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

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

Alexander Raynor

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

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

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

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

Roots: The Foundation of Identity

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

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

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

Being in the World: Living European Values

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

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

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

Becoming: Shaping the Future of Europe

 

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purchase Guardians of Heritage here.

Spiro Agnew’s Surprising Embrace of Antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark dimensions

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

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

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

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

England’s new patron saint

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

Black martyr Stephen Lawrence, England’s new patron saint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esau’s Tears

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2794 Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Criminality of Hope Not Hate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Restorationist’s charges:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Judeo-Accelerationist Presidency

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The Judeo-Accelerationist Presidency

From killing Iran’s top general to legitimizing West Bank annexation, Donald Trump has made U.S. power serve Israel.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked by a dramatic intensification of U.S. support for Israel that would make previous presidential administrations blush. This shift is so marked and forceful that it can be understood through the lens of Judeo-Accelerationism. Originating from accelerationist theory, which holds that intensifying a prevailing system’s logic can bring about transformative change, Judeo-Accelerationism describes the abandonment of incremental support for Israel in favor of rapid, sweeping policies that reshape the geopolitical landscape to Israel’s benefit.

While every American president since Harry Truman has maintained a baseline of pro-Israel policy, Trump has gone well beyond this norm. His approach shattered long-standing diplomatic taboos and pushed U.S.-Israel relations into an entirely new and more aggressive phase. Far from merely maintaining the status quo, Trump’s policies reflect a zealous commitment to radically advancing Israeli interests at an unprecedented pace, making even the most hawkish neoconservative administrations of the past appear cautious by comparison.

Trump’s Judeo-Accelerationist Agenda: From First to Second Term

Both of Trump’s presidential terms reflect this relentless pursuit of Israeli objectives. The clearest and most symbolic move came in 2018, when Trump officially moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This wasn’t just a symbolic gesture—it was the violation of a long-held international consensus. Although Congress had passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, every president since then, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, had deferred the move out of concern it would undermine peace negotiations. Trump not only executed the move but also timed the embassy’s opening for May 14, 2018, the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding. As Palestinians protested at the Gaza border, Israeli forces killed dozens of demonstrators.

In March 2019, Trump went further by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. This region has been occupied by Israel since 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981. No other country had ever formally accepted this annexation. The timing of Trump’s announcement—just two weeks before Israeli parliamentary elections—suggested it was a deliberate attempt to help Benjamin Netanyahu secure victory. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo justified the move by stating it acknowledged “the reality on the ground,” effectively endorsing Israeli territorial conquest through military force.

Where earlier administrations at least gave lip service to a two-state solution, Trump and his advisors openly abandoned the framework. Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, declared in May 2019: “If you say ‘two-state,’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians. We said, you know, let’s just not say it.” The Trump administration’s so-called peace plan would have confined Palestinians to disconnected territories resembling bantustans, while allowing Israel to annex roughly 30% of the West Bank. This represented the most pro-Israeli “peace” proposal ever advanced by an American administration, one that would have formalized permanent Israeli control over Palestinian territory.

Further entrenching Israel’s power, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in November 2019 that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were “not inherently illegal,” overturning decades of U.S. policy that had treated settlements as violations of international law. The “Pompeo Doctrine” marked a radical departure from the positions of previous presidents, including ardent Israel supporters like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Trump’s Abraham Accords, heralded by many as a diplomatic success, in fact undermined the long-standing Arab Peace Initiative. By pressuring Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan to normalize relations with Israel without securing any concessions for Palestinians, Trump stripped away one of the last forms of regional leverage against Israel’s intransigence. For groups like Hamas, this shift represented a death knell for Palestinian statehood aspirations. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel was in part a daring response to the erosion of regional support for their cause—a gambit designed to re-ignite global attention and leverage international outrage over Israel’s retaliation.

