I.
Students of Russian history soon learn the lesson that Russian history repeats. The past carries on over to the present, and in that past one can discern outlines of a racial type. Alfred Rosenberg would call this type a 'shape', Jung an 'archetype', Plato and Aristotle a 'Form', 'Universal', and 'Idea'. It recurs in the Russian history of the twentieth century and the twenty-first; the Prigozhin rebellion re-enacts the Kornilov Rebellion of 1917, the main difference being that unlike Kornilov's drive on St Petersberg, Prigozhin's 'March of Justice' on Moscow met with little in the way of political resistance. But like Kornilov's putsch, it failed nonetheless.
Prigozhin mounted his putsch for much the same reason that Kornilov mounted his: dissatisfaction with the war. By 1917, the Russians were losing badly to the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians, and Russian appetite for war had begun to wane. A last-ditch offensive - later dubbed the Kerensky Offensive - was launched into what is today Ukraine in order to deliver a victory that would boost Russian morale. The Kerensky Offensive did hurt the Austro-Hungarians, but not as badly as the Brusilov Offensive did the year before, and it was all for naught, as a combined German and Austro-Hungarian counter-offensive drove the Russians back to their starting line. Russian morale deteriorated further, and Kornilov, a Russian general, vowed to improve Russia's military fortunes. Like Prigozhin, Kornilov belonged to the 'patriotic' faction of the Russian armed forces that wanted Russia to stay in the war, but in a war to be waged the right way, that is, without the interference of civilians; and like Prigozhin, Kornilov advocated strict and brutal military discipline.
As to how Kornilov's coup attempt went: it got off to a good start as Kornilov advanced on the Russian capital, as Prigozhin did over a hundred years later; Kornilov intended to wipe out the St Petersburg Soviet, and the communists fortified St Petersburg (under the direction of Trotsky, or so the story goes) to protect the city against the anticipated attack. But they need not have bothered. Inexplicably, Kornilov's drive fizzled out at the last minute, like Prigozhin's.
Had Kornilov succeeded, Russia may have become a military dictatorship; as we know, Russia wound up with a Dictatorship of the Proletariat instead. What if Prigozhin had succeeded? We can make an educated guess after we study his character. Wolf Stoner delivers a brief chronicle of Prigozhin's life here. From it, we can find little to admire in Prigozhin, a shady Jewish-Russian businessman who made a fortune (like so many of the 'Jewish oligarchs' Putin supposedly had purged after his ascent to power) in the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 2000s, he flourished like all the post-Soviet nouveau riche, and in the 2010s, he formed a private military company (PMC) called Wagner, which drew recruits from Russia's prison system and which was what in WWII would have been called a penal battalion. Being recruited into Wagner is a punishment. In the present war, Wagner has suffered horrendous casualties on a scale comparable with those of a French division on the Western Front in WWI. But Wagner remains one of Russia's most experienced units, and in a war, the degree of a unit's experience determines much of its combat effectiveness. It remains to be seen how Russia will fare once the Wagner is withdrawn from the front line. And aside from the military repercussions, there are the political. An aspiring 'ultranationalist' (that is, pro-war) politician, Prigozhin has skilfully cultivated an image of himself as a populist and tough-talking, hard-bitten, no-nonsense man who gets things done. In spite of Wagner's reputation for cruelty and brutality, or perhaps because of it, Wagner has earned a following in Russia. One Prigozhin enthusiast is Rolo Slavski, whose work has been featured on Kevin MacDonald's Occidental Observer and Ron Unz' Unz.Com. Wolf Stoner argues convincingly that Slavski is a press agent paid for by Wagner.
If Putin had been ousted, it is quite possible that his successor would have put an end to the war. My reasoning is as follows. In the day before the coup attempt, Prigozhin let the cat out of the bag so far as the reasons why Russia went to war are concerned, as we can see from the quotations below. Prigozhin here goes beyond criticising the Ministry of Defence and the conduct of the war; he is attacking the rationale for the war itself.
