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?

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[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.

Below I present the abridged version of an interview that I conducted with Andrei Tsiganov in St. Petersburg on March 30th.

Mr. Tsiganov is a political activist in Russia. You may not have heard of him personally, but it’s far more likely that you have heard of some of the activity that he and his organization have been engaged in. In his own words, Mr. Tsiganov is engaged in a lawfare campaign against Liberal forces in Russia and while there are other conservatives operating in Russia, his organization appears to be the largest and most effective, with some actual victories to their name. The much-derided (in the West) anti-LGBT propaganda law passed in Russia was largely the work of him and his organization and the work of Duma Deputy Vitaly Milonov, who became the face of the law. You may or may not remember the British homosexual comedian Stephan Fry coming to Russia to give the Russian people a stern talking to about the values of tolerance and inclusion.

Recently, Tsiganov was active in the fight against the COVID clampdown in Russia, filing lawsuits and providing an alternative perspective to the WEF with the help of his media resource “Katyusha”, which is quite popular in Russia. As an aside, the Covid hysteria has largely been dropped in Russia as a result of the military operation in Ukraine and Mr. Tsiganov has much to say on this topic, so I hope that we can revisit it with him in depth in the future. This time though, we spoke mostly about the state of the Russian government and the media situation in Russia and the sweeping changes that are occurring in civil society. Tsiganov and his people are a fairly good representative of the views and positions of the large patriotic bloc in Russia, which generally wants the government to adopt a more conservative, sovereign position in its national policies, foreign policy and cultural program.

I hope you enjoy it.

Me: Mr. Tsiganov, what is happening within Russia? The shakeups that we have seen in the last weeks are historic, no? Is Russia finally fed up with Liberalism?

Tsiganov: First and foremost, it is important to understand that there is a stark difference between the “deep nation” and the traitor class — the usurpers of Russia’s financial system, its media, and its culture-creators. Many of these traitors have left the country in recent weeks. True patriots don’t abandon their country. We can also refer to these people as “foam” — the foam on the top of the water. In other words, the foam is leaving the country. Alternatively, these people can be thought of as the sores on the Russian body. Many of them are non-Russians, but all of them are people who do not identify with Russia at all. They just used Russia to earn some money, temporarily. This is a positive cleansing process that is occurring now. We should be very thankful for it. Things would have been better had the West imposed sanctions on Russia earlier.

Take Anatoly Chubais as an example. He was one of the most prominent Liberal western agents. It’s a very good sign that he left. He was part of the pro-Western cultural elite in Russia. However, I hesitate to even use such words to describe him because neither he nor the people like him can be considered “elite” or particularly cultured for that matter. Unfortunately, we have to consider the possibility that some of them have may come back. For example, Vladimir Pozner [Channel 1 TV presenter] returned and thinks that he will be able to adjust to the new reality. His show is back on the air. Ivan Urgent [late night show entertainer who fled to Israel] also said that he might come back.

In the meantime, Konstantin Ernst [Channel 1 CEO] has had charges brought up on him. You have to understand, Channel 1 was pushing anti-Russian news on a state channel.

Me: How so?

Tsiganov: Well, they invited many liberal people, people from the pro-West camp, onto their shows and PR’d them. Take Morgenshtern, as an example. This is an entertainer that popularizes drug use to the youth. The government recently kicked him out of the country.

Me: So the poster stunt on Channel 1. Are you saying it was staged?

Tsiganov: It was a deliberate provocation by Ernst. He refused to apologize. It was done to send a message to Putin. The audience for this was the West —  the message was written in English, after all. Western media jumped on it. The woman with the sign had a lawyer sitting by ready. It was also a shot fired off Putin’s bow to demonstrate that Ernst and his operation did not approve of his actions in Ukraine.

Me: I see. What changes would you like to see occur within Russia?