Maximum Pressure, Minimum Restraint: The Trump Doctrine Against Iran

Trump’s sustained hostility toward Iran, Israel’s foremost regional adversary, further illustrates his Judeo-Accelerationist trajectory. His opposition predates his 2016 campaign, going back at least to his 2011 book Time to Get Tough, in which he declared:

“America’s primary goal with Iran must be to destroy its nuclear ambitions. Let me put them as plainly as I know how: Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped–by any and all means necessary. Period. We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists.”

He repeatedly condemned the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), calling it a “disaster” and “the worst deal ever.”

Though he occasionally struck a peaceful tone with select audiences, Trump’s actual policy toward Iran was one of consistent escalation. After pulling the United States out of the JCPOA in May 2018, he launched the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign—an aggressive move that clashed with his public image as an antiwar candidate. He dismissed the deal as “the worst deal ever,” claiming it “enriched the Iranian regime and enabled its malign behavior, while at best delaying its ability to pursue nuclear weapons.” Sanctions were swiftly reinstated, hitting Iran’s energy, petrochemical, and financial sectors. Trump also warned of “severe consequences” for any country that continued doing business with Iran.

These measures ranked among the most severe sanctions in modern history, with the explicit aim to “bring Iran’s oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue.” Trump’s administration steadily widened the scope of the sanctions, targeting Iran’s central bank, space agency, and even the inner circle of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

In October 2019, Trump sanctioned Iran’s construction industry, linking it to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which he had previously designated as a foreign terrorist organization in April of that year—the first time the United States had ever applied that label to another country’s military.

At the time of the terrorist designation, Trump bragged: “If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism…This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as an FTO [foreign terrorist organization].” These steps were not only economic in nature but also intended to isolate Iran diplomatically, cripple its economy, and prepare the ground for potential military confrontation.

The most dramatic episode came in January 2020, when Trump authorized the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. Trump claimed Soleimani had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel,” a move that brought the United States and Iran to the edge of open conflict. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on U.S. bases, and tensions surged as the world braced for war.

Even after this volatile episode, Trump continued to escalate with Iran. Toward the end of his first term, he reportedly explored military options for targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. According to accounts, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and other senior officials pushed back firmly. Milley warned, “If you do this, you’re gonna have a f***ing war,” and began holding daily briefings to prevent an unchecked spiral toward military conflict, a process he described as efforts to “land the plane.”

As tensions with both Iran and Israel intensified, Trump privately gave the green light for preparations to strike Iranian targets. U.S. military assets—including carrier strike groups, bombers, and fighter jets—were moved into strategic positions. According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump informed aides that he “approved of attack plans for Iran, but was holding off on giving the final order to see if Tehran will abandon its nuclear program.”

In June 2025, Trump ordered direct strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—using B-2 stealth bombers and bunker-buster bombs. Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “completely and totally obliterated,” despite conflicting reports from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) suggesting that the strikes failed to neutralize Iran’s underground infrastructure and only briefly hindered its nuclear capabilities. Rafael Grossi, head of the UN nuclear watchdog, stated Iran could resume uranium enrichment “within a matter of months.”

This escalation went far beyond anything contemplated by previous neoconservative administrations. Even the Bush administration, which went on a nation-building bender in Iraq and Afghanistan, had never authorized such a strike on Iranian soil. Trump’s willingness to risk regional war to directly advance Israeli security interests represents a qualitatively different level of commitment to Zionist objectives that previous administrations would dare not broach.

Unprecedented Support from Israel First Interests

Trump’s policies cannot be divorced from the powerful influence of pro-Israel donors and organizations. According to watchdog group Track AIPAC, pro-Israel interests have contributed over $230 million to Trump since 2020. The vast majority—over $215 million—came from Miriam Adelson’s Preserve America PAC. Trump’s unwavering pro-Israel stance has helped win over former critics in the neoconservative camp, such as Bill Kristol, who endorsed Trump’s Iran strikes, stating, “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have.”

