterate and make my point clear: the “pro-Russian” politicians were not really pro-Russian, but were, at a minimum, willing to not rock the boat with Russia. The pro-Westerners successfully created the association of “pro-Russia = pro-corruption” and used this propaganda to rally Ukrainians at the polls and on the level of street politics. The “pro-Russians” were indeed corrupt. But we all know that the West is not any less corrupt and that the people in the pro-West camp looted the country as thoroughly if not more than the “pro-Russian” people.

By the way, to my eternal shame, in my youthful NPC naiveté, I even wore one of those orange hats that they handed out at the maidan to show my support for the good Victor against the bad one. Orange man good, I suppose.

But patriotic circles in Russia are not exactly heart-broken by the news that Medvechuk was taken captive by Zelensky. The general sentiment appears to be that Zelensky has done Russia a favor by getting rid of an incompetent oligarch that lost millions of Russian rubles and an entire country through his counter-productive efforts. But, the nonchalance of the Russian public notwithstanding, his arrest is sort of, kind of a big deal. After all, Medvechuk is a billionaire that ran several TV stations that criticized the Kiev government up until Zelensky banned them following his patron and master Igor Kholomoisky’s direct orders that he do so, effectively granting Kholomoisky a monopoly over all media in Ukraine. It is worth pointing out that despite this party supposedly being “pro-Russian” they condemned the Russian special operation in Ukraine in early March. Some pundits have argued that this was simply to outmaneuver the Kiev government and another example of the much-vaunted hyper-dimensional 5D chess that we’ve heard so much about in recent years on display yet again. But either way, it did literally nothing but score another propaganda blow against Russia before Zelensky’s regime dissolved and disbanded the party in the Rada anyway. One could argue that there was nothing that they could do. I would agree that doing literally nothing at all would have done more to help and promote Russia and Russians’ interest in Ukraine.

As an aside, the “pro-Russia” faction in Ukraine did in fact have many shady dealings with the West. The only difference was that they seemed to prefer making deals and rubbing shoulders with Republicans, not Democrats. At this point, everyone knows that prominent Democrat politicians have been looting the Ukraine with the help of their pro-West allies in the government. It is funny to think that the roles used to be reversed once upon a time.

Russia’s own, personal efforts in Ukraine, however, were just as poor, if not worse than the non-existent efforts of the so-called “pro-Russia” parties in Ukraine. This is quite clear when we look at, say, the virtually non-existent propaganda effort used to deal with the ever-deepening crisis that resulted from Euromaidan.

Question: what was the Russian message to the Ukrainian people over these difficult years? Does anyone know?

I suppose the most logical and easiest message to send would be “we’re one people of one blood and our future belongs together, one way or another.” But, apart from Putin’s occasional video-message appeals which state just that, this hasn’t been the position of the Russian government and her official spokespeople. They’ve instead insisted on constantly referring to Ukraine as a “buffer state” and opining about the sanctity of arbitrarily drawn squiggly lines on the map.

Heart-warming stuff.

Even I, an ardent pro-Russia shill, just assumed that Russia had abandoned and written off Ukraine because of the messaging coming out from within the Presidential Administration. The intervention took me completely by surprise — and not just me. Dmitri Peskov, the official Kremlin spokesperson, was totally blindsided by the announcement. Literally two hours before the announcement by Putin, he was still talking about Minsk II i.e., saying the Kremlin would simply engage in more negotiations. Even the FSB chief was taken by surprise and had to be dressed down personally by Putin on stage and asked point blank if he supported the operation or not.

In between the stuttering and frantic gulping he manages to say that he more or less supports the recognition of the LNR and DNR. With administrators like these, Russia doesn’t even need enemies.

It’s worth pointing out that nobody in the patriot camp in Russia likes Peskov or understands why he still has his job — not even, apparently, Putin himself. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Putin told said that he himself doesn’t understand why Peskov says some of the crap that he does.

But back to Ukraine.

Hell, I personally knew a few pro-Russia journalists in Kiev. I asked them if they had any help or support or even had any contact with anyone in the Russian government. Protection, money, support, a Christmas card? The answer was always a resounding, “sadly, no.” This was a conversation among friends, not an official interview, mind you. No 5D black ops chess here — they were no doubt telling the sad truth. Pro-Russian Ukrainians had very good reason to feel completely and totally abandoned by Russia for many years.

And even now, the Kremlin and its loathsome PR spokespeople claim that they are only in Ukraine temporarily, to conduct a de-nazification campaign. Not only is this claim bizarre, but what’s worse, people think they might actually mean it. So, after smashing the Ukrainian army and the volunteer battalions, they intend to do what — pull out?

Why then should anyone in Ukraine support the Russian army? So that they can receive a bullet to the head for being collaborators once they’re gone? No wonder Ukrainians are hunkering down and keeping quiet. Why support a military that won’t be there to protect you once they’ve won? After all, genius strategic feint or not, Kiev and the environs around it were abandoned. What will happen to the people there who came out waving Russian flags? A war is a great time for neighbors who envied (and stole) the roses from your garden to accuse you of being a collaborator. Don’t think that people aren’t reporting on each other right now — that’s what neighbors are best at the world over. Look at your own neighbors — can you honestly say that you can trust the Joneses to not rat you out if the secret police come knocking at some point in the near future? Were you paying attention during COVID and the hunt for the Trump Insurrectionists?

And on the Russian home-front?

Well, the patriotic block is sweating bullets that the Kremlin might actually go ahead and negotiate with Zelensky. They needn’t worry so much — Zelensky’s handlers want war down to the last Slav, so there’s no real prospects for a meaningful ceasefire. But still — it is hard to mobilize a society with such mixed messages coming from near the top. And a general mobilization might not only be desirable, but necessary in the coming months.

