Dominique Venner – a hero of the True Europe
Ten years ago – on 21st May 2013 – a great French racial nationalist, Dominique Venner, committed suicide in dramatic circumstances at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Venner’s father had been part of Jacques Doriot’s pre-war nationalist party. He was himself politically active from the mid-1950s until his death, as one of the leading figures in an intellectual movement known as the Nouvelle Droite, together with Alain de Benoist, Pierre Krebs, and the late Guillaume Faye. The ND’s leaders later came to disagree with each other on some fundamental issues, but for the past sixty years their work has been among the highest quality contributions to European resistance.
Usually, racial nationalists should disapprove of pessimism, and especially suicide, since our racial nationalist ideology is a celebration of life and optimism.
Of course, some leading European nationalists have killed themselves in exceptional situations, but in today’s world we should not usually accept that suicide is a positive political option.
But Venner was 78 and very seriously ill. He wanted to make a final political gesture while he was able to do so.
Dominique Venner died as he had lived – as a hero of the True Europe.
Paris march remembers Sebastien Deyzieu
On Saturday French patriots from a cross-party coalition held a march in central Paris to remember their comrade Sebastien Deyzieu, who died during a demonstration in 1994.
Deyzieu was part of a demonstration that sought to highlight disastrous consequences of the Allied invasion of Europe and the post-1945 political settlement – Soviet Russian domination of Eastern Europe and American global capitalist domination of Western Europe.
Parisian authorities banned this May 1994 event, organised by the nationalist student group Groupe Union Défense (GUD), and Deyzieu was killed during an ensuing confrontation with police.
Every year since then, GUD has been part of a cross-party ‘9th May Committee’ that organises a memorial event.
This year the French left and Zionist groups have reacted with predictably hysterical demands that the march should have been banned.
President Macron and his government are among the most fearful and unpopular of Europe’s rulers. Yesterday all counter-demonstrations were banned as Macron attended events to commemorate the “victory” over National Socialist Germany on May 8th 1945. Macron also travelled to Lyon yesterday to pay tribute to the “Resistance hero” Jean Moulin, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and died during interrogation.
Rival biographies in recent decades have suggested either that Moulin was himself a Kremlin agent, or that he was betrayed by communist rivals within the “Resistance”.
Perhaps that historical debate over Moulin will never be resolved. But what we do know is that the “victory” of 1945 inaugurated decades of tyranny, from which Europe is only now beginning to emerge. Sebastien Deyzieu is a hero of the True Europe whose spirit has survived that postwar tyranny.
H&D joins patriots across Europe in saluting his memory.
Ireland set to adopt new ‘hate crime’ law
The Republic of Ireland’s parliament is about to pass a new law on ‘hate crime’ that will be among the most restrictive in Europe.
This will bring Ireland broadly into line with most European Union countries that already restrict historical investigation of aspects of the Second World War, notably the alleged mass murder of six million Jews in purported homicidal ‘gas chambers’.
Section 8 of the new law describes historical revisionism in similar terms to those used in many other debate-denying European laws that have been strengthened since the 1980s: “condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace”.
Offences under this section will be punished by up to one year in prison. Moreover even possession of revisionist material will be criminalised under Section 10: courts will assume that an offender intended this material for distribution, and the burden of proof will be on a defendant to show otherwise.
The maximum sentence for such “possession” (which could be in printed or electronic format) will be two years imprisonment. There will be potential exemptions, including for material that can be shown to be of scholarly importance, but as elsewhere in Europe courts are likely to impose historical judgments that should normally be outside their competence.
In a direct attack on conservative Catholic traditions that were once the backbone of Irish society, the new law targets not only the usual categories of racial ‘hate crime’, but also offences against new, fashionable ‘protected characteristics’ involving gender and sexual orientation.
In short, it will be a ‘hate crime’ for anyone to fail to agree that a man who asserts he is a woman, has actually become a woman.
Almost all parties in the Dail, Dublin’s parliament, are supporting this Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill. In Northern Ireland, only Traditional Unionist Voice has so far spoken out against the new law.
At H&D, we are unsurprised to see Irish politics going down this route. It has long been obvious that despite the persistent delusions of many Irish-Americans, Sinn Fein is fully on board with a toxic mix of Marxism and post-1968 leftist liberalism.