Within his administration, Trump has elevated individuals whose views reflect the most extreme elements of the Zionist project. David Friedman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term, was a financier of West Bank settlements and later published One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s current ambassador to Israel and a vocal Christian Zionist, has floated ideas for population transfers of Palestinians while supporting continued Israeli annexation.

In January 2025, Trump proposed moving Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan: “I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people … we just clean out that whole thing.” Asked if the relocation would be temporary, he responded that it could be “long term.” The following month, Trump stated during a press conference with Netanyahu that the United States would “take over” Gaza and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Israeli analyst Noam Sheizaf observed: “Trump accomplished what no Israeli politician has: He transformed ‘population transfer’ from a fringe, near-taboo concept in Israeli political discourse to a viable policy option.”

Domestically, Trump further prioritized Jewish interests through his January 2025 Executive Order to “Combat Anti-Semitism.” This order allowed for the deportation of foreign students participating in pro-Palestinian activism and threatened universities with loss of funding if they failed to suppress such speech. The order marked an unprecedented use of federal power to silence political dissent in service of a foreign nation.

America Last: Trump’s Radical Realignment in Service of Israeli Power

What makes Trump’s presidency uniquely dangerous is not simply the extremity of individual policies, but their cumulative effect in normalizing Jewish supremacist objectives under U.S. protection. By shattering norms around Jerusalem, settlements, and Palestinian displacement, Trump has created new facts on the ground that future administrations may find politically impossible to reverse.

Unlike his predecessors, who operated within international frameworks, respected multilateral diplomacy, and maintained at least nominal distance from Israel’s most extreme demands, Trump has turned the United States into an uncritical enabler of Israeli expansionism. His decisions have gone far beyond even the Bush administration, which pursued nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan but never attacked Iran directly or endorsed population transfer.

Despite running as an America First candidate, Trump has spent much of his political capital bolstering Israeli military and geopolitical power. In the process, he has revealed the hollow nature of his anti-war image and nationalist rhetoric. His administration, staffed with ideologues committed to Israeli supremacy, has reoriented U.S. foreign policy around the goal of cementing Israel’s regional hegemony, no matter the cost in lives, stability, or American credibility.

By aligning U.S. power with Israel’s expansionist agenda, Trump has steered American foreign policy into dangerous and potentially irreversible territory.

Chapters 1 & 2 from “Vanikin in the Underworld”

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Vanikin in the Underworld

Falling Marbles Press, 2025

A rebirth from the rubbish

Disgraced, deposed, and driven to the ‘underworld’ for the crime of political incorrectness, Harry Vanikin — formerly Professor Vanikin — has not left the London housing estate in which he hides for seven years. Even going so far as to cover up his windows, the seventy-year-old Vanikin lives the life of a discarded shadow, going about the motions of something called life and only occasionally visited by his sister, his tormenting nephew, and his fellow residents of the run-down housing project they call home. From these fellows, however, from these similarly mad and equally rejected beings, the ashes begin to stir, and a ray of hope appears for the man who once said: I tried to teach my students the truth; no one told me the truth was no longer wanted.

Vanikin in the Underworld is the story of the furthest down and possible redemption of an educator who can’t escape education.

*   *   *

Eurydice trod on a serpent as she fled, and died of its bite. But Orpheus boldly descended into Hades, hoping to fetch her back…
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

Then you are not one of us? You are well, you are but a guest here, like Odysseus in the kingdom of the shades? You are bold indeed, thus to descend into these depths peopled by the vacant and the idle dead…
Descend, Herr Settembrini? I protest. I have climbed some five thousand feet to get here…
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Chapters