Tsiganov: Well, in the constitution it says that ideology as such is banned. Modern Russia was created as a post-ideological country by the West. But the Russian people need an idea and there is now an attempt to create something new. The closest that we have to this is the National Safety Plan put together by the military where a first attempt was made. Several theses were voiced such as the necessity of defending the traditional view of family and fighting back against the anti-Russian historical narrative that is being promulgated in our schools. A second such document came out recently as well: the Project for the Defense of Traditional Values. This document provides guidelines for what projects are allowed to be funded with government money and what people can be allowed to sit in the government by proposing a loyalty test for ministers and bureaucrats. Much is still in the air and depends on the concepts, programs, and ideas that are eventually adopted. But the key point here is that nothing has been adopted yet because of the chinovniks (bureaucrats) refusal to implement it. Take, for example, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. This is a Western creature through and through. His whole mindset is Western. He uses neoliberal models in his policies and programs. The entire government is in panic because of this; they don’t know how to do things outside the liberal operating protocol, which is being jettisoned now.

Over the last 2 years, Mishustin has been instrumental in pushing for and implementing the “cyber gulag” and for increasing the cooperation of the Russian government with the World Economic Forum. Mishustin went so far as to open the Center For the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Mishustin’s entire operation is staffed by graduates of the Higher Economic School and employees of Sberbank. [NOTE: The Higher Economic Schools is one of the pre-eminent forces within Russia pushing for neoliberal reforms since the 90s.] These people are Western-educated and, more importantly, they believe in the Western consensus on everything from governmental policy, economic policy, and social issues. Mishustin and his cronies have formed what they themselves refer to as the “cyber spetznaz” and have passed all these laws without the consent of the Russian people. Our Minister of Digital Transformation says that robots make the best administrators — this is the mentality of the man who wants to totally reform our system of governance. Strange as it may sound, Europe and America have better cyber protection laws on their books. No such protections exist in Russia. Luckily, Mishustin and his people have failed to realize their plans because of the war.

Mikhail Mishustin

Me: Pardon me for the direct question: is the current situation good for you and people who support your position?

Tsiganov: This is a war against the West and Western values. Furthermore, Russians are unlike many other peoples because they are pro-big state. The Russian people hope that the government will go to war for them against the Liberal class. People with our values are to be found in the military and the ranks of the FSB [Federal Security Service]. There are lots of patriots in the administration of the president as well. The war has shown us who is who. People in the government thought that it was possible to come to a compromise with the U.S. And now this has changed. This has created more room for internal maneuver for Putin and his allies.

Me: Why did it take Russia so long to do something about Western propaganda on the internet? Pro-Russian content is routinely banned off all social media sites, and it is impossible to put a pro-Russian narrative out on the internet. What was the plan? At least they’re talking about “cyber sovereignty” on the state channels now.

Tsiganov: First and foremost it is necessary to understand that Russia has no plans — only the Soviet Union had plans. [NOTE: Here he means the Soviet 5-year national plans and such.] That being said, Putin tried to create a “Runet” [a program aimed at furthering Russian sovereignty over the internet in Russia]. But the money was diverted and squandered on the digitization plan promoted by Mishustin and his so-called cyber spetznaz. 150 billion dollars were allocated from the budget and only 11 billion went to internet sovereignty projects. The rest went to various digitization schemes based on Western models.

Another silver lining to the current situation: Kaspersky has come out and said that Russia has lost 200,000 programmers. [NOTE: I am not sure that this number is accurate, but scores of big city dwellers have indeed fled Russia. Programmers who have stayed have been discussing the phenomenon on their channels. I personally know several that moved to Poland and Latvia for what it’s worth.] This means that Mishustin’s cyber gulag plan will fall through — he no longer has the political cachet or the cadres to pull it off. That being said, Russia could still create a sovereign internet if the political will was there. We have the talent and resources to do so.

Now, the US considers the internet its sovereign territory and treats it as such. It is part of the US cyber-strategy plan. There is no such thing as a free and universal internet. Do you know who actually does have a sovereign internet?

Me: China?

Tsiganov: Yes, China. Only China has developed a sovereign internet. The project was completed in the fall of last year thanks to a law on servers which effectively banned the transfer of data across borders. This is the way to do it. The Russian government needs to undertake big projects, like China does, not rely on the so-called invisible hand. Sergei Glazyev talks about this — the Minister of Eurasian Integration. But the people who ran Russia relied on the Liberal way of doing things — allowing private, foreign capital decide what gets invested into and how for the last 30 years. As you know, many of these people have fled the country now. Consider the absurdity of the situation: the Alphabet company controls a large part of Sber [an important bank]. And Alphabet runs Google. We can’t have this. We can’t have our enemies controlling our internet.