Dublin is increasingly multiracial, and its political culture is almost entirely ‘woke’.
Added to these toxic trends is a more fundamental problem. More than any other country in the world (except Israel), the Irish Republic is founded on a set of historical lies and distortions, reflected even in the absurdity of fake ‘Irish’ titles for Prime Minister (Taoiseach), Parliament (Dail) and many other party names and official positions.
Having forged their own identity on the basis of ‘victim’ imposture, Irish republicans now find themselves obliged to surrender to those who deploy stronger ‘victim cards’.
Reclaiming May Day for European workers!
May Day was a traditional European festival long before it was hijacked by American Marxists in 1889.
Linked to the ancient celebration of Beltane (marking the midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice), May Day is marked in Germany by Walpurgis Night and in England by traditional dances.
One of the most colourful celebrations of Beltane is in Edinburgh, which for H&D readers had a special significance this year because our comrade Vincent Reynouard has been in Edinburgh prison for more than five months. (An interview with Vincent will appear soon on this website and in the July-August edition of H&D.)
Racial nationalists have rightly begun to reclaim May Day as a European festival, and to assert the reality that we are the true champions of European workers.
The so-called ‘left’ has long since surrendered to the demands of global capitalism. Mass immigration is championed both in the name of ‘wokeness’ and to provide cheap labour, directly undermining the wages and working conditions of Europeans.
Meanwhile the so-called ‘right’ sometimes talks about resisting mass immigration, but in reality its reactionary ideology is in many ways worse than the ‘left’, and is even more devoted to the exploitative values of global capitalism: anti-nature, anti-worker, anti-White, anti-European.
On May Day 2023 H&D‘s comrades around the world asserted the eternal values of racial nationalism – the true interests of European workers.
Falangist leader exhumed from Madrid war memorial
On the 120th anniversary of his birth, the remains of Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera are today being removed from his tomb at the Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos), a vast memorial to the dead of Spain’s Civil War. H&D‘s Isabel Peralta reported today from the scene of José Antonio’s reburial in Madrid (see video below).
José Antonio founded the Falange Española in 1933 in an effort to transcend petty factionalism and offer Spaniards a non-Marxist critique of capitalism:
“The National-Syndicalist State will not stand cruelly aloof from economic conflicts between men, nor will it look on impassively as the strongest class subjugates the weakest. Our regime will make class struggle totally impossible, since all those cooperating in production will constitute an organic whole therein. We deplore and shall prevent at all costs the abuses of partial vested interests, as well as anarchy in the workforce.”
In November 1936, aged 33, José Antonio was murdered by leftist assassins in the prison yard at Alicante. After the nationalist victory in 1939 his Falangist followers carried José Antonio’s remains 300km to the Escorial near Madrid, and in 1959 he was reburied nearby at the newly consecrated Valley of the Fallen, a huge cathedral carved out of a mountain, where Spain’s caudillo Francisco Franco was also buried in 1975.
For decades the Valley of the Fallen was a place of pilgrimage for Falangist veterans and Spanish nationalists from various factions, who were often joined on November 20th each year (the anniversary of both José Antonio’s murder and Franco’s death) by comrades from across Europe. H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was part of BNP delegations to the Valley on several occasions during the 1990s.
The left-wing government in Madrid have for several years made clear their determination to desecrate José Antonio’s grave as an act of political spite. Last autumn they introduced new laws designed to criminalise aspects of Spanish history. One was designated a “democratic memory law” and the other was a new law against “anti-semitism”, which effectively means a law exempting Jews and Zionism from criticism.
José Antonio’s family surrendered to official pressure, and took the decision to go ahead with his exhumation and reburial of his remains at Madrid’s San Isidro cemetery.
H&D correspondent Isabel Peralta first wrote about the impending exhumation of José Antonio in Issue 110 of our magazine, and also made several videos discussing related issues (see versions below with English subtitles).
Isabel has recently been banned from Twitter but has a new website at www.isabelperalta.net with an English version at www.isabelperalta.net/english
Reports on the Spanish government’s attack on their own history will appear at these sites and here at H&D. Isabel also writes in the forthcoming edition of our magazine, which will be published at the start of May.