The point I’m driving at here is rather simple: Russia needs a new strategy and new people handling her interests in Ukraine and the near abroad. No more lazy half-measures, but smart, comprehensive propaganda and political efforts. Funding and support and protection for actual, genuine pro-Russians — it’s not hard to figure out. Most importantly, there needs to be a consistent and simple message presented to the Ukrainians. Putin himself said it well on several occasions: “we are brotherly peoples with a shared past and future.” I would add, “We will not abandon you,” for good measure.

Why Putin’s own government struggles to follow his lead is, frankly, infuriating to say the least.

Russian Jewish Oligarchs, from left: Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven, Moshe Kantor,
Roman Abramovich

The subject of Jews and money is controversial and essential, and yet not without its darkly comic aspects.  Back in November I wrote an essay on criticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for its alleged anti-Semitic qualities, and noted one scholar’s angst about a scene in which Jonathan Harker slashes at Dracula with a knife, cutting the vampire’s coat and sending a flood of cash to the floor. Instead of fleeing immediately, Dracula snatches up handfuls of money before sprinting across the room. The offended scholar, Sara Libby Robinson, complained that “This demonstration of putting the preservation of one’s money on par with the preservation of one’s life shows that stereotypes regarding Jews and their money were alive and well in the late nineteenth century.”

Those who spend enough time observing Jews, however, will know that the curious thing about them is that associated stereotypes have an uncanny habit of finding constant empirical confirmation. Take, for instance, a recent news article pointing out that Israel has experienced an influx of Jewish refugees since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The punchline is that the influx has involved many more economic refugees from Russia, who are seeking relief from Western sanctions and dropping currency values, than Ukrainian Jews seeking safety from violence. Faced with warfare, Jews really are “putting the preservation of one’s money on par with the preservation of one’s life.” In one of my favorite anecdotes from the Ukraine crisis thus far, the Russian-Israeli immigration lawyer Eli Gervits claims to have received thousands of calls from Russian Jews issuing an appeal he calls SOS: “Save our Savings.” This remarkable story is emblematic of the fact Putin’s war in Ukraine is a net negative for the Russian-based international Jewish oligarchy, and the international Jewish networks that survive and thrive on their patronage.

The Fall of Moshe Kantor

Few things have raised my spirits in recent times like the news the UK government has finally imposed sanctions on Moshe Kantor. Russian billionaire, pernicious oligarch, and one-time president of no less than the European Jewish Congress, the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, the World Holocaust Forum Foundation, the European Jewish Fund, and the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, Kantor is the quintessential strongly-identified Jewish activist, fully committed to the advancement of the interests of his ethnic group. A devoted Zionist, Kantor is a citizen of Israel, as well as both Russia and the UK. Kantor, with his curious blend of citizenships, didn’t so much straddle East and West as use plunder in the former to fuel activism in the latter. One of his primary projects in recent years has been to lobby the European Union for greater restrictions on individual freedom and for the imposition of a vast, draconian apparatus for the protection and enforcement of multiculturalism across the continent. In his treatise Manifesto for Secure Tolerance, Kantor writes with Orwellian flair that “Restrictions are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life.” Reading between the lines, the message becomes clearer: “Restrictions on Europeans are necessary for the freedom of Jews to live a secure life.” Among Kantor’s proposals was the creation of a continent-wide apparatus for internet surveillance targeting opponents of multiculturalism, enforced promotion and ‘education’ on multiculturalism across Europe, and a significant increase in prison sentences for all infractions against the cult of diversity.

Kantor escaped the wave of Western sanctions on Russian (often Jewish) elites until last week, but was finally targeted because of his role as the largest shareholder of the fertilizer company Acron, which has strategic ties to the Russian government. Needless to say, the sanctioning of yet another one of their hugely influential oligarchs is sending shockwaves through international Jewish institutions reliant on the wealth and influence of such figures. On April 6, the European Jewish Congress, Kantor’s primary vehicle for the advance of his war on European freedoms, issued a statement stressing that it was

Deeply shocked and appalled by the decision today of the British government to sanction Dr Moshe Kantor, President of the European Jewish Congress, the World Holocaust Forum Foundation and the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation. The decision is misguided and lacks any factual or evidence-based merit. Dr Kantor is a British citizen who has lived for over three decades in Western Europe, many years of which has been in the UK. He is a long-standing and respected Jewish leader, who has dedicated his life to the security and wellbeing of Europe’s Jewish communities and the fight against antisemitism, racism and xenophobia. … We call for this decision to be reversed as soon as possible.

Moshe Kantor hobnobs with the boss

The most recent statement issued by the British government is low on detail, stating only that Kantor will be subject to an “asset freeze.” Since Kantor owns, and spends much time in, a substantial mansion on London’s Winnington Road, where property prices average over $8 million, this is sure to be a sore point for the oligarch. Much more worrying for Kantor is that the European Union followed suit a few days later, issuing its own asset freezes and travel bans. His bank accounts, homes, and other economic interests across the continent have been locked down.

Hungary and Austria, influenced by Zionist sympathies, both attempted to save Kantor from sanctions, with the Hungarian envoy expressing “surprise at the blacklisting of somebody he described as a highly decorated man.” However, Kantor’s fence-sitting strategy of being an Eastern kingpin and Western multiculturalist preacher has been demolished by the Ukraine conflict. Like a game of musical chairs, he finds that the music has stopped and he’s left standing, his hands full of Russian assets that were once so precious and central to his power. Ironically, the envoys of Estonia and Lithuania, two countries accused of anti-Semitism and fascism by Russia, successfully urged their partners not to remove Kantor, one of the most influential Jewish activists in Europe, from the list. And so poor Moshe, who once proposed that restrictions were a pathway to freedom, will now have to live by his own words. As his homes and possessions are seized by European governments, as the value of his companies declines, and as he finds himself with fewer places to go, I can only offer to Moshe the reassurance of his own dictum: Restrictions are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life!