Me: What will happen next? What measures do you expect in the coming weeks and months?

Tsiganov: The government will now be forced to lean on the patriotic base in the country because the Yeltsin-era people and the various Western-educated technocrats can’t be trusted. They can’t even mobilize the country should Russia need to transition to a war economy. I expect Youtube to be closed down soon. We have the necessary resources and professionals to implement a sovereign “Runet.” All that we lacked was the political will. I hope that we now have a chance to do what should have been done years ago. People with our values and positions finally have a chance of rising up into government positions that will be vacated as as the cleanings continue in the government, media.

Ukraine as it was before 2014, when it was neutral, independent and whole

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was thirteen and for the only time in my life nuclear war seemed like a very real and imminent possibility. I also remember the very different feelings I had in the spring of 1989 when we saw the first definite signs of the end of the Cold War that began before I was born. I remember expressing the hope that with the external distraction of the Cold War that had so engaged the thoughts, passions and energies of potential pro-Whites (“White” here meaning European) for so long coming to an end, our people would finally refocus their attention on the much more dangerous internal enemy. I also allowed myself to hope that Russia would join us in a Pan-European grand alliance.

Alas, that hope was not to be. Within the next several years the Soviet Union not only collapsed politically but the Russian successor state also suffered an economic collapse, largely engineered and exploited by U.S. and Russian Jewish actors, that wreaked more havoc and suffering on the people than the Great Depression of the 1930s did upon the United States, causing the Russian people to feel that the friendship and trust they had extended to America had been betrayed. This was followed by betrayal in international relations, as the assurances given by Western leaders that they would not take advantage of Russia’s weakness to expand the anti-Russian NATO alliance eastward was repeatedly violated, and subversive Western NGOs worked to promote color revolutions and regime change in several of the successor states, most notably and fatefully with the U.S. engineered anti-Russian coup in Ukraine in February 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin finally offered resistance and pushed back by annexing Crimea and supporting breakaway states in the Donbass.

In the quarter century since 1989, and especially after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States had enjoyed the so-called “unipolar moment,” a period of military dominance and effective global hegemony, that lasted without noteworthy challenge until at least the Georgian-Ossetian conflict of August 2008. One could even describe this period as a Pax Americana except for the numerous military campaigns, nearly all conducted by the United States and its allies, that made it far from peaceful. Near the beginning of this epoch Francis Fukuyama heralded it with his much-celebrated book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) in which he maintained the world had evolved institutionally into a final human state of perpetual peace based on universal liberal democracy. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and prominent neocon Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008) countered Fukuyama’s thesis, largely based on the continued existence of authoritarian and autocratic governments, but it still enjoyed broad acceptance. During this period, it was as if, as far as the West was concerned, Russia had exited the stage of history as an independent actor, and its interests and capabilities were generally ignored or dismissed as inconsequential. As a result, during this period, it seemed that events at the scale of Ossetia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014  were not sufficient to categorically refute the “end of history” idea. But with Russia’s current invasion or “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine there can no longer be any doubt or denial. History is definitely back, and in a very big way, in fact roaring back, and Russia is back with it as an independent actor of the first rank on history’s stage, shocking those who had remained so unwise as to continue to dismiss them.

International relations can be likened to a game of 3D chess. In this great game Putin, in the finest Russian tradition, or like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, is a grand master. I don’t believe the chess players in the U.S. State Department, such as Victoria Nuland (wife of the Robert Kagan mentioned above) and the other neocons who are at the helm, are quite at Putin’s level, but they had the great advantage of being able to make a series of aggressive moves (e.g., the series of NATO expansions and the 2014 Ukraine coup) before Putin was able (i.e., was strong enough) to make a counterplay in response. By comparison, the general run of media journalists, commentators and even supposed analysts are tiddlywinks players.