Leftists get a taste of their own ‘anti-terrorist’ medicine
Far left activists were outraged this week when a French Marxist publisher was arrested by London police under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.
Ernest Moret was held for 24 hours after refusing to provide passwords for police to access his phone. He was released on bail yesterday evening.
Racial nationalists have known for many years that Schedule 7 gives UK police and border security officers extraordinary powers that would once have been seen as unconstitutional. Our own citizens as well as visitors can be detained on entering the country, and questioned for up to six hours.
Unlike any other arrest, those detained under Schedule 7 have no right to remain silent and are obliged to surrender their phones, computers and other devices, together with any relevant passwords. The authorities do not require any reason for detaining and questioning anyone under Schedule 7, and their questions can cover any subject.
Four of our H&D team have been detained under Schedule 7 in recent years. Editor Mark Cotterill has been stopped twice at Manchester Airport after returning from a non-political holiday to Mexico and a visit to H&D supporters in Australia. Assistant editor Peter Rushton was stopped at London Stansted Airport on returning from a visit to Germany. And last September our Spanish comrade and H&D writer Isabel Peralta was stopped at Manchester Airport, the night before speaking at our 2022 meeting in Preston.
Isabel’s case was especially outrageous because her computer and phone were retained for almost a week, without any justification, as part of a political ‘fishing expedition’ where UK authorities were liaising with political police and intelligence agencies in Germany and Spain.
Everyone at H&D understands that we have very limited rights under Schedule 7, but it seems that the far left is only now waking up to this reality.
In this week’s case, it seems likely that London police were cooperating with their Paris counterparts in an investigation of Ernest Moret’s involvement with protests against President Macron’s changes to French pensions.
Moret and a colleague were visiting fellow Marxists in London, associated with the well-known leftwing publishers Verso.
His fellow leftists at the Guardian and BBC, as well as the National Union of Journalists, were happy to publicise Moret’s case as some sort of outrage. Yet the same wokeists were perfectly happy when Mark, Peter and Isabel (who similarly have no connection to anything that could reasonably be called ‘terrorism’) were detained under the exact same law.
Why do Marxists assume that dictatorial laws will only be used against ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’, and that the far left is immune?
Italy on the front line of African migrant ‘invasion’
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has warned EU leaders of an ever-worsening immigration crisis amid an ‘invasion’ from North Africa.
Meloni (who entered politics as a young activist in the neo-fascist party MSI and now heads a coalition of conservative and semi-nationalist parties) is derided by the liberal left as Europe’s most ‘far right’ leader since the Second World War. Her election victory last September was partly due to her promise to deal with Italy’s immigration crisis, but for reasons mainly beyond her control these problems have worsened rather than improved during her premiership.
Part of the crisis is due to dysfunctional governments in Tunisia and Libya. The collapse of Colonel Gadafy’s dictatorship in 2011 has led to a decade of chaos in Libya, where various warlords and factions battle for influence but have no interest in blocking the flow of illegal migrants (often crossing Libya from other parts of Africa). Meanwhile Tunisia’s own dictatorship is on the brink of collapse, and despite Meloni’s urging, the European Union and IMF are reluctant to send aid or loans that might encourage the Tunisians to cooperate in effective anti-immigration measures.
The numbers involved in this Mediterranean migrant trade dwarf the problems of ‘small boats’ crossing the English Channel. Many H&D readers have justifiable doubts about Meloni, but she is surely correct to argue that the problem can only be addressed by concerted European action, not by any individual government.
As Sir Oswald Mosley suggested decades ago, and as Meloni is now arguing, the most credible approach would have to combine resolute action against ‘people traffickers’ (whom Meloni proposes to jail for up to 16 years) with aid to African governments that will be strictly conditional on these governments turning off the immigration tap.
The problem is that African governments might seek to take advantage of the situation by blackmailing Europe: an example of shameless surrender to such blackmail is the Spanish government’s deal with Morocco, which inter alia led to the prosecution of H&D correspondent Isabel Peralta.
Fundamentally the answer to this migrant crisis is for Europeans to rediscover their confidence, get off their knees, and cease apologising for the ruthless methods necessary to secure our borders.
