Not in vain is Russia heir to the traditions of Byzantium; intrigue, secret diplomacy and espionage are integral to the Third Rome’s strategic culture. Over the past decade Vladimir Putin has proven a consummate practitioner of statecraft in this fashion, as well as an able defender of the national interest. Yet where is he leading Russia? The answer remains a mystery. His formidable will and predisposition to action are impressive, but only in the service of a higher principle will these gifts signify greatness.

Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.

Essentially every article one reads regarding the current Eurozone mess focuses on one end of the chain of irresponsibility or the other. Half of the finger-wagging is directed at the stingy Germans, who are deemed recklessly irresponsible for their reluctance to shovel their savings into the endless money pit that is southern Europe in order to socialize the losses of various bankers who have profited enormously from the previously artificially inflated credit-worthiness of the PIIGS. The other half is typically directed at the PIIGS themselves, most notably at  Greece since it seems to be the pig on the spit at the moment. This half of the self-indulgent finger-wagging is intended to admonish them for not tightening their belt enough . . .  with a fair amount of hand-wringing about the proles and their inconceivable unwillingness to either sell their country's assets at fire-sale prices, or to accept a descent into abject poverty via austerity measures imposed to reduce an astronomically high level of completely unserviceable debt to a slightly lower level of completely unserviceable debt.

The economic crisis is the most prominent issue facing the EU these days. But there is also another issue – a silently emerging one – that may have even more serious repercussions for the EU’s future than the economic crisis.If the mishandling of the issue of immigration - both legal and illegal – continues, it may well threaten the existence of the EU as we know it. Recently, the pressure is mounting on a basic pillar of the EU: the Schengen Agreement.

The Schengen Agreement led to the creation of the Schengen Area through the strengthening of external border controls and the abolition of internal controls among Schengen states. The Agreement also set the preconditions for police and judicial cooperation and a common set of rules on visas and asylum. Schengen states may reinstate border controls for reasons of public policy or national security, but only for a short period.

How legal immigration threatens the solidarity among EU states

Citizens of the EU and the Schengen Area may move and settle from one State to another provided that they have the means for supporting themselves. Recent EU enlargements towards Eastern Europe in 2004 and 2007 have resulted in significant movements of labour from the new members to countries of Western Europe (e.g. the UK, Germany, France). These movements have had a considerable impact in the receiving countries’ social services (health service, education, housing) and in the employment opportunities and the wages of parts of the indigenous workforce, especially in those receiving countries who did not impose restrictions in the movement of workforce from the new member-states. Moreover, some moved to the West without being able to support themselves and this resulted in a rise in criminality. This situation led some countries, such as Italy, France and Spain, to take measures to limit the settlement of people from the new enlargement countries or to even deport citizens of such countries on the grounds of public order (e.g. France’s deportation of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma). It is obvious that, even in cases of legal movement of EU citizens, each member-state’s national interest takes precedence over a -still vague- EU solidarity.

How illegal immigration threatens the solidarity among Schengen states

The issue that fragments the solidarity, and thus the functionality, of the EU even more is that of illegal immigration and of the burden-sharing of immigrants who managed to enter the EU illegally. In April 2011 France decided to close its borders with Italy so as to stop trains carrying African immigrants who had entered Italy illegally and the Italian government had provided with temporary residence permits in order to help them leave the country. Italy, acting on its national interest, tried to export its problem of increased inflow of illegal immigrants by granting temporary residence permits to more than 20,000 North African illegal immigrants, while France, acting on its own national interest as well, closed its borders. Italy, then, accused France of violating the Schengen Agreement but the European Commission concluded that France’s decision was legal. The end result is that both Italy and France have called for the Schengen rules to be modified in order for them to restore some border controls. The latest challenge to the Schengen Agreement has come from Denmark, which recently reinstated control checks on its borders with Sweden and Germany in order to fight crime and illegal immigration.

It is obvious that, in order to tackle this challenge to its solidarity, the EU will have to take the issue of immigration - and especially that of illegal immigration - very seriously. The EU will have to do much more on the issue than mere words of support and some funds that cover only a fragment of the costs of the border countries which receive the bulk of the inflow of illegal immigrants.

The mishandling of illegal immigration threatens core EU values such as the free movement and settlement of European citizens. What the EU must understand is that it is not one single EU-society but a union of sovereign national societies which have been formed through the ages. These societies carry their own national and cultural traits and have their own interests. A weak notion of European identity, especially so long as the EU remains a federal bureaucratic mechanism, will never take precedence over national identities and interests. And the issue of immigration – especially that of illegal immigration – poses a key challenge to the EU by putting its solidarity under pressure.

In the desperate war for the soul of the West, we witness another atrocity. And this time the perpetrator was neither a Bolshevik nor a disciple of Mahomet. Last week Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, gunned down 68 unarmed Labor Party youth activists on an island camp outside Oslo after bombing government offices (where eight died). The deed, he announced, had been wrought in the name of traditional Europe. Breivik’s massacre seems designed to inflict maximum damage to the European cause, but at this point it looks to be the well-planned and executed work of a dedicated madman.

