Labour’s multicultural crisis!

Sir Keir Starmer (above left) with his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose Palestine policy Starmer has repudiated

Though it still seems very likely that Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister in about a year’s time, the latest crisis in Palestine has raised problems that are rooted in Labour’s historical commitments to both Zionism and the UK’s multiracial society.

For most of its history, the Labour Party has been pro-Zionist – with the partial exceptions of the Attlee government that presided over a war against Jewish terrorists from 1945-48, and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party during 2015-20.

Successive Labour leaders (ever since Attlee’s government saw the first large-scale West Indian immigration) have become ever more committed to the vision of multiracialism and multiculturalism.

Until the 1980s it never occurred to any politician that Islam and in particular solidarity with fellow Muslims in Palestine would become a factor in British politics. Even racial nationalists during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s emphasised other reasons why non-European races and cultures didn’t belong here. Religion was rarely taken seriously as a political division (apart from Protestant v Catholic divisions in Ulster and some British cities).

Oldham was one of the few areas where Labour previously sacrificed Muslim support: anti-Islamist leaflets from former MP Phil Woolas were ruled illegal by an election court in 2010

But now significant numbers of Muslim councillors and MPs (as well as some pro-Palestinian, non-Muslim Labourites, usually either from the Corbynite left-wing or worried about Muslim voters in their areas) are rebelling against their leader’s support for Israel.

Starmer seems determined to distance himself from Corbyn and take Labour back to the Tony Blair era (or even the era of Harold Wilson, who from 1963-76 was the most pro-Zionist Labour leader in the party’s history).

Yet the brutality of Israel’s assault on Gaza has shocked some Muslim councillors so much that they have quit the party.

Much of the trouble has come in areas of Lancashire that are well-known to the H&D team from the 2000s when racial nationalism flourished in some racial flashpoint areas.

Burnley’s council leader is one of several Muslim councillors who have resigned from Labour over the Gaza issue

The leader of Burnley council has quit Labour together with ten colleagues, instantly removing Labour’s control of the council. For now they are in an independent group, and the council’s future direction is uncertain.

Councillors have also quit Labour In nearby Pendle, while in Blackburn (where H&D editor Mark Cotterill was once a councillor) there have been defections from both the Tories and Labour.

Yesterday three members of Haringey council in North London (this time non-Muslim Corbynists) joined the exodus.

For now it seems obvious that Starmer will stick with his pro-Zionist policy whatever happens. But if Israeli policy becomes even more brutal, he will start to come under pressure from more mainstream voices in his party, and the split will widen.

The tragedy in all this of course is that while Muslim councillors are prepared to speak for their brothers and sisters in Gaza, there is no racial nationalist party of any size able to speak for indigenous Britons.

Noble but futile

The UK’s Terrorism Act prohibits any form of support for the Palestinian resistance organisation Hamas.

Therefore when writing for a UK-based magazine, the only legal ‘side’ to take in relation to this morning’s events in Palestine would be to join the mindless chorus of ‘condemnation’ of Hamas for ‘invading’ their own country.

Or to take no ‘side’ at all.

Zionists are free to say what they like in support of Jewish terrorists, none of whom are covered by the UK’s Terrorism Act even when they have committed barbaric acts against British servicemen and civilians.

And as we have previously commented, even Robert Misrahi – a Jewish terrorist who planted a bomb in a British servicemen’s club in London, and whose colleagues murdered a young Englishman with a parcel bomb – remains at liberty in Paris today.

One of the few groups to be removed from the Terrorism Act proscription list and made legal (even encouraged) in the UK is the anti-Iranian terrorist group Mujaheddin e Khalq, whose leaders (not coincidentally) are closely involved with the fake patriots in the Spanish kosher ‘nationalist’ party Vox.

But Hamas is one of five Palestinian groups on the UK’s proscribed list (not including the many international Islamist groups).

A school and mosque bombed by Israel in Rafah, during one of many earlier attacks on Gaza in 2009: no doubt many more civilian targets will be destroyed by Israel in the coming weeks.

Aside from this legal question, it’s possible to say two things about this morning’s action by Hamas.

Firstly, that in the very short-term it appears to have been successful in surprising Israel, ironically on the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack, the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

But secondly, that unlike the Yom Kippur War (which at least stood a chance of success) this morning’s attacks seem guaranteed to fail.

In 1973 several Arab states (at least to some extent) sincerely opposed the Zionists, so much so that they inflicted economic damage on the West by imposing huge increases in oil prices to punish Western governments for supporting Israel.

Half a century later, almost every so-called ‘Arab’ government (especially the Saudis, despite their weasel words) has become cynical and is either openly allied to Israel or moving in that direction.

Added to that is the characteristic Palestinian ability to undermine their own cause by unwise alliances. Hamas and other groups have for years stupidly allied themselves to the IRA, which gains absolutely nothing for the Palestinian cause but alienates potential supporters in the UK.

And during the past 18 months many Palestinian spokesmen (and their allies in Damascus and Tehran) have equally stupidly allied themselves to Vladimir Putin, despite the illogicality of defending the oppressed Palestinian nation while supporting the obliteration of the Ukrainian nation.

Putin will of course do nothing to help Hamas or other Palestinians: he and his cynical propagandists (including some British ‘nationalists’) will instead enjoy and exploit the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the retaliatory terror bombings by Israeli forces that are sure to follow.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has his own reasons for this morning’s strong statement of support for Israel. But the vast majority of Ukrainians who have no personal reason to support Zionism, and who might well instinctively support the Palestinian cause, have also now come to see Hamas, Syria and Iran as the ‘friends of their enemy’ in the Kremlin.

South Vietnam’s capital Saigon during the Tet Offensive of 1968

Some instant experts have wrongly compared this morning’s short-term Hamas success to the Tet Offensive carried out by the communist Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces in 1968.

The comparison doesn’t work because the whole point about that offensive is that it demonstrated the long-term unsustainability of the South Vietnamese state, at a time when US aid for that state was already becoming very unpopular across the West.

Sadly the inevitable crushing of today’s Hamas offensive will be applauded by almost every influential politician in the West, including those cynics and cranks in the US Republican Party who are openly or covertly pro-Putin.

Rather than Vietnam in 1968, the appropriate comparison is with the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War in 1854. As the British cavalry mounted their doomed frontal assault against Russian artillery, charging into what the poet Tennyson later termed “the valley of Death”, an observant French general Pierre Bosquet commented “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie”. (“It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.”)

Bosquet might say the same in 2023 about Hamas, even though in the UK such words would now risk prosecution under the Terrorism Act.

