Moscow reinstates tribute to the original Bolshevik secret police chief
Vladimir Putin’s Russia is steeped in the values of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Earlier this year Putin visited Volgograd, which in honour of his visit temporarily restored its old name of Stalingrad and sent a new “Stalingrad Brigade” to fight in Ukraine – a war that Putin boasted would restore the old Soviet border and wipe out the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian culture.
That war hasn’t gone according to the Kremlin’s script, but Putin and his henchmen continue to turn back the clock with their veneration of the Soviet era and all its brutalities.
Last week Putin’s foreign intelligence service SVR (the direct heir of the KGB) reinstated a giant bronze statue of the founder of Bolshevik Russia’s secret police and intelligence service, Feliks Dzerzhinsky.
A Polish aristocrat, Dzerzhinsky became a Marxist activist in his schooldays. In 1917, within weeks of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin put him in charge of the Cheka, a new secret police force, where he led a campaign of ruthless terror including mass executions.
Like Putin, Dzerzhinsky was a gentile who surrounded himself with Jews in key positions of the terror apparatus.
His Cheka changed its name several times, eventually evolving into the KGB. Putin idolised the KGB of the Stalin era, and was proud to serve in the organisation during the last days of the Soviet Union.
A few years ago he visited the home of his old KGB boss, Lazar Matveev, for whom Putin worked in Dresden from 1985 until the collapse of communist ‘East Germany’ at the end of 1989 and start of 1990.
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.
It will be interesting to see the extent to which Putin continues to wrap himself in the Red flag of Stalinist ‘anti-fascism’ and seeks to further the bloody legacy of Feliks Dzerzhinsky and Ilya Ehrenburg. The big difference is that (for many decades) the likes of Dzerzhinsky and Ehrenburg appeared to be on the winning side. With Putin’s hubris having led to stalemate and a slow slide into defeat, we shall see the end of the post-1945 settlement – and for the first time in almost 80 years, the potential rebirth of the true Europe.
Death of an embarrassment
We are unlikely ever to find out for certain who was responsible for the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin on 23rd August after their plane crashed in unexplained circumstances.
Many observers will quite reasonably point to the long history of Kremlin dictators assassinating their rivals. The KGB and its predecessors and successors have frequently tracked down ‘traitors’ even in foreign countries, let alone those such as Prigozhin and Utkin who had the temerity to continue to challenge the Kremlin’s authority within Russia.
Yet even today we don’t know for sure whether (for example) the KGB murdered Walter Krivitsky in the Bellevue Hotel, Washington, in February 1941, or whether he killed himself in the despair and isolation of exile.
Even in death, Prigozhin and Utkin continue to be an embarrassment to the European cultural and political traditions whose symbolism they and their Wagner Group abused.
It seems unlikely that Prigozhin had the slightest interest in or knowledge of Wagner, beyond a vague idea that he was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer, and that the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from Die Walküre was used to accompany scenes of American helicopter gunships slaughtering Vietnamese civilians in the Hollywood film Apocalypse Now.
Neither did he or Utkin demonstrate any appreciation of national socialist ideas, nor of Adolf Hitler’s true political legacy.
What Prigozhin, Utkin and their fellow ‘Wagner Group’ thugs liked was the Hollywood image of ‘nazi brutality’. They revelled in slaughter and profited from selling their murderous services to sundry African dictators. In so doing, they acted as arm’s length instruments of their Kremlin sponsor Vladimir Putin, who of course naturally took his cut from their numerous criminal enterprises.
This cosy partnership fell apart for only one reason. The Wagner Group was in the forefront of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, given special license to scour Russia’s prisons for rapists and murderers who could be unleashed on Ukrainian civilians. As is so often the case with mercenary forces, their reward was to come largely from looting their victims, in what was expected to be a swift conquest.
Ukrainian resistance prevented that scenario, and left Prigozhin’s forces under fire and under paid.
The consequence was that Prigozhin and Utkin turned on their Kremlin master, and even after the swift evaporation of their attempted ‘coup’, Putin was left looking enfeebled. If he believed that killing Prigozhin and Utkin would be a form of political Viagra, Putin is sure to be disappointed.
For European nationalists, the embarrassment of the Wagner Group’s ‘nazi’ iconography continues. Not only are we faced by endless news bulletins describing the dead mercenaries as ‘neo-nazis’, but we also have the living embarrassment of some of their associates, such as another supposed ‘neo-nazi’ gang allied to the Kremlin, Rusich and its co-leader Yan Petrovsky.