Stadtlans in the Spotlight

As leader of so many groups and mover in so many high circles, Kantor fulfils the qualifications of the early modern stadtlan—Court Jews of the early modern period who boasted of significant wealth and intensive relationships with non-Jewish elites. And he exemplifies many of the same qualities, acting always in un-elected but highly-influential intercessory roles, seeking to improve the tactical and material advantages of his tribe. Look at any country of significance and you will find not only a Jewish clique ensconced in the heart of its political machinery, but often also a small number of Jewish individuals so influential that they can be regarded as political actors in their own right. These figures are the tip of the spear of Jewish activism, and in the past such men and their families have been so impactful on the course of history that their names have passed into common parlance — Rothschild, Schiff, Warburg, and more modern corollaries such as Soros, Adelson, and the constellation of Jewish billionaires infesting Ukraine and orbiting Vladimir Putin.

For these eastern Jewish elites, the war in Ukraine has had the doubly concerning effect of impacting their finances and raising their profile. Petr Aven, Mikhail Fridman, German Kahn, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Klyachin, Yuri Milner, Vadim Moshkovich, Mikhail Prokhorov, Andrey Rappoport, Arkady Rotenberg, Boris Rotenberg, Igor Rotenberg, Viktor Vekselberg, God Nisanov, Oleg Deripaska, Alexander Abramov, Gavril Yushvaev, Zarakh Iliev, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Arkady Volozh, Eugene Schvidler, Leonid Simanovskiy, Yuri Shefler, Kirill Shamalov, Aleksandr Mamut, Lev Kvetnoy, Yevgeniy Kasperskiy, Yuriy Gushchin, Oleg Boyko, Leonid Boguslavskiy, are just some of those who have hidden in plain sight for some time, but now find themselves not only discussed, sanctioned, and blacklisted, but also grouped together in lists that highlight the startling patterns of their wealth accumulation and ethnic partnership.

In 2018 the U.S. Treasury department published a list of Russians they were considering for sanctions, and the list has continued to cause unease in Jewish circles. The Times of Israel recently tried to downplay the Jewish prominence by arguing that “At least 18 of the figures on [the Treasury list] are Jewish oligarchs,” while adding that the list consists of 210 names (meaning a Jewish representation of 8.5%). But they don’t mention that the Treasury separated their list into 114 politicians and 96 oligarchs, and there are in fact 29 confirmed Jewish oligarchs in the latter list, with a further two (Aras Algarov and Alisher Usmanov) married to Jews and raising Jewish children. In other words, at least 30% of Russia’s most influential oligarchs are Jews in a country in which Jews comprise an estimated 0.1% of the population. One cannot honestly speak of the eastern oligarchs without on some level discussing the Jews.

Russia’s billionaire Jews might be almost untouchable, but they have a history of worrying that their Jewishness might become a topic of public discussion. In 1998, the Irish Times published an article outlining the beginning of the end of the Yeltsin era. Titled “Russia Bows to the Rule of the Seven Bankers,” the article explained that Russia had fallen largely into the hands of six Jewish financiers (Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Fridman and Vitaly Malkin), and a token gentile (Vladimir Potanin). The most interesting part of the piece is the discussion of the old Jewish strategy of using a European frontman to disguise the Jewish nature of the power structure:

In the run-up to the 1996 election, the tycoons contributed millions of dollars to Yeltsin’s re-election campaign, spurred on by Berezovsky, who later boasted that the seven members of the club controlled half of Russia’s economy. It was an overstatement but reflected their hubris. After the election, according to several sources, the tycoons met and decided to insert one of their own into government. They debated who — and chose Potanin, who became deputy prime minister. One reason they choose Potanin was that he is not Jewish, and most of the rest of them are. They feared a backlash against Jewish bankers.

Putin’s Increasing Control of the Jewish Oligarchs

As with Yeltsin, the seven bankers, especially Berezovsky, initially claimed to have promoted Putin and insisted on his candidature as a Prime Minister and President. As the Guardian pointed out in 2013, Berezovsky’s fatal flaw was simple: he misread Putin:

Berezovsky met Putin in the early 1990s, when the KGB spy was working for St Petersburg’s mayor. The two socialised and even skied together in Switzerland. By the late 1990s, Putin had become head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. Yeltsin’s entourage was seeking a successor to the ailing president. They dispatched Berezovsky to offer the job to Putin — who became prime minister in the summer of 1999, succeeding Yeltsin as acting president six months later. Berezovsky had reckoned that his friend would be a pliable successor — and that he, the ultimate Kremlin insider, would continue to pull the strings. It quickly became apparent that Putin had his own vision of Russia: a darker, less democratic place, in which the country’s spy agencies would play a vanguard role, and with Putin unequivocally in charge. The two clashed; Putin seized Berezovky’s ORT TV station; and Berezovsky decamped to London. Their feud was nasty and would lead ultimately to Berezovsky’s death at the age of 67 in exile.

Other members of the Semibankirschina (Seven Bankers) were either exiled or brought to heel. Gusinsky left Russia in 2000 following accusations of misappropriation of funds. Khodorkovsky was arrested by Russian authorities in 2003 and charged with fraud. He served 10 years in prison, during which time his wealth was decimated, and he fled to Switzerland and then London upon his release. Alexander Smolensky sold off many of his assets, lowered his profile, and reportedly moved to Vienna. Vitaly Malkin became an outward Putin loyalist, while trying for almost 20 years to relocate to Canada, investing millions in Toronto, and taking Israeli citizenship. Curiously, Vladimir Potanin, the lone gentile among the Semibankirschina, prospered most under Putin, becoming Russia’s wealthiest man.