And Tennyson’s words (though they might seem appropriate) would certainly be illegal if applied to the Light Brigade’s Palestinian successors as they throw themselves against one of the most heavily armed states that has ever existed.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder’d.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Holodomor Remembrance Day

One of the photos taken by Austrian nationalist Alexander Wienerberger documenting the Holodomor: these photos formed part of anti-communist exhibitions during the Third Reich, but the Holodomor was ignored by the Anglo-American press, dominated by the Kremlin’s agents and ‘useful idiots’.

Today is Holodomor Remembrance Day – but most people in the UK don’t even know the meaning of the word.

In contrast to the ‘Holocaust’ which has become the new religion of the West – with scholars such as Vincent Reynouard and Ursula Haverbeck jailed for raising questions about its historical veracity – the Holodomor, the terror-famine during 1932-33 in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death, is unknown in most of the world.

The Austrian nationalist and chemical engineer Alexander Wienerberger was working in Ukraine during the Holodomor and his photographs and eyewitness reports were some of the first evidence of Stalin’s crimes. Yet despite Wienerberger’s partly Jewish ancestry, his testimony was ignored or disbelieved during the 1930s by most journalists outside the Third Reich. Wienerberger’s work was promoted by national-socialists but ignored by mainstream journalists.

Walter Duranty (above centre) was a Stalinist agent whose denial of the Holodomor dominated the Western media narrative, except in the Third Reich. Duranty is seen here at a New York lunch in his honour, flanked by Kenneth Durant from the Russian propaganda agency TASS, and Bernard Moloney from Reuters

Instead the ‘Western’ media preferred to believe communist agents such as the New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, a Kremlin shill who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932!

Apologists for Stalin and his successor Putin proliferate even today on the political fringe, including parts of the fragmented racial nationalist movement who openly call themselves ‘National Bolsheviks’.

Yet the truth of the Holodomor has begun to be recognised, and the truth about the ‘Holocaust’ cannot be suppressed forever, despite increasingly desperate attempts to silence revisionists.

Today Ukrainian patriots are bravely resisting another Kremlin-directed effort to crush their independence – another attempted genocide, which seeks to re-establish Stalin’s Soviet borders.

True Europeans and those who respect historical truth will today stand with our Ukrainian brothers and remember the Holodomor.

Ethics and Oligarchs in Tel Aviv

Roman Abramovich (above left) with his close ally Vladimir Putin

One of Israel’s leading academics has admitted lobbying in defence of sanctioned oligarch Roman Abramovich, saying: “When someone offers you $50m, you sign their letter.”

Abramovich – former owner of Chelsea Football Club – was hit by UK and later US sanctions soon after his close ally Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine.

The tycoon was already controversial for reported links to organised crime as well as his role as Putin’s international financial fixer, but had been welcomed as a big donor to Israeli institutions as well as to international campaigns against ‘racism’ and ‘anti-semitism’.

Just two days before the invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich and the Israeli ‘holocaust’ memorial Yad Vashem announced a “strategic partnership” in which the oligarch would donate tens of millions of dollars. He had acquired Israeli citizenship in 2018.

Professor Ariel Porat (above left) with Nadhim Zahawi, Secretary of State for Education in Boris Johnson’s ‘British’ government. Porat has defended lobbying Western governments on behalf of $50m donor Abramovich.

Perhaps it was unsurprising therefore that soon after the invasion Yad Vashem’s chairman Danny Dayan was among signatories to a letter from influential Israelis to the US Ambassador in Jerusalem, calling on the American authorities to refrain from sanctioning Abramovich.

These distinguished Jews, including Israel’s Chief Rabbi, wrote:
“We are examples of institutions that have benefited from Roman Abramovich, and have long-standing ties with him. We implore you warmly to consider Roman Abramovich’s position and importance to the community and to Israel. We warn that any action against him will not only be unfair, but will also negatively impact the Jewish world and Israel.”

Roman Abramovich with Rabbi Alexander Boroda, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, at the opening of Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, which Abramovich co-founded

After the appeal failed and Western governments proceeded with sanctions, a few of these institutions belatedly distanced themselves from the disgraced oligarch. Yad Vashem suspended their receipt of his largesse, but has not handed back his earlier gifts.

One of the senior Israelis who co-wrote the letter and remains unabashed is Professor Ariel Porat, president of Tel Aviv University, which had received $50 million from Abramovich.

Last week in a secret meeting with senior academics, Porat – one of Israel’s leading legal scholars – defended the university’s links with Abramovich. He admitted: “Unfortunately there is a legal impediment to taking money from [Abramovich]. After the war is over, I imagine the sanctions will be lifted.”

And he told his colleagues: “When someone offers you $50m, you sign their letter.”

One of Porat’s critics pointed out: “No one is disputing the necessity of donations — but not at all costs and at any condition. It is embarrassing that an academic institution is willing to sell its prestige and social standing for money.”

Embarrassing, but in the case of Tel Aviv University and Roman Abramovich not surprising.

The oligarch who hedges his bets

Three leading Russian oligarchs – Len Blavatnik, Mikhail Fridman, and Viktor Vekselberg – with then BP chairman John Browne (second right).

Today Spanish police seized a £70m ‘superyacht’ belonging to one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarch cronies.

Tango is registered in the British Virgin Islands – one of the favourite havens for shady international tycoons – and belongs to Viktor Vekselberg, son of a Ukrainian Jew and a Russian. Since 1990 Vekselberg has been head of the Renova Group, a Russian conglomerate with interests in aluminium, oil and other sectors. He has been subject to international sanctions due to his close Kremlin ties.

According to several investigators, Vekselberg’s most interesting international role has been as the man who does the dirty work for Sir Len Blavatnik, his business partner, co-founder of the Renova Group and closest friend since their schooldays.

Viktor Vekselberg being decorated by his patron Vladimir Putin

While Vekselberg has been sanctioned, Blavatnik has earned a teflon reputation which might be connected to his remarkable talent for backing opposite political sides and remaining close to power.

Blavatnik has at various times backed pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions in Israel; Tony Blair in the UK; Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the USA. In 2015 a group of international scholars condemned Oxford University for accepting Blavatnik’s money to fund the ‘Blavatnik School of Government’.

Blavatnik however insists that he has distanced himself from Putin, and the likes of Tony Blair and his ‘charitable foundations’ have continued to work closely with the Blavatnik School of Government. Meanwhile Blavatnik has continued to be one of the world’s leading sponsors of ‘Holocaust’ education, including a recent international conference to celebrate “the nearly 1.5 million Jewish men and women who fought in World War II against Adolf Hitler and the Axis powers.” H&D will soon be analysing some of the interesting omissions from this ‘history’!

