Scottish justice or “due deference” to French-Zionist lobby? The Reynouard case hangs in the balance

On 21st September, a Scottish Crown prosecutor asked an Edinburgh court to show “due deference to France” and extradite a man who is accused of no crime under Scottish law. H&D’s assistant editor Peter Rushton reports from the court. This article and related material also appears at Peter’s Real History blog and now also in Spanish by clicking on this link.

The revisionist historian Vincent Reynouard was appearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for a full hearing of his extradition case. This was almost exactly ten months after his arrest in the Scottish fishing village of Anstruther, where Vincent had been working quietly as a private tutor and completing his most important historical revisionist work concerning the so-called “massacre” at Oradour.

He was arrested in a raid by Scottish police, working with Scotland Yard detectives, at the request of French prosecutors who wish to jail him for revisionist videos concerning both Oradour and the alleged homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz.

None of these revisionist works contravenes Scottish or English law, but the UK authorities were heavily lobbied by the Jewish charity ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ and by the ultra-Zionist peer Lord Austin (formerly Ian Austin MP).

The sheer absurdity of this situation – the criminalisation of a scholar – was brought home to me by two incidents (one trivial, one serious) at the Edinburgh Court while waiting for Vincent’s case to be heard.

A sticker for the Edinburgh branch of the St Pauli supporters’ club was displayed in the lavatory at the Court. Supporters of St Pauli (a football club based in Hamburg) are notorious worldwide for their violent ‘anti-fascism’ and Marxism. It is impossible to imagine that a sticker promoting any violent ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ group (from, for example, supporters of a club such as Lazio, Chelsea, Millwall or Oldham) would have been allowed to remain on display at a court!

The other incident was more serious. Vincent’s case was being heard in a courtroom that specialises in extradition, which of course meant that more than two hours were taken up (before Vincent’s case began) by a long procession of procedural, pre-trial discussions of a range of unconnected defendants, including alleged gangsters from Eastern Europe.

By far the most serious of these procedural discussions involved a defendant appearing by video link. This was the notorious ‘Real IRA’ terrorist and assassin Antoin Duffy (aka Anton Duffy), who in 2015 was jailed for 17 years for conspiracy to murder two ex-UDA members (Johnny Adair and Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory) exiled in Scotland after their expulsion from the UDA.

Duffy is still serving this sentence in a top-security Scottish jail, but he is also now wanted by police and prosecutors in the Irish Republic, to face charges of murdering Denis Donaldson, an MI5 agent inside the IRA, who was killed in 2006. This is why Duffy was appearing on the same day as Vincent, in the Edinburgh extradition court.

H&D cannot yet comment on the latest specific charges – but it is beyond dispute (based on earlier convictions and years of police and MI5 covert surveillance) that Duffy is one of the UK’s most dangerous terrorists. Extradition procedures are designed for those accused of actual crimes: yet this week in Edinburgh (and in fact for the past ten months) Vincent Reynouard – a scholar, not a criminal – has been subjected to these same procedures.

As we have also seen with persistent abuse of the Terrorism Act by the UK authorities, those who simply seek to tell the truth about European history are persecuted by UK authorities who choose to follow the instructions of shadowy international lobbyists rather than UK law.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic about Vincent’s case. He was very ably represented by his solicitor Paul Dunne and advocate Fred Mackintosh KC (who also practices as a barrister in England). It should of course be emphasised that Vincent’s defence is (rightly and properly) based on legal arguments, not on his historical and political views per se. As in any other such case, it should not be inferred that either Mr Dunne or Mr Mackintosh is in any way sympathetic to Vincent’s opinions, or indeed that either of them have any views or expertise on historical or political matters. They are experts on extradition law, not on historical revisionism or national socialism.

Due to Vincent having already spent ten months in jail (for something that isn’t even a crime in the UK!) the initial French warrant has been discharged.

This initial warrant was based on his having already been convicted and sentenced (in his absence) by a Parisian court. But he is no longer extraditable on those grounds, because that sentence has (in effect) already been served in Scotland, while Vincent awaited this extradition hearing.

Having dealt with the discharge of the first warrant, Mr Mackintosh proceeded to address the second.

Since it involves new charges (rather than a prior conviction) the ‘ticklist’ of the old European Arrest Warrant (now operating in revised form post-Brexit) doesn’t apply. Mr Mackintosh therefore pointed out that the traditional extradition principle of “dual criminality” operates in this case.

In other words, the Edinburgh Court must be satisfied that the conduct of which Vincent is accused would potentially be criminal in Scotland as well as in France.

The judge should (Mr Mackintosh continued) draw inferences as to Vincent’s “intent”, by looking at his overall conduct, and by studying the entire transcripts of his videos, not merely accepting the prosecutors’ interpretation of certain phrases taken out of context.

He highlighted one video, on which the prosecutors had based a large part of their case, and emphasised that the judge should study the full translated transcript carefully. This was a video published on 22nd February 2020, whose title translates as “The Jewish Problem – what solution?”

Vincent’s counsel did not dispute that his videos contain what has been termed “Holocaust denial”, that some of them address the “Jewish problem”, and that one in particular “denies” the historicity of the “Oradour massacre”.

But Mr Mackintosh’s central argument as to why Vincent should not be extradited began with a judgment in 2015 by the European Court of Human Rights, in the case of Perinçek v. Switzerland.

The relevant aspect of this judgment (which involved a Turkish political activist accused of “denying” the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War), is that the European Court spelled out the very different laws among European states regarding “denial” of genocide.

Among those European countries that have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights, the Court noted:
“there are now essentially four types of regimes in this domain, in terms of scope of the offence of genocide denial: (a) States, such as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania, that only criminalise the denial of the Holocaust or more generally of Nazi crimes (Romania in addition criminalises the Nazi extermination of the Roma, and Greece criminalises, on top of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes, the denial of genocides recognised by an international court or its own Parliament); (b) States, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, that criminalise the denial of Nazi and communist crimes; (c) States, such as Andorra, Cyprus, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia and Switzerland, that criminalise the denial of any genocide (Lithuania in addition specifically criminalises denial of Soviet and Nazi crimes vis-à-vis the Lithuanians, but Cyprus only criminalises the denial of genocides recognised as such by a competent court); and (d) States, such as Finland, Italy, Spain (following the 2007 judgment of its Constitutional Court cited in paragraph 96 above), the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian States, that do not have special provisions criminalising such conduct.”

The European Court was clear, Mr Mackintosh said, that the UK had not chosen to make any form of “Holocaust denial” a specific criminal offence.

He added that in Vincent Reynouard’s case, the prosecution therefore had to satisfy the Scottish court that Vincent’s conduct (as alleged in the extradition warrant) met the test either for a S.127 Communications Act offence, or a breach of the peace (a common law offence).

The question of what behaviour can constitute a “breach of the peace” under Scottish law has been revised several times during recent decades – and is a matter on which Mr Mackintosh has special expertise, having for example written an article for Scottish Legal News on this very topic.

Such conduct must be serious enough to “cause alarm to ordinary people”, and it must “threaten serious disturbance to the community”. The relevant judgment was delivered in 2014 by Lady Clark of Calton, and Mr Mackintosh said that Lady Clark had reminded the lower courts that “for conduct to be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm there has to be something further than annoyance and distress”.

Mr Mackintosh explained that the test of whether conduct “threatens serious disturbance in the community” necessarily involves considering the full context. He quoted several cases in Scottish courts involving racial and sectarian abuse at football matches, where a crucial element was that this abuse had been directed at (or delivered in close proximity to) rival supporters, in the incendiary context of a football match attended by supporters of opposing teams.

In a 1981 case against communist activist Mike Duffield, the Sheriff Court had ruled that shouting pro-IRA slogans while selling the Marxist newspaper Fight Racism Fight Imperialism and the pro-IRA newspaper Hands off Ireland was a breach of the peace, despite this being carried out at the stadium of Glasgow Celtic, where many fans hold similar views.

And on the other side of politics, there had been a breach of the peace case involving a National Front activist selling the Young NF paper Bulldog outside the Hearts stadium in Edinburgh.

But in all these cases – and especially bearing in mind recent clarifications of the law in Scotland – it was essential to assess the wider context of the words used – in Vincent’s case, words used in videos broadcast online.

There were eight such videos referred to by French prosecutors in the present warrant. The first related specifically to Oradour. The second, third and fourth presented detailed arguments as to why (in Vincent’s considered opinion) there had been no homicidal ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, explaining that conventional ‘Holocaust’ history is based on specious evidence. The fifth and sixth discussed the “Jewish problem” or “what to do about the Jews”. And the seventh and eighth returned to the topic of Auschwitz, the ‘gas chambers’, and broader ‘Holocaust’ themes.