This action makes him a dangerous man. We can deduce from his opinions that had he been in charge of Russia, he could have shut the war down, seeing its absurdity and folly. This ceasing of the war was a distinct possibility after Wagner's seizure of Rostov, Voronezh, and Tula, all towns vital to supplying the Russian army in Ukraine. These offered no resistance to Wagner, as they were unmanned - the majority of combat-effective Russian forces had been stationed at the front - and Wagner was received by the populace with enthusiasm or indifference. This makes Prigozhin's surrender a few miles from Moscow all the more strange. Prigozhin held the advantage; for the first time in a quarter century, Putin was in danger of losing power. The Russian people could have struck a blow against the Russian state the only way they know how: through rebelling, through staging a coup-d'état, through changing the regime through force. These methods are supremely Russian, as we know from 1905, 1917, and 1991, and Russians resort to them because of the simple fact that one cannot vote out the Tsar. And it is significant that the upsurges of 1905, 1917, and 1991 followed in the wake of military disasters, as did the one of 2023. In Russia, regime change, or reform, coincides with the winding down of a war effort and the ceasing of a foreign adventure. To go by history, then, we are right to think that Putin's dethroning could have led to the end of the war.
The end of the war, and a Russian retreat to the borders of 1991: would that be a good or a bad thing? I argue that it would be for the good. Russia has held the Western dissident Right movement in a death grip since at least 2014 and much of the mainstream conservative Right as well, especially the conservative Right of the Anglosphere. (The lines between the Center and Far Right have blurred in recent years, and as have those between the Far Left and Far Right, and recognising this, Putin makes appeals to both extremes on the Left and Right simultaneously, sometimes within the same speech). Were the grip on the Right to slacken, as it would after a Russian military defeat, then we would be freeing ourselves from political influence. But then, is defending the Right and prying it from the clutches of Russia worth it? To judge by the experience of the last ten years, the answer is no; the dissident Right does not want to emancipate itself. Whereas Ukrainians believe that the defense of their interests against Russia is worth it, dissident Rightists do not.
If a member of the movement is to distinguish his ideology from that the Kremlin's, he needs to ask himself who he really is and what he really believes. Clarifying is required because we on the Right today find ourselves in an absurd position. During the Prigozhin putsch, Zelensky promised to defend the West: 'Ukraine is able to protect Europe from the spread of Russian evil and chaos'. But many of those on the Far Right, especially in the Anglosphere, endorse the Russian 'evil and chaos'; fighting NATO expansionism, denouncing Victoria Nuland's cookies, etc., takes precedence over any racialism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, 'National Socialism', and the like. Beliefs held to for two decades more were thrown out overnight after the Russian invasion of February 2022; anti-Nazism, anti-fascism, became 'based' (in 4Chan parlance); as did Russia's 'defensive' wars against Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler; as did the Soviet Union's decades-long campaign (in the First World and the Third) against Western 'imperialism', 'colonialism', and 'racism'. Is Zelensky, then, the real Neo-Nazi? What is a Neo-Nazi anyway?
II.
The Russian World, or Russkiy Mir, is organised around a few central principles that have been upheld for hundreds of years by a Russian ruling elite whether it be Tsarist or Communist or Putinist; the principles have been impressed upon a Russian populace that obeys its rulers with a serf-like obedience. The ruling elite uses a set of procedures of social control that have not changed since Czarist times. In that connection, the Marquis de Custine's observations on Russian life could have been written yesterday. Amusingly enough, Custine undertook a pilgrimage to Russia, like a member of the dissident Right in the Putin years, in order to learn from Russia's 'based' ways. He came away disillusioned.
Custine visited Russia in 1839, spending most of his time in St. Petersburg, but also visiting Moscow and Yaroslavl. A political reactionary in his own country, fearful that democracy would inevitably lead to mob rule, he went to Russia looking for arguments against representative government, but he was appalled by autocracy as practiced in Russia and equally by the Russian people's apparent collaboration in their own oppression. He attributed this state of affairs to what he saw as the backwardness of the Russian Orthodox Church, combined with the disastrous effects of the Mongol invasion of medieval Russia, and the policies of Peter the Great.
Most of Custine's mockery was reserved for the Russian nobility and Nicholas I. Custine said that Russia's aristocracy had "just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be 'spoiled as savages' but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like 'trained bears who made you long for the wild ones.'" Custine criticized Tsar Nicholas for the constant spying he ordered...
According to Kennan, Custine saw Russia as a horrible domain of obsequious flattery of the Tsar and spying. Custine said the air felt freer the moment one crossed into Prussia.
Russia, then as now, is the only country run by its secret service. Left to their own devices, the Russians would be harmless enough; but the Russian secret service, and the Russian state, devote an enormous amount of time, energy, and effort to the task of subverting dissident movements in the West.