Perhaps the ambiguities of Blavatnik’s own position will never be fully resolved, but as the Kremlin’s brutality continues in Ukraine, the likes of Tony Blair are feeling increasingly nervous about their ties to Putin’s oligarchs. Whatever their politics, Western politicians (including some so-called ‘nationalists’) have been happy to stick their snouts in the Kremlin trough.

Len Blavatnik with Bill Clinton, one of many political leaders (often of opposing tendencies) whom he has sponsored.

Madrid government surrenders to immigration blackmail

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez meeting King Mohammed VI of Morocco, who has blatantly blackmailed the Madrid government over immigration.

The Spanish government has been humiliated, conceding to Moroccan blackmail over illegal immigration. Simultaneously, by a strange non-coincidence, politically motivated prosecutors in Madrid have leaked news that they are preparing a criminal case for ‘racial incitement’ against H&D’s Spanish comrade Isabel Peralta, over an anti-immigration speech that she gave outside the Moroccan Embassy in May last year.

Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has surrendered control over Madrid’s diplomacy, because he has proved unable or unwilling to exercise control over immigration.

And the consequences could be severe for Spain’s access to natural gas, and the prices paid for energy by long-suffering Spanish consumers.

This all concerns Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, where control has since 1976 been disputed between Morocco and an independence movement called Polisario Front, which is backed by Algeria.

Until this week, the Madrid government backed the Polisario – i.e. backed Western Sahara’s independence from Morocco – partly in order to remain on good terms with Algeria, which supplies Spain with natural gas.

Brahim Ghali, head of the Polisario Front

For a year or more, Morocco has sought to blackmail Spain into changing its position on Western Sahara. Morocco’s main weapon is control over illegal immigration into Spanish territory. They have indicated that they are prepared to turn the immigration tap on or off. And Spain’s socialist government is naturally unable or unwilling to take firm action against the consequent flood.

Essentially this was the background to a demonstration addressed by Isabel Peralta in Madrid in May last year. The demonstration targeted both the Moroccan government’s blackmail, and the Spanish authorities’ weakness.

Now the argument of Isabel and her colleagues in the Spanish nationalist youth movement Bastión Frontal has proved correct, but the response has been to threaten criminal charges against Isabel!

Isabel Peralta addressing an anti-immigration rally in May 2021, which drew attention to the Moroccan government’s behaviour and the Spanish government’s weakness

Having for decades argued that Western Sahara’s future should be settled by a referendum of its inhabitants, the Madrid government has this week carried out a U-turn and adopted a pro-Moroccan position.

Consequently the Moroccan Ambassador to Madrid has been reinstated, but the Algerian Ambassador has been recalled, threatening vital trade deals including the supply of natural gas.

The entire situation is a shambles, rooted in the inability of Spain’s socialist government to stand up for Spanish interests.

And as so often across the West, when the arguments of nationalists are vindicated, the authorities’ response is to persecute us. And as so often, weakness in the face of an invader or a blackmailer merely invites further invasion and further blackmail.

H&D readers will hear more from Isabel Peralta, beginning with our next edition in May.

Who was Stepan Bandera – and how does his history help explain the present crisis? Peter Rushton reports from London and Washington’s secret files

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has prompted much ill-informed comment in nationalist circles. Many nationalists have chosen to believe an online fantasy world in which Vladimir Putin is really an Alt-Right or White Nationalist culture warrior. H&D‘s Peter Rushton has this week turned away from the propaganda and attempted to reconstruct a balanced assessment of Ukrainian nationalism based not on Google searches but on primary source documents. What follows is partly based on British intelligence reports, some only recently declassified and analysed publicly here for the first time. Not propaganda material for external consumption, but internal assessments aiming at accuracy – from the archives of MI5, the Foreign Office, and the CIA. In the latter case the relevant document (a detailed assessment of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera) was written for the CIA by a senior MI6 officer. Despite the CIA archive’s attempt to delete his name, we here identify the MI6 author of that report for the first time, attempt to set this and other reports in context, and consider what lessons today’s European nationalists can draw from Ukrainian nationalist history.

Banners at Zhovkva Castle, Ukraine, greet German liberators in July 1941 with the words: “Heil Hitler! Glory to Bandera! Long Live the Independent Ukrainian State! Long Live Our Leader Stepan Bandera!”

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly sought to justify his invasion of Ukraine by asserting it was necessary to defeat “neo-Nazis” and “Banderites”. This not only emphasises the extent to which Putin’s image of both his nation and himself is bound up with Second World War propaganda, it also tells us something quite specific about this invasion, its motives and objectives.

Most importantly it tells us for certain that the invasion was launched not to defend ethnic Russians in parts of eastern Ukraine, where they were supposedly under threat from ethnic Ukrainians. Nor was it intended merely to conquer areas of Ukraine that are deemed by the Kremlin to be traditionally Russian.

Putin’s choice of “neo-Nazis” and “Banderites” to describe his targets shows that his objective is to restore the old Soviet borders, to conquer and incorporate the entirety of Ukraine, including those western regions variously known as Eastern Galicia or Ruthenia – regions that have never been ethnically, culturally or politically Russian but which became Soviet territory as a result of the 20th century’s wars and revolutions.

Steeped from childhood in Second World War mythology, Putin is referring to the bloody battles in the southern sector of the Eastern Front following ‘Operation Barbarossa’ from 1941-45; to the role of the Galizien Division of the Waffen-SS, created in April 1943 and formed of Ukrainian anti-communist volunteers; and to Stepan Bandera, the most famous Ukrainian anti-communist leader, who continued guerrilla activities against the Soviet occupiers of his homeland until he was assassinated by a KGB hitman in Munich in 1959.

The life and death of Stepan Bandera helps us to understand not only Putin’s strange obsession, but the reasons why H&D readers might – while denouncing Moscow’s aggression without hesitation or qualification – be in two minds about aspects of Ukrainian nationalism.

Galicia has a long and complex history, but the short, simple version for understanding the present crisis is that it straddles the border between modern Poland and modern Ukraine, and while its control has long been disputed, one thing’s for sure: it’s not Russia.

Its largest city (which I visited in 1993) is now called Lviv, in Soviet days was Lvov, but was for much of its history known by the German name Lemberg since it was incorporated in the Habsburg Empire from 1772 to 1918. In the chaos that followed the defeat and dissolution of that Empire, much of Galicia (including Lemberg) was incorporated into Poland, whose government proceeded to ignore its treaty obligations to respect Ukrainian culture and autonomy.