Mr Mackintosh emphasised that in the case of six of these eight videos, Vincent Reynouard had not been calling for any form of action. None of the content potentially qualified as personal abuse, and none of it could be seen as “threatening”. The videos amounted to a historical critique – which might well be controversial, but not illegal in Scotland.

In the case of videos 5 and 6, Vincent was responding to a correspondent. The prosecution had chosen to isolate certain phrases out of context, but Mr Mackintosh said that once seen in context it was clear that Vincent was stating his opposition to any policy of “exterminating” the Jews.

The test that the court had to apply was not whether “reasonable people” would reject Vincent’s views, but whether these views threatened “serious disturbance to society”. Were the court to accept the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to ruling that discussion of controversial arguments regarding the ‘Holocaust’ had become a crime in the UK. Mr Mackintosh said it was open to Parliaments in London and Edinburgh to make ‘Holocaust denial’ a crime, but they had (so far) chosen not to do so.

Therefore to be criminal, Vincent’s words would have to cross a further line, a further evidential test, in order to be regarded as a “breach of the peace”.

Mr Mackintosh then turned to the alternative test, S.127 of the Communications Act. For Vincent’s videos to be considered criminal in this context, they would have to be not merely offensive, but “grossly offensive”.

Prosecutors had rested much of their argument on the precedent of the Chabloz case, as tried in the London courts during recent years – not a binding precedent, but, they argued, very much a “persuasive” precedent in this case. [Chabloz has in recent years been excluded from British revisionist circles, due to her treacherous and malicious conduct in betraying Robert Faurisson’s final meeting to the ‘anti-fascist’ publication ‘Hope not Hate’. But her earlier actions have, as we predicted at the time, served as a precedent to threaten the liberty of Vincent Reynouard.]

On appeal, Chabloz’s conduct had been found to go beyond satire, having crossed the legal line into deliberate, malicious abuse. By contrast, Mr Mackintosh argued, the judge in the present case would find (if he examined the full transcripts of Vincent’s videos) that his arguments – even when highly controversial – were delivered as a calm, academic analysis, not as crude anti-semitic abuse in the Chabloz style.

Mr Mackintosh referred to the leading S.127 case in relation to interpretation of what is “grossly offensive”, namely the Collins case, and the judgment of Lord Bingham.

This had made clear that what is “grossly offensive” has to be assessed in the context of the standards of an “open, just, multiracial society” – a contemporary context that is “reasonably enlightened, but not perfectionist”.

In other words, Mr Mackintosh emphasised, the words complained of had to cause gross offence, not simply “to people who care about the Holocaust” and who, for whatever reasons, hold different views to Vincent, but to broader society.

Were ‘Holocaust denial’ or disputing the historicity of Oradour to be deemed criminal per se, the question would necessarily arise – what about the Amritsar massacre, what about the Armenian genocide, and many other controversial historical subjects?

Mr Mackintosh concluded his argument by addressing the question of proportionality. An extradition court is required to consider whether the alleged offence is sufficiently severe to attract a custodial sentence. For example, recent instructions to the lower courts had emphasised that defendants should not be extradited for minor public order offences.

He noted that even in the Chabloz case – where the defendant had been convicted for gross offensiveness which was of a very different character to Vincent’s videos – this had not led to custodial sentences.

It would therefore, Mr Mackintosh argued, be both wrong in law and disproportionate for the Edinburgh Court to extradite Vincent Reynouard to France.

In his argument, the prosecutor (Advocate depute Paul Harvey) insisted that Vincent’s videos did pass the evidential test for the Court to regard his conduct as either (or both) a breach of the peace, and/or “grossly offensive” under S.127.

He invited the judge to consider Vincent’s words in one of the video transcripts, where he had stated that “there is a Jewish problem”, and that in his analysis of this problem he would “go further” than Adolf Hitler. “Naturally, the Jews exploit the situation: to dominate, even to subjugate us.”

Mr Harvey described these words as “the most appalling anti-semitism”, and asked the judge to view all of the videos complained of in the French warrant, in the light of this “anti-semitism”.

Questioned by the judge on this point, Mr Harvey said that (in the prosecutors’ submission) each video should be looked at as a separate breach of the peace offence, but should also be interpreted overall as a “course of conduct” by Vincent.

The mere fact that the UK had no special provision criminalising “Holocaust denial” did not in itself absolve the defendant. When expressed in the terms used by Vincent, Mr Harvey insisted that “Holocaust denial” could be interpreted as criminal under UK as well as French law.

Quoting the case of Rangers fan William Kilpatrick, who had posted on Facebook endorsing the sending of “bombs and bombs” to Celtic manager Neil Lennon, Mr Harvey argued that under Scottish law, intending or inciting a specific action was not necessarily relevant to whether certain words were a “breach of the peace”.

Mr Harvey maintained that some of Vincent’s words in the video could reasonably have led to his being charged with a breach of the peace under Scottish law, because they were calculated to provoke a disturbance of public order.

In fact, he argued that Vincent’s words were potentially a more serious crime than breach of the peace in a football stadium: because they could be viewed online at any time, anywhere in Scotland. Incitement to specific criminal action did not, the prosecution argued, have to be proven.

Mr Harvey added that Vincent’s “crimes” had to be looked at in the context of the very different cultural context in France, and the more serious risk of “anti-semitism being incited”. While the words Vincent used could, Mr Harvey argued, be prosecutable even in Scotland, the Court should take account of the fact that in a French context, they were even more serious.

Unsurprisingly, the prosecutor rejected the defence argument that Vincent’s words were calm, academic discourse. He said they were comparable to the Chabloz case, where it had been established that once a clearly anti-semitic motive had been established, espousal of “Holocaust denial” was ipso facto grossly offensive.

Mr Harvey accepted that (under UK law) not every instance of “Holocaust denial” was criminal, but he maintained that in the cases of both Chabloz and Vincent Reynouard, denying the “Holocaust” did amount to “gross offensiveness”, and therefore contravened S.127.

The prosecutor said the judge would need to apply the proportionality test very carefully. Unlike, for example, a drugs or theft case, Vincent’s criminal conduct was highly context-specific, where the appropriate sentence might differ enormously between Scotland and France. The judge should therefore “respect and give due weight” to French circumstances involving their history, and even present day “racial relations”, which meant that a French court “is justified in taking a severe approach to this”.

Given Vincent’s long and repeated record of “criminal conduct”, Mr Harvey concluded that a custodial sentence in France was not only possible but highly likely: “I urge you to show due deference to France and their different traditions.”

In a brief reply concluding the hearing, Vincent’s counsel Fred Mackintosh said that if the judge accepted the prosecution’s argument, it would amount to saying that any “racist” statement on Facebook or YouTube, regardless of context, would be a breach of the peace. He urged the judge to reject this argument and to recognise that “Holocaust denial” when expressed in Vincent’s terms, is not a crime in Scotland – neither a breach of the peace, nor grossly offensive.

The judge said that he aimed to have read all relevant material and considered the arguments fully, in time to pass judgment on 12th October.

Clearly, the Vincent Reynouard case has become a vitally important test of whether historical revisionism will be criminalised in the UK via a ‘back door’ route, without any honest and open discussion in Parliament.

We shall make a further assessment of the broader context soon. But it should be recognised by all concerned that there will be no surrender of the basic principles involved. In the UK, Spain and Canada, European traditions of free historical inquiry are under attack. We shall defend those traditions, by any and every method that proves necessary.

Vincent Reynouard reports from his Edinburgh jail on the eve of his extradition trial

Scottish justice will soon decide whether to extradite me to France or release me. Knowing that, if I am extradited, I will probably spend years in prison, we can say that my fate will be decided on September 21st.

My lawyers are optimistic. Indeed, having served the entire prison sentence which earned me the first arrest warrant, only the second remains. Paris is asking me to judge me for several videos. However, to be extradited, these videos must constitute crimes in both France and Scotland. My lawyers’ argument is clear: my comments do not transgress UK laws.

My opponents invoke the precedent set by the conviction of singer A. Chabloz in 2018. However, A. Chabloz was convicted for having composed, performed and broadcast “grossly offensive” songs. In question here were the vocabulary chosen, the tone adopted and the criticisms formulated against the Jewish people in general. My videos are totally different. Although they may shock and offend, they are never grossly offensive and, therefore, remain within the bounds of freedom of expression as conceived in the United Kingdom.

Many of my relatives are therefore optimistic about the outcome of this hearing. For my part, I am neither pessimistic nor optimistic, because I have learned not to hope for anything and not to fear anything. The reason is always the same: I trust in Providence. So far, she has protected me in my mission. I am therefore convinced that the decision of September 21 will be the most likely to serve the revisionist cause. Certainly, for me, it will undoubtedly be the occasion for new trials, but the trials are there so that we improve by overcoming them.