International relations occur and need to be seen and analyzed at different levels similar to the different levels of military affairs. In this context we can skip the lowest or tactical level. The level above the tactical is the operational level, and above this is the strategic level. Seen only from the operational level, the Russian “Special Operation” in Ukraine is an offensive or aggressive move, initiating the use of military force. But in strategic terms, seen from the perspective of the higher strategic level, it is a defensive move in reaction or response to a series of strategically offensive moves by the United States and NATO to turn Ukraine into what Putin regards as an existential threat to Russian security and independence.

In theory there are two major schools of international relations, the liberal idealist school and the realist school. The former, which was exemplified in Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, is based on the Enlightenment concepts of rights and values and since its inception has been preached much more than practiced, honored more in the breach than in the observance, with the realist approach actually applied in practice though often hypocritically disguised or cloaked under liberal idealist arguments and justifications. Realism is the tradition of Thucydides (“The strong do what they want. The weak suffer what they must.”), Machiavelli, Bismarck, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, and is currently perhaps best represented academically by John Mearsheimer. Realism has always been dominant in the actual practice of international relations by the Great Powers, however dominant liberal idealism might be in academia and among philosophers, media talking heads, a deluded public, and the misleading politicians who help delude them. Col. Douglas Macgregor, although primarily a military analyst, is also firmly in the realist tradition in his analysis of international relations. The problem is that liberalism, in the words of Will Durant, is a luxury of security, and this is especially true in international relations. Where one’s security, one’s perceived existential interests, are at stake, liberalism is a luxury one cannot afford, and realism reigns.

John Mearsheimer (b. 1947) in 2007

It is futile to attempt to discuss the Ukraine matter in a useful way with those who are ignorant of its background or context, or of the Russian perspective, or who are intolerantly hyperpartisan or hypersubjective and thus unwilling or dangerously unable to understand the opponent’s position and motives. This would seem to include the great majority of the public, along with the media figures who pose as experts and presume to lecture us in the moralistic terms of liberal idealism. In this sense, John Mearsheimer (co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy) and Ray McGovern (former head of the Russia desk at the C.I.A.) are commendable for carefully and objectively providing the necessary background, context and facts before presenting their realist views, which would not be so understandable and justifiable otherwise. (See “Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Salon” with Ray McGovern and John Mearsheimer, March 2, 2022).

By contrast, at least from what I’ve seen and heard, the mainstream media provides neither context nor the pre-2014 background, or the Russian perspective, but rather seeks to block or ban this information as it would tend to discredit the politically correct liberal idealist posturing that is being used to cloak the strictly realist and strategically offensive aggressive moves made by the U.S. and NATO. In this regard there is also a clear difference between military analysts Col. Douglas Macgregor and Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. The latter, when asked what reasons or justifications Putin could have for invading Ukraine, could only — with the look of a deer caught in the headlights — profess complete bafflement, thus revealing his own uselessness as a serious analyst, because to admit any legitimate reason would be politically incorrect, and modern generals tend to be careful political animals, and colonels who are not careful political animals are unlikely to be promoted to general.

The United States and NATO are major players in the Ukraine crisis (with the U.S. leading). Their series of strategic offensive moves actually precipitated the event, so Russia clearly can’t trust them to act as honest brokers in peace negotiations. This provides an opportunity for France and Germany to step back onto the stage of history as independent actors, following-up on their role as mediators in the Minsk agreements, to again offer their good offices in peace negotiations. Failing this, it seems likely the war could continue for some time, with the Russians eventually imposing a de facto partition in which they occupy much more of Ukraine than would have been the case if the crisis had ended quickly by satisfying their demands. John Mearsheimer said that Russia didn’t want to occupy Ukraine as doing so would be like swallowing a porcupine. In the context of this analogy the densest concentration of quills is in the northwest, the ten northwestern Oblasts (administrative districts) that are the most anti-Russian part of the country. That is also the part of the country closest to Poland and the core NATO countries. It is therefore the part of Ukraine that Russia would be least likely to occupy. The rest of the country, including the entirety of its Black Sea coast, could end up on the Russian side of a partition, with a border perhaps running north to south along the eastern borders of the Oblasts of Zhytomyrs’ka and Vinnyts’ka that would be about 250 miles long compared to the previous 1,226 mile border.