The result was that after 1918 Ukrainian nationalists (many of them originating from Galicia) fought against Bolshevik Russians – with some also fighting against anti-communist Poles. In the former case this inevitably also meant fighting Jews, because Jews played a grossly disproportionate role in the Bolshevik Party – in Ukraine as much as (if not more than) elsewhere in the nascent Soviet Union.

Symon Petliura, assassinated Ukrainian patriot

This can be seen most clearly in the case of Symon Petliura, the first of four Ukrainian patriot leaders to be assassinated by Russians within just over thirty years.

Having ousted the short-lived Cossack monarchist regime of the so-called ‘Hetman’ (Pavlo Skoropadskyi), Petliura fought for and led Ukraine from 1918 to 1921. During these years he was in alliance with anti-communist Poles, since in this period at least they shared anti-Soviet (indeed frankly also anti-Russian) territorial objectives. Jews have frequently asserted that Petliura and his Ukrainian forces carried out pogroms in which several hundred Jews were killed (atrocity inflation had not yet taken hold, so even Petliura’s critics speak of hundreds, not thousands or millions).

After the Bolshevik victory Petliura went into exile and was murdered outside a Paris bookstore in May 1926. His assassin was a Russian-born Jewish anarchist poet, Sholem Schwarzbard. While prosecutors alleged that he was a Soviet agent, Schwarzbard argued that as a Jew he was justified in murdering Petliura, in revenge for Ukrainian ‘atrocities’ against Jews.

Readers will not be surprised to learn that (even in this pre-‘Holocaustian’ era) the Paris court chose to believe this Jewish defence, and Schwarzbard was acquitted. British authorities refused him a visa to enter Palestine and he travelled instead to South Africa, where he died while raising funds for a Yiddish encyclopaedia.

OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets

The militant Galician/Ukrainian nationalists denounced by Putin as ‘Banderites’ can be traced back to Yevhen (or Eugen) Konovalets, a former officer in the Austrian army who (unlike Petliura) fought against both Russian Bolsheviks and Poles. This is an important distinction when in 2022 we consider slogans such as “no brothers’ wars”. Petliura believed in the transnational anti-communist alliance that these words imply – and so did his various sponsors including Britain’s intelligence service MI6 who helped Petliura’s Ukrainians and their Polish allies set up the ‘Promethean League’, in cooperation with anti-communists of numerous Eastern European nationalities.

It is vital to understand that when anti-communist Ukrainians were recruited into the Waffen-SS Galizien Division in 1943, these were the latter-day successors of Petliura and the once (and future) MI6-linked, and Vatican-linked Promethean League. (I shall be analysing long-secret intelligence documents about these anti-communist networks as part of my book later this year on British intelligence and the alleged ‘Holocaust’.) These SS men were not the people Putin calls ‘Banderites’, who as part of their Ukrainian nationalism were fundamentally anti-Polish and anti-Russian (at least to a large extent) as well as anti-communist, and to some degree anti-clerical. At the time when the Galizien Division was formed, Bandera and his allies were interned in German camps for political prisoners, because they were regarded as politically unreliable (i.e. too extreme in their nationalism).

In a far more extreme mirror-image of this ethnic chauvinism, Putin is not only anti-‘Banderite’, he wants to remove Ukraine from the map entirely!

Stepan Bandera was a 20-year-old nationalist student in Lviv when the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed in 1929, with Konovalets as its first leader. OUN is the group from which various future nationalist factions traced their lineage.

According to a 1942 British intelligence summary, Konovalets had been paid by German military intelligence since 1927 (i.e. first in the Weimar era, then in the national-socialist era). Until 1934 the OUN was encouraged by Berlin to attack both Polish and Russian targets, but after a German-Polish agreement was signed in 1934 Konovalets’ “activities on Polish territory were diverted to other parts of Central and Eastern Europe”.

The OUN’s final anti-Polish operation in 1934 was a spectacular one: the assassination of one of Poland’s leading politicians Bronisław Pieracki. The gunman escaped, but several of the OUN team directing the assassination were caught and sentenced to death by the Polish authorities, a sentence that was commuted to imprisonment. These OUN convicts included the young Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, whose on-off friendship and rivalry became important features of Ukrainian nationalist history.

The MI5 report continues: “Serious Nazi interest in the possibilities of an independence movement may be dated from 1935, when a Ukrainian Bureau, acting in an advisory capacity to the German Government and as liaison between Germans and Ukrainians, was established in Berlin. Since then most Ukrainian nationalist organisations in Europe have had some financial support from Rosenberg’s Aussenpolitisches Amt [i.e. the NSDAP’s Office of Foreign Affairs].”

Like his successor Putin, Stalin saw the OUN as a serious threat to the Kremlin’s control of Ukraine and ordered his intelligence service NKVD (forerunner of the KGB in which Putin was trained) to kill its leader. NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov infiltrated the OUN. In May 1938, meeting Konovalets in a Rotterdam restaurant, he handed the OUN leader a box of chocolates with a bomb inside, then made his excuses and left before the bomb exploded.

According to Sudoplatov, Stalin had personally told him (foreshadowing later Moscow plots against Ukrainian nationalists): “Our goal is to behead the movement of Ukrainian fascism on the eve of the war and force these gangsters to annihilate each other in a struggle for power.”

And after Konovalets’ removal, that internecine struggle was exactly what happened. In theory the new leader was Andriy Melnyk, who though himself having served four years in Polish prisons during the 1920s for paramilitary activity, was now less keen on ‘terrorism’.

UPA veterans in Kyiv celebrate their murdered leader Stepan Bandera

Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed either escaped or were freed from their Polish captivity soon after the German invasion in September 1939 – the precise circumstances are still unclear – and they soon became more militant rivals to Melnyk, at first fighting both Germans and Soviets – but then in 1941 becoming allies of Germany.

In the weeks before Hitler launched his attack on Stalin, the Abwehr (German military intelligence) worked with the OUN to set up two pro-German Ukrainian units that would act as part of the German spearhead, winning local support for the liberation of Ukraine from Stalin. These units were named ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’.

A priest in the Greek Catholic or ‘Uniate’ church – Fr. John Hrynioch – was attached to the Nachtigall unit and became a loyal ally of anti-communist Ukrainians throughout the various phases of the war, whether in the OUN or in the Waffen SS.

During these same weeks before Barbarossa, Bandera’s OUN faction held a conference in Krakau, issuing a policy programme for the future war where they explained the anti-Bolshevik context of what would now be called their ‘anti-semitism’.