After the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, neutral observers in the West noticed the enormous number of spam in the comments section of every article devoted to news on Ukraine. All of these sounded as though they were written by the same person and all concerned the same themes - the Maidan 'coup', Victoria Nuland's cookies, Ukrainian 'repression' of Russian speakers in Ukraine and the Donbas, Ukrainian Neo-Nazism, interference in Ukrainian politics by a combination of the Mossad, MI5, and the CIA. The new line was echoed by respectable luminaries on the Far Right and the Far Left. In 2014, shortly after the Euromaidan, I along with my nationalist friends had been proud of the Ukrainian nationalists' participating in the ouster of the Yanukovych; it seemed as though our side of politics had become involved in great world events at last. But I was soon aghast to discover that, in the eyes of my peers on the Far Right, Ukrainian nationalism and 'Neo-Nazism' was not good but bad and that it deserved to punished. And punished it was, firstly by Russia's annexing of Crimea, then by Russia's setting up of Soviet-style phony 'independent people's republics' in Donetsk and Luhansk, and finally by Russia's making open war on Ukraine. Before 2014, I felt vague misgivings towards Putin; after 2014, I began to realise, with a growing certainty, that Putin was not the friend we on the Far Right had assumed him to be.
I became baffled by Russia's attracting both the Left and Right; after 2014, Putin assembled a real Red-Brown coalition. We saw an instance of it at work at the 'Rage Against the War Machine' rally held in Washington, D.C., in February 2023; there communists and libertarians demonstrated as part of a 'Stop the War' effort in support of the country that was making war (of course Tucker Carlson praised those in attendance as 'reasonable people'). I saw the phenomenon repeated many times in 2014 and after. To take one example: during the 'referendum' on the annexation of Crimea to Russia, communists and neofascists from Europe did duty together as 'election observers'. In retrospect, the sight of these left-wing and right-wing 'extremist' serving the Kremlin together induces mirth; one has to ask if these Far Rightist and Far Leftist 'election observers' talked to one another; what were the conversations like, did they compare notes? In Putin's world, any differences between Left and Right only exist on the surface and as such are trivial. Western commentators in 2022 and 2023 were bemused by the sight of Russians on the battlefield and social media wearing Neo-Nazi symbols one day, neo-Bolshevik symbols the next. This was equally as jarring as the sight of Russian Orthodox priests blessing framed portraits of Josef Stalin. Roman Skaskiw explains it:
Long time observers may be confused why Russia so readily embraces the most obviously conflicted ideologies. Ideologies are just costumes for Russia. Underlying everything is a religious belief in an all powerful Czar, and in salvation through enduring and inflicting suffering.
Here we have the key. The two main principles of Russkiy Mir are: religious suffering and fealty to the Czar. Again, both of these would be harmless enough if confined to Russia; but Russia must perpetually export them.
III.
Russian propaganda is all-pervading and unrelenting. It is also extremely centralised, as much today as it was eighty to ninety years ago. Then communist parties all around the world (including Australia) were perfectly synchronised, and directives transmitted via the Comintern instructed Russia's agents what to say and think.
Over-centralising can make propaganda sometimes strong, other times weak. Deficiency manifests itself when the absence of directives from a center panics and disorients. The soldiers waging war for Russkiy Mir in the 'information sphere' are then cut adrift. We saw this on display when Prigozhin launched his coup.
In the Anglosphere, three types of nationalist and racialist organisations exist: those who are closed off to Kremlin propaganda, those are open to it, and those who are indifferent to it. If I survey some of my most visited sites, I see that Renegade Tribune and National Vanguard belong in the closed category, Occidental Observer and Unz.Com in the open, and American Renaissance in the indifferent. Counter-Currents and VDare sit on the fence. VDare appears to be in the indifferent category, but whoever controls the VDare Twitter account does post messages about 'Corrupt Ukraine' and Victoria Nuland's cookies. In the case of Counter-Currents, the editor Greg Johnson aligns himself with the Ukrainians against the Russians - he forged links with Ukrainian nationalists in the 2010s - but I have noticed a number of 'neutralist' (or 'nootralist' in 4Chan speak) articles recently. I suspect that Johnson, who needs to publish new articles every day, cannot afford to be too choosy. He overlooks the content of these neutralist screeds and publishes them regardless.
Russian trolls, Vatniks, FSB agents, CHUGgers (see below), stay away from the open category sites as a rule; there no need to spend time there. The Vatniks will make a sortie into the closed sites, but are usually swatted away quickly. Their advances are rebuffed. So where do they go?
The answer is, to the one popular racialist, nationalist, Neo-Nazi site that has no editorial policy and little to no moderation, and that is 4Chan/Pol. This board, influential in the 2010s and perhaps not so much in the 2020s, is still seen by Vatniks as a prize. They fight for control of it, and they fight 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Their efforts have paid off; they have not yet subdued it, but they have caused a split. 4Chan is now divided up into two 'sticky' forums, and these are the anti-Russian UHG (Ukrainian Happenings General) and the pro-Russian CHUG (Comfy Happenings in Ukraine General). A poster who subscribes to the doctrines of the latter is a CHUGger.