1. Inappropriate teaching methods

2. The fall of Mulciber

3. Estrella and the arriviste

4. In the TV room

5. Magda and the measuring man

6. Preparations for a royal visit

7. Queen and consort

8. I am everywhere else

9. Breakfast of champions

10. Time and the maiden

11. The wonders of the invisible world

12. The life and times of Jimmy-Shawn Pallis

13. School for vandals

14. Measure for measure

15. The follies of Pygmalion

16. In the antechamber

17. Europa after the rain

18. Dinner with Estrella

19. Of first and last editions

20. Let the games begin

21. Entry of the gladiators

22. Term time

23. A new printing

24. The book of the dead

25. The dinner party

  1. Inappropriate teaching methods

I dreamed last night I was being measured up for my burial suit. The odd thing was that I was still alive. That’s right. Some mincing little chaffinch with a tape-measure round his neck was feeling me up, chalking outlines on butcher paper, cocking his birdy head to one side while he looked at my scrawny 70-year-old old frame, and all to the end of making a suit to grace Harry Vanikin’s coffin, his lying in state. He didn’t say anything, but I knew. That’s one of the things about dreams that sets them apart from the waking life; however strange or other they might be, you always know what’s going on.

I say I had the dream last night but I meant when I was last asleep. The windows here are blacked out by big theatre curtains. It could be day or night. There used to be tiny ragged holes in the fabric, wounds from a moth invasion, and the daylight would announce itself through these tiny spaces, making it look like a knackered old planetarium. That’s what the ancient astronomers thought stars were, light getting in through a bloody great dome a few hundred miles above the earth. How do we know they were wrong? Everything else in the modern world is built on lies, why not the stars too? Make it all up, fabricate, weave and spin. I stuck black gaffer tape on the holes and now it’s as black in here as a crow’s heart.

I used to burn candles but I set fire to one of the walls and now the boy refuses to buy me any. So I switch on the electric light, the 40-watt bulb suddenly spewing out its pale yellow effusion. Not pale enough for Vanikin. I asked the boy if the shop did 20-watt bulbs, 10. Can you get a 1-watt bulb? Could you see by its light? Perhaps I should learn to feel my way around this haunted palace, like a blind man. Once, when the boy was sick, Estrella did my shopping and brought me back a light bulb that looked like it had been a prop in a Russian science fiction movie of the 1960s. Estrella, tall and gangling, with an anachronistic flapper’s face tending to the lengthy. The bulb was sculpted glass tubing and Estrella said it was energy efficient. Like all young people now, she is the conscience for an entire planet. When she had gone, I broke the monstrosity with the ball-peen hammer to see what was inside and waited for the boy to get well and buy me a proper bulb.

At the moment the boy is well. He rarely gets ill, but he is on the right side of puberty, untroubled by the itches and drives that arrive when poisonous hormones leak into the childish glands. He is, however, prey to the natural maladies of the young. I don’t know what time it is; watches and clocks simply sneer at you concerning your own mortality. When the boy comes I know it is morning. He is a part of the overworld and he has a mother to keep him on the temporal straight and narrow. His mother is called Manda. Not Amanda. Just Manda. I saw her once, peering in at my humble dwelling like a medieval courtesan gazing in wonder into a turf-cutter’s hovel. She lives with the boy in one of the other rooms. The boy has a similarly mutated modern name, but to me he is just the boy, a beacon of innocence in a world as rank as month-old cheese in a long-broken refrigerator.

The house has yet to come to life, so it must be early in the morning. The boy used to chatter away of his adventures in the overworld, and would give away clues as to the season. I forbade him ever to speak of it again. I carry enough of the infection from outside and I am here for the cure, to take the waters. Winter or summer, equinox or solstice; these climatic mood swings no longer concern me.

No. That’s a lie too far. You will become used to my lies, my swingeing embellishments and outright deceptions, but let’s not run before we can walk, or walk before we can crawl, or crawl before we have oozed from our mother’s great tented bellies. Of course I know the seasons even here, down here in the underworld. It is summer now. There is no need for the convection heater and the caretaker of the building in which I live has turned off the central heating. The caretaker is a man called Craig McCerrow and is one of the most frightening of God’s creations. God, or whoever runs this spiteful orb. But it is summer now.