I will therefore accept the final truth, whatever it may be, and will continue to place the revisionist cause above my personal destiny, because revisionism serves the Common Good and, as a National Socialist, I have always advocated the primacy of the common good over particular interests. Therefore, I will not back down now. My personal destiny is of no importance.

Some will call me a fanatic. However, when we see how the anti-revisionists treat us, we understand that only diehards can endure the fight on the front line. If I wasn’t one, I would have given up a long time ago. Providence raises up the right people where they are needed. Our adversaries being fanatics, She opposes fanatics to them. It’s in the natural order of things.

So I calmly wait for September 21st. In the calm of my cell, I continue my activities of reading, writing, meditation and drawing. After ten months, a daily routine was established. I hardly notice that I am in prison anymore. I’m like on a ship where life unfolds peacefully. For the past few weeks, I have been the oldest on my wing. I know the staff and the inmates know me, because I am a somewhat unusual prisoner.

I should have been released on August 10th, once my prison sentence was fully served. However, the Scottish justice system decided to keep me in prison on the grounds that I could take advantage of my release to escape again. Knowing what I have done since October 2021, this fear is understandable. I would add that, even if this extension of my detention were illegal, I would not claim any compensation, because I did not suffer – far from it – in Edinburgh prison.

Besides, in Edinburgh prison, the deprivation of liberty as it affects me is entirely relative. Certainly, my body is held in a penitentiary establishment, but my mind remains free. Here, I read a lot: I discovered authors like Denis Marquet (on spirituality) and Jacques Ellul (on technique). I corresponded freely with wonderful people. I was able to exercise every day, including three times a week in a well-equipped gym. I enjoyed an excellent diet that many people would envy. Finally, I improved my drawing techniques, especially watercolour.

In my eyes, I am much freer than the citizen forced to get up every morning to do an uninteresting job. My freedom is a thousand times greater than that of people without an inner life, glued to their screen and slaves to social networks.

As for the prison guards, they were very kind to me, probably because they think that there is no legitimate reason for me to be in prison. Not long ago, in fact, a guard told me: “You have been in prison for almost a year, because France does not respect the right to freedom of expression!” I think she was expressing the thoughts of the guards in general…

It is true that, from this vantage point in Scotland, we observe, incredulously, the climate of hysteria which reigns in France around real or imagined anti-Semitism. The causes of this frenzy are undoubtedly multiple.

First of all, I think a lot of Jews are worried. In this changing and crisis-ridden world, they fear a new persecution, even a new “Holocaust”, on the grounds that they would always have been the scapegoats. The associations which represent them therefore act to eradicate anti-Judaism from society. However, knowing that, in our part of the world, “racism” has become the capital sin, the government – whoever it may be – is obliged to support this action.

To this is probably added another fact: at a time when the Rassemblement National (RN – National Rally) is considered, rightly or wrongly, as a force capable of influencing politics, attacking the ultra-right induces Marine Le Pen increasingly to dissociate herself from the ideals of the national right. And as we always end up becoming what we say, whether by conviction or by strategy, then the more the government attacks the ultra-right, the more the RN becomes normalised .

Finally, I think that for some, hitting the ultra-right is another way of attacking the RN, with a view to preventing a possible electoral victory for Marine Le Pen. Indeed, when a government has no positive record to its credit, its only political strategy consists of presenting itself as the ultimate bulwark against the foul Beast. He can then say: “See, the foul beast is not dead. Don’t be fooled; the de-demonisation of the RN is only apparent. If Marine Le Pen comes to power or even comes close, the ultra-right will take the opportunity to resurface.” In my eyes therefore, these various causes contribute to the ambient hysteria.

As for me, I represent an intellectual danger for the government, because I demonstrate that the crimes attributed to the Foul Beast are propaganda lies. My action appears all the more dangerous to him because I denounced a particularly fragile myth: the alleged massacre of women and children in the church of Oradour by the ‘barbaric’ Waffen SS. Without denying the deaths of these people, I demonstrate that the circumstances of this tragedy were very different.

However, if the myth of Oradour falls, some might wonder about Auschwitz. The link will be all the more natural since, since 2017, the challenge to the official History of Oradour has also been repressed by the anti-revisionist law. People will then say: “The myth of Oradour was protected by the same law which prohibits contesting the existence of the gas chambers of Auschwitz; therefore, are these gas chambers also a myth?”

The guardians of Memory cannot therefore retreat: they must defend tooth and nail the myth of Oradour. Hence their interest in silencing me. This doesn’t bode well for me. However, here again, my personal destiny is unimportant. I don’t expect anything down here. The reward will come after this earthly life. This is my conviction (which I do not impose on anyone). Therefore, I am calm.

H&D will report further on Vincent Reynouard’s case and additional reports will appear in English at the Real History blog and in French at Vincent’s own blog Sans Concession.

One law for them and one law for us?

A recent decision by the Crown Prosecution Service raises serious questions as to whether ‘anti-terrorist’ law in the UK is being enforced in a partisan manner, or whether there is one law for those perceived to be on the radical left, and another for those perceived to be on the radical right.

Press reports this week suggest that far leftists seem to have got away with defying the UK’s Terrorism Act, Schedule 7 – the same law that has been repeatedly used against H&D, most recently to detain our European correspondent Isabel Peralta and seize her phone and computer.

On Friday 23^rd June, the CPS and the Counter Terrorism Command of the Metropolitan Police announced there would be no further action against Ernest Moret, a publisher who works as foreign rights manager for the Paris firm La Fabrique.

Moret was detained at St Pancras station under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, on the evening of 17^th April 2023 after travelling by Eurostar from Paris (as reported in H&D two months ago). He was en route to the London Book Fair, where his firm was working in close collaboration with another far-left publisher, London-based Verso Books.

He allegedly refused to provide UK police with the pin code for his mobile phone, leading to his arrest and transfer to a London police station where he was held until the following day, “on suspicion of wilfully obstructing a Schedule 7 examination”.

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 entitles UK police and border control officers to question anyone entering the country at any airport, seaport, or in this case rail terminal (classed as a “port of entry”). Those arriving (even if they are UK citizens) can be detained for up to six hours without any reason being given and without any evidence or specific suspicion against them.

Since this six-hour period begins when the interrogation starts, then in practice the detention period can be longer (as one can be kept for some time before questioning).  

Those detained are required to answer whatever questions are asked of them, and do not have the customary right to silence. They are obliged to hand over their possessions and provide any passwords, pin numbers etc needed for officers to be able to access electronic devices.

Any refusal to answer, or refusal to provide such access codes is regarded as an offence under the Terrorism Act.

Officers do not need to show any reasonable grounds for detaining and questioning someone under Schedule 7.  Although the rationale behind the law is to allow officers to obtain information relevant to anti-terrorist investigations, there is no implication that those detained are themselves terrorists or sympathetic to terrorism.

A joint statement by La Fabrique and Verso wilfully ignored this legal reality, claiming that Moret’s participation in leftwing protests in France against President Macron, had been cited “as a justification” for his detention and questioning. No such “justification” is necessary under Schedule 7, but Moret’s employers seem to believe that the far left is exempt from laws that apply to the rest of us, especially to the so-called ‘far right’.

H&D has always argued that nationalists should avoid unnecessary confrontations with the police. We have always maintained that (outside the specific context of Northern Ireland) paramilitary activity and anything resembling terrorism is unjustifiable and counter-productive to the cause of racial nationalism.

Accordingly, we have consistently argued that if detained under Schedule 7, then whatever we might think about the disproportionate and arbitrary powers conveyed by that law, nationalists should accept that this is (for now) UK law and we should cooperate with those enforcing it.

H&D’s editor Mark Cotterill has been detained twice at Manchester Airport under Schedule 7, once when returning from Cancun, Mexico, and once when returning from Adelaide, Australia. Assistant editor Peter Rushton was detained at London Stansted Airport in 2019 after returning from Düsseldorf. And most recently, in September last year our European correspondent Isabel Peralta was detained at Manchester Airport on arrival from Madrid. (click here to view an interview with Isabel about this Schedule 7 detention)

The latter case was especially serious, since not content with an interrogation lasting almost six hours, the authorities retained Isabel’s phone and computer for almost a week.

H&D is now writing to the Metropolitan Police and to the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, seeking clarification of the Moret case. Naturally we know no more about the circumstances of his arrest (and his later release) than what has appeared in press reports and police statements, but these raise troubling questions which must be answered if nationalists are to retain confidence in the impartiality of the police, and if we are to continue to recommend compliance with police investigations.

Background note:

Verso was founded in 1970 as New Left Books, and throughout its history the firm has specialised in works by Marxist authors. It is especially associated with the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ of Marxist theorists.