Ukraine-born Mikhail Fridman has steered a mostly steady course, focusing on financial matters, cultivating an East-West persona from his London mansion, and avoiding political confrontations. The wheels have recently started to come off for Fridman, however, thanks to the Ukraine conflict and his desire to avoid personal financial repercussions. Fridman was one of the first oligarchs to make clear his opposition to the war, and in a later interview with Bloomberg he admitted that his statement decrying the conflict as a tragedy “could make it dangerous for him to return to Russia.” The Bloomberg interview highlights the shock that Fridman felt on finding himself frozen out of the Western sphere despite, like Moshe Kantor, investing years in careful networking:

None of this helped him avoid the fate of some fellow Russian tycoons. Nor did his years of networking in the U.S. and Europe. On Feb. 28 his lawyer pulled him out of a meeting with the news that the European Union had sanctioned him and his longtime business partner, Petr Aven [also Jewish], who was heading Alfa-Bank, Russia’s largest privately held bank and a key part of Fridman’s Alfa Group Consortium. The lawyer started to rattle off what it meant: travel bans, frozen accounts. Fridman could barely register the words. “I was in shock,” he tells me. “I almost didn’t understand what he was saying.”

Fridman claims that sanctions are politically useless because the oligarchs have no influence over Putin, only business relationships:

What’s clear to him now, he says, is that the EU doesn’t get how power actually works in Russia. If the point of sanctions is to motivate people like him to apply pressure on Vladimir Putin, he says, that’s worse than unrealistic. “I’ve never been in any state company or state position,” Fridman says. “If the people who are in charge in the EU believe that because of sanctions, I could approach Mr. Putin and tell him to stop the war, and it will work, then I’m afraid we’re all in big trouble. That means those who are making this decision understand nothing about how Russia works. And that’s dangerous for the future.”

Sanctions and other economic impacts of the war have already wiped out a third of Fridman’s wealth, and although he’s still incredibly rich, he is more or less trapped in London and has no access to cash. Stephanie Baker, interviewing Fridman for Bloomberg, points out that “he now must apply for a license to spend money, and the British government will determine if any request is ‘reasonable.’” Jewish organizations in Ukraine keep calling him asking about progress on a $10 million donation he promised them but can no longer fulfil. Baker adds,

Fridman’s argument that he’s not positioned to exercise influence over the Kremlin reflects how the role of Russia’s billionaires has been turned on its head since the 1990s. Back then, Fridman was one of the original seven oligarchs, the semibankirschina. As a group they backed President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign and had sway over the Kremlin. When Putin came to power in 2000, he imposed his own model: The new deal was that if they stayed out of politics, they could continue running their businesses. Putin destroyed oligarchs who violated that arrangement.

Fridman’s inability to contain his frustration at sanctions, and willingness to express opposition to the war, may well mark the end of his direct involvement in Russian life. Perhaps more than any other oligarch, his actions provoked the now infamous speech in which Putin attacked anti-war oligarchs seeking after their own economic interests:

The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths — spit them out on the pavement. … I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.

“A natural and necessary self-purification of society”

News that thousands of Russian Jews are fleeing to Israel to protect their money, and the ongoing signs that many Jewish oligarchs now outside Russia may never return, are suggestive that Putin’s “natural and necessary self-purification of society” will involve a reduction in the Jewish presence, in Jewish wealth, and in Jewish influence in the country. As well as the oligarchs already mentioned, there are several Jewish billionaires, including the recently sanctioned Boris Mints, on Russian most-wanted lists, for a variety of crimes including embezzlement and fraud. Leonid Nevzlin, a Jewish oligarch, friend of the exiled Khodorkovsky, and former oil tycoon who fled to Israel from Russia 20 years ago in order to escape a life sentence for murder and financial crimes, recently undertook the symbolic act of renouncing his Russian citizenship. Russian requests for Nevzlin’s extradition have been repeatedly ignored by Israel. Nevzlin recently told a journalist: “I was one of the first to be hit by Putin. He threw my friends in jails, and killed some of them.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Putin’s political career is that it combines an often flamboyant rhetorical and performative philo-Semitism with actions that directly harm or obstruct Jewish interests. As mentioned in a previous essay, Putin is one of Europe’s foremost promoters of the Holocaust narrative, but it is a Holocaust narrative significantly less useful to Jews than the Hollywood/Spielbergian version we are so used to in the West. It’s a Holocaust narrative stripped of Jewish exclusivity, imbued with geopolitical moral codes favorable primarily to Russia, and unashamedly directed by, and for, Moscow rather than Jerusalem. In another curious example of rhetoric clashing with reality, in 2016 Putin invited Jews to come and settle en masse in Russia, presumably knowing full well that thousands of Jews were already leaving Russia at an increasingly rapid pace. In 2014, more than double the number of Jews left Russia than in any of the previous 16 years.

One of Putin’s strengths in overcoming Jewish financial power at the highest level, which he has unquestionably done, might have its basis in the fact he is not an anti-Semite in the classical understanding. He may well not think in racial terms, but, as a former member of the secret service, he is finely tuned to cliques, intrigue, subversion, and the subtleties of identity — the standard hallmarks of Jewish activism in European cultures. He appears fully capable of eliminating such strategies when he confronts them on an individual basis and with autocratic power. He can depose a Berezovsky, for example, not on the grounds of Jewishness, but, nonetheless, on certain behaviors and associations that are an outgrowth of Jewishness. They say a broken clock will still be right twice a day, and in the same way if one sets out to eliminate opposing, group-based strategies, even in a “race blind” manner, then confrontations with Jews become inevitable. In this way, Putin is a kind of accidental, or rather incidental, anti-Semite who has dominated or eliminated Jewish financiers in his country in a way probably not seen since the days of the Court Jews and the rise of parliamentary democracy.