“The Jews in the USSR constitute the most faithful support of the ruling Bolshevik regime, and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in Ukraine. The Muscovite-Bolshevik government exploits the anti-Jewish sentiments of the Ukrainian masses to divert their attention from the true cause of their misfortune and to channel them in a time of frustration into pogroms on Jews. The OUN combats the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime and simultaneously it renders the masses conscious of the fact that the principal foe is Moscow.”

It was in this context – an anti-Bolshevik rather than religious or racial ‘anti-semitic’ context – that Bandera’s men killed large numbers of Jews during the early stages of Barbarossa.

Richard Yary, OUN intelligence officer and Gestapo liaison

According to MI5 the most important Gestapo contact was Bandera’s ally Richard Yary (even though some of his rivals claimed that Yary was himself of partly Jewish descent, and the rival Melnyk faction of OUN predictably accused him of being a Soviet agent):

“It is believed that during the Polish campaign the dropping of saboteurs by parachute behind the Polish lines was organised for the Germans by Captain Yary, a leading Ukrainian Nationalist. According to a Polish source, a Ukrainian Gestapo Company, German-trained, appeared in the Cracow district in October 1940. By March 1941 a Ukrainian Military HQ in Vienna and a Military Academy in German-occupied Poland had been established, with the intention of raising six divisions for eventual use against the USSR.”

In the broader historical context it is especially interesting to note that none of these files, even when discussing the possible partly Jewish ethnicity of the main Gestapo contact in OUN, mentions anything about what is now called the ‘Holocaust’. It’s also important to note that German intelligence operations all over Eastern Europe and Russia often relied on Jewish or part-Jewish informants and contacts. This is partly because such people proliferated among smugglers and criminals (on a petty or grand scale) who could make themselves useful to intelligence services.

Here we need to take a step back and avoid the temptation to see Bandera and his colleagues as part of a generalised force of ‘nazis’.

They were certainly anti-communist – and this meant in a Ukrainian as in a broader Soviet context that it was logical also to be anti-Jewish. But it didn’t mean that they were going to be puppets of Berlin.

One problem for the Third Reich was that many of its actual or potential allies in Central and Eastern Europe hated each other, even though they might all share antipathy to communism. For example, German intelligence long hoped to make use of anti-communist Russians as well as non-Russian nationalities such as Ukrainians who had been subjected to Moscow. This involved inherent contradictions, because many anti-communist Russians were reactionary Czarists who wanted to re-establish or even extend their pre-1917 Empire.

We now know that German intelligence analysts on the Eastern front were systematically misled by their Soviet rivals into believing in non-existent Russian anti-communist groups. Amazingly, German intelligence even trusted as their main intelligence network on Russian soil the so-called ‘Klatt Bureau’ of supposedly anti-communist Russians, run by the Viennese half-Jew Richard Kauder, who is now known to have been a Soviet agent all along.

The story of the Klatt or ‘Max’ network is an aspect of the Second World War that is yet to be fully explored, partly because today’s historians prefer to see Jews as victims of events in the 1940s rather than as manipulators of events.

The half-Jewish Viennese spy Richard Kauder (alias Klatt) whose fake network fooled the Third Reich’s intelligence services; seen here with his Hungarian mistress Ibolya Kálmán.

There is some evidence that German intelligence was misled into over-rating the potential of ‘White Russian’ / Czarist Russians, and therefore under-utilised more genuine anti-communist Ukrainians in Bandera’s OUN. For whatever reasons, German forces soon decided that their initial ally Bandera was a troublemaker, and in September 1941 he and his right-hand man Yaroslav Stetsko were arrested and interned by the Gestapo. Yet even during their internment they retained links with some German intelligence and special forces operatives. For example Otto Skorzeny met with them in April 1944 to discuss potential anti-Soviet operations. And in early 1945 the SS Galizien Division’s Gen. Pavlo Shandruk negotiated a last minute deal between the various Ukrainian factions, bringing Bandera and Stetsko on board in a ‘Ukrainian National Committee’ and reforming part of the Galizien Division as a ‘Ukrainian National Army’.

By the time of Germany’s collapse in May 1945, there was therefore an uncertain alliance between two different groups of Ukrainian nationalists. Shandruk’s troops managed to trek to the Italian-Austrian border where they could surrender to British rather than Soviet forces.

Centrally important here – and a continuing reason for festering resentment in the mind of ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin – is that the Waffen-SS Galizien Division was accepted by the British as being immune from the requirement to hand back prisoners who were of Soviet nationality. (Unlike for example the Cossacks and other Russians who had fought with Germany, and who even after surrendering to the British were handed over to Stalin’s torturers and executioners.)

The vital difference was that the British accepted these Ukrainian anti-communists were ‘Galicians’, and therefore arguably of Polish rather than Soviet nationality. (There was of course at that period no official ‘Ukrainian’ nationality.)

Therefore as Jewish historians John Loftus and Mark Aarons later complained – and the like of Putin still complain – the SS Galizien Division was “the only Axis unit to survive the war intact, under arms and with their own officers”. An additional factor was that one of the British officers in immediate charge of assessing these 8,000 Ukrainians – Maj. Denis Hills – was himself a man of staunchly anti-communist (though maverick) opinions who had fascist sympathies in his Oxford student days and attended the 1935 Nuremberg rally.

We also now know from previously secret sources that the British and Americans – as well as the Germans – eventually found Bandera a difficult person to deal with. Though he has become a posthumous hero of the anti-communist cause, it seems that he could be arrogant and blinkered, vitiating his undoubted courage.

Senior MI6 officer Col. Harold Gibson who handled British intelligence liaison with the OUN for more than 25 years

A Top Secret MI6 assessment of Bandera can be read in CIA files, even though it is still unavailable in British archives. This was written in 1954 but looks back over more than a quarter-century of British intelligence involvement with Ukrainian nationalists. Though the CIA archive attempts to disguise the report’s authorship, I can reveal that it was written by Col. Harold Gibson, a senior MI6 officer, who writes that he had been in touch with the OUN leadership from the moment the group was founded, clearly aiming to cooperate with them in anti-Soviet covert operations:

“I was in touch with followers of Petliura and Konovalets in Romania in the late 1920s and in Czechoslovakia from 1933 to 1939 and was quite well impressed with their possibilities. It was not however until after the end of World War II that it was decided to use them operationally.”

Large numbers of Bandera’s guerrilla fighters continued to fight against the Red Army occupiers from 1945-48, and smaller numbers for another eight years under MI6 sponsorship. While the Americans chose to form links with the Melnyk faction, the British chose to work with Bandera and Stetsko.