Last month Petrovsky, who sadly (unlike Prigozhin) does have real connections to the fringe of European nationalism, was arrested while passing through Helsinki airport. He co-founded Rusich with a sadist and football hooligan from St Petersburg, Alexey Milchakov, and they have polluted various corners of the internet with a combination of crude, fake ‘neo-nazism’ and advocacy of anti-European genocide in Ukraine.
But like the Wagner Group, Petrovsky and Milchakov turned against Putin. Rusich is now complaining loudly that the Kremlin has done nothing to help Petrovsky after his arrest.
These gangsters (large and small) are fighting each other as their plan to loot Ukraine falls apart.
For Western European nationalists the broader lesson is clear. We must firmly dissociate ourselves from sadistic thugs and mindless scum who discredit our cause, not only in Russia but throughout the White world.
Putinist oligarch arrested in London
Mikhail Fridman – one of London’s leading Russian oligarchs – was arrested at one of his two London homes on Thursday by officers from the National Crime Agency’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell. British press reports have avoided naming Fridman.
According to an NCA statement, Fridman – a close ally of Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin – was arrested “on suspicion of offences including money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the Home Office and conspiracy to commit perjury”. A 35-year-old man was arrested in the vicinity after being observed leaving Fridman’s home with a bag containing a large amount of cash.
Later on Thursday, the former boyfriend of Fridman’s current partner was arrested at his home in Pimlico, “for offences including money laundering and conspiracy to defraud”.
The NCA’s Director-General Graeme Biggar said: “The NCA’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell, only established this year, is having significant success investigating potential criminal activity by oligarchs, the professional service providers that support and enable them and those linked to the Russian regime.
“We will continue to use all the powers and tactics available to us to disrupt this threat.”
Mikhail Fridman was born in Lviv but now holds joint Russian and Israeli citizenship. He began to build his Alfa business empire in his early 20s, in partnership with two fellow Jews – German Khan and Petr Aven – and is best known for his co-ownership of the controversial Alfa Bank and associated companies.
Since 2017 Fridman and his partners have been involved in several legal actions against the former MI6 officer Chris Steele, whose dossier alleged that they had corrupt dealings with Putin and Donald Trump.
Fridman co-founded the Russian Jewish Congress and has been a major donor to Zionist causes including the European Jewish Fund and ‘Holocaust’ education projects. His Genesis Philanthropy Group sponsors an annual prize for “Jewish contributions to humanity”.
Fridman’s two London homes are 25 Cavendish Close, St John’s Wood (close to Lord’s cricket ground), and Athlone House, a mansion in Highgate, North London, that was used as an RAF Intelligence base during the Second World War. For many years pre-war it was owned by Sir Robert Waley Cohen, one of the leaders of the Anglo-Jewish community.
In 2018 Fridman addressed a Chabad “Living Torah” event in London’s exclusive Belgravia district, where he described the Torah as the “backbone” of key concepts pioneered by Judaism, including “the precedence of good over evil and the power to choose between them using free will’. No doubt following his arrest he will be given plenty of time to explain these concepts to the Combatting Kleptocracy Cell of London’s National Crime Agency.
Ethics and Oligarchs in Tel Aviv
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
Tony Blair’s favourite oligarch hit by sanctions: ex-PM and ‘Holocaust’ lobby under scrutiny
As far back as 27th February H&D raised questions about former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his favourite oligarch Moshe Kantor, a close friend of both the ex-Labour leader and the Kremlin godfather Vladimir Putin.
We pointed out that since 2015 Blair has been chairman of Kantor’s ‘European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation’, which campaigns for ‘tougher laws against extremism’.
Naturally the extremism Blair and Kantor wish to criminalise involves such things as publishing a magazine or running a bookshop. For this type of extremism the likes of Blair and Kantor endorse the approach of Spanish prosecutors, who wish to jail Pedro Varela for twelve years, or German prosecutors who wish again to jail the 93-year-old Ursula Haverbeck, or German border guards who defy their own laws and their country’s obligations under the European constitution to deport the 19-year-old student Isabel Peralta.
Invading a neighbouring country is, by contrast, not ‘extreme’: not if the invader is Moshe Kantor’s close friend Vladimir Putin.