Summer too when I first descended from the glare, down into the bowels searching for no Eurydice but the truth, or at least a truth. Supposing truth to be a woman, wrote Nietzsche, who slept with one woman in his life, who gave him syphilis, which drove him mad and left him in the Jena asylum for eleven years. Beware truth. Summer when I came here, seven summers ago, and in that seven years I have left this room for a period in excess of 24 hours once and once only. Of which more later.

Inappropriate teaching methods drove me here, or led me here (the distinction is a part of the purpose of my visit), and I have to say that is pretty rich coming from the gauleiters of the overworld. I taught inappropriately? In a world where pinheaded advertising executives spend Third-World-economy-sized amounts selling children plastic and rubber shoes endorsed by multi-millionaire hoodlums who made their own fortunes braying about violent sex acts and ballistic weapons, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which banks deemed too big to fail are paid to survive by money taken from the pockets of toilet cleaners and nurses before awarding their incompetent executives yearly bonuses outstripping the amount those same cleaners and nurses would need to live for as long as a dozen Roman empires to earn, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which women can become men and men women on the state’s ticket, children can view buggery at any hour of the day or night, screaming dervishes knife octogenarians as they queue for the bus, actors are asked about the world economy, simpering and large-breasted women lie about the weather to make themselves a fortune, shallow graves dot woodlands when men are done with their entertainments and no one is allowed to use the word ‘spastic’ even though it comes from the ancient Greek ‘spasmos’ which, meaning as it does ‘to tremble violently’, adequately describes the condition it used to stand for, and my teaching methods were inappropriate?

‘Mr Vanikin?’

Outside the door, the boy is here. I shuffle to the door and release the latch, tacky with age, and open the door an eye’s width, checking that this is not that dreadful sprite Adam, with his abilities, his mimicry and othernesses. It is not. It is the boy. I retreat back to the safety of my geriatric sofa, my large bald flannel dressing-gown’s train following like a sick dog.

The boy is about twelve but already tall. Christ knows what there is in food nowadays, but it’s not just the post-war boons I remember, iron and calcium and phosphates. Nowadays the junk they shovel down must be crammed with alchemised plant food, kerosene, plutonium. The boy is tall but not independent of limb like Estrella. He already has co-ordination and grace, a larval godling. His mop of curly hair falls over one hazel eye. He would have gone down handsomely in the Athenian square, fawned over by a gaggle of Socrates’ loquacious bum-chums.

Don’t worry; little boys are not what the young people call ‘my thing’. Christ alive, what do you do if you find out it is your thing? Lars, the middle-aged Danish laboratory worker who sometimes sits with me and brings me newspaper snippets from the world of men, like a paunchy Scandinavian Mercury, tells me there has been a spate of arrests of ‘celebrities’ over child abuse back in the days when men were all wearing Neanderthal sideburns and velvet jackets with landing-strip lapels. What actually happens on the day you discover that little girls – or little boys – are your thing? You are sitting on the tube train opposite a cherub. The swinging legs, the flash of tiny knicker cloth, the empathic pull in the sinews of the unruly member… Jesus, do you make straight for the nearest hospital, the nearest cop shop, or do you embrace your new vocation and head for darker infernal regions? Or are we, to use another phrase beloved of today’s academic grubs and pupae, just ‘ethnocentric’ about all this? African tribes and their child brides. Nine-year-old Aisha shepherded into a tent to meet the patiently waiting Mohammed.

The boy has come into the room and is standing tapping at his ever-present mobile telephone, the portal to elsewhere beloved of all modern youth.

‘What do you need today, Mr Vanikin?’

‘Um, the usual really’.

I hand him my list, a pathetic inventory in a crabbed hand. Harry Vanikin’s needs, strip-lit libations. The boy looks down at the meagre collection of items and pries loose the twenty-pound note carefully stapled to the torn strip of copier paper. He says,

‘Craig says the water’s got to go off today for two hours. Shall I fill the kettle right up?’