Jews as Warmongers and Pacifists

There is an irony in the latest predicament of Russia’s Jewish financiers given that war, historically, has been very good for Jews. For this reason, it is worth looking for some historical precedent and parallels. Derek Penslar, in his Princeton-published Jews and the Military (2013), points out that Jews might be notorious for shirking actual military service, but have been prolific in profiting from conflicts all over the world:

Jews were prominently involved in an international banking system that derived considerable profit from lending funds directly to governments or packaging and selling government debt. Much of this activity took place during or in the wake of wars. During the American Civil War, the Union government’s debt skyrocketed from $65 million to $3 billion, some 30 percent of the Union’s gross domestic product. Much of that debt was marketed in the form of government bonds in small denominations and bought by ordinary citizens. The Rothschilds had pioneered this practice in France during the 1830s, and the banker Joseph Seligman picked it up in the United States during the Civil War. After the war, the Seligmans, along with the bankers Mayer Lehman and Jacob Schiff, energetically marketed U.S. bonds as well as those of cash-strapped southern-state governments.^[1]

It was Schiff who provided some $200 million in loans to Japan to fuel its expansionist aims in the Far East against a Czarist Russia that was much hated by Jews, and it was the Seligmans who “encouraged the United States’ intervention in Colombia in 1903 to carve out a quasi-independent Panama, where the Seligmans had invested in land along the prospective route of the canal.”^[2] One of the most obvious and notorious examples of a war for Jewish interests is of course the Boer War, 1899–1902. South Africa had been regarded as a rural backwater by the Jews until a diamond strike in 1884 and the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1887. Following these events there was a substantial influx of Jewish traders, who quickly became a clique of millionaires. Claire Hirschfeld, writing in the Journal of Contemporary History, describes how Jews “were able in a relatively short period of time to create powerful financial syndicates and extended empires within a Boer republic of farmers still clinging to a pastoral life-style.”^[3] Financial power soon evolved into a desire to achieve political domination, which required the toppling of the Boers. This would require the use of the British army, and Hirschfeld points out that much of the fever for war was whipped up by a British press dominated by Jews: Oppenheim’s Daily News, Marks’ Evening News, Steinkopf’s St. James Gazette, and Levi-Lawson’s Daily Telegraph. One of the foremost opponents of the war was the English Marxist Henry M. Hyndman, who accused “Semitic lords of the press” of hounding the government into a “criminal war of aggression” in South Africa. He was joined by the editor of Reynolds’ Newspaper, W. H. Thompson, who wrote at the beginning of the war:

At the bottom of the war are the Jewish syndicates and millionaires … counting the chickens shortly to be hatched. … The Stock Exchange pulls the strings and the government dances. But behind the Stock Exchange is the sinister figure of the financial Jew who is gradually enmeshing the world in the toils of the money-web which day and night the great racial freemasonry is spinning in every corner of the globe.

Penslar agrees that Jews worked together to profit from war, writing that “it is a fact, not an antisemitic fantasy, that Jews played vital roles in coordinating the allocation of raw materials during the First World War, not only in Germany but also in the United States.”^[4] This involved overlapping cliques of Jews profiting from every aspect of war production.

Conversely, Jews can flip the pacifist switch when it is judged that war can harm their interests. Penslar points out that the Rothschilds worried in 1914 that “a war could divide the great banking dynasty,” while Max Warburg began hastily dumping his shares in companies trading on the Vienna exchange. Baron Rothschild pleaded with The Times to tone down its anti-German rhetoric, only for the editor to publicly retort at this “dirty German-Jewish financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality.” The German-Jewish shipping magnate Albert Ballin looked on despondently when his merchant fleet sank to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Conclusion

The present war in Ukraine carries more echoes of Ballin than of the war against the Boers. Faced with the Russian invasion and the perennial question “is it good for the Jews?” the scattered Jewish oligarchs of Russia would probably answer a resounding “No.” The most important reason would, of course, be the decline in their individual and collective wealth. Billions have been wiped from their accounts, their businesses have been hobbled, their movement and ability to do business is restricted, and their access to cash is limited. The nature of international finance — politically, philosophically, and technologically — has evolved to such an extent that Jewish profiteering in the old style is more difficult than ever. In addition, it’s also made the individual targeting of financiers in the context of conflict and war not only feasible, but easy and immediate.

The oligarchs find themselves between a rock and hard place, viewed with hostility and suspicion by the West, despite years of Holocaust promotion and Jewish philanthropy (as if this actually contributes anything to the West), and increasingly distant from, and fearful of, the Kremlin. The natural settling place for most of them is Israel, which itself tries to cultivate a relationship with both East and West, dropping one and fawning at the other according to the winds of its needs. Even Israelis, however, are viewing the oligarchs as “toxic,” and have been warned by the US government about taking in “dirty money.”

Forbes has discussed speculation from some experts that Putin is secretly happy about the twilight of the oligarchs. Sanctions may force them into asset sales that ultimately benefit his security agencies. Or they may return to Russia and be forced not only to invest in the Russian economy rather than spread their wealth globally (like property empires in London, opulent yachts etc.), but also to adopt an even more servile position under Putin. Diminished oligarchs will lead to a vast diminishment in the coffers of international Jewish organizations. A key financial well will have dried up. Putin’s war may well have breathed some truth into an edited version of Moshe Kantor’s dictum: Restrictions on Jewish financiers are necessary for the freedom to live a secure life.

^[1] D. Penslar, Jews and the Military (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013), 146.

^[2] Ibid, 147.

^[3] C. Hirshfield “The Anglo-Boer War and the Issue of Jewish Culpability.” Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 4 (October 1980): 619–31.

^[4] Penslar, 150.

Pepper’s Ghost: A Victorian stage-effect by which special lighting and plate glass is used to make illusory objects appear.

Campaign speeches are generally just another scene from political theater, and the listener takes away about as much worthwhile information as they would from a sports coach in a pre-game interview. But in August of 2016, on the home stretch of the American presidential election, Hillary Clinton made a stump speech in Nevada that kicked a hornets’ nest.

After blaming Trump for the world’s ills, Clinton linked the future president — via his association with Steve Bannon and, by extension, Breitbart — with a loose-knit movement that was about to become more cohesive thanks to her clumsy scare tactics. Quoting her advisers the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), she described Breitbart as having “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” Clinton continued:

This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman — all key tenets making up an emerging ideology known as the “Alt. Right.”

The way Clinton told it, these were heady times for this Alt. Right. What The New York Times fairly accurately described as a movement which “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to White identity” had, according to Clinton, “taken over the Republican Party.”