Kantor’s many leading positions in international Jewry and Zionism include President of the European Jewish Council; Vice President of the UK’s Jewish Leadership Council (a registered charity); Chairman of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress; and President of the World Holocaust Forum Foundation.
In many of these roles he has worked closely with Tony Blair, who was one of the most pro-Israel Prime Ministers in UK history.
In 2015 Kantor organised a conference in the Czech Republic where he called on European governments including the UK to adopted standardised laws criminalising ‘Holocaust denial’. Defying the views of scholars and legal experts who wish to repeal these ‘historical memory laws’ that jail people for their opinions, Kantor wanted to make the laws stricter and the punishments harsher.
Tony Blair joined Kantor in promoting these arguments and demands for legal crackdowns on opinion-crime, via a major article in The Times newspaper.
The main vehicle for demanding these new debate-denial laws was the ironically named European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, with Kantor as President and paymaster, and Tony Blair as chairman.
Now Kantor himself is facing legal sanctions – not for opinions, but for his documented ties to the Kremlin’s war machine and lie machine.
It is now beyond dispute that for the past twenty years or more, Vladimir Putin has used Holocaust propaganda as an instrument of Russian diplomacy and as a justification for Russian military aggression.
Now is the time to ask the forbidden questions. Whatever European courts might say, it’s time to demand historical truth.
Back in 2007 – in a letter prominently published in a national newspaper – H&D‘s Peter Rushton discussed the way that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had used Holocaust propaganda to pressure US governments into allowing Israel to get away with nuclear proliferation. His letter ended: “Should a self-interested version of 1940s history be allowed to dictate the nuclear power politics of the 21st century, with potentially disastrous consequences?”
In 2022 the same question becomes more urgent, and we can no longer allow the risk of prosecution in many European countries to silence that question.
Therefore this week H&D will launch a new website section – Real History and the True Europe – in which over the coming months we shall ask the important questions about Europe’s history and culture, including the ‘Holocaust’.
On this website, in our magazine, and in a book to be published later this year – The Dogs That Didn’t Bark: British Intelligence, International Jewry and the Holocaust (the first of a series examining aspects of Britain’s secret history with the aid of new archival discoveries) – we will examine whether, just as Moshe Kantor and Vladimir Putin have exploited ‘Holocaust’ stories for propagandist purposes, other official and unofficial propaganda agencies were behind parts of the original ‘Holocaust’ narrative in the 1940s.
We shall re-examine the work of revisionist scholars including the late Professor Robert Faurisson, including work newly available in English translation.
We shall have interviews and court reports from across Europe, as politically biased judges seek to jail nonagenarians for ‘criminal’ opinions.
And we shall reveal other political abuses of the judicial system, where a new generation of European political activist is threatened with prosecution to distract from government treachery and failure to enforce immigration laws.
This online project and publishing venture will look at many other topics besides the ‘Holocaust’, but we shall not be afraid to challenge the establishment consensus. Europe is again at war. Historical and political truth is too important for us to tolerate its restriction by the courts.
The oligarch who hedges his bets
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.
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.
Putin’s corrupt oligarch profits while his soldiers starve
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might have fared better if his circle of oligarchic cronies had been just a little less corrupt.
Reports tonight that Russia is asking China to supply basic food rations for its invading army indicate that the existing food supplies are woefully inadequate. Troops on deployment are meant to be supplied with “meals, ready to eat”, known in military jargon as MRE. Russia is already asking China to supply these, in a desperate effort to plug gaps in its own military planning.
On further investigation it seems that more than 90% of the contracts for supplying food to Russia’s armed forces had gone to one of Putin’s leading oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Like many of his ilk, the half-Jewish Prigozhin has an interesting background that might not seem the ideal qualification for a position of trust.
He began a career of crime as an 18-year-old in Soviet-era Leningrad, convicted several times for offences of robbery, fraud and gangsterism, and eventually spending nine years in jail before emerging into post-Soviet Russia, which was and is ideal territory for professional criminals.
For almost twenty years Prigozhin has been a close friend and ally of Vladimir Putin, and therefore can do no wrong. But that doesn’t help the soldiers at the sharp end of Putin’s invasion, who are relying on food that Prigozhin was contracted and paid to supply, but which doesn’t exist.
Desperately hungry soldiers have been reduced to looting as they make their slow progress. Some of the MREs carried to the frontline proved to be more than seven years past their use-by date!