Ernest Moret’s employer La Fabrique was founded in 1998 by the left-wing French Jewish author Éric Hazan. It has published several controversial extreme leftist texts including The Coming Insurrection, written by a so-called “Invisible Committee” and calling for a revolutionary uprising. Moret’s employer Hazan was investigated by French anti-terrorist police seeking to confirm that the author of The Coming Insurrection was in fact Julien Coupat, who was arrested in 2008 for “direction of a terrorist organisation” in connection with the organised sabotage of French railway lines.

Information leading to Coupat’s arrest (and subsequent court cases that ended in legal chaos and acquittals) was supplied to French police by Mark Kennedy, an undercover English police officer who had infliltrated Coupat’s organisation. Kennedy’s actions as a police spy are themselves now among many such undercover operations being examined by an official enquiry.

In other words, whatever Ernest Moret has or hasn’t done, the UK authorities knew that his employer La Fabrique was closely connected to someone who was the focus of a very long-running investigation into politically-motivated criminal activity. And they knew that this anarchism (predating Moret’s involvement with La Fabrique) had also involved people in England.

Nothing published in H&D has ever been the subject of criminal charges, and we have never published any article that recommends criminal behaviour. Outside the specific context of Northern Ireland, we have never endorsed paramilitary activity. It is quite clear that the questioning of Mark Cotterill, Peter Rushton and Isabel Peralta under Schedule 7 was in each case a “fishing expedition” for political intelligence, conducted in the latter case as a favour for the German authorities, and had no connection to any actual or suspected terrorist activity or any other offences against UK law.

Leftists get a taste of their own ‘anti-terrorist’ medicine

Far left activists were outraged this week when a French Marxist publisher was arrested by London police under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act.

Ernest Moret was held for 24 hours after refusing to provide passwords for police to access his phone. He was released on bail yesterday evening.

Racial nationalists have known for many years that Schedule 7 gives UK police and border security officers extraordinary powers that would once have been seen as unconstitutional. Our own citizens as well as visitors can be detained on entering the country, and questioned for up to six hours.

Unlike any other arrest, those detained under Schedule 7 have no right to remain silent and are obliged to surrender their phones, computers and other devices, together with any relevant passwords. The authorities do not require any reason for detaining and questioning anyone under Schedule 7, and their questions can cover any subject.

Four of our H&D team have been detained under Schedule 7 in recent years. Editor Mark Cotterill has been stopped twice at Manchester Airport after returning from a non-political holiday to Mexico and a visit to H&D supporters in Australia. Assistant editor Peter Rushton was stopped at London Stansted Airport on returning from a visit to Germany. And last September our Spanish comrade and H&D writer Isabel Peralta was stopped at Manchester Airport, the night before speaking at our 2022 meeting in Preston.

Isabel’s case was especially outrageous because her computer and phone were retained for almost a week, without any justification, as part of a political ‘fishing expedition’ where UK authorities were liaising with political police and intelligence agencies in Germany and Spain.

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Everyone at H&D understands that we have very limited rights under Schedule 7, but it seems that the far left is only now waking up to this reality.

In this week’s case, it seems likely that London police were cooperating with their Paris counterparts in an investigation of Ernest Moret’s involvement with protests against President Macron’s changes to French pensions.

Moret and a colleague were visiting fellow Marxists in London, associated with the well-known leftwing publishers Verso.

His fellow leftists at the Guardian and BBC, as well as the National Union of Journalists, were happy to publicise Moret’s case as some sort of outrage. Yet the same wokeists were perfectly happy when Mark, Peter and Isabel (who similarly have no connection to anything that could reasonably be called ‘terrorism’) were detained under the exact same law.

Why do Marxists assume that dictatorial laws will only be used against ‘racists’ and ‘fascists’, and that the far left is immune?

Vincent Reynouard case latest: new warrant, delayed extradition hearing

French revisionist scholar Vincent Reynouard – who has been jailed in Edinburgh for almost four months despite not being accused of any crime under Scottish or English law – was handed further charges today while in the dock at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

As with the previous charges, these have been issued by French prosecutors who are seeking Vincent’s extradition to be tried under the ‘Gayssot Law’, introduced in 1990 by a French Communist MP.

This bans the expression of sceptical historical views about the ‘crimes against humanity’ defined at the Nuremberg Trial and in the 1945 ‘London Charter’ that established that trial.

Most obviously, the Gayssot Law prohibits sceptical research into ‘Holocaust’ history, which is banned in several European countries, though perfectly legal in the UK.

Vincent Reynouard has previously been convicted several times of such ‘crimes’, and is best known for his investigation into the ‘Oradour massacre’ of June 1944. His published work about Oradour dates back to the 1990s, and he recently wrote a comprehensive investigation of this topic, now available (in French) from his website.

The latest warrant seems to reflect an admission by French prosecutors that they made an error in their initial warrant, under which Vincent Reynouard was arrested in Anstruther, Scotland, on 10th November last year. He has been held in Edinburgh Prison ever since his arrest.

An interview with Vincent Reynouard, by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton, will appear in the May-June edition of Heritage and Destiny. Vincent will next appear in court for a pre-trial hearing on 20th April, and the full extradition trial is presently scheduled for 8th June, again in Edinburgh.

Updates on the Vincent Reynouard case will appear here soon.

Vincent Reynouard extradition update

Yesterday there was another court hearing in Edinburgh on the case of Vincent Reynouard, the French revisionist scholar who despite having committed no crime under UK law, was arrested at his home in Scotland on 10th November. Since then he has been held in Edinburgh Prison.

The French authorities demanded Vincent’s extradition to face charges under their law which forbids challenges to orthodox versions of 20th century history, including the ‘Holocaust’.

Vincent Reynouard is best known for his detailed investigation of the alleged ‘massacre’ at Oradour, in west-Central France, on 10th June 1944, as well as further revisionist research and analysis that can be read at his website.

The law under which he would be tried in France (and under which he has previously been convicted and served a prison sentence there) was introduced in 1990 by the Communist MP Jean-Claude Gayssot and the Jewish Socialist former prime minister Laurent Fabius.

Its original target was the French scholar Professor Robert Faurisson who was prosecuted and heavily fined several times under the ‘Gayssot Law’, and its main target today is Vincent Reynouard.

The court in Edinburgh will have to decide whether Scottish law allows for a man to be extradited for something that is not a crime in Scotland – and the case is therefore an important test of the new extradition arrangements that replaced the European Arrest Warrant system after Brexit.

In 2008 the German authorities attempted to extradite the Australian revisionist Dr Fredrick Töben from London using a European Arrest Warrant, after he was arrested while in transit at London’s Heathrow Airport. However this extradition attempt was defeated in the London courts, and after several weeks detention at Brixton Prison, Dr Töben was freed to return home to Australia.

In Vincent’s case a further preliminary hearing is due on 9th March, with the full case presently scheduled to be heard (again in Edinburgh) on 6th April.

Further reports will appear soon, both here at the H&D site, in our magazine, and at the Real History blog.

Vincent remains in good spirits. H&D readers wishing to send him a letter of support (in English or French) should write to: Vincent REYNOUARD, Prisoner Number 160071, HMP Edinburgh, Scottish Prison Service, 33 Stenhouse Road, Edinburgh, EH11 3LN.

The spy exposed in his own words

Madrid lawyer Armando Rodríguez Pérez was exposed this week as a spy operating inside the Spanish nationalist movement and seeking to subvert international anti-Zionist networks.

Now further information has come to light, drawn from this infiltrator’s own former Twitter account.

Armando first began to infiltrate radical nationalist circles at the end of 2020 and later became co-leader of a militant national-socialist group, Bastión Frontal.

As explained in a detailed investigation earlier this week, his past record involved working for a staunchly pro-Zionist and anti-Nazi academic institute. He disguised this past record from his new comrades.

Now the extent of Armando’s personal commitment to the Zionist cause can be revealed in his own words.

During May-June 2017 – when retweeting and commenting on tweets from an official Israeli government account, Armando publicly declared his commitment to the hardline Zionist position of “reuniting Jerusalem” as the Jewish capital.

On 27th May 2017 after a hardline pro-Zionist resolution by the Czech Parliament had condemned UNESCO for its criticism of Israel and endorsed Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Armando wrote that the Czechs had set a “great example” and said to the Israeli government account: “Let’s hope that many others follow this example at once.”

Ten days later, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the notorious Israeli aggression known as the ‘Six Day War’, which resulted in the Zionist seizure of vast swathes of territory from its Arab neighbours, Armando tweeted: “In my opinion, the study of the Six-Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem can help us understand many things: brilliant!”

Though most of his old Twitter account is devoted to his cycling hobby, the political tweets/retweets reflect a consistently militant pro-Zionist and “anti-Nazi” stance – curious in man who three years later was to reinvent himself as a leading national-socialist and ‘radical’ anti-Zionist pursuing links with Iran.