He’s a good boy. If the child is father to the man then the world has a treat coming its undeserving way. The boy will not grow up to be Craig, crackling with malice, finding his way into a job with people, I’m certain, because people are his sport. The water is always having to go off, the lights go out, the heating fade to tepid, so that gangs of mythical ‘workmen’ can tinker and prise. The block is like some great sick mastodon tended by pygmy veterinarians.

The boy has gone, striding down to Ahmed’s shop, and I am alone, or as alone as I can be. Vanikin in the underworld. Where were we? Ah, yes. Inappropriate teaching methods. I suppose it could have been worse. Socrates got the hemlock, Bruno, Wycliff and Savonarola the stake and the fire, looking down and hoping the breeze was ministering to the flames. The university simply made no fuss and paid me my pension before laying me off. Estrella tells me my book is no longer to be found in the library reference system. My book. So much to tell.

Another day in my circle. I rip off a puckered square of kitchen roll and evacuate my nose into it before looking down to view the outcome, a Kandinsky miniature in grey, green and red. My stomach, that aged coil of plumbing, is making small spiral noises, like tiny springs emerging from a captor mattress, and I must prepare porridge.

In the ‘kitchen’ – the square boarded off by prefabricated and hastily painted and wonky boards – I line up oats, salt, milk, a cup of water and sugar on the ugly Formica surface. I turn the hob to three. Hob; Anglo-Saxon word for the devil. Now, a circle of fire. Everything is present everywhere else; the human task is to sort it into piles that make sense.

I make porridge exactly the same way my father did, the big bearded man who was as good to me as he knew how to be. Porridge must not be a swimming gruel, but neither must it be industrial adhesive. It should exist betwixt and between the two extremes, like we poor ape-angels. As I carry the bowl back into the central space and the retired sofa, I realise I must not have slept at all well.

2. The fall of Mulciber

Just as every version of the underworld has its guardian or attendant devil, infernal factotum or dog of three heads, so too Europa House has Craig McCerrow. There he is now, shirtlessly grappling with some ancient lead fixture in the sweltering boiler room deep in the basement. His upper body is a patchwork quilt of tattoos, some professionally applied and some of more home-made provenance. They record past dalliances, the names of Craig’s awful sociopathic children, tribal affiliations in the world of association football, nationalistic aspiration, and mythical creatures, zombie overlords and full-breasted, broadsword-wielding vixens. Craig’s mental life is correspondingly crammed and chaotic, but he is grateful for the job of resident caretaker at Europa House.

Indeed, the job was a godsend. Craig had had quite enough of his regular employment as doorman of various risk-laden speakeasies across the city. He had been stabbed and shanked, shivved and striped too many times to justify the money and drugs he received in payment for plying his precarious trade, and the caretaker’s role allowed him to exercise power without the accompanying perils of the order of clientele to which he had become used. His biography presented here is a composite work, for which I must note the reportage of residents Lars, Declan, Ricky Rick and Mrs. Podolski, who together form a sort of BBC World Service concerning the happenings at Europa House.

I dread Craig. On the few occasions he had been inside my cubicle here at the House I had cringed in the corner while he attended to trip switch or faulty tap, and he seemed exactly what he was, a dreadful man in a city of dreadful men. There is an order of being which seems to take place, to take its place, in a parallel dimension to that in which we, the weak and frail and fallible, live and breathe and have our being. To see Craig McCerrow, his sleeveless shirt showing enough of the hinterland of his squamously illustrated body to indicate his likely passage through life thus far, is to see a type of hell.

Now, he has simply turned off the water to the entire block to attend to some dysfunction in the ancient plumbing. Alerted by the boy, I have filled saucepans and the kettle and the old tin pail for my ablutions. Two hours was mentioned, but Craig keeps to no earthly temporal calibration. Once he turned off the electricity for an afternoon but was persuaded by one of his appalling coterie of friends to go on a three-day drink and drug field exercise, and Europa House remained plunged in darkness for the duration.