Strong third-place for Marine Le Pen’s party in French by-election
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National did well in Sunday’s by-election for one of the two seats in the National Assembly allocated to the department de l’Ariège, which is a very beautiful but rather poor and traditionally left-wing area of southern France, famous in history as the centre of the Cathar or Albigensian heresy.
The by-election was caused by irregularities in the conduct of the general election in this constituency. The far-left candidate Bénédicte Taurine was elected at last year’s general election but has been forced to recontest the seat after the poll was quashed by the Constitutional Court. Ms Taurine represents a broad alliance of ultra-left groups which calls itself La France Insoumise (‘France Unbowed’), a title which reflects the oddly patriotic stance of French socialists who argue that economic liberalism (promoted by President Emmanuel Macron) is a betrayal of French traditions.
The RN’s vote went up by a quarter from 20% to 25% but that was not quite good enough to take RN candidate Jean-Marc Garnier into next Sunday’s second round, where the far-left’s Ms Taurine (whose first round vote slipped slightly from 33.1% to 31.2%) will run-off against a Socialist Party dissident, Martine Froger (whose vote rose from 20.0% to 26.4%, no doubt partly thanks to having her party’s name on the ballot paper this time).
The strange situation is that last year the Le Pen candidate only missed out on the run-off by eight votes, but in this week’s by-election they were 155 votes short despite a substantial increase in their own backing. Rival nationalist party Reconquête (led by Éric Zemmour) polled 2.8% (down from 3.3% last year), but while in theory this means that a combined nationalist vote would have taken second rather than third place, no-one can be sure that the RN could have relied on Reconquête voters’ backing.
Reconquête continues to be an annoyance to Marine Le Pen. It would however be simplistic to think that the two parties’ electorates are simply interchangeable. It is noteworthy that MLP’s niece Marion Maréchal (whose credibility has been badly damaged by Reconquête‘s electoral failure, but who is still seen as the eventual successor to Zemmour and perhaps as the eventual leader of French nationalism) has severely criticised the RN for not taking steps against a RN deputy who opened a mega-mosque in his constituency funded by the Turkish government. (Le Pen did eventually condemn the deputy concerned for this ‘personal initiative’.)
At the same time Maréchal and Zemmour have more or less endorsed President Macron’s view that raising the retirement age is inevitable given the burden of pension payments on the public purse.
So, rather in contrast to the way things have usually been in the UK’s nationalist movement (broad and narrow), the French movement’s middle class supporters take a harder line on race than its working class base (as well as forming a much larger proportion of the movement’s electoral base than they do here).
Macron’s candidate polled only 10.7% (down from 20.0% last year, reflecting the challenge to the president’s authority during the pensions crisis), and as in last year’s election there was no ‘centre-right’ candidate.
The split in the nationalist vote was unfortunate, but hatred between the Socialists and the far-left will be much increased by the bitter run-off on April 2nd, regardless of who wins!
Disillusionment with the entire French political system no doubt contributed to a very low turnout of only 39.6% in the by-election’s first round, down from 56.4% last year, despite a very wide range of candidates to choose from, comprising two rival nationalists, a Trotskyist who polled 2%, plus a local independent with 2.2%, and a Macronist, as well as the two rival left-wingers who will contest the run-off.
Europeans mark two contrasting anniversaries
H&D‘s friends and comrades in Europe have marked two contrasting anniversaries in recent days.
In Dresden commemorations were held for the greatest crime of the Second World War – the terror bombing that destroyed this ancient city in February 1945. As discussed in a new article by our assistant editor Peter Rushton at the Real History blog, no one knows the true death toll at Dresden, partly because the city was packed with refugees who had fled from Stalin’s Red Army as it advanced into eastern Germany. Based on his detailed archival research, the British historian David Irving has estimated 135,000 deaths.
Dresden was the culmination of a deliberate policy of terror bombing – a deliberate decision to flout pre-war agreements (and to abandon the policies of the British government at the start of the war, maintained until Churchill took office).
The most famous British military historian, J.F.C. Fuller wrote in 1948:
“It may seem a little strange, nevertheless it is a fact, that this reversion to wars of primitive savagery was made by Britain and the United States, the two great democracies… With the disappearance of the gentleman as the back-bone of the ruling class in England, political power rapidly passed into the hands of demagogues who, by playing upon the emotions and ignorance of the masses, created a permanent war-psychosis.”