In three months, Clinton would lose to Trump. In Nevada, she unintentionally gave impetus to those on the Right reasonably happy with the Times summing-up of their basic position. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the knock-on effect of Clinton’s free brand promotion, and its potential galvanizing effect on the British “far Right,” had not gone unnoticed.

Forward to May 2018 and another rally, this time on a fine spring day in London. The event was billed as National Freedom Day, and the main speaker was Tommy Robinson. The crowds were huge and accordingly the event went entirely unreported by the BBC. Robinson gave his usual rabble-rousing speech, and one of the effects of shaking the snow-globe that was the Alt. Right in the US four years ago was that Milo Yiannopoulos was a guest speaker. The Alt. Right tag was becoming a hot ticket for chancers, and there were a lot of takers just then. The rally was good natured, a very British way of protesting the encroaching totalitarianism of an increasingly authoritarian government. But to those ideological watchers of the skies who must eternally and vigilantly observe the British Right, thunderclouds were forming.

Hope not Hate (HNH) is very much a British equivalent of the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And, just as Hillary Clinton is counseled by the SPLC, so too HNH acts in an advisory capacity to the British government, although it is at pains to state that it is not government funded. In one consultative document, HNH covered the Day for Freedom rally and deemed Robinson’s patter to be messianic and ominous. The report, Modernizing and mainstreaming: the contemporary British far-Right (MM), was published in July 2019 and can be found on the British Government’s website. The author, Dr. Joe Mulhall, wrote his doctoral thesis on British fascism between 1939 and 1960, and has an extensive CV in the British media.

It would take a novella-length book to point out the internal inconsistencies and faulty reasoning in MM and an almanac to catalogue its unsubstantiated and unlinked assertions. But it does have an interesting sub-text which suggests that fear of the British far Right is not just a standard reaction to what MM calls its “traditional far-Right politics, namely explicit racism, broad anti-immigrant politics and vitriolic homophobia.” There is also a warning sounded over recent Right-wing espousal of two causes: free speech, and the belief in a controlling global elite: “It becomes evident that large parts of the contemporary far-Right’s platform — namely anti-Muslim politics, co-option of the free speech debate, and an anti-elite populism — has widespread public support” [Italics added].

This is an entirely groundless, ex cathedra assertion. It’s based on a sleight-of-hand by which Dr. Mulhall conflates Robinson’s speech in front of tens of thousands in 2018 with his far more sparsely attended English Defence League speeches [EDL], falsely extrapolating the beliefs of the latter audience into that of the former, and using this reasoning illegitimately to show the public spread of “Right-wing ideology.” This deceit assumes both that something called “Right-wing ideology” had previously been sparklingly exemplified by the drunken yahoos that largely comprised the EDL, and that everyone else couldn’t wait to try it.

These underlying concerns in MM continue throughout a document which is otherwise obsessed with Tommy Robinson. Its conclusion repeats the spurious idea that Robinson’s stance when with the EDL is now increasingly shared by the British public:

When talking about the mainstreaming of the far right it is less a matter of traditional far-right politics, namely crude racism, anti-immigrant racism, antisemitism and vitriolic homophobia having become acceptable in British society. … The elements of the far-right currently growing and attracting supporters are those individuals and groups, especially those gathered around [Tommy Robinson], that consciously eschew this sort of extremism and even claim to oppose it.

Dr. Mulhall is referring to the fact that British far-Right groups in general have made attempts to distance themselves from ideas and behavior associated with the extreme far-Right by a compliant media. This, says HNH, is merely cosmetic and I am inclined to agree, as we will see later.

Two years after HNH’s dire predictions in MM, in April of last year, it seemed that Dr. Joe Mulhall was a modern Cassandra. The invasion by the far-Right had begun. The proscription of Atomwaffen Division (AD) as a terrorist organization by Britain’s higher bicameral chamber, The House of Lords, mentioned in passing that AD were “a predominantly US-based White supremacist group,” but the fact remains that a demonstrably White, Right-wing terrorist organization is now banned in the UK.

This legislative instrument also makes it “a criminal offence to be a member of, or invite support for the group.” [Italics added]. That’s right. Fourteen years for a Facebook post saying, “hey, come to this march. There will be almost ten other people there!” But how can it be, particularly as we were forewarned by Dr. Mulhall in 2019, that AD remained undetected in the UK for so long? The short answer is, of course, that they didn’t. They were never there.

The British Government admitted in its official document that US-based AD had no physical presence in the UK. These people may be a bunch of circus freaks with a Baader-Meinhof complex, but they have achieved the singular feat of being outlawed in a country where they don’t exist and never have. What are the wider implications? Again, from the legislative document: “When groups without a physical presence in the UK are proscribed, particularly groups such as AD which have an established online presence, it is important to consider the wider impact that proscription has.” [Italics added]

You bet it is. This type of ostensibly targeted legislation has a wider purpose. The wording is open-ended and vague. What counts as an “established online presence”? Any other White group whose statements overlap to however small a degree with any made by AD will suddenly find that this legislation covers them. Baroness Williams of Trafford (who proposed the legislation) continues: “By proscribing White supremacist, accelerationist terrorist groups with like-minded ideologies … we underline our commitment to ensuring that the UK is a hostile environment for individuals involved in White supremacist or accelerationist terrorism.”

We may be surprised, in the coming months, by those the British government — ably assisted by HNH and the mainstream media — deem to have a “like-minded ideology” to that of AD. The British deep state needs White, Right-wing domestic terrorists. And if they don’t exist, they will invent them.

As ever, Britain has taken its lead from North America. The USA and Canada see White domestic terrorists under every bed, from parents at school board meetings to truckers, January 6 “insurrectionists” to pastors. As with all things North American, which cross the herring-pond to Britain like New York snowstorms, it was only a matter of time before the witch-finders were saddled up, torches ablaze, in the UK. But this is a witch-hunt with no witches. Where are they?