As I accept that it is the morning, I must prepare for my day. I heat water in my kettle, testing the great orange gas container with the ball-peen hammer to see how much remains. We are all of us hooked up to these containers, and Craig replaces them for a stipendiary fee when they expire. There is no working gas supply system at Europa House, a fact which exercises the gangling Estrella. She, like most of her generation, is well versed on her rights, and claims that the contraptions which Craig has rigged up in each of our battery cells (the original house has been divided and divided again to provide more hutches for the inhabitants) contravene various Health and Safety commandments. I wouldn’t know about that, although I do know that the last representative from the council to visit Europa House was so menaced by Craig that he had to take a month’s sick leave from his place of work. That awful hobgoblin Bertie Spedding told me that. Bertie Spedding, the Mercury of bad news and sniffer of ill winds.

My water ready in the singing kettle, I fill the basin, select a flannel (one of two, royal blue and washing-machine grey) and begin to soap and valet the various cracks and orifices of my awful old body. The body, writes Plato. A shadow which keeps us company. I can’t have a bath because the bath has a crack in it like lightning-split timber. It also has about a hundredweight of academic papers, newspapers, notepads dense with my scrawl, coverless books. Research, you see, for my next book, the follow up to my university-banned and universally unread debut. More later.

With my cleansed frame snugly inside my billowing dressing gown once more, I sit and read, transported to wherever today’s book (the first of many) will take me. Reading is life to me, the phrases, ideas, concepts, new words and formulations all pouring into the old Vanikin head like wine into a cracked gourd. I would rather be a notepad for the sayings of great men, writes the pugnacious Julius Caesar, than be a great man myself. Some time later, I rest my book on the frayed elbow of the sofa’s arm-rest as I hear the light tappity-tap on my door which announces the arrival of Lars and the news.

Lars is a bald and shiny-domed Dane who was once a laboratory assistant before retirement drew him to the dubious environs of Europa House. He eschewed a return to the Norse land of his fathers on the grounds that it was now overrun by Mohammedans to an extent that not even the sleeping Holger Danske (the giant but currently comatose defender of the Danish people) could ever counter. He and I sit washed by my pale bulb, and Lars will tell me of affairs in the wider world, carefully préçising the main currents of activity before expanding on one or two stories which have caught the attention of his enquiring Scandinavian mind, and dutifully omitting to tell me the date.

Lars sits in my guest’s chair, a sort of faux Regency throne with elegantly curved dark wood legs and the look of a creature with nocturnal habits all its own. Tufts of old horse-hair from a nag long dead protrude at intervals.

Lars speaks perfect English, retaining the slightly clipped tunefulness of his native land. His round-up of current affairs confirms the movements we all know to be taking place outside the ramparts of Europa House, as the world outside marches slowly but resolutely towards a second dark age, a sort of anti-Enlightenment. Money is still acting like an insane woman in the market square, all matted hair and flung excrement. Politicians still parade and speechify, like street vendors in the last minutes of Pompeii. The young still rule the streets while the old stay indoors praying to gods who are themselves frightened. Motor cars still tear around culling the population, television still holds a nation in its mesmeric grip, and it has not rained for eleven days in a row. I make tea.

Lars and I sip at our hot brew as the amiable Dane begins a circumspect tour of what counts these days for news. News. The media. These old shades are part of the reason I fell from the heavenly ramparts of academia and landed here. I think of Milton’s Mulciber in Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s angels pushed (by Michael, if memory is a good and faithful servant) over heaven’s battlements to fall to earth in a leafy forest, a descent which took a full day.