Prigozhin is protected partly because he now owns the Wagner Group, a private Russian paramilitary organisation that has profited from some of Putin’s foreign policy adventures, including security operations for African dictators.
Putin came to power pledging to root out the corruption that plagued Russia under his predecessor and patron Boris Yeltsin. Yet all that has happened is a rationalisation and concentration of corruption in the hands of fewer and more organised crooks. This criminality might be the final determining factor in Russia’s military failure and Putin’s downfall.
Azov Regiment continues to defend Ukraine as Kremlin targets civilians
Maj. Denis Prokopenko – commander of the Azov Regiment – this morning issued an official video (see below) highlighting the latest deliberate targeting of Ukrainian civilians by Vladimir Putin’s invaders.
Ukraine has astonished the world – and certainly astonished the Kremlin – by its determined defence. By now Putin was expecting to have overrun the east of the country completely, but the courage of the Azov Regiment and their comrades has caused the invasion to stall, at huge cost to Putin and his circle of kleptocrats.
Prokopenko’s men are valiantly defending the city of Mariupol, a port on the Sea of Azov that is presently on the war’s front line. With typical cynicism, Putin told the world that he was allowing a ceasefire to allow evacuation of civilians from the Mariupol war zone, but cynically betrayed this pledge: civilians are now the Kremlin godfather’s target as he grows increasingly frustrated by his lack of progress.
The Azov Regiment (originally the Azov Battalion) grew out of patriotic paramilitary groups almost eight years ago during Ukraine’s successful nationalist revolution against the pro-Moscow government of Viktor Yanukovych.
Azov members went on to form a National Militia that successfully fought against crime as well as Putinist subversion.
While racial nationalists around the world have regularly used the rhetoric of war, Major Prokopenko and Azov are dealing with its reality. They have the respect of all true Europeans, and whatever happens in Mariupol over the next few days, their sacrifice will not be in vain.
As Maj. Prokopenko says in this morning’s video:
“Western countries always declare their ‘democratic values’ amongst which one of the most important is respect for human life and the honour of man.
“But the innocent people in the city of Mariupol are almost starving. This is happening now in modern Europe.”
Putin’s London oligarchs: the dishonouring of Britain’s ‘elite’
This morning’s Sunday Times front page reports that MI5 and MI6 – Britain’s security and intelligence services – objected to the peerage awarded 18 months ago to Evgeny Lebedev, Russian owner of London’s Evening Standard.
Lebedev owes his fortune to his father Alexander, a prominent oligarch and former KGB officer who was in charge of the KGB’s station in London at the end of the Soviet era in the late 1980s, the period when a young Vladimir Putin was number two in the equivalent station in Dresden. As is often the case in the complex politics of post-Soviet Russia, Alexander Lebedev was briefly an enemy of Putin’s but then changed sides and became what one former MI6 officer has called “a craven supporter” of the Kremlin godfather.
Lebedev junior has been a good friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson for more than a decade, ever since his strong support for Johnson first term as Mayor of London and his re-election campaign in 2012.
According to this morning’s Sunday Times, Johnson exerted pressure on MI5 and MI6 to withdraw their objections to Lebedev’s peerage, and they duly did so. His elevation was announced in July 2020 and he officially took his seat as Lord Lebedev in November that year.
The blatant sale of honours (up to and including knighthoods and peerages) has been an intermittent feature of British political life since the early 1920s, when Prime Minister David Lloyd George marketed such baubles to political donors via a shady coterie of corrupt businessmen including Maundy Gregory, a theatrical producer and newspaper owner who used his network of homosexual associates to obtain blackmail opportunities for British intelligence.
These schemes became so notoriously disgraceful that a special law was brought in to criminalise such behaviour: the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Maundy Gregory himself is the only person to have been convicted under this law – he was jailed for two months in 1933. Gregory’s death remains mysterious. He was reportedly captured by German forces after the French surrender in 1940, and possibly died in an internment camp the following year, but there has never been any official confirmation.
For forty years after Lloyd George there were few if any scandals surrounding honours, until the arrival of Britain’s most pro-Zionist Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson and his notorious political secretary Marcia Williams (herself ennobled as Lady Falkender).