Mearsheimer is an exponent of what he terms offensive realism. In this theory of international relations, states seek to maximize their power, wanting as much as they can get, with hegemony as their ultimate goal. This contrasts with defensive realism, which theorizes that states don’t want much more power than they already have if it is enough to give them security, in which case they concentrate on maintaining the balance of power rather than risk upsetting it by seeking more. In these terms I would tend to see the United States as primarily practicing defensive realism, in the form of George Kennan’s policy of containment, in the first several decades of the Cold War. Then, during the Reagan era and the rise of the Neocons, there was a shift in the direction of offensive realism, with this going into overdrive after the breakup of the Soviet Union when it enjoyed the “unipolar moment” as the world’s sole superpower and sought to prevent the rise of any challenger to peer status. Russia’s strategy throughout the Cold War tended to be more consistently and cautiously defensive (the Cuban Missile Crisis being a rare exception, and even this was more of a counter to the missiles already deployed by the U.S. in Turkey than a true offensive initiative) and this has remained true during the Putin era. In the nuclear arms race the U.S. took the initiative with the Russians following well behind and trying to catch up, not finally achieving parity until the beginning of the 1970s.

According to Mearsheimer, a cardinal tenet of offensive realism is that a smaller and weaker state, such as Ukraine, that borders a much larger and more powerful state, such as Russia, should seek to avoid being antagonistic toward or being a serious threat to—and certainly not existential threat to, the larger state. In this situation Ukraine is an abject lesson that should be a warning to others, as it persistently violated this tenet, whether by its own folly or as a U.S. puppet being led down the primrose path, for although it was not capable of posing a serious threat to Russia in itself, it was capable of being such a threat if they became a host and a platform for U.S. and NATO offensive power, a process which was already long underway even though it had not yet become a NATO member.

U.S. troops of a training mission on parade in Ukraine before Russia’s “Special Operation.” Does it mean the end of the Pax Americana?

The tenets of offensive realism have lessons for pro-Whites that apply not only to international relations but also to the dynamics of the relations between different races and ethnic groups with conflicting interests in a multiracial society. Seen in the context of realist international relations, the small ethnostate or secessionist concept is clearly not a credible option as its independence and even existence would be under constant threat from more powerful hostile actors. This means that the “National Premise” or grand partition ethnostate concept, with the European successor ethnostate remaining in the first rank of global powers, is the only credible option for European racial preservation and independence in realist terms. An example of this concept would be my proposal for a partition into European and non-European successor states, with the non-European population occupying the 669,000 sq. miles of the southwest between the Atchafalaya, Mississippi and Arkansas rivers in the east and the Pacific in the west, and the European population occupying the larger remaining part of 2,226,000 sq. miles.

Applying realist theory to interracial relations, where the different races have competing and conflicting interests and a resulting adversarial relationship, with each wanting to maximize its level of power and control, supports the necessity for a separation of the races into different countries or ethnostates with their own governments where each can be in control of its own existence.

What should be the stance of pro-Whites on the Ukraine issue? The realist answer would be whatever is best for the White (i.e., European) race in its current struggle for survival and liberation from the anti-White forces that are subjugating and destroying it. Obviously, we should seek to avoid any war between the kindred peoples of our race, which in Eastern Europe is complicated — as it was in Yugoslavia — by traditional but now petty intra-Slavic nationalism, ethnic ressentiment, and revanchism. But in terms of the interests of the White race, and of the racial interests of the Ukrainian people themselves, Ukraine has been moving in the wrong direction, as have almost all White countries. It has been following, or been put on, a Westernizing course, which now unfortunately means an anti-White course, for the West is now dominated by anti-White forces which have turned it against the White race, promoting White racial replacement and the global homogenization program (“globohomo”) of multiracialism and John Lennon’s Imagine, and will remain so unless and until its subjugated White populations, long ensnared in the Kumbaya delusion, somehow assert their racial interests and liberate themselves.