Armando never at any stage explained this curious ideological journey, and until now none of his new comrades had checked up on his record.

While there can be many reasons (including irony) for retweeting something you disagree with, it is obvious when seen in the context of his own words above, and his own record already described in detail in the earlier article, that Armando Rodríguez Pérez was retweeting in celebration of anti-nazism and Zionism.

For example, in recent months he has been an outspoken Anglophobe and enemy of all things American, yet on the 2017 anniversary of the Anglo-American D-Day landings in Normandy (6th June 1944) Armando tweeted in celebration of this decisive blow against the Third Reich.

He also retweeted anti-Nazi and pro-Zionist resolutions such as the one below from the European Parliament.

And in response to terrorist attacks in Egypt and Barcelona, the people Armando set out to retweet were for some reason the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Israel’s extremist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Taken in isolation any one of these might be seen as a one-off, provoked by Islamist terrorism. But taken together (and bearing in mind his own extreme Zionist sentiments expressed above) we can perceive Armando Rodríguez Pérez as a committed anti-nazi and supporter of Israel who set out to infiltrate national socialist and anti-Zionist groups.

In doing so he disguised his true allegiances and past record from his own client, Isabel Peralta, and betrayed her when she was visiting Germany during 2022.

The spy has now been exposed, and our movement will emerge stronger from this unfortunate experience.

Anti-Fascist Spy Exposed

A leading figure in several radical nationalist, national socialist and anti-Zionist groups in Spain can today be revealed as an undercover ‘anti-fascist’ agent. This exposé is also published at the Real History Blog and in German, in Spanish, in French, and in Italian.

Beginning in late 2020 and with increasing prominence since late 2021, Armando Rodríguez Pérez has led a double life.

One face of Armando Rodríguez Pérez is as a lawyer with an academic specialism in human rights, organising conferences with a strongly ‘anti-fascist’ theme, and sharing the Madrid office of a legal firm offering advice to German and English speaking clients in Spain.

The other face of Armando Rodríguez Pérez is as a radical leader of the ‘far right’, not only representing some of Spain’s most noted national socialists, but also taking an active role in leading their organisations, raising troubling questions about the extent to which he and his controllers may have crossed the line between infiltrator and agent provocateur.

During November-December 2022 Armando Rodríguez Pérez (recently using the online identity ‘Armando Renacer’ and previously ‘Armando Bastión’):
(1) became “political action secretary” for a new movement that represents the ‘National Bolshevik’ faction of Spain’s ‘far right’;
(2) infiltrated the circle of a British political activist and travelled to her home in Germany, where he met with several leading German national socialist activists;
(3) volunteered to act as liaison between a fugitive political dissident and the Iranian Government.

For more than a year until the group’s dissolution in the autumn of 2022, Armando Rodríguez Pérez was co-leader of a national socialist youth group, Bastión Frontal, and organised international connections with similar groups in France, Italy, Serbia, Poland and elsewhere.

And until today he was still acting as lawyer for the activist who attracted international media attention to Bastión Frontal, the 20-year-old student Isabel Peralta.

Yet Armando Rodríguez Pérez is not what he seems.

INFILTRATING THE ‘FAR RIGHT’

During the summer of 2020 – in the early months of the pandemic – Spain’s secret police (the CGI, roughly equivalent to the old British Special Branch, or what is now SO15) began to monitor the activities of a new national socialist youth group, Bastión Frontal, whose activities involved both opposing illegal immigration (especially immigrant street gangs) and drawing attention to the economic plight of many working-class Spaniards suffering under pandemic restrictions.

An 18-year-old history student at Complutense University of Madrid, Isabel Peralta, was first observed by the secret police at a Bastión Frontal activity in September 2020. She had previously been active in other Falangist groups but had become disillusioned by some of their reactionary and corrupt leaders. Isabel attracted international attention on 13th February 2021 when she gave a speech in tribute to the heroic anti-communist volunteers of the Blue Division (División Azul), who fought on the Eastern Front after 1941 against Stalin’s Red Army.

At the end of 2020, a 30-year-old lawyer named Armando Rodríguez Pérez suddenly appeared in ‘far right’ circles. He first turned up among football ultras in the tough Madrid district of San Blas-Canillejas, then gave a speech about the Blue Division’s war record at a meeting of national socialists with an interest in military history. He had no known past political activity, or indeed even the remotest connection to any form of nationalist movement. No one knew anything about him and no one checked up on him. For reasons that now seem mystifying, Armando was accepted as a comrade by various radical factions, each perhaps assuming that someone else had vouched for him.

Armando enhanced his credibility in such circles by latching onto Bastión Frontal after it had become the most visible face of Spanish radical nationalism, largely thanks to its co-leader Isabel Peralta.

Within a very short time he had emerged as one of the leaders of this national socialist youth group, partly because he was a few years older, and partly because he offered them free legal advice and even represented them in court without charge.

Soon he was calling himself ‘Armando Bastión’ and making regular speeches at the group’s meetings, also acting as moderator for their online Telegram forum. After Isabel Peralta moved to Germany for a few months during late 2021 and early 2022, Armando Rodríguez Pérez established himself as effectively the leader of Bastión Frontal, especially after co-leader Rodrigo Miguélez was imprisoned. Armando represented both Rodrigo and Isabel in several criminal and civil cases.

During the autumn of 2022 Bastión Frontal collapsed, but Armando Rodríguez Pérez is continuing to represent Isabel in a long-running criminal case, where prosecutors are trying to jail her for a speech made at an anti-immigration rally outside the Moroccan Embassy in May 2021. He is also representing her in a continuing civil action that she has brought against the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jerusalem Post.

Yet in both of these cases (and earlier legal problems relating to Bastión Frontal activists) Armando Rodríguez Pérez had a conflict of interest that made it grossly improper for him to act on behalf of such clients. While they are militant nationalists, national socialists and anti-Zionists, Armando Rodríguez Pérez has a long background (which he disguised from his new clients and ‘comrades’) working for an explicitly anti-fascist and anti-nazi academic foundation with close connections to Israel and international Jewish organisations.

ARMANDO AND THE BERG INSTITUTE

Armando Rodríguez Pérez arrived suddenly in nationalist / national-socialist circles after a background of several years working with an important academic organisation that specialises in ‘Holocaust’ studies and other ‘anti-fascist’ themes, the Madrid-based Berg Institute (Instituto Berg).

He studied for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His biography on the Spanish version of his former law firm’s website was later edited to remove reference to his time in Jerusalem, but an earlier English-language draft of the same page still includes this reference.

Armando’s master’s degree in “International Relations, International Law and Conflict Resolution” was undertaken jointly with Alfonso X el Sabio University, Madrid; the UN’s ‘University for Peace’; and the Berg Institute.

He went on to work as part of the Berg Institute’s ‘academic coordination team’ and took part in the Institute’s joint training programmes with the Colombian Army and security forces.

In other words Armando Rodríguez Pérez was not simply studying in Israel, or casually associated with the Berg Institute: he was actually an organiser and coordinator for several of their projects. This is especially disturbing when one looks in more detail at the content of the conferences that he organised.

Similar connections with the Berg Institute were shared with both of the close friends with whom in 2015 Armando Rodríguez Pérez set up a law firm in Madrid called GABEIRO – José Feliciano Beceiro Armada and Jesús Gavilán Hormigo. Gavilán studied in Jerusalem during 2014 alongside Armando, and worked for the Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón, named in honour of Spain’s most infamously left-wing, ‘anti-fascist’ judge. While Beceiro preceded Armando as organiser of the Berg Institute’s international conference.

A fourth lawyer who was part of this short-lived GABEIRO firm (Álvaro Domec López) was brought into Isabel Peralta’s criminal case by Armando in January 2022 – a fact that was completely unknown to Isabel herself until it was revealed in court documents.

It is necessary to look more closely at this Berg Institute, for which Armando Rodríguez Pérez acted as a coordinator / organiser before his sudden ‘conversion’ to the radical nationalist / national socialist cause.

There are many Jews in the world, and of course it would be ridiculous to assume that a lawyer is a Jewish agent if he simply had a passing connection with a Jewish client.

Armando’s connection is far more serious, especially when viewed alongside work with the police and military, and international work undertaken with the backing of this particular anti-fascist organisation.

Readers should bear in mind that Armando has never at any stage confided in his new comrades, in order to explain his political conversion. His past as the organiser of anti-fascist conferences was completely secret until revealed during this investigation.

ARMANDO THE ANTI-NAZI CONFERENCE ORGANISER

In 2014 and 2015, Armando Rodríguez Pérez was the organiser of two international conferences for the Berg Institute. These were very high-level events lasting in each case for a fortnight, starting in Madrid and moving on to several other European cities. The academic directors of the conference were the two co-directors of the Berg Institute, one of whom was Armando’s academic supervisor, Prof. Joaquin González Ibáñez.