We are fallen too. Crashing to earth where we sit huddled in a damp, loamy forest to be told tales by various spirits of the wood who do not have our well-being in mind. Inappropriate teaching methods. I tried to teach my students the truth; no one had told me that the truth was no longer wanted. Think of Orwell, lanky, pencil-moustachioed, public-school George with his fags and his TB. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Vanikin the revolutionary, Vanikin in a beret, bearded and chomping a cigar. I told them that Media Studies, the degree for which so many of them clamoured like ducklings at the water’s edge, was a waste of time. Media studies was what you did in your own time. Media studies was just reading the papers and watching television. University education should be more than a breakfast-time habit tenured. Inappropriate teaching methods.

Lars is summing up the state of world affairs. But we all know where the world is heading. It’s heading here, to join exiled Vanikin in the underworld. The world outside my retired theatre curtains was a rickety pier full of whizzing circus rides with the nuts and bolts all loosened and the lights off when I last trod the boards. I tremble to think what it has become since I groped my way below stairs, but I suspect that if I were to re-emerge from my dank and Gyprocced chrysalis this very day, I would not walk out into a second Renaissance.

It’s consciousness, you see. Nietzsche called the brain our last and least developed organ, and he was right, poor mad syphilitic old Friedrich. Giving consciousness to homo sapiens was like giving the Large Hadron Collider (and there Lars did hold my attention) to a saloon bar full of association football aficionados. There was the Renaissance, of course, but it was hardly general issue. A Milanese peasant born the day Fra Angelico was born and breathing his final rasping breath, a rare octogenarian, the day Uccello passed away would in all probability have lived his entire span without setting eyes on a framed painting. A frame was what you grew your turnips in. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism; these were mostly things that happened to other folk, the folk on the hill. The majority of the world’s population went on much as before while Michelangelo was creating his wonders, dirt under the nails and trying not to get killed by their neighbours. My tea is cold, and Lars has finished his report.

I bid Lars a fond farewell in his native Danish. Farvel. It more or less exhausts my knowledge of that jolly-sounding language, and sounds to me like a minor character from a Dickens novel. Little Farvel. Dickens, with his mad hair and social conscience. I feel vaguely unclean after being sprayed with the ordure of the outside world, and I head for my bath tub. I retrieve something soothing and recline on the buggered sofa, wondering who the house will throw at me next.

Europa House was built at the start of the 1960s, and so has no exterior charm and resembles a hybrid of an East German tax office and a giant lock-up by a ring road. As mentioned, the original spacious apartments have been cordoned and sub-divided and partitioned to produce the current human hen-house, and I am merely one lonely occupant among many. A surprising proportion of the inhabitants are, by any reasonable usage of the phrase, clinically insane (I am one), but there are gems amid the chaos. Part sanctuary for the disenfranchised, part asylum, part dormitory, part ghost train, Europa House has been my abode these seven years since my public disgrace and defenestration. After the fall, this is my pandemonium.

No one came to see me as I cleared my office at the university. To associate with Vanikin was to be on McCarthy’s black list, in the FBI’s little black book, marked down for a Leninist show trial. I had become toxic, a pariah or pharmakos or scapegoat. And so for seven years I have wandered in the desert of myself, apart from the ways of men…

A small drum-roll at my hollow door. The boy has returned with my provisions. I trust him with my pension, giving him a small stipendiary consideration of which I suspect Manda would not approve. All modern mothers believe that all elderly men are sexual predators with their offspring squarely in the crosshairs. The danger, however, lurks elsewhere. Mentally and intellectually, the peril starts when teacher arrives with her curriculum of anti-life skills. Outside the school gates, meanwhile, the drug dealers lurk.

The boy, as always, leaves two gossamer-thin carrier bags outside my warped front door, and I retrieve them like a laboratory rat snatching at a food pellet.

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, cordial, tea, milk, biscuits, porridge oats. Ahmed’s prices are reasonable, and I have purchased enough to keep a sub-Saharan family for most of a week. I have modest requirements; such is the life of the fallen angel, the outcast scowling back at the city of the sun, the civitas solis.