The “Hundred Handers” are described as an “international anti-immigration nationalist group from the UK, US, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Canada.” So this is big and it’s White. The Hundred Handers even take their name from classical mythology, and you can’t get much more White supremacist than that. Now we just need confirmation from an expert.

Aristotle Kallis is a professor of history at Keele University in England, and an expert on fascism. There are plenty of them around, these diviners. In an interview with TRT World, Professor Kallis describes the British chapter of the Hundred Handers as “a significant, terrifying deeper threat as they normalize the most extreme racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.”

Dr. Mulhall’s voice in MM echoes from the past. Here, we clearly have the British far-Right at its most potentially deadly. HNH’s prophecy has come to pass and Tommy Robinson’s time has surely come. The preamble to the interview goes straight to the scene of one of the Hundred Handers’ heinous crimes. Did they fire-bomb a synagogue, deface a mosque, disrupt Kwanzaa celebrations?

“Two members of the White supremacist group Hundred Handers were arrested for public order offences across the UK’s county of Sheffield[1] on April 16. They had posted racist stickers on lamp-posts, bins, bus stop signs and bollards, reading ‘Borders open. Pubs closed’ and ‘Open border, virus disorder,’ linking the coronavirus to immigration in Britain.”

Stickers. The Hundred Handers, it transpires, have no internet presence outside chat rooms, no official existence, and an estimated 200 members. Now, Sir Oswald Mosley’s BUF had around 50,ooo members in the 1930s, pre-internet and even television, when the population of the UK was 46 million compared to today’s 66 million. What Mosley didn’t have, however, was stickers: “They recruit through social media and QR codes on their stickers. Some of the QR codes direct scanners to White supremacist news, TV networks like Red Ice.”

Red Ice. Woah, they’re banned from YouTube. This is big. And in case you think some acne-riddled teenager in Sheffield — a city grim even by English standards — may seem harmless enough with his stickers, the effects go straight to the top, says Professor Kallis: “Their work is being done in the White House, in the daily briefings of the US government, through “mainstream” figures like Trump.”

There are very few degrees of separation for the Left between anything undesirable and Donald Trump, but who would have thought his chain of command reached to a post-pubertal advisory arm in Sheffield?

So, led by the nose by HNH, a voracious British media is determined to put White, British far-Right terrorist groups on the menu, and the Hundred Handers is the best fare they can serve up? Given HNH’s warnings, and the hard data that White domestic terror-related arrests doubled in just one year (from nine to 18), you would expect the press to better reflect life during wartime. Where is the real action, the training grounds, the bomb labs, the kill list? Let’s visit Britain’s courts of justice and find out.

This March, at Doncaster Crown Court, “Four members of a “fascist” cell who made pistol parts on a 3D printer and celebrated right-wing attacks have been convicted of a range of [terrorist] offences.” The gun is pictured here in the Lancashire Evening News. It seems to me to have no outer casing and, symbolically for the British Right in general, no trigger.

In February, a man from East Lancashire was jailed for being in possession of terrorist literature and “an extreme pornographic image.” Strange that he should have just one. As with all of these online offences, what we do know is that we are not dealing with expert cyber-criminals, and no VPNs or other simple ways of concealing your online fingerprints seem to have occurred to these masterminds.

Last August, a 15-year-old admitted to terrorist offences, including running an “openly racist” online channel and being in possession of “potential terrorist literature.” This almost always refers to — as it does in this case — the downloading of The Anarchist Cookbook and the White Resistance Manual. I have downloaded them both myself and, although I am English, the police won’t be bothering me. I relocated to Central America six years ago to escape what is now happening in England, and I can download — and say and write — what I like.

There were a handful more “terrorist” convictions in the last year, but only a handful, and they are all very similar to the above. Meanwhile, within that same past year, a Somalian immigrant butchered David Amess, Member of Parliament for Southend West, as he was seeing constituents in October, while an Iraqi immigrant blew himself up in a taxi while attempting to bomb Liverpool Cathedral in November. Of course, these stories were fully covered in the UK media, but the notion of terrorism was whispered at most. These were “lone wolf” incidents. What concerns HNH — and by extension government — are the far-Right militias they predicted so confidently in MM. So far, they appear to be either socially and mentally retarded, low-IQ misfits or kids. Perhaps this is psy-ops, and Tommy Robinson is training a secret army somewhere deep in the woods, the media heat taken off him by the discovery of stickers on a bus stop in Sheffield that say “No 2 Halal!” Perhaps ISIS should get a 3D printer or download a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. The world might pay more attention.

And perhaps viewing the far Right through the distorting lens of the British media was not the way ahead. I contacted a spread of British “far Right” parties and organizations, my criterion being to approach those groups denounced as such by HNH. I told them who I was (they wouldn’t know me), who I had written for and who I was writing this for, so there could be no doubt of my politics and that this was not just some MSM stitch-up. I have never written under a pseudonym (and that decision has cost me at least one job), and I asked simply if the respondent would be happy to answer a couple of questions, one general, one specific. I threw in a wild card or two (including HNH), and sent off 10 emails.

A fortnight later there were five replies, with just two of the organizations finally answering the questions. I had no reply at all from The British National Party, For Britain,[3] Turning Point UK (wild card) or HNH (unsurprisingly). Automated replies came from the Reform Party (the latest version of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party) and Britain First. I prompted them a week later, but heard nothing.

The Reclaim Party, formed by actor Laurence Fox, asked for some links to pieces of mine, and I selected three that were not overly two-fisted but did not shy away from race and culture realism. There was no further correspondence. Maybe they didn’t like my style.

Resistance GB sent a slightly panicky email saying that they were a media group and not a political organization, despite their highly politicized stunts involving politicians. I suspect they had looked up The Occidental Observer and found it a bit too rich for the blood, so they considered it best to distance themselves so as not to be included in this piece, for which it is now a little late.

Patriotic Alternative (PA) looked very promising, with the organization’s number two Laura Towler telling me she “loved” Occidental Observer. One of the questions was indeed part-prompted by the story of Ms. Towler having her bank account closed without notice. After a reminder, she told me she had passed on the questions to the head of PA, Mark Collett. He didn’t reply.