These conferences were imbued with the ‘anti-nazi’ and anti-fascist ethos of the Berg Institute. On 23rd June 2014, the second day of the conference included a homage to an exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía dedicated to the Picasso painting Guernica, the Spanish town bombed by the Condor Legion (a German force supporting General Franco’s Nationalists) in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, which has attained mythic, iconic status for anti-fascists.

A co-director of the Berg Institute gave a lecture to the conference titled ‘Colonialism, World Wars and the Holocaust’, then on 1st July (after the conference participants had visited the European Court of Human Rights), Armando organised a visit to the concentration camp at Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace. This was the only such camp established by the German authorities on French soil, and is often described as a ‘death camp’. Controversially, there is claimed to have been a homicidal gas chamber at the camp, but only a primitive one supposedly used for occasional experimental killings, not the mass killings alleged at Auschwitz and other camps in Eastern Europe.

The late revisionist scholar Prof. Robert Faurisson analysed this Natzweiler-Struthof ‘gas chamber’ story in detail. Faurisson discovered that even the scientific expert sent by French prosecutors to examine Struthof (Prof. René Fabre, Dean of the Pharmacology Faculty in Paris) concluded in December 1945 that there was no trace of hydrocyanic acid (i.e. the active ingredient in the alleged mass murder weapon ‘Zyklon B’, actually an insecticide) in Struthof’s alleged ‘gas chamber’. Neither did the corpses of allegedly ‘gassed’ victims that Fabre inspected in a Strasbourg morgue show any trace of this poison. Natzweiler-Struthof is thus unique among the alleged ‘death camps’ in having been inspected – not by a ‘revisionist’ but by an expert witness working for the new French government – and found not to have been used in the manner now described by the ‘Holocaust’ industry.

But none of this is mentioned by the Berg Institute, for whom the visit organised by Armando was simply a genuflection at a ‘Holocaust’ site. As with the trip to the Guernica exhibition in Madrid, this was an act of quasi-religious homage to the ‘victims of nazism’. As we shall see, the entire outlook of the Berg Institute is based on Holocaustian foundations.

The day after this act of homage at the ‘death camp’, the conference discussed the Nuremberg trials, which again are fundamental to the version of ‘international human rights law’ promoted by the Berg Institute.

A year later, in June-July 2015, Armando organised a second Berg Institute conference along very similar lines, again incorporating a visit to the Natzweiler-Struthof ‘death camp’. This time there was also a lecture by the academic lawyer Javier Chinchón from Madrid’s Complutense University, on the theme of historical memory and the state’s responsibility to ‘victims’. Chinchón argued that Spain had failed sufficiently to condemn the crimes of the Franco era: he has been one of the main academic lobbyists pushing for a strict ‘democratic memory law’ of the type recently adopted.

Armando’s present client Isabel Peralta has campaigned on the other side of this argument – but at no point has Armando admitted to her that he had himself been the organiser of academic conferences that actively promoted such a law; conferences that were thoroughly imbued with an ‘anti-fascist’ ethos seeking to ground the entire approach to ‘human rights’ in a politically-slanted approach to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

In 2013 an earlier Berg Institute conference – run along similar lines to the two organised by Armando himself during 2014-2015 – was organised by Armando’s partner in the GABEIRO firm, José Feliciano Beceiro Armada. This included a reception hosted by the Colombian Ambassador. (Beceiro and Armando were both involved in the Berg Institute’s training sessions for the Colombian Army and Security Forces.)

Yet again, this conference concluded with a solemn pilgrimage to the ‘death camp’ at Natzweiler-Struthof.

Armando’s colleagues at the Berg Institute have continued to organise these conferences every year, when not disrupted by the pandemic. In 2019 the conference was held in Israel, in coordination with the Berg Institute’s longstanding academic partner, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It included visits to the ancient historic icon of Masada, where, allegedly, Jewish soldiers killed themselves in 74 AD rather than surrender to Roman forces that had besieged the fortress; to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset; and of course a pilgrimage to the Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem.

In January 2022 a similar international conference organised by the Berg Institute included a pilgrimage to Auschwitz.

THE BERG INSTITUTE – ROOTED IN ‘HOLOCAUST’ STUDIES AND ANTI-NAZISM

The Berg Institute – for which Armando Rodríguez Pérez has worked and which was the co-organiser of his academic training – specialises in publishing the work of leading Jews in relation to the ‘Holocaust’, war crimes trials, and anti-Nazi activities.

Formally incorporated in 2009 as the Fundación Berg Oceana Aufklarung, its founder and co-director is Joaquín Gonzáles Ibáñez, a professor of international law and international relations at both the long-established Complutense University, Madrid, and at the much newer private university Alfonso X.

Interviewed in January 2019, Prof. Gonzáles explained that the Institute was partly inspired by his political hero Nelson Mandela, and stressed that its entire outlook on “human rights” was rooted in anti-fascism and anti-nazism:
“We always refer to the historic perspective, that probably the three worst legacies in the last centuries, the darkest hours, the darkest chapters, the most infamous moments in the last two centuries in world history were precisely created by Europeans. What I mean are the legacy of colonialism and fascism, all of them are European creations. So, Franco, Mussolini and Hitler and other historical characters are as European as van Gogh, Goya or Picasso. And in this program, we start with Auschwitz and we go to the Modern Art Reina Sofía Museum to encounter the Guernica from Picasso. And we have this tool, which is a legal approach, but also historical, political…”

Prof. Gonzáles went on to describe how his Berg Institute had created “the most important human rights library in the Spanish language.” This began in 2010 with Primo Levi’s Auschwitz Trilogy, which was “the cradle of the project, the first book of the collection, number zero, we were lucky to have the best departure point. …Going to Auschwitz hand in hand with Primo Levi, it shows you not just the past, but what are your main responsibilities towards planet earth.”

At the time of this interview in 2019, the Institute had just published Totalmente Extraoficial, the memoirs of Raphael Lemkin, first published in English in 2013 as Totally Unofficial. Most famous as the man who coined the term ‘genocide’, Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer who moved to the USA and became a special adviser to the US War Department. His 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe is regarded as a “foundational text in Holocaust studies”, and Lemkin went on to be the senior adviser to Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel to the Nuremberg trials.

The Spanish edition had 70 extra pages drawn from Lemkin’s archive and a prologue by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, a winner of the Jerusalem Prize who now resides in New York. Muñoz also wrote an introduction to the Berg Institute’s 2019 Spanish edition of the memoirs of Europe’s most famous militant “nazi-hunters”, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld (first published in French in 2015 and in English in 2018 as Hunting the Truth: Memoirs of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld). The video below shows an event jointly organised by the Berg Institute and a Jewish cultural centre in Madrid – Centro Sefarad Israel – paying tribute to the Klarsfelds.

It’s now known that the Klarsfelds worked on a regular basis with the communist East German secret police – the Stasi – to demonise Western politicians as “nazis” and stage “anti-nazi” propaganda stunts. They organised many secret operations against national socialist veterans and “neo-nazis” and in 1974 were convicted and given two-month jail sentences (later suspended) for the attempted kidnapping of former SS intelligence officer Kurt Lischka.

The Klarsfelds’ most famous achievements include tracking down former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie and having him deported from Bolivia to France for trial, and campaigning for the prosecution of retired French police chief Maurice Papon. They also tracked down René Bousquet, a former civil servant in the French government of Philippe Pétain in Vichy. Bousquet was murdered before he could stand trial.

On several occasions the Klarsfelds tried to track down Alois Brunner, a former Third Reich official who lived in Damascus after the war: Beate Klarsfeld even undertook an undercover mission to Syria, where she was briefly jailed.

Since the late 1970s one of the Klarsfelds’ main targets was the French revisionist scholar Prof. Robert Faurisson. They campaigned for his prosecution, testified at his trials, and organised anti-revisionist propaganda in many countries. They have also been active in campaigns against many different varieties of modern-day nationalist politicians, even those such as Marine Le Pen who painstakingly distance themselves from racialism, historical revisionism and ‘anti-semitism’.

The Klarsfelds are highlighted by Berg Institute founder Gonzáles as among his main inspirations, as is Fritz Bauer, the German Jewish judge who was responsible for alerting Israel’s intelligence service Mossad to the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, allowing them to begin the operation that ended in his kidnapping from Buenos Aires and subsequent trial and execution. Bauer also led the prosecution at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that began in 1963, and was the most important ‘Holocaust’-related trial after that of Nuremberg. The Berg Institute worked with the Fritz Bauer Institute to create a “Human Rights Film Award” in joint honour of Fritz Bauer and Raphael Lemkin.

