10 years on: remember Golden Dawn’s martyrs – Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis
Ten years ago today – on 1st November 2013 – the Athens headquarters of the Greek racial nationalist party Golden Dawn was attacked by ‘anti-fascist’ terrorists. At least a dozen bullets were fired and two Golden Dawn activists – Giorgos Fountoulis (27) and Manolis Kapelonis (22) – were killed.
No-one has ever been charged with these murders.
Five weeks earlier, many Golden Dawn members including their leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos had been arrested. Following years of pre-trial detention and house arrest, 68 party officials were convicted. In effect the party was banned.
The enemies of Greek nationalism – in fact the enemies of Europe – operate with their left hand via Marxist and anarchist terrorism, and with their right hand via the courts.
In 2013, eight days after the murders of Giorgos and Manolis, H&D‘s assistant editor spoke at a rally outside the Greek Embassy in London. This week racial nationalists from across Europe gathered in Athens. Even today, the treacherous rulers of Greece fear the legacy of Golden Dawn – and they especially fear those who are inspired by the memory of Giorgos Fountoulis and Manolis Kapelonis.
A ban on all public gatherings has been imposed and several rail and metro stations have been closed. Twenty–one activists from the Italian organisation CasaPound were detained at Athens airport as they arrived to pay tribute to the Golden Dawn martyrs.
H&D readers join our European comrades in remembering Giorgos and Manolis. Their heroic sacrifice will continue to inspire resistance to the betrayal of Europe. And on the day when the true Europe is fully liberated, we shall continue to pay tribute to their memory.
The Rudolf Hess memorial, the Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – a strange tale of the new ‘European’ left
Edinburgh’s extradition court has been the scene of a drama played out across several episodes, demonstrating certain common factors among Europe’s enemies, and the deep historical roots of a challenge facing all European patriots.
H&D‘s assistant editor – writing at the Real History blog – today explains the strange story of the Rudolf Hess memorial stone, an Asian Marxist lawyer, and subversion in Spain – an extraordinary tale of the new ‘European’ left.
Visit this site after 12th October for an update direct from the extradition court in Edinburgh, where the fate of Vincent Reynouard will be decided. Click here to subscribe to H&D so that you can learn the full story in our November edition, and obtain the two-part interview with Vincent Reynouard in issues 115 and 116 of H&D.
One law for them and one law for us?
A recent decision by the Crown Prosecution Service raises serious questions as to whether ‘anti-terrorist’ law in the UK is being enforced in a partisan manner, or whether there is one law for those perceived to be on the radical left, and another for those perceived to be on the radical right.
Press reports this week suggest that far leftists seem to have got away with defying the UK’s Terrorism Act, Schedule 7 – the same law that has been repeatedly used against H&D, most recently to detain our European correspondent Isabel Peralta and seize her phone and computer.
On Friday 23rd June, the CPS and the Counter Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police announced there would be no further action against Ernest Moret, a publisher who works as foreign rights manager for the Paris firm La Fabrique.
Moret was detained at St Pancras station under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, on the evening of 17th April 2023 after travelling by Eurostar from Paris (as reported in H&D two months ago). He was en route to the London Book Fair, where his firm was working in close collaboration with another far-left publisher, London-based Verso Books.
He allegedly refused to provide UK police with the pin code for his mobile phone, leading to his arrest and transfer to a London police station where he was held until the following day, “on suspicion of wilfully obstructing a Schedule 7 examination”.
Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 entitles UK police and border control officers to question anyone entering the country at any airport, seaport, or in this case rail terminal (classed as a “port of entry”). Those arriving (even if they are UK citizens) can be detained for up to six hours without any reason being given and without any evidence or specific suspicion against them.
Since this six-hour period begins when the interrogation starts, then in practice the detention period can be longer (as one can be kept for some time before questioning).
Those detained are required to answer whatever questions are asked of them, and do not have the customary right to silence. They are obliged to hand over their possessions and provide any passwords, pin numbers etc needed for officers to be able to access electronic devices.
Any refusal to answer, or refusal to provide such access codes is regarded as an offence under the Terrorism Act.