During the Prigozhin putsch, the CHUGGers, Vatniks, and FSBers fell strangely silent, almost as though the Internet in Moscow had been turned off (in fact, it had). They were unsure as to who to favour - Putin and Prigozhin - and were awaiting orders, orders which in the chaos were not forthcoming. Their uncertainty mirrored that of the agents of the Kremlin state itself. One of Russia Today's leading propagandists, Margarita Simonyan, claimed that she had been unaware that a putsch was taking as place, as she had been holidaying on the Volga at the time.
In the days before the putsch, the CHUGgers had of course been busy propagating the Kremlin line on these subjects:
- The Kalkhovka Dam explosion: the Ukrainians had done it;
- The June 19th rocket attack on Kiev, which had sent a delegation of African Heads of State scurrying to a bomb shelter: it either never happened, or it was the fault of the Ukrainians, who wanted to frame the Russians;
- The Ukrainian counter-offensive: a failure, one that had taken many Ukrainian soldiers' lives needlessly; it would be canceled any moment now, and could NATO and America have their money back please?
CHUGgers seek to: demoralise (in Yuri Bezmenov's sense) those in the West; ridicule non-Russian opponents; and discourage Russian opposition and resistance to the Putin regime. Putin's Russians are not ones for self-sacrifice and high ideals, which is why so few of them have volunteered for the war. The coarseness and baseness of the CHUGger world-view explain why it is that CHUGgers abstain from an attempt to influence and persuade their opponents through careful reasoning and logic; instead they are to constantly abuse and insult opponents and call their motives into question; anyone against the Putin agenda is a homosexual, a Jew-lover ('Zelensky is a kike, don't you know?'), a multi-cultist, an enthusiast for unrestricted non-white immigration, and an advocate of 'globohomo' (a shortening of 'global homogeneity' and a sly pun on 'globalist homosexual'). This world-view contradicts the official Kremlin line - after all, we know what Putin's opinions are on Jews and anti-Semites - but as we have seen, Russians view consistency as the hobgoblin of small minds.
But it would be a mistake to classify all these trolls, Vatniks, CHUGgers, et al., as Russian; many of them are Indians posting from India, for instance, or non-white immigrants living in the Anglosphere (in countries such as Canada, for example). They do what they do either because they have been paid or indoctrinated, and they are tasked with creating certain illusions. One of these is that Russia enjoys support all across the world and especially in the Anglosphere, and to that end, they will hide their locations using a VPN, for on 4Chan, the flag of the country you are posting from appears at the head of your post.
In the 24 hours of the Prigozhin coup, the CHUGgers stayed away from 4Chan, and once the news broke that Prigozhin had cut a deal, the CHUGgers returned. And as could be expected, they reacted with malice and glee. In their minds, they had triumphed over the anti-Russians on 4Chan; they had 'won'. Putin had narrowly averted an African or Latin American-style coup, this counted as a 'win', and 'winning' is all that matters to the troll, whose entire life revolves around asserting himself over strangers.
IV.
All this bewilders, and what is most bewildering of all is the lack of principles involved. How, exactly, is Putin 'based'? Biden likes non-white immigrants, and lots of them; so does Putin. Biden likes the Great Replacement; so does Putin. Biden likes Jews, and appoints them to his cabinet; so does Putin. Biden likes miscegenation; so does Putin. Biden likes brown people; so does Putin. And so forth.
But we are told by Putin's followers that this is all an imposture, a ruse; we are told that the day is coming when Putin shall unmask himself and reveal himself to the world as an immigration restrictionist, a racialist, an anti-Semite, and a Nazi sympathiser; and on that day, the Jews of Russia will be put in their place and the 'churka' (a Russian derogatory term meaning 'blockhead from the Caucasus') immigrants who have flooded the country in the millions will be deported.
Those followers of Putin's are fostering illusions, of course; we know what the ideology of Putin, which is the ideology of Russkiy Mir, consists of. As an example of it, see the tweets of the Russian Embassy in America in the Trump years. The Embassy bragged that Russia is building a big mosque, bigger than any ever built on American soil. The Embassy feels that this is 'owning' Trump, 'owning' America.
All of this brings to mind Evola and his theses that a) America and Russia are two sides of the same coin, and that b) the Modern World is sinking into decadence and its final age, the age of the Kali Yuga, the age before the End of Everything. What can arrest that slide? Agents of decline such as Putin have presented us with clues.