The first party to answer is in many ways the grand old man of what passes for the contemporary British far Right, the National Front (NF). I asked the same two questions I asked everyone else: Could the various factions of the British far Right ever work together against a common enemy, and had the organization been censored via de-platforming, denial of service by internet providers, closure of bank accounts and so on. Michael Easter of the NF answered both.

The NF, he writes, is “firmly democratic unlike the governing parties who select candidates for Parliament and instruct the locals to vote for them. I live in a very “blue” constituency,[2] yet the MP, Tugenhat, is a foreigner.”

This is unclear, but it contains a point about the finessing of demographics in Britain to produce desired, usually Muslim, results. Mr. Easter also writes something tantalizing I would very much like to have a conversation with him about: “There are a plethora of parties claiming to be nationalist but they are all multi-culti and several of them are definite money scams. Again some of these parties are overtly fascist, so I am afraid there is little hope of amalgamation.”

Three points: The “multi-culti” comment refers to the “civic nationalist” approach to running a political party, whereby members of all ethnicities are welcomed. The description of other parties as “overtly fascist” is an example of the brand de-toxification many on the British far-Right are trying to implement.

But it is the mysterious comment claiming of competing parties that “several of them are definite money scams” that holds the attention. We are used to race grifting for profit on the Left, but perhaps this presents an entrepreneurial opening for some on the far Right.

I’ll be brief about English Democrats as I hope to write a separate feature on them. Mr. Robin Tilbrook is a charming gentleman, if his emails are anything to go by. He sent me a recent speech he gave to party members. It gives as good a potted, non-revisionist version of slavery as I have read, underlining England’s role in ending it, offers a fascinating snapshot of English Democrats’ political rivals — most of whom I contacted as noted and none of whom replied — and quotes Aristotle, William Wilberforce, St. Paul and a Roman jurist called Gaius. I have a rather naive feeling that if the England envisaged by Robin Tillett existed, I would move back home. HNH describe the English Democrats as “on the fringes of the far Right.”

As for censorship, Mr. Tillett tells me that when the BBC were asked why English Democrats were never invited on the state broadcaster’s programs, Laura Kuenssberg (a well-known and outgoing journalist, Left-wing even for the BBC) told him they were “blocked.”

Other than that pleasant interlude, this was a dismal experience. There is a book to be written on the current state of the British far Right, but who would read it? Christ, who would write it? Who would want to traipse through this intellectual wasteland, listen to the endless egg-bound cries of “Britain for the British” or spend even an afternoon with any of these goombahs?

There is no British far Right. HNH don’t have an enemy worth the name so they have ginned one up to justify their own existence, and their portrayal of the far Right is a Potemkin village. As the Americans have shown, there is a lot of money in race-hustling, and a career in hassling “White supremacists” is a banker, particularly if you have the ear of government to validate the various straw men and paper tigers you have created. To find potential racist militias, all you have to do is control the discourse and game the truth a little to provide the illusion of impending terrorist attacks by people who aren’t brown.

This is Pepper’s Ghost, walking the Victorian music-hall boards, there but not there, visible but composed of airy nothing. In the Britain of 2022, you can race-bait as much as you want, and someone will pay you for doing that. HNH produce an annual report on what they call the British far Right. This year’s is here, and it is worth reading to get a barometric reading of the Left in the UK. The report is lavishly produced and obviously cost a lot of money.

On a related subject, you will look a long time for any decent journalism from the British radical or dissident Right. In the past year I have written for half-a-dozen magazines which HNH would unquestionably describe as far-Right. These magazines are pan-cultural, literate in terms of philosophy and history, unashamedly intellectual and geared for a Right-wing audience. And they are all American.

There are a handful of centrist/Right-of-centre British magazines — Quillette, Spiked, UnHerd, The Critic, the veteran Spectator — and although they are moving at glacial speed in a Rightward direction, there are still subjects they won’t touch with a long pole and quite probably never will. We can be fairly certain, however, that these publications keep a weather eye on the far Right to see what they themselves will be allowed to get away with writing in about a year.

In the end, HNH manufacture the optics the media can work with. The far Right in Britain is and will remain linked with the image of the skinhead, the football thug, the tattooed, drunk, gormless, charmless bootboy. This media-produced image is perfectly captured by the late Jonathan Bowden, writing in an essay on Ezra Pound: “The radical Right is regarded as a trajectory that has no connection with civility, or with art, or with culture. It is a tendency connected to thuggery in the mass mind and in the mass media mind.”

The only thing that genuinely concerns people like Nick Lowles, chief executive of HNH, is maintaining the illusion that there is an enemy, and one to be feared. What they fear is that one day they won’t be able to keep the lights on, Pepper’ s Ghost will vanish and with her the revenue stream.

Britain needs a far Right. But perhaps we could move on from the gormless demonstrations, the LARPing, the banner drops, the Nazi chic, the phone footage of immigrant hostels you posted on Gab to 100 followers, riling Muslims just for the sake of it, the survivalist manuals, the coffee mornings where you invite a couple of Black people and a Jew for optics. And maybe back off on the stickers.

Just someone please put together an intelligent bunch of people — media-savvy, intelligent but not full of themselves, tenacious researchers and punchy writers — who can hit people like HNH where it hurts, by showing that their claims of an incipient British far Right backed by a newly radicalized British public is all just a part of the hustle, part of the grift. In the real world, looking for the British far Right is like watching Hamlet without the prince.

HNH have worked so hard they deserve a real enemy. Why do they not have one?

[1] Sheffield is not a county, but a town and city in the county of South Yorkshire.

[2] ‘Blue’ in Britain is associated with the Conservatives, red with Labour, the reverse of the American political color associations.

[3] For Britain replied the day I filed this copy, 15 days after I had first emailed them. I gave them a day to answer the questions. They haven’t replied.