Prof. Gonzáles has said that, while building the Institute, he “personally dreamt of my heroes, Lemkin, Primo Levi, of course, Klarsfeld and finally, Fritz Bauer. …Also, we are working in something special about the Civil War in Spain and the post-civil war and the trauma and the punitive and infamous legacy of Franco´s dictatorship and the luck of a democratic response during the last 40 years of Spanish democracy. We didn’t have in Spain any agenda designed when the Spanish transition unfolded on how to address the human rights violations and crimes of Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. Probably few people thought about this necessary scenario.”

In other words, Prof. Gonzáles addresses the failure to institutionalise “anti-fascism” in post-Franco Spain. This deficiency was remedied in 2022 with the “democratic memory law” which demonises Spanish nationalism and enshrines communists and anti-fascists as heroes, and by an accompanying “anti-semitism” law that effectively criminalises criticism of Judaism and many forms of Holocaust revisionism.

Other books published by the Berg Institute include:
– The Spanish edition of Deborah Lipstadt’s El juicio de Eichmann (2019): first published in English in 2011 as The Eichmann Trial.
– The Spanish edition of the memoirs of Richard Sonnenfeldt, a German-Jewish intelligence officer who was personal interpreter to Gen. William Donovan, head of the OSS (precursor to the CIA), and chief interpreter to the US prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials; these memoirs were published in Spanish by the Instituto Berg in 2018 as Testigo en Núremberg; first published in English in 2006 as Witness to Nuremberg.
– A book about American neo-nazis by Aryeh Neier, a German-Jewish lawyer who served for twenty years as president of George Soros’s ‘philanthropic’ network, the Open Society Institute; in the Instituto Berg’s Spanish edition (2020) this book is called Defendiendo a mi enemigo; first published in English in 1979 as Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and the Risks of Freedom.
– The memoirs of Sari Nusseibeh, a highly controversial Palestinian seen by many of his countrymen as a traitor because he advocates giving up the Palestinians’ right of return in exchange for unspecified ‘peace’ deals with Israel; Nusseibeh co-founded a joint initiative in 2002 with Ami Ayalon, former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet; the memoir was published by Instituto Berg in 2020 as Érase una vez un país: una vida palestina (first published in English in 2007 as Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life).
– El juicio del Káiser, by the Canadian Jewish academic William Schabas, a history of the attempt to put German Kaiser Wilhelm II on trial for ‘war crimes’ after the First World War; this Spanish edition was published in 2020; the first English edition in 2018 was titled The Trial of the Kaiser; much of Schabas’s work focuses on the development of human rights law in the context of the ‘Holocaust’ and the Nuremberg trial, though he has sometimes been controversial for his association with the Israeli left-wing and his criticisms of the Netanyahu governments.
– The memoirs of Telford Taylor, an American lawyer and intelligence officer most famous for his role as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial. This was published by Instituto Berg in 2022 as Anatomía de los juicios de Núremberg, and first published in English in 1992 as The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir.
– Justicia Imperfecta by Stuart Eizenstat, published by Instituto Berg in 2019, first published in 2009 as Imperfect Justice: Looted Assets, Slave Labor, and the Unfinished Business of World War II. This is an account of Eizenstat’s role during the 1990s in attempts to obtain financial compensation for Jewish families whose properties, belongings or bank accounts had allegedly been confiscated or otherwise lost during the ‘Holocaust’. Since 2013 he has been the US State Department’s “Special Adviser for Holocaust Issues”, appointed to that role by Hillary Clinton.

It really could not be clearer that the Berg Institute is one of Spain’s leading academic promoters of ‘Holocaust’ studies and is imbued with an anti-fascist and ‘anti-nazi’ ethos. Meanwhile the Berg Institute alumnus Armando Rodríguez Pérez has portrayed himself for the past two years as a militant fascist, national socialist, or national bolshevik: sometimes a Carlist, sometimes a Falangist, sometimes a pro-Franco advocate of an integral Spanish nation, sometimes promoting separatist schemes. While switching switching between factions, Armando has closely associated himself with militant wings of the Spanish ‘far right’. Not only did he act as a lawyer for the leading figures in the now defunct national socialist youth group Bastion Frontal, but he inserted himself into its leadership.

ARMANDO’S INFILTRATION MISSION

In recent months the mission of the anti-fascist infiltrator Armando Rodríguez Pérez has been extended. He has sought to become ever closer to Juan Antonio Llopart, a veteran radical nationalist and publisher. Armando portrays himself as a militant anti-Zionist seeking to liaise with the Iranian government and its allies.

He is now listed as ‘political action secretary’ to Llopart’s new organisation Movimiento Pueblo, which is seeking to register as a political party in time for the 2023 local elections. At a recent Madrid conference that he helped Llopart to organise, Armando met for the first time the British activist Lady Michèle Renouf, who naturally enough assumed that he was a bona fide nationalist and anti-Zionist. During the weekend of 2nd-4th December 2022, Armando attended a small gathering at Lady Renouf’s second home in the German countryside, where fellow guests included some well known figures on the German national socialist scene. Good news for the anti-fascist infiltrator Armando, who will have picked up intelligence and made what he hopes will be useful contacts. Those involved are now being warned as to Armando’s true allegiances, and we hope that the damage will be minimised.

These British and German connections have already allowed Armando Rodríguez Pérez to insinuate himself into a scheme to obtain Iranian assistance for a political fugitive wanted by the German authorities. We are fully informed about this plan, but for obvious reasons are not yet reporting the full details. Steps are being taken to minimise the damage that the anti-fascist infiltrator Armando Rodríguez Pérez can cause – though of course it’s not yet known whether his intention is to sabotage the rescue of this dissident, or to use the entire affair in order to ingratiate himself with Iranian networks and perhaps infiltrate them on behalf of Israeli interests.

What is certain is that Armando Rodríguez Pérez is bad news for nationalists, national socialists, revisionists and anti-Zionists. Several of his inconsistent ideological positions seem to have been adopted with the primary intention of weakening and dividing the radical nationalist movement, both within Spain and internationally.

In January this year when Madrid police were attempting to track down Isabel Peralta (who was at the time temporarily resident in Germany) they were telephoned by a lawyer called Alvaro Domec who claimed to be Isabel’s legal representative. In fact she had never met him, never corresponded with him, and never heard of him, but court papers in her ongoing trial for the May 2021 speech outside the Moroccan Embassy continue to present Domec as having been her lawyer.

For unknown reasons, none of the police and prosecution files relating to the investigation of Isabel Peralta and Bastión Frontal mention Armando Rodríguez Pérez. Moreover, despite the anti-fascist and mainstream media’s intense interest in Bastión Frontal, which was portrayed for much of 2021-2022 as a particularly dangerous and violent ‘neo-nazi’ organisation, no journalist and no ‘anti-fascist’ ever exposed its co-leader ‘Armando Bastión’ as being the outwardly respectable Madrid lawyer Armando Rodríguez Pérez. It is worth mentioning that the legal action brought by Isabel against the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jerusalem Post, in which Armando is acting as her legal representative, has twice been extended since no response had been received by the plaintiffs within the required deadline.

Equally mysterious was Armando’s own reticence during March 2022, when his client Isabel Peralta was detained at Frankfurt Airport and questioned, before being expelled from Germany in what appears to be a potentially illegal deportation; and in October 2022 when she was again detained by German police in Hessen and served with an exclusion order. On both occasions she was badly in need of a reliable German lawyer, but Armando gave every impression that he had no German contacts who could help.

At the time of Isabel’s March arrest in Frankfurt, it was the assistant editor of Heritage & Destiny, Peter Rushton – not her Madrid lawyer Armando Rodríguez Pérez – who made contact with an experienced German lawyer from Berlin, Wolfram Nahrath, and asked him to represent Isabel, which he did.

This was then used six or seven months later by the German authorities as ‘evidence’ that Isabel herself had ‘high-level connections’ with ‘German political extremists’.

Completely unknown to Isabel, her Spanish lawyer Armando actually has particularly close associations with German lawyers, a fact that he had studiously avoided mentioning to her. In fact his legal office in Madrid (C. de Serrano, 79, 7d), which was at one time the office of his defunct firm GABEIRO, now operates as the Madrid branch of a legal firm called Strafverteidiger Spanien. This firm has a German name, even though it is based in Barcelona and also has a branch in the tourist resort town of Palma de Mallorca.

The firm is headed by Armando’s friend and colleague María Barbancho Saborit, and specialises in representing German-speaking clients in need of legal representation in Spain, including people accused of financial crimes and/or facing European arrest warrants.

Ms Barbancho Saborit seems to be of part-German ancestry, and was educated at the Deutsche Schule in Barcelona, before spending part of her university course at Heidelberg. There is no suggestion that Ms Barbancho Saborit is necessarily party to or even aware of Armando’s double life inside European national socialist movements. She is qualified in both Spanish and German law.