Putin hates above all else 'Neo-Nazism', and he launched the 2022 invasion of Ukraine because of it; so what is it? One could deduce from Russian rhetoric after 2014 that 'Neo-Nazism' is the handful of Ukrainian soldiers who wear Wolfsangle rune tattoos. This, according to Putin, is a great evil; and it is something so despicable, so deplorable, that it merited an invasion. Young Ukrainian couples are to be blown up in their apartments daily by Iranian drones, children are to be blown up in their cribs, and this is a sad necessity; the blood of innocents must be spilled in order to destroy 'Neo-Nazism'.
I define Neo-Nazism differently from Putin. In order to arrive at a definition, and glean what the world-view of the real Neo-Nazis was, a good place as any to start is Martin E. Lee's The Beast Reawakens (1998):
Tracing the history of neo-Nazism over the past half-century, this book sets out to demonstrate the growing symbiosis between right-wing groups in Europe and America. From Nazi spymasters in the post-war German intelligence services to Nazi emigres in South America, it describes how a well-organized underground network kept memories of the Third Reich alive thoughout the Cold War. And while European Nazis necessarily kept a low profile, American groups such as the Holocaust-denying Liberty Lobby openly promoted the fascist agenda. When the Berlin Wall fell, fascism in Europe, dormant for 45 years, began making headlines again. German skinheads, many inspired by neo-Nazi propaganda originating in the US, terrorized minorities and then, through the Oklahoma City bombing, America's own militia movement served notice that fascist extremism was alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic.
As could be expected, the book's author, who is a liberal anti-fascist, feels nothing but enmity towards nationalism and racialism, especially German nationalism and racialism, but the book can serve as a useful guide to the prominent personalities on the Far Right in America and Europe after WWII, and I wish I had read it in my youth, as I would have become familiar with the movement in a shorter amount of time.
It goes without saying that Lee holds up a distorting mirror to the movement. Like the trashy novelists of the period, Lee sensationalised and exploited Neo-Nazism.
Before the advent of the Internet and the smart phone, boomers read a lot of print - they still do - and they would make a bestseller out of what in the seventies and eighties became known as the airport novel. These were usually thick, so as to entertain the reader for a flight that would take hours, and they were easy to read. Appropriately enough, the spy and thriller airport novels were jet-setting; the story would take place across several countries and continents, and the plots usually involved international intrigue and mystery.
In keeping with the loose morals of the time, the novels exploited sex. A sleazy tone pervaded. For that reason, I devoured these novels as a teen after I had grown tired of fantasy and science-fiction, because I wanted to read what the adults were reading. And I discovered a world in which men did not make love to women or even have sex with women; no, they 'bedded' them, as if women were foam batting.
One cannot not discount these thrillers as escapism and romanticism, because of all the literary genres, the airport thriller is the most political of all. By studying it, a sociologist can learn a great deal about Cold War politics, and terrorist politics, and Neo-Nazi politics. One novel, Black Sunrise (1997) by a Robert Hayden sums up Lee perfectly; Lee's 'investigative' journalism is embodied in schlock-literary form:
ONE THING IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN: MARTIN BORMANN DID NOT PERISH IN THE RUINS OF BERLIN.
JULY 1956
Eleven years have passed since the end of World War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany. But in those years Martin Bormann and Mengele, safe in their hideouts in the jungles of South America, have been planning the birth of the Fourth Reich. Eleven years have passed since the end of World. War II and the collapse of Nazi Germany. But in those eleven years Bormann and the notorious Doctor Mengele, safe in their hideouts in the jungles of South America, have been planning the birth of the Fourth Reich. Now, with the help of Colonel Nasser’s military junta, they are preparing to launch their evil plan codenamed
Project Sunrise.
It is to begin with the seizure of Britain's oil jugular, the Suez Canal.
Between them and the success of this diabolical plan stand two men: CIA superstar Matt Corrigan and Mossad spymaster Mike Sharon. With invaluable help from the "Committee", a secret shadowy group of ex-concentration camp survivors, they uncover Sunrise, led in Europe by a sinister figure known only as Vulcan.
Who is Vulcan?
The deadly race is on to find out, and to stop him as East and West are brought to the brink of World War III.
Hayden blends fact and fiction seamlessly in his terrifyingly believable new thriller.