Officers do not need to show any reasonable grounds for detaining and questioning someone under Schedule 7. Although the rationale behind the law is to allow officers to obtain information relevant to anti-terrorist investigations, there is no implication that those detained are themselves terrorists or sympathetic to terrorism.
A joint statement by La Fabrique and Verso wilfully ignored this legal reality, claiming that Moret’s participation in leftwing protests in France against President Macron, had been cited “as a justification” for his detention and questioning. No such “justification” is necessary under Schedule 7, but Moret’s employers seem to believe that the far left is exempt from laws that apply to the rest of us, especially to the so-called ‘far right’.
H&D has always argued that nationalists should avoid unnecessary confrontations with the police. We have always maintained that (outside the specific context of Northern Ireland) paramilitary activity and anything resembling terrorism is unjustifiable and counter-productive to the cause of racial nationalism.
Accordingly, we have consistently argued that if detained under Schedule 7, then whatever we might think about the disproportionate and arbitrary powers conveyed by that law, nationalists should accept that this is (for now) UK law and we should cooperate with those enforcing it.
H&D’s editor Mark Cotterill has been detained twice at Manchester Airport under Schedule 7, once when returning from Cancun, Mexico, and once when returning from Adelaide, Australia. Assistant editor Peter Rushton was detained at London Stansted Airport in 2019 after returning from Düsseldorf. And most recently, in September last year our European correspondent Isabel Peralta was detained at Manchester Airport on arrival from Madrid. (click here to view an interview with Isabel about this Schedule 7 detention)
The latter case was especially serious, since not content with an interrogation lasting almost six hours, the authorities retained Isabel’s phone and computer for almost a week.
H&D is now writing to the Metropolitan Police and to the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, seeking clarification of the Moret case. Naturally we know no more about the circumstances of his arrest (and his later release) than what has appeared in press reports and police statements, but these raise troubling questions which must be answered if nationalists are to retain confidence in the impartiality of the police, and if we are to continue to recommend compliance with police investigations.
Background note:
Verso was founded in 1970 as New Left Books, and throughout its history the firm has specialised in works by Marxist authors. It is especially associated with the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ of Marxist theorists.
Ernest Moret’s employer La Fabrique was founded in 1998 by the left-wing French Jewish author Éric Hazan. It has published several controversial extreme leftist texts including The Coming Insurrection, written by a so-called “Invisible Committee” and calling for a revolutionary uprising. Moret’s employer Hazan was investigated by French anti-terrorist police seeking to confirm that the author of The Coming Insurrection was in fact Julien Coupat, who was arrested in 2008 for “direction of a terrorist organisation” in connection with the organised sabotage of French railway lines.
Information leading to Coupat’s arrest (and subsequent court cases that ended in legal chaos and acquittals) was supplied to French police by Mark Kennedy, an undercover English police officer who had infliltrated Coupat’s organisation. Kennedy’s actions as a police spy are themselves now among many such undercover operations being examined by an official enquiry.
In other words, whatever Ernest Moret has or hasn’t done, the UK authorities knew that his employer La Fabrique was closely connected to someone who was the focus of a very long-running investigation into politically-motivated criminal activity. And they knew that this anarchism (predating Moret’s involvement with La Fabrique) had also involved people in England.
Nothing published in H&D has ever been the subject of criminal charges, and we have never published any article that recommends criminal behaviour. Outside the specific context of Northern Ireland, we have never endorsed paramilitary activity. It is quite clear that the questioning of Mark Cotterill, Peter Rushton and Isabel Peralta under Schedule 7 was in each case a “fishing expedition” for political intelligence, conducted in the latter case as a favour for the German authorities, and had no connection to any actual or suspected terrorist activity or any other offences against UK law.
Undercover policing of ‘extremists’: will we ever know the truth?
An official Undercover Policing Inquiry is under way in London, following a series of revelations about the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), an undercover unit of Metropolitan Police officers that operated against various radical political groups and individuals from 1968 to 2008.
Today’s hearings focused on famous Marxist activist Tariq Ali, born to a wealthy family in what is now Pakistan, but mainly based in England since his student days. Undercover police and MI5 officers monitored Ali going back to 1965 when he was President of the Oxford Union. Most famous for organising protests against the Vietnam War, Ali was one of the leaders of the International Marxist Group (IMG).