CONCLUSION

The infiltration mission of Armando Rodríguez Pérez as a spy within radical nationalist and national socialist circles raises serious questions about the Spanish justice system.

How can it be right for an infiltrator to act as the legal representative for someone accused of political crimes, when unbeknown to his client, the lawyer concerned has a long record of association with completely opposed political ideas?

Naturally it is possible for a lawyer to represent someone whose views he does not share. But in this case Armando Rodríguez Pérez pretended to share those views – in fact acted as a leader of the political groups concerned as well as lawyer for their activists – while actually having a longstanding allegiance to opposing forces.

It is urgently necessary for the present prosecution of Isabel Peralta to be abandoned, and for the Spanish secret police and prosecutors to explain just how much they know about the real agenda of Armando Rodríguez Pérez.

Meanwhile we shall continue to work with those in nationalist, national socialist, revisionist and anti-Zionist movements in various countries in an effort to minimise and repair the damage inflicted by Armando Rodríguez Pérez.

As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote more than a century ago: Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens – Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “From the military school of life – What fails to kill me, makes me stronger.”

Robert Faurisson Archive restored – including newly rediscovered audio

On 21st October last year – the fourth anniversary of the death of the historical revisionist and literary scholar, Professor Robert Faurisson – the usual suspects removed the online blog hosting a comprehensive archive of his writings in several languages.

Thanks to the work of Professor Faurisson’s righthand man and translator, the blog has been restored at a new address, robert-faurisson.com

This blog remains under construction with material being added and adapted to the new format.

Among the most recent additions is an important rediscovery: an audio recording of a speech delivered by Professor Faurisson in New York in 1980, to a group of revisionists convened by Fritz Berg.

This period was a turning point in revisionist history. As implied by the meeting chairman, this was the early days of what has since become the established religion of Holocaustianity.

The American miniseries Holocaust had first been broadcast only two years earlier, in April 1978, and then rebroadcast in September 1979, just a few months before this meeting. It was first broadcast in Germany in January 1979 and undoubtedly had more impact than any of the more ‘serious’ treatments of the topic by the likes of Claude Lanzmann, with far more brainwashing effect on Germans than the immediate postwar propaganda by Anglo-American occupiers.

Robert Faurisson’s first reaction to this Hollywood production appears on the blog (in French) here. In English his comments, headed “The docudrama Holocaust or the end of a taboo”, translate as follows:

Hitler’s “gas chambers” never existed.

The “genocide” (or: the attempted “genocide”) of the Jews never took place.

Those so-called “gas chambers” and that so-called “genocide” are one and the same lie.

This lie is of essentially Zionist origin.

It has allowed a gigantic political-financial swindle of which the State of Israel is the chief beneficiary.

This lie was denounced by the Germans as early as 1944.

From 1945 to the present day it has also been denounced by Frenchmen, Britons and Americans.

For thirty years, the general public knew nothing of the fact that the lie had been exposed. The mainstream media said nothing about this. On the contrary, they repeated the lie in an ever more deafening way.

From 1974-1975, they started talking about those who exposed the lie. With insults, and distortions of their words. They said, for example: “These people are Nazis, madmen, cranks. They deny the obvious. They dare to say that the Nazi concentration camps and their crematory ovens didn’t exist.”

In 1977, the mass media continued still more vigorously. They put out cries of alarm. They said that Nazism was reappearing in Germany and a bit all over the world.

Not once have they agreed to give those whom they accuse a chance to speak.

Not once have they made known the precise opinions of the people accused.

Why is this?

Because they are afraid that the general public, on seeing what these people actually are and what they actually say, will realise that they have been lied to.

The general public would see that they are serious people, well informed, concerned with the truth and not with propaganda. They have never denied the existence of the concentration camps and the crematory ovens. They say that those camps existed and they add that the Germans were neither the first nor the last to use concentration camps. They say that those crematory ovens also existed and they add that there is nothing bad about burning corpses rather than burying them, above all in places where there is a risk of epidemic.

Moreover, they say that never did Germany’s leaders either give the order or equip themselves with the means to kill anyone simply because of his or her race or religion. The alleged “holocaust” of six million Jews is a lie orchestrated, like it or not, by the media. The American film Holocaust, described as a “docudrama”, is nothing but a farce and a political and commercial operation to boot. It constitutes the admission that now, in 1978, the Zionist taboo can choose only between sex-shop Nazism and show business hype.

Yet in the thirty-five years since Holocaust was first broadcast, cultural ‘occupation’ has proved more relentless than literal military occupation. Reportedly around half of the West German population watched the series.

Robert Faurisson pioneered the resistance to this brainwashing, and in 2023 his work is more relevant than ever before, as the reach of Holocaustian laws spreads even to countries such as the UK, Spain and Canada that were once relative havens of free historical investigation.

The Vincent Reynouard extradition hearing in Edinburgh next month will be an important stage in this steady encroachment of tyranny. It will be said that this is not backdoor criminalisation, because Vincent’s ‘crime’ was committed in France and it is ‘simply’ a matter of extraditing him to face French justice, regardless of the fact that he infringed no UK law.

But the effect is to move towards acceptance by the British media (and by British police and border control officers who collaborate with their European counterparts) that ‘Holocaust deniers’ and ‘Nazis’ are ipso facto criminals.

Here and at the Real History blog, a campaign of resistance to this tyranny is being prepared. Keep watching these two sites for further details, coming soon.

H&D writer Isabel Peralta banned from Germany for life

UPDATE: Isabel is now back on Twitter, even though banned from visiting Germany. The German government cannot suppress the truth forever, whether online or in person.

Germany is already known for its laws banning free political debate and historical research – most notoriously for the recent decision to imprison 94-year-old Ursula Haverbeck. It has become almost routine for Germany to deny basic human rights to its own citizens, while welcoming alien immigrants from every corner of the world.

Now the German authorities have again breached their basic obligations under the Schengen treaty, by which fellow Europeans are supposed to be allowed freedom to travel across its borders.

They are attempting to impose a life ban on Spanish nationalist activist and H&D writer Isabel Peralta – despite the fact she has never even been charged with, let alone convicted of, any criminal offence in Germany.

As we reported in Issue 111 of H&D (but has only yesterday been picked up by the mainstream press in Spain), German police detained Isabel on 6th October while she was minding her own business in the central German university town of Marburg. She was served with official papers ordering her to leave the country.

This followed earlier harassment at Manchester Airport, when Isabel was detained for more than six hours on 24th September, the night before her speech at the H&D meeting in Preston, which can be viewed online here.

It’s now apparent that UK authorities abused Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, so as to do a favour for their German colleagues. The UK authorities knew perfectly well that they had no valid reason to detain Isabel, but they used Schedule 7 as a ‘fishing expedition’ to collect political intelligence from her phone and computer, and pass it to the German authorities.

This has nothing to do with terrorism and nothing to do with UK law: British police and border security have become accomplices in the German authorities’ campaign of political persecution against nationalists.

Unlike post-Brexit UK citizens, Isabel is of course (as a Spanish citizen) entitled under European law (in fact under the European constitution) to enter Germany free of harassment, and for that matter to work or study in Germany.

Such rights can only be withdrawn in very exceptional circumstances: even convicted criminals are normally entitled to these rights.

In order to expel Isabel, and now to argue that she should be excluded from Germany for life, the authorities have had to argue not that she is a criminal (because they know that she has broken no German laws) but that she is a serious threat to “national security”, because she supposedly has such high-level connections with dangerous subversives in leadership positions among the “far right”, including people who aim to overthrow the German government!

This extraordinary paranoia reflects the fact that despite the evident short-term weakness of German nationalist movements, those who govern the occupied Federal Republic are aware of their lack of legitimacy. They know that their rule since the end of blatant Allied military occupation in the early 1950s has been based on lies, and they fear (correctly) that Isabel Peralta, as a brave and intelligent advocate of truth, is capable of inspiring a movement among new generations of Europeans that will eventually win.

That’s why they had to invent a quite ludicrous case against her, which now aims to exclude her from Germany for life. This legal and constitutional outrage will of course be appealed, if necessary as far as the European courts.

H&D and our colleagues in several European countries have been working for the last two months on a major investigation of the extreme measures that have been adopted by the enemies of nationalism to subvert our movement and deny legal and constitutional rights. Next week we shall publish the results of this investigation.

Our brave comrade Isabel is still facing legal proceedings in Spain under their version of the race laws (though this case is unrelated to her exclusion from Germany and does not provide any valid reason for the German authorities’ behaviour). She is also bringing a civil action against the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jerusalem Post, a case which has already begun in the Madrid courts.

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