Black Sunrise borrows much of its plot from Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File (1972), the book that began the 'Nazism resurgent' sub-genre of the airport novel. Among other notable works in the genre are William Goldman's Marathon Man (1974), Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1977), and many novels by Robert Ludlum. Novels in the genre cry out for parody, but in the end, there is no need; the novels parody themselves. By the time of The Watchdogs of Abaddon (1980) by Ib Melchior, we have reached the heights of bathos:
1945: A NEW MESSIAH RISES FROM THE ASHES OF THE THIRD REICH
A group of SS officers flees in mortal terror from a remote hut in the heart of Nazi Germany. In their wake, a trail of bloody carnage - and in their keeping a secret prized possession: the son of Adolf Hitler.
1978: THE WATCHDOGS ARE WAITING
A motiveless murder, a single photograph and an instinct for trouble plunge Harry Bendicks, ace investigator, into a nightmare world of political intrigue, frenzied murder and power-crazed manipulation. The trail leads Bendicks back 30 years to war-torn Europe and the deadly horror of a lethal conspiracy that threatens to destroy the very fabric of the Western word.
THE WATCHDOGS HAVE WOKEN - AND THEY HERALD THE FOURTH REICH!
THE WATCHDOGS OF ABADDON blazes a trail from Nazi Germany to the heart of Washington to the fabulous wealth of the Middle Eastern oil empires, and explodes in a brilliant nerve-shattering climax...
With only a little imagination, one could conceive of a Russian novel published in 2023; its plot would concern a brilliant Russian secret agent who sneaks into Ukraine in early 2022 and blows up one of the US and German biolabs that are growing the virus that infects and kill only Russians. (Perhaps, too, the laboratory is breeding the mosquitos that attack only Russian soldiers). Zelensky will be portrayed as belonging to a secret cabal of Zionists, Banderites, and Neo-Nazis; as one literary critic has observed, the 'Nazism resurgent' airport novel turns the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on its head; the Neo-Nazis and not the Jews are the ones who have founded a secret society that engages in international conspiracies and aims to take over the world.
To convey overtones of Ludlum, such a novel should be given a double-noun title, e.g., The Kornilov Affair. But that title, good as it is, sounds too soft. We need something harder-edged, perhaps something such as The Kornilov Memorandum. Other titles for our Putinesque thriller could be The Kiev Protocol, The Dnieper Pact, The Kharkov Covenant, The Kherson Factor, The Melitopol Exchange, and The Rostov Ultimatum.
VI.
The Odessa File was named after Odessa, a city in Ukraine that became important after the outbreak of the war in 2014; the name Odessa re-entered circulation decades after the publication of Forsyth's best-seller. This, I think, lends weight to the argument that airport thrillers are grounded in political reality. We must take the Neo-Nazi novels seriously and ask what it is in The Odessa File that a Neo-Nazi such as William Pierce would not like?
In The Odessa File, without the mass of the similarly unsuspecting West German population having the slightest inkling, the remnant of the SS has assumed sufficient power to start the Third World War (by means of rockets, equipped with bubonic plague bacillus and nuclear waste, launched against Israel). It typically requires only the slightest stimulus to galvanize the still existing frame of Nazism back to violent life. [John Sutherland, Bestsellers : popular fiction of the 1970s (1981)]
Such an outcome is deplored by the Anglo-Saxon and the Russian. Forsyth's novel was inspired by a visit to a German ex-servicemen's club in the early 1960s; Forsyth was dismayed by these soldiers' boisterousness, their pride in their military service, and their lack of repentance for 'Nazi crimes' (here we can see where the ideology of a Forsyth intersects with that of a Putin). Afterwards, Forsyth conceived the idea for his novel and wrote the book in co-operation with 'Nazi hunter' Simon Wiesenthal.
I read the novel in my teens, and in my memory only a few passages stand out - passages of the sort that induce laughter (in a teenage boy) that are not meant to. Far more memorable was the movie adaptation. This was released in 1974 and starred American actor Jon Voight (a lifelong activist for Israel and a big supporter of Trump) as the hero, a crusading West German journalist named Peter Miller. Opposing him is the villain, the Nazi Eduard Roschmann, who is known as the 'Butcher of Riga'; Roschmann is played by the great Austrian actor Maximilian Schell, who steals the show. (Bizarrely, IMDB (Internet Movie Database) claims that Schell was a 'dedicated anti-Nazi', even though he was a seven year old at the time of the union between Germany and Austria). The highlight of the movie occurs when Roschmann delivers a monologue at the end; in this scene, Roschmann, declaiming before Miller, is the old Germany speaking to the new.