In relation to Tariq Ali and other less well-known targets, it has become obvious that the SDS had long-term agents inside militant ‘anti-racist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ groups. For example one heavily-redacted Special Branch document released today gave nine pages of names of anti-NF demonstrators at a march in Southwark, South London, in March 1980.
The Inquiry will later discuss SDS infiltration of anti-BNP groups in the 1990s. Earlier press revelations have included interviews with an officer who infiltrated ‘Youth Against Racism in Europe’, a front for the Trotskyist group Militant Tendency, who held one of several violent protests against the BNP bookshop in Welling, SE London.
Some accounts have suggested that undercover Met officers were present both outside the bookshop among the demonstrators, and inside the bookshop among a small group of nationalists defending the premises.
So far just two such police infiltrators inside the BNP have been named. One used the name Alan ‘Nick’ Nicholson and was supposedly active in BNP circles during 1990 and 1991. The other used the name Darren Prowse and supposedly attempted to join the BNP in 2007 before his mission was aborted.
We expect to hear more as the Inquiry progresses about the SDS role in targeting both the far left and racial nationalists. However the Inquiry is likely to ignore or hush up suggestions that the authorities deliberately stirred up violence between ‘anti-racists’ and the BNP, as well as between nominally radical racial nationalist groups and the BNP during the 1990s.
Wisconsin liberal attacked by BLM mob
Overnight yet another historic American statue came down: this time the victim was former Vice-President John Calhoun (1782-1850) whose statue had stood in downtown Charleston, South Carolina since 1896.
Meanwhile in another state capital a thousand miles north of Charleston, a liberal state senator was attacked by ‘Black Lives Matter’ rioters in Madison, Wisconsin.
State Senator Tim Carpenter, a 60-year-old LGBT etc activist, was punched and kicked by the mob when he photographed them. The rioters had earlier destroyed another two statues, including one of an anti-slavery activist, Col. Hans Christian Heg.
Senator Carpenter might now realise that these riots are not ‘political’ in the normal, civilised sense of the word. His crime (and that of Col. Heg) was simply to be White.
The paradox of course is that many of the rioters are themselves White, but they are determined to destroy their civilisation in an orgy of self-hatred.
Anti-fascist gangster shot dead
Paul Massey – one of Britain’s leading organised crime figures – was shot dead near his home in Salford on Sunday night.
Massey was a former leading activist in the anarchist group Class War, and together with members of the infamous Noonan family had played a bizarre double role in violent ‘anti-fascism’ and straightforward brutal criminality.
However during the past year he had posted several tweets supporting UKIP, and less than three weeks ago sent a tweet apparently accusing Dominic Noonan of being a paid police informant.
Paul Massey’s mysterious tweet less than three weeks before his murder – seemed to accuse fellow gangster and ‘anti-fascist’ Dominic Noonan of being a police informant.
In 2012 Massey was a candidate for Mayor of Salford: his campaign manager Nic Seddon was later jailed for murdering his own parents. In April 2015 another close friend of Massey’s, former boxer Paul ‘One-Punch’ Doyle, received a 16-year jail sentence for his role as boss of a heroin and cocaine empire.
Paul Massey (far right) as a pall bearer at the funeral of Class War anarchist Ken Keating in 2011, where Massey gave the oration.
The murder of Paul Massey might spark a new Chicago-style gang war on the streets of North West England. It should also lead to a long overdue examination of the links between this gangland milieu and ‘anti-fascist’ politics – but sadly it won’t: not in the mainstream media at any rate. However it wouldn’t surprise me to see the national press taking a close look at one or two of Massey’s UKIP associates and family friends…
Former Class War anarchist and gangland ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey endorsed UKIP at the General Election.
Food for thought…
CHANNEL 4, 12Oct09: The Enemy Within (49mins).
An extremist ideology is sweeping across Europe. Fundamentalist terrorist groups are operating in London. They want to end the British way of life and a minority are prepared to bomb and kill to get what they want. But the year is 1892: Victorian England…