Again these files are notable by the absence of any reference to what we would now call the ‘Holocaust’, but Gibson leaves no doubt that he was well aware of Bandera’s capacity for extreme violence. (This article is the first to quote or analyse Gibson’s assessment in detail, and the first to identify Gibson as Bandera’s senior MI6 contact.)

“In the summer of 1951, Stefan Bandera, the real leader of the movement, emerged from his clandestine concealment to have his first meeting with me in London. The following is an account of my impressions then of Bandera – impressions which in the main are still valid today:
‘Allowing for the fact that he was out to show himself in the best light, much of what he said sounded both convincing and sincere. We have to accept him for what he is; a professional underground worker with a terrorist background and ruthless notions about the rules of the game, acquired by hard experience, along with a thorough knowledge of the Ukrainian people which I would judge to be more instinctive than deeply psychological. A bandit type if you like, with a burning patriotism which provides an ethical background and a justification for his banditry. No better and no worse than others of his kind I have had dealings with in the past. He appears to be genuinely grateful for the help given to him, but at the same time is certainly trying to get all he can out of it.'”

Gibson continued:

“Since that first meeting I have had occasion to see Bandera repeatedly. The contacts he and his people were to develop with us did have some effect on his character and outlook making him slightly less ruthless and uncompromising than he had been at first. But he nevertheless remains essentially the dictatorial type and as such a difficult customer both to his well-wishers and particularly to his political opponents.”

These problems led to serious difficulties during the early 1950s. Undoubtedly these problems were exacerbated by the mischief of Soviet agents. From 1949-51 the senior liaison officer between MI6 and the CIA was Kim Philby, a long-term Soviet ‘mole’ who also (as I shall discuss in my forthcoming book) had longstanding ties to Zionist intelligence organisations. This meant not only that the various factional differences could be continually stirred up rather than smoothed over, but also that many teams of Ukrainian anti-communists were sent straight to their deaths, because Philby had informed his KGB masters of their precise plans.

West Germany’s new intelligence service BND – run by the former Third Reich military intelligence chief on the Eastern front, Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had been recruited by the Americans – was likewise thoroughly penetrated by the KGB with fatal results for its brave Ukrainian recruits. And recent analysis by Polish scholars of their communist-era archives suggests that a Polish-based section of OUN was entirely under the control of that country’s communist intelligence service from 1948 until the mid-1950s.

But partly there was also a genuine strategic difference. MI6 had smuggled parties of Ukrainians into their homeland and Bandera wanted to use them to carry out aggressive anti-Soviet operations, such as ‘terrorist’ assassinations of Soviet officials. Some in MI6 agreed, while others (and especially their CIA friends) preferred to keep these assets safe behind the Iron Curtain, both to carry out intelligence missions and to be in place as a ‘stay behind’ army in case of World War III (similar to the so-called ‘Operation Gladio’ within western European countries deemed vulnerable to Soviet attack). The Ukrainian agents would then be able to carry out sabotage missions behind enemy lines, as part of undermining the Soviet war effort, not as a quixotic act of anti-communist gallantry.

This was the Ukrainian version of a much broader Cold War argument. Should anti-communist forces attempt to “roll back” the Red tide, to liberate “captive nations” from the Moscow yoke? Or should they bide their time and merely act as loyal eyes and ears for their Western allies?

In his long and detailed account of the MI6-OUN relationship, Gibson writes for example:

“At a meeting with Bandera in Germany in March 1953 I once again stressed the need for political peace in order to achieve the main purpose of our collaboration, namely the collection of worth while intelligence.”

Bandera’s sometime friend turned rival Mykola Lebed, who survived the many violent episodes of Ukrainian nationalism to die in the USA aged 89 in July 1998

By 1953 Bandera’s former ally Mykola Lebed (with whom he had plotted the Pieracki assassination in 1934 and served five years in Polish jails) had become a rival. Where Bandera was MI6’s man, Lebed was the CIA’s man. In the 21st century we are instructed to see all this through a ‘Holocaust’ prism and the main argument among modern historians is over whether Lebed was ‘protected’ by the CIA when he should have been prosecuted for ‘war crimes’.

Yet in Gibson’s report none of this is considered worth mentioning. Either MI6 didn’t believe there had been a ‘Holocaust’ of Ukrainian Jewry, or they didn’t consider it disproportionate or worth mentioning among the other horrors of war.

An earlier Top Secret document about Bandera – unlike the Gibson report which is only available via the CIA archives – is now available in the UK National Archives, where it had been marked as closed until 2028 but has now been released. This details a conversation at the Foreign Office in November 1951 between Stepan Bandera and three senior British diplomats and intelligence officers. The minutes of this conversation (which include several sections that remain blanked out in the version available at the Archives) include the following points made by Bandera:

“He thought that the Soviet Union would attempt to secure world domination by war if they could not achieve their aims otherwise. He admitted that he saw in war the only hope of the liberation of the Ukraine. He did not believe that independence could be achieved in other circumstances.

“…He said that the aim of his movement was the liberation of the Ukraine not merely from Soviet but also Russian influence. He said that they would never collaborate in any scheme or plan which entailed any form of connection with any Russian state regardless of its political outlook. Similarly, he was not prepared to have any contact with any émigré Russian body or group and disapproved of American attempts to bring Greater Russian and Ethnic Minority Groups in exile together, which he described as destined to failure.

“…In his opinion, an independent Ukraine was a viable state. His attitude to the problem of the viability of an independent Ukraine was unrealistic and it seemed clear that he had not seriously grappled with it. He admitted that any Great Russian state was bound to look on it with covetous eyes but suggested that it would be possible to preserve its security by a system of guarantee with other limitrophe states [i.e. potentially independent border states on the edges of Russia, such as the Baltic States].”

A 19-year-old Stepan Bandera (standing, third from right) with other young Ukrainian nationalists in Lviv, 1928

Two years later London’s relationship with Bandera had evidently soured. Writing in 1954, Col. Gibson of MI6 strongly criticises Bandera when reporting intense discussion during 1953 and 1954 when repeated attempts were made to persuade Bandera to work with a more collegiate leadership: a “Committee of Three” alongside Zinovii Matla and Lev Rebet. (The latter is also thought by some to have been of half-Jewish origin, but this had nothing to do with his internment by the Gestapo after 1941, which was – like Bandera – because at the time the Gestapo viewed the OUN as troublemakers.)

“A final attempt to bring Bandera to reason was made by me and meetings took place in London on 24th/25th February [1954]. At these meetings Bandera attempted to justify himself by producing instances of what he regarded as an abuse of power by Rebet and Matla of the Committee of Three. He accused them of manoeuvring to subordinate ZCh/OUN and implied that this was being done on instructions and indeed under pressure from the Americans.