When one is watching the movie and others like it, one contemplates a paradox: the villain of the piece, a 'Nazi', seems to be talking nothing but sense. By dint of his charisma, he makes 'Nazism' glamourous, alluring, and seductive. Surely, then, the Jews who make these movies (and we know from Pierce that American entertainment and media is controlled by Jews) are flirting with danger? Do they have a death wish?
Here I am not interested in plumbing the depths of the Jewish psyche; I want to come to a conclusion as to what makes Roschmann and the other villains of the 'Nazism resurgent' genre attractive. And I think the answer lies in the simplicity of their world view: the Roschmanns and their objectives are easy enough to understand and delimit. Hegel said that we can define a thing by limiting it. This is true when it comes to a Hollywood Nazi such as Roschmann. We know who he is, where he stands, and what he wants to do. His objectives are easy to understand and fulfill: he wants to bomb the Jews of Israel with plague-infected rockets - what could be simpler?
In the movie, Miller pays a visit, like Forsyth, to a German ex-serviceman's club, and he spies on the reunion of the veterans of a fictional SS division. Despite their age, the veterans have not grown 'wiser' with time. They feel no repentance; they love life; and they are still proud, boastful, arrogant, and patriotic Nazis; and this repels Miller. When he confronts Roschmann, he finds Roschmann exhibiting the same distasteful qualities. But these are not confined to the Germans of the Third Reich. Roschmann merely echoes the arrogant, militaristic 'Prussian' whom the British and French confronted in 1914; this is the Prussian who is cast as the villain in thousands of British and American polemics that were so many morality plays. It is the cockiness of these 'Prussians', in the war years 1914 to 1918, and 1939 to 1945, that really gets under the skin of the Americans and the British; the Anglo wants to get back at this German and take him down a peg or two; 'I'll teach you, I'll learn you, I'll re-educate you!'. The goal is to break the Teuton's pride and make him hate himself.
VII.
Novelists such as Forsyth, Ludlum, and Crichton made a fortune out of writing paranoid thrillers that exposed international conspiracies. In these tales, ordinary people are directed and manipulated by shadowy elites and mysterious men behind the scenes; these hidden individuals wield great power - the power over life and death. This world-view is political, however much these novelists may profess otherwise - they may state that they are mere entertainers out to make a fast buck - and its political assumptions, frighteningly enough, were borne out in the Covidian years. Journalists, politicians, 'health professionals', and other members of the political establishment all spoke with one voice, and from Auckland to Manila, Moscow to London, Ottowa to Buenos Aires, they followed the one script. And the masses followed obediently, like sheep. Unveiled was a new political model, one in which democracy, the will of the people, elections, opinion polls, etc., were to be circumvented. Life imitated art; events mimicked those of a cheap thriller. Suddenly, Forsyth and Ludlum no longer seemed implausible.
The heroes in these thrillers are often presented with a stark choice: they can either be one of the ordinary folk or one of the globalist master-men, a transnational member of one of elites whose existence is posited by Nietzsche and Michels. As master-types, Prigozhin and Putin belong to this class, and so do Fauci and Gates.
The spiritual home of these master-men is Switzerland, which hosts the Davos forum; it is no coincidence that the action of many of the seventies thrillers (see Ludlum's Bourne novels, which were turned into a movie series starring Matt Damon) takes place there.
Soros, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Putin, Schwab, have all been compared to James Bond villains, and any of these men could double as Jason Bourne villains as well. But, when we are reading airport thrillers, we detect an ambiguity in the feelings of their authors towards the men of power. The master-men may be immoral, but they grasp how it is that the political, economic, and social system works, and to a certain extent they steer the system. In this they show themselves themselves superior to the average man; they are men of a higher type. Reading between the lines, we can surmise that if a paranoiac conspiracy theorist such as Ludlum were to be given the choice of being ignorant and being in the know, he would choose the latter.
In the airport novels, then, the hero, once he crosses the Rubicon and sets out on a journey to becoming a master-man, puts morality by the wayside; he views the world in terms of what Spengler calls technics, that is, the technical means of achieving one's goals without considering morality or anything else that could stand in one's way. Viewing these men from such a perspective, one asks how it is that a master-man of the Soros or Bezos type uses his wealth and power. What are the means, not the ends, and what patterns does a Soros or Bezos follow, and can their procedures be imitated?
We can bring the question to bear on our politics - movement politics. What if our master-man were, in the best tradition of Ludlum and Forsyth, to use the wealth and power of a Soros to 'build the Fourth Reich'? If he were a Mengele or Bormann figure lurking in his South American hideaway, what would he do? (A man of Bormann or Mengele's age would be very old, but we can assume in this scenario that he has discovered, like Doctor Fu Manchu, an elixir of youth).