Russia, in stark contrast, has been the only major White state with both the power and the will to resist the anti-White tide, with Hungary being a minor White state which has also showed admirable resistance to the extent its lesser power allows it to do so. This makes Russia far more important to the interests of the White race than it has ever been before. Indeed, unless Whites in the West do liberate themselves, Russia may become the last remaining major White state upon which all hope for any White future, however tragically diminished, will depend. But to fulfill that hope and remain independent of globalist control and the New World Order Russia must have security and freedom of action. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained in a March 19 interview:

The West did not want equal cooperation and, as we can now see, has kept true to the “will and testament” of Zbigniew Brzezinski who said that Ukraine should not be allowed to side with Russia. With Ukraine, Russia is a great power, while without Ukraine, it is a regional player.

So what is at stake here is not just Ukraine but something much bigger — the power and independence of Russia and its ability to stand against the anti-White tide led by the anti-White-dominated United States. The Polish-born and deeply anti-Russian Brzezinski (1928–2017), a grand master of the Neocons, authored The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998), described as follows in the Amazon blurb for the updated 2016 edition:

In The Grand Chessboard, renowned geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a brutally honest and provocative vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home to the greatest part of the globe’s population, natural resources, and economic activity, is the “grand chessboard” on which America’s supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. In this landmark work of public policy and political science, Brzezinski outlines a groundbreaking and powerful blueprint for America’s vital interests in the modern world.

Since 1965 the United States has been an effectively anti-White country in the most profound, meaningful and ultimate sense of the concept. It has been against the most vital (life-essential) and existential interests — the interests involving the conditions required for its continued existence and control of its own existence — of the White race, and it has set on an anti-White course culminating in White racial dispossession, subjugation, replacement and destruction. Within one or two decades after 1965, the same was true for Canada, Australia, Britain and the other countries of western Europe. After 1991 most of the countries of eastern Europe started on the same course. What Foreign Minister Lavrov said in a March 18 interview on Russia Today about Ukrainian cultural distortion and brainwashing since circa 1991, promoted by western governments and NGOs, can be multiplied by an order of magnitude for the U.S. and the other western countries.

The United States’ desire … to come back to a unipolar world… to take the melting pot concept from the United States soil and to make a melting pot of the entire world, and they will do the melting … . [T]he efforts of our Western colleagues [are] to make Ukraine Russophobic and an anti-Russian instrument, anti-Russia.”

For the anti-White forces in control of the West, with the globalists and Neocons in control of U.S. foreign policy, the ultimate goal, what they mean by the New World Order, is an anti-White (i.e., opposed to White existence and independence) global unipolar system, exercised through the U.S. acting as global hegemon. To reach that goal, the true end of history and end of any hope for White survival, they must first eliminate any White obstacles in their path. Putin has made Russia the foremost of those White obstacles, the one most capable of effective opposition, so they must pacify and subjugate Russia and bring it to heel, preferably through subversion and regime change, thus removing Russia as an independent actor from the stage of history and making it as subservient to U.S. will as Germany, France or Poland. Pro-Whites seek a collaborative relationship with Russia as part of a Pan-European grand alliance. Anti-Whites seek it by Russian subjugation to the Pax Americana. That is offensive realism with a vengeance.

Unfortunately for pro-Whites, the return of Russia and history includes the return of the external distraction from the far greater internal threats to our racial independence and survival. Indeed, that external distraction has also returned with a vengeance, serving the interests of the anti-White forces so well that one could almost suspect they wanted and intended this to happen. The conservatives who had rightly come to view Facebook and Twitter as enemies after their censorial banning of conservatives and subversive intentions and actions were made clear (actually banning pro-Russian speech), now rush to their defense when that same behavior in Russia caused Putin to reply in kind and ban the banners and subverters.

Our task, as always, requires our primary focus and attention to the internal threat that is destroying us. Russia and history are both back in action, and so is the external distraction, as they were before 1991. The internal threat we face now is the same we faced then, only much larger and more developed. The history we need to make is in our own countries. The conflict we face at home is far more dangerous to us than any that might threaten us from afar, so we should not go abroad to seek conflict but commit ourselves fully to winning the conflict at home. That is the epic historical victory we seek. The continued existence and independence of our race depends on it.