“…Having wasted so much time over dealing with Bandera I decided to give him one last chance. Knowing that Matla would be transiting the United Kingdom on his return to the USA I suggested to Bandera that the three of us should meet together in a last effort to reach a settlement, or at least a compromise. Bandera refused this suggestion with arrogant finality. The break between us was complete.”

Paradoxically it was after Stalin’s death and during the apparent ‘liberalisation’ of the Soviet Union under Khrushchev that the KGB decided to kill the two most important Ukrainian nationalist leaders. Had the KGB for some reason lost confidence in their ability to contain and manipulate the Ukrainian anti-communist resistance? Perhaps we will never know for sure, but what we do know is that the KGB launched one of its most famous assassination plots to remove both Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera.

Professional assassin Bogdan Stashinsky was sent to Munich and equipped with the latest KGB technology, a pistol that fired a spray of hydrogen cyanide directly into the face of the victim, who would ideally be presumed to have died a natural death. In the case of Rebet, whom Stashinsky killed in October 1957, this is exactly what happened; but after he killed Bandera with a modified version of the same gas-gun in October 1959, a post mortem revealed that the former OUN leader had died from cyanide poisoning.

It was not until August 1961 – when Stashinsky defected to the West and told the whole story to the CIA – that anyone knew Rebet had also been murdered. By that time Harold Gibson, the MI6 spymaster who had liaised with Ukrainian nationalists for a quarter of a century, had also met a violent end – shot dead, supposedly by his own hand, in August 1960 in Rome.

OUN activities continued for the rest of the Cold War – but now more as propaganda than as paramilitary activity, via the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) and an associated World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Periodically, these ABN and WACL activists were accused of the terrible crime of ‘anti-semitism’ and there were frequent purges from WACL of ABN allies such as Lady Birdwood (see my article in H&D 106) and Dr Roger Pearson (in whose Washington office H&D‘s editor Mark Cotterill worked for several years).

When Soviet communism collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukrainian nationalists including the OUN’s old leaders became heroes of the new independent Ukraine. And evidently to this day their bold defiance of Kremlin domination still rankles with one old KGB man, Vladimir Putin.

What lessons should H&D readers draw from the complex saga of militant Ukrainian anti-communism?

OUN leader Lev Rebet and the KGB cyanide gun used to kill him in Munich in 1957

The OUN were undoubtedly brave, and the fact that their operations were almost all undermined by their enemies in Moscow does not detract from their courage.

Stepan Bandera was also a brave anti-communist who paid the ultimate price, but his uncompromising personality and chauvinist ideology caused grave problems for those who wished to work with him – whether in Adolf Hitler’s intelligence services or in MI6 and the CIA.

The bitter ethnic and personal rivalries that bedevilled the anti-communist cause in Central and Eastern Europe could probably only have been resolved by some overall discipline, either exerted by the New European Order envisaged by Adolf Hitler, or by a network united by Catholic religion. The problem with the latter is that this would inevitably be hostile to the other great Eastern European religious tradition – Orthodoxy – whereas National Socialism should (had history worked out differently) have had a chance of forging a modus vivendi between those of differing religions and those of no religion.

And what of Vladimir Putin, cast by so many blinkered Western nationalists as a potential ally in the ‘culture war’ against liberalism.

We should not be surprised that (as explained above) Putin’s rhetoric about “nazis” and “Banderites” betrays a world view thoroughly soaked in Second World War propagandist obsessions, and reveals that his objective is the destruction of Ukraine.

After joining the KGB in 1975, Putin spent a decade based mainly in Leningrad, before his first (and only) foreign posting to Dresden, from 1985 until the end of communist East Germany in late 1989 and early 1990.

During this period he worked for the senior KGB officer liaising with the East German Stasi – Lazar Matveev, one of many Jews to hold senior rank in the KGB. Putin was Matveev’s protégé and remains close to his old boss, who will be 95 next month.

Vladimir Putin greets his old KGB boss Lazar Matveev

Just as he has continued to do via the KGB’s successor agencies in the era of Facebook etc., Putin during his Dresden years worked on Matveev’s instructions to infiltrate and manipulate ‘extremist’ political groups in the West – both the far-left ‘Red Army Faction’ terrorists and some of Germany’s most militant ‘neo-nazis’.

In the latter case Putin’s main agent was Rainer Sonntag, a petty criminal who became close to Michael Kühnen, homosexual leader of one of Germany’s many neo-nazi factions. Kühnen died of AIDS in April 1991, and Sonntag was shot dead in Dresden a few weeks later. A neat and perhaps not coincidental way to prevent discussion of Putin’s operation in post-communist German courts.

By this time Putin was almost 40 and beginning his post-KGB ascent of the new and intensely corrupt Russian bureaucracy. A few weeks after Sonntag’s murder, Putin took the first of several influential jobs in the office of the Mayor of Leningrad (later St Petersburg), a man with close ties to the elite of Russian organised crime.

Putin’s subsequent close ties to Russian oligarchs (many of them Jews, including some of the world’s leading promoters of ‘Holocaust’ education such as Roman Abramovich and Moshe Kantor) are too well-known to need further discussion here.

For the purposes of this article, the important point is that these many Jewish connections will have reinforced Putin’s obsession with the Second World War and his obsession with restoring Soviet-era Russian prestige by wiping Ukraine off the map and making Russia’s south-western borders similar to those of the Soviet Union.

Racial nationalists are a long way from power, though interest in our ideas and our ideological heritage has spread considerably in recent years. If we are to continue to build on that heritage we must avoid the wishful thinking that has led so many on the Alt-Right to see Putin as some sort of hero, simply because he has outraged sections of liberal opinion.

If we are to maintain and extend the relevance of our ideas, we must build on a foundation of truthful and honest analysis, not wishful thinking. That means dissociating ourselves firmly from Putin’s brutal aggression and territorial aggrandisement. It also means recognising that – even aside from the particular transient problems presented by today’s Ukrainian government, whose leaders are quite obviously hostile to our entire world-view – the complex and tragic history of Ukrainian nationalism itself reveals many pitfalls, some related to personal vanities, others to chauvinist ideologies.

We cannot easily dismiss this chauvinism as petty. For countless numbers of Central and Eastern Europeans, speaking the wrong language (or even the wrong dialect) or having the wrong religion would have meant for generations that they and their children would be excluded from decent jobs, and possibly face worse forms of persecution.

“No brothers’ wars” is an easy slogan, but a difficult reality. As with so many other areas of our racial nationalist struggle for the true Europe, we cannot expect an easy victory. Perhaps there will be no victory in our lifetimes. But I’m confident that we are now beginning to attract the calibre of activist who can make very significant progress in laying the foundations for that victory.