In Ludlum's novel The Holcroft Covenant (1978), the hero Noel Holcroft (played by Michael Caine in the 1985 movie adaptation), an American architect who lives in New York, receives a bequest from his late father, Heinrich Clausen, a German who has served as an economic advisor to Hitler. The inheritance is stored in a Swiss bank, naturally enough, and comes to the tune of $USD780 million - a handsome sum then as it is now. Holcroft is told the story that his father, one of the 'good Germans', stole the money from his fellow Germans, and that he wants it distributed to Holocaust survivors. But all is not as it seems. In a superb plot twist, it is revealed that Clausen is tricking his son from beyond the grave; the money is to be put to work building the Fourth Reich.
Forty-five years after the novel was published, any member of movement reading it will ask himself what he would do with the $USD780 million: what and who would he spend it on?
The first impulse, I think, of any 'Neo-Nazi' would be to spend at least some of that money on altering the public's perception of Hitler, National Socialism, the Third Reich; that is, the money should be spent on Holocaust Revisionism. But most of the work of Revisionism has been done already, and on a shoestring budget, by men such as Carlo Mattogno and Germar Rudolf. Much can be done, still, to disseminate the ideas of these men until they become as nearly as popular as, say, the ideas of the global-warming doom-mongers. But would such an effort bring a Roschmann or Vulcan closer to his goals?
In 2023, I think, our Bormann or Mengele figure would be more certain what not to do with his Nazi gold. He would not sink money into, for instance, pro-Russian political parties such as Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). The reason for his aversion would be twofold.
Firstly, National Socialists, or 'Nazis', uphold truth; truth is most Aryan; Evola writes in The Doctrine of Awakening that the ancient Aryans held telling a lie to be worse than committing a murder. Now, before his abortive coup, Prigozhin told some of the truth, and this outraged sections of both the Left and Right. The British communist Jack Conrad dismisses Prigozhin's statements:
Of course, this narrative echoes western propaganda - conveniently ignoring, as it does, Ukrainian plans to dramatically escalate military attacks on the Russian majority areas in Donbass and Nato expansionism (Ukraine was placed on the first rung with a Nato membership action plan in November 2002).
This is unhinged: Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 because of a 'Nato membership action plan' twenty years before? Conrad is far more plausible when he contends that the 2022 invasion was a spoiling attack: Ukraine planned to 'dramatically escalate military attacks on the Russian majority areas in Donbass', and so Russia invaded in early 2022 to forestall the attacks and throw Ukraine off-balance. That is the official Kremlin line. But no evidence can be found for a Ukrainian military build-up and plans for a massive assault on the Donbas. Even so, had Ukraine planned an offensive, it would have been in the right; Ukraine cannot invade its own territory. In 1914, France invaded Alsace-Lorraine and Russia invaded East Prussia, and Germany launched a series of counter-offensives to drive the French and Russians out. If France and Russia behaved in the same manner as Putin did a hundred years later, they would have made the spurious claim that there were no French or Russian soldiers in Alsace-Lorraine and East Prussia; instead, there were only 'French and Russian backed separatists'. But this was in the days before Putin's brand of 'hybrid warfare', which operates on Mossad's principle, 'By Way of Deception Thou Shalt Wage War'. And that principle is most un-Aryan.
The second principle of National Socialism is race, or at least the recognition of racial otherness. Yockey writes that Europe by the 1930s and 1940s recognised itself, for the first time, to be a Culture, and as such, distinct from other Cultures such as the Magian, to which Jews and Muslims belong. Before Hitler, Europe did not really concentrate its attentions on the Jew overly much - the Jew was an afterthought and an annoyance - and after Hitler, Europe saw the Jew for what he was: a member of another Culture, an alien, a foreigner, a non-Westerner. When it considered the Russians, National Socialism did not put the Russian on the same plane as the Jew. But the heightened racial sensitivity of the National Socialists entails a recognition of Russian racial otherness; the Russian is 'not like us'; he is The Other. This characterising has been validated by the present war. One can find a thousand examples of how the Russian thinks, feels, behaves differently from the Westerner. And in this day of social media and the smartphone, none of it can be covered up, as it was in 1945.
In future writing, then, we should examine how Russian conduct during the present war has affected the world's view of Russia, and in particular, the West's view; and how that same conduct leads the world, and the West, to revise its opinions of Russia in WWII. In advance, I can state that the war has been a godsend to Holocaust and WWII Revisionists, and to 'Nazis' (if they still exist).
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