Fuller went on to acknowledge that as a consequence of the seizure of power in Britain by such “demagogues”, notably Churchill, “the obliteration of cities by bombing was probably the most devastating blow ever struck at civilisation”. Fuller wrote of “the moral decline which characterised the war.”
The Spanish nationalist group Devenir Europeo carried out a campaign of leaflets and posters targeting universities and military academies in an effort to raise awareness of the events of the Second World War and how they shaped our world. Our correspondent Isabel Peralta was very much involved in this campaign: she also marked this week’s other important historic anniversary.
In February 1943, 4,000 Spanish anti-communist volunteers – the División Azul (‘Blue Division’) – successfully fought off a vastly greater force of Stalin’s Red Army at the Battle of Krasny Bor, near Leningrad, allowing their German allies to regroup and maintain the Leningrad front.
Speaking beside the División Azul memorial at the Almudena cemetery, Madrid, this week, Isabel pointed out that her compatriots won at Krasny Bor not because they had greater numbers or greater weapons, but because they had greater faith in their cause – the noble ideals of the true Europe.
Spain is now at the front line of the struggle to maintain freedom of research and freedom of speech on historical and political questions. Under their new ‘democratic memory law’ some forms of historical revisionism are now illegal, although in other respects Spanish laws on ‘incitement of racial hatred’ are less restrictive than in the UK.
Isabel herself is presently facing trial in Madrid for a speech at an anti-immigration rally outside the Spanish Embassy last year.
Change to German electoral system – is Sir Keir watching?
This week the German coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals began moves to reform the Federal Parliament (Bundestag) in what would be their country’s biggest constitutional shake-up for many years.
With electoral reform likely to be on the UK’s political agenda after the Conservatives almost certainly lose the next general election (due by January 2025 at the very latest) the choices made in Berlin are worth examining. Especially because their present government is ideologically very similar to a likely Labour-led coalition in the UK.
Germany has a hybrid system, with some MPs elected on a Westminster-style first-past-the-post system, but others elected via a top-up list so as to make the entire Bundestag represent the nationwide percentage share of the vote.
This hybrid system means that the Bundestag is not simply divided proportionally to match the parties’ share of the vote. For example, to gain proportionally-based seats, a party must poll at least 5% nationwide, or qualify for proportional top-ups if it wins at least three directly-elected seats. This happened recently with the far-left party Die Linke.
On the other hand, a party with a very strong regional base can end up winning more directly elected seats than a proportional carve-up would have given them. This is the case with Bavaria’s conservative party CSU. Extra seats are created to balance out such anomalies and are known as ‘overhang’ seats: these have meant that the present Bundestag is the largest ever, with 736 MPs.
This week’s proposed reform would eliminate ‘overhang’ seats, and fix the number of German MPs at 598.
At a basic level the reform is likely to be popular with voters, since it will save money and cut bureaucracy. And it’s a cunning move by the government because it will weaken the CSU. Even though CSU is the sister party of CDU, the present system of ‘overhang’ balancing takes no account of that, and gives an artificial boost to the combined CDU-CSU strength.
Reforming this would be likely to make any future conservative-led government more dependent on a deal with parties further to the right – presently AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) or whichever party succeeds AfD if it splits/declines. Unsurprisingly, the present reform is similar to a policy that the AfD itself promoted four years ago.
Here in the UK the party in a similar position to CSU (though very different ideologically) is Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party. The present electoral system gives the SNP grossly inflated importance at Westminster, relative to its share of the UK-wide vote. At the last general election SNP won 3.9% of the UK-wide vote, and 48 MPs (i.e. 7.4% of the House of Commons). The system almost doubled the SNP’s importance at Westminster, and this would be far more important in the event of no major party gaining a Commons majority, thus making Sturgeon and her allies kingmakers.
By contrast a more purely proportional system would probably give a populist/nationalist party (i.e. whatever replaces Reform UK and UKIP) more Westminster seats than the SNP. The other big winners from a change to a German-style system would almost certainly be the Greens.
Most importantly for racial nationalists, it would end the ‘wasted vote’ argument that has so far prevented many of those who sympathise with our ideas from voting for a racial nationalist party.