Those foundations cannot include a morally and politically toxic association with Vladimir Putin and his apologists.

Ghislaine Maxwell – daughter of notorious Mossad agent Robert Maxwell – guilty of trafficking teenagers

Shimon Peres (above right) former and future Prime Minister of Israel, pays his respects to Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine at her father’s funeral on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, in November 1991. Maxwell was a long-term operative of Israeli intelligence.

Within the last hour Ghislaine Maxwell – daughter of the notorious fraudster, arms dealer and Mossad agent Robert Maxwell – has been convicted by a New York jury on five criminal charges including “sex trafficking of a minor”, which carries a maximum prison sentence of up to forty years.

This verdict will lead to many pages and hours of print and broadcast media analysis.

Whether the role of Israeli intelligence in the Maxwell family saga will be properly examined is, however, doubtful!

So for the benefit of H&D readers we publish here the review by our assistant editor Peter Rushton of the most recent book about Robert Maxwell.

As you might expect, this review contains meticulously researched facts that you won’t get from the mainstream media!

Abu Dhabi Sheikh buys 50% of “racist” Israeli football club

Sheikh Hamad (above right) with Beitar Jerusalem owner Moshe Hogeg in Dubai last week after signing the deal for Abu Dhabi investment in the “racist” Israeli club

A member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, has bought 50% of the Israeli club Beitar Jerusalem, pledging an investment of more than 300 million shekels (£68 million) over the next decade.

The Abu Dhabi royals already own Manchester City of course, as well as the likes of New York City FC, Melbourne City, and Mumbai City.

And their Israeli move is consistent with the decision earlier this year by the United Arab Emirates (which includes Abu Dhabi) to develop diplomatic and economic ties with Israel.

What will surprise a few people is that it should be Beitar of all clubs. Not only does it have a “racist” (i.e. anti-Arab) reputation, but even the club’s name is a clue as to its political roots.

Betar was the Zionist youth movement founded by Zeev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and it went on to be closely aligned with the Jabotinsky wing of Zionism and associated terrorist groups such as the Irgun. During the mid-1940s MI5 had an informant inside Betar monitoring the group’s terrorist links, and Betar organised terrorist training camps in New York’s Catskill mountains.

Betar activists in Berlin, 1936, during a period when the National Socialist Government actively encouraged militant Zionist groups.

Some other Israeli football clubs have names linked to the rival, more ‘moderate’ wing of Zionism led by Jabotinsky’s enemy David Ben Gurion and rooted in the labour movement – e.g. Hapoel Tel Aviv and several other clubs with Hapoel (i.e. ‘Worker’) in their names.

But then I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. These Arab sheikhs are interested only in power and money. Whereas the Labour/Hapoel types used to be the Israeli mainstream, and the ‘right-wing’ used to be marginalised – it’s now the ‘right-wing’ under Netanyahu and his Betar/Beitar allies who have the power.

Trouble is, that might not carry on for much longer, especially now that Netanyahu’s pal Trump is out of power. The Israelis might ditch Netanyahu and go back to some form of liberal/leftist government in the Ben Gurion tradition – in which case it would be Hapoel Tel Aviv, or perhaps Maccabi Tel Aviv or Maccabi Haifa, who would be the diplomatically correct team for kosher Arab royalty to link with!

Rolf Hochhuth – ally of David Irving and target of secret British propagandists – dies aged 89

Rolf Hochhuth (above right) who has died aged 89, seen here in London in 1966 with the British historian David Irving.

Provocative German playwright Rolf Hochhuth died on May 13th at his home in Berlin, aged 89.

His death came just as the latest edition of Heritage and Destiny was going to press, featuring a two-part exposé of the conspiracy by secret British agencies at the end of the 1960s to smear Mr Hochhuth and the British historian David Irving.

This full extraordinary story is based on very recently released documents from the Information Research Department, a secret Cold War propaganda unit that was dissolved in 1977 and whose records remained highly classified until earlier this year. The IRD files were read by H&D‘s assistant editor days before the UK’s National Archives closed down due to Covid-19.

Hochhuth had made himself a target of IRD and associated agencies including MI5 and MI6 because of a play in which he alleged official British complicity in the death of Poland’s wartime leader Gen. Sikorski, in what was officially declared an accidental plane crash off Gibraltar in July 1943.

David Irving carried out extensive research to assist Hochhuth in writing this play Soldaten (‘Soldiers’). It was commissioned by London’s National Theatre but banned by the theatre’s board (and later by the Lord Chamberlain) in 1967 at the instigation of prominent establishment figures.

Soldiers also explored the morality of RAF area bombing strategy and the culpability of Winston Churchill and his scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell).

Hochhuth in 2005

Rolf Hochhuth’s death has been widely reported in the German press, though so far only by the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

Despite his friendship with Irving, which dated back to 1965, Hochhuth was very much a man of the left. His best-known play The Representative (Der Stellvertreter) dealt with the Vatican’s alleged knowledge of the presumed wartime murder of six million Jews in the ‘Holocaust’. It is presumably for this service to ‘Holocaust history’ that the German government paid tribute to the “iconoclastic” playwright, saying he had “never ducked a confrontation” while “loving provocations and remaining true to himself”.

Similarly the Central Council of German Jews called Hochhuth a “courageous taboo-breaker” who had “touched off an overdue debate in Germany” about the Vatican’s role. Notably the AFP press agency report on Hochhuth’s death avoids all mention of the Sikorski saga.

Poland’s wartime leader Gen. Sikorski, seen here (second left) at a tank demonstration in Surrey, February 1941 with (centre) Winston Churchill, (second right) Gen. Charles de Gaulle, (far left) Royal Armoured Corps commander Lt. Gen. Giffard Le Quesne Martel, and (far right) Gen. Andrew Thorne (GOC Scottish Command).

These official German and Jewish spokesmen might change their tune once they get to see H&D‘s new two-part series about Hochhuth and Irving. Will official spokesmen – Jewish or Gentile – welcome re-examination of Sikorski’s death; the various associated issues of murderous rivalries and official lies concerning Poland’s exile government; its military, intelligence and propaganda forces; and the Faustian pact with Stalin?

And who was the Hungarian Jewish journalist who began his propaganda career inventing stories about Adolf Hitler as early as 1932, then worked for IRD in their campaign against Hochhuth and Irving in the late ’60s and early ’70s?

The first episode of this stranger-than-fiction tale, based on top secret documents many of which have never been reported before, is in the May edition of Heritage and Destiny, available now.

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