Wilson and Falkender lavished honours upon corrupt Jewish businessmen who had either donated money to the Labour Party or provided them with personal favours. Many of the beneficiaries had ties to Israel’s intelligence service Mossad, and at least two of those elevated to the Lords – Joseph Kagan and Rudy Sternberg – were suspected of links to the KGB or other Soviet bloc services.
Heritage and Destiny has carried out extensive investigations into the Wilson-Falkender ties to Israeli interests, as readers will learn in a forthcoming book by our assistant editor.
In one important respect, Johnson’s government is even worse than Wilson’s, whose most notorious apparent sales of honours followed his still-mysterious resignation in 1976 – known as the “Lavender List” because Lady Falkender supposedly compiled it on her personal notepaper.
Despite their corruption, Wilson and Falkender did give in to pressure from the honours scrutiny committee and removed three names. One of those removed was the boxing promoter Jarvis Astaire, who was one of many Jews with shady connections who had donated to Wilson’s party coffers and had been suggested for a knighthood. A later pro-Zionist Labour Prime Minister – Tony Blair – eventually gave Astaire a slightly lesser honour, an OBE, in 2003.
Blair’s own government was for some time embroiled in allegations surrounding the sale of honours, involving several prominent Zionist lobbyists close to Labour’s then-leader.
Another name that Wilson agreed to remove was Illtyd Harrington, deputy leader of the Greater London Council, whom he had suggested for a peerage. In Harrington’s case there were probably two problems: first he was openly homosexual (which in those days was considered more scandalous than it would be today), and secondly his father had been an active communist who fought with the communist-controlled International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and would certainly have had an MI5 file.
Lord Lebedev is also widely assumed to be a homosexual, but in today’s world MI5 and MI6 objections would not have been related to his private life, unless they were concerned that his famously lavish parties had been used to promote Vladimir Putin’s interests.
When Lebedev’s ex-KGB father first purchased the London Evening Standard in 2009, then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson turned down requests for the British government to intervene. Mandelson is a close associate of another Putin oligarch, Oleg Deripaska.
Now that the Sunday Times has made these allegations, and given that ordinary Britons will inevitably pay a heavy price in their shopping and utility bills for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, it is surely imperative for the Johnson Government to publish all relevant documents about the Lebedev peerage and be completely open about the Prime Minister’s friendship with the Standard owner and fellow oligarchs.
And to show that this is a matter that transcends party politics, we are sure that the Labour Party will support the formal request that H&D is now making under the Freedom of Information Act for similar release of all relevant files concerning the Wilson government and its donors. One such file is catalogued as PREM 19/589/1 – due to be released to us at the National Archives in January this year but withheld, “closed while access is under review” for unexplained reasons.
A formal request for release of this and other documents will be submitted at the start of office hours tomorrow.
We shall of course inform H&D readers of any progress in this long overdue forensic examination of the British state’s decline into dishonour.
Putin, Yeltsin, Falstaff: the brutal reality of transferring political and criminal power
The video above combines two clips illustrating the transfer of political power and its cold brutality. (Click square in bottom corner above to view full screen.)
First, in March 2000: Vladimir Putin climbs to power on the back of Boris Yeltsin’s corrupt camarilla and Putin’s own KGB/FSB circle. In amazing video footage at Yeltsin’s home, the corrupt old president is seen celebrating because he assumes his protégé will continue his influence and that of his crooked family and friends. Yet as we see, Putin will not even accept or return Yeltsin’s phone calls.
Putin goes on to work closely with some of the kleptocrats and gangsters from the Yeltsin circle and KGB, while purging others. And so it has continued for more than 20 years.
I’ve combined this clip with a famous scene from Shakespeare, as adapted by Orson Welles in one of my favourite films, Chimes at Midnight.
Here the old rogue Falstaff approaches his former partner-in-crime Prince Hal, who has just become King Henry V. But his former protégé (like Putin to Yeltsin) rebuffs him:
““I know thee not old man.
…Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.”
That’s their world of ‘high politics’, and it’s one reason why we shouldn’t wish to surrender our loyalties and ideological commitments in exchange for the baubles of ‘power’, whether in a 21st century Moscow dictatorship or a 15th century English monarchy.
Putin will doubtless soon experience the same treatment he once gave to Yeltsin: as his grip on power loosens, the new powerbrokers will again “turn away their former self”.
We might see the victory of the true Europe in our lifetimes or we might not. But unlike these ‘statesmen’, honour and loyalty will continue to be central to our lives.