Breivik claims to have acted on behalf of Christendom, and so appropriated its heroes and imagery in his propaganda. In this we uncover the tragedy of his recourse to murder, as well as an element of the diabolical. Speaking on the inversion of symbols, the great French traditionalist René Guenon would warn:

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”

Who today remembers the once-mighty Warsaw Pact? Not the punk rock group, of course, but the Soviet Bloc’s formidable answer to U.S.-led NATO. Twenty years have now passed since it was peacefully dismantled in what was a finishing touch on the collapse of Communist power and the end of the Cold War. Yet unlike the Warsaw Pact, the North Atlantic alliance did not disband; it steadily pushed east toward an exhausted Russia and then metastasized. Like any successful multinational, NATO went global.

Largely through its role in NATO, the United States had applied generations of resources and manpower in containing the Soviet threat, and its investment paid off. America’s triumph against such a dangerous peer competitor was total and unambiguous- the one state that spanned the length of Eurasia had fractured into fifteen. The End of History was at hand, and with Marxist management practices discredited only one contender for humanity’s future remained. A democratic-capitalist world system, already organized in the post-war years, could now be fully implemented under Washington’s benevolent aegis.

One Cold War veteran who can well recall the course of this vast transformation is Robert Gates. After all, he operated behind the scenes and at the highest levels of power during critical moments of the U.S.-Soviet struggle. A career CIA analyst, Gates was National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s staff aide when the Carter Administration launched a covert action program to aid the Afghan mujahideen in 1979. The White House signed off on the order six months before the Politburo in Moscow committed to an invasion of its southern neighbor, along with a disastrous occupation that would cripple the USSR.

When I was finishing The Real National Interest (TRNI), it became clear that a follow-up article would be needed; because there is a complimentary aspect of state policy; common to all nations of the West, whose justification isn't entirely clear from the ethnocentric perspective referred to in the original article.

It might be useful to first restate the hypothesis posited in TRNI: That American Near- and Middle-East policy is logical and comprehensible when viewed from the perspective of its actual purpose: to destroy or marginalize potential threats to the state of Israel. These threats being other nation-states or coalitions thereof. And that “terrorists” are not only not a threat to Israel (or any other state)—they are to a large extent useful catalysts for the aggrandizement of state power. Thus the goal of American policy in this region is to destroy nation-states; and if the dissolution of a given state actually results in the propagation of terrorist activity—all the better.

When a modern, secular state such as Iraq is replaced by a largely anarchistic, proto-feudal and unstable pastiche of clashing religions and ethnicities, sharing nothing in common but a tendency towards religious fundamentalism and intolerance for “the other”, the region (one can no longer refer to it as a state in any meaningful sense) loses the capacity to act outwardly—to project a common will to power—and instead becomes consumed by internal conflicts that feed upon themselves, and that are relatively easy for external forces to influence, inflame, and maintain.

And when readers of the original article suggest that “hand[ing] Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood” is a failure of US foreign policy, they are precisely missing the point. In fact, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is one of the greatest boons of our adventures over there. People need to consider what Islamic fundamentalism actually is: It is not only a retrograde religion—it is cultural and civilizational retrogression! Islamic fundamentalism creates societies of unemployable men and ignorant and civically “invisible” women, who are collectively incapable of maintaining, much less producing, the level of technological development necessary to create a functioning, modern state. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism is the indoctrination of teeming masses into a societal model taken en bloc from the first millennium AD.

In Western countries, boys and girls go to school and learn things like math, biology, physics, chemistry, history, and their language. One can argue convincingly about the pathetic state of education in many western countries—but the intent is as described. In Muslim countries dominated by fundamentalists, boys go to madrasas and learn how to recite the Koran forwards and backwards by heart. Girls . . . well, girls get to stay at home and be quiet and out of sight—OR ELSE. The extent to which reciting the Koran can help put a man on the moon (or more to the point—design and build a modern, main battle tank capable of taking on, say, the Merkava) is unknown to me, but I have a feeling it's rather limited.

So in conclusion, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is an effective means of transforming what might otherwise be a temporary state of political disarray into a permanent state of 6^th century, ineffectual feudalism. That these teeming masses are at times inclined to strap dynamite to their chests and blow up stuff in a futile expression of their inability to accomplish anything on a meaningful, political level is icing on the cake.

This leads me to the larger point about the state policy exhibited throughout the West: wholesale immigration of various, culture enrichers—many of them Muslim. People are often incredulous when they note the current degree of anti-Semitism prevalent in these new arrivals—and they ask the logical question of whether or not this immigration isn't mortally dangerous for the Jewish populations of the countries being culturally enriched. The suggestion being that the Jewish community—by supporting (as they unquestionably have) wholesale Islamic immigration into western countries—is actually engaging in an insane and ultimately self-defeating policy. I do not believe this is the case, and indeed, I think that this policy meshes well with the Zionist project of Greater Israel (which is being facilitated by the foreign policy that was the subject of TRNI). There are three aspects that characterize the successful nature of this external political project—the transformation of the West into a multicultural soup comprised in no small part of Islamic ingredients:

Firstly, there is the “secular” political benefit of destroying ethnic homogeneity of Western states. This being the ability of a group exhibiting high intelligence, an ingroup/outgroup moral code, a strong sense of self, and the willingness to act in its own interests, to control a motley collection of other groups that are lacking one or more of the same characteristics. In order to affect this transformation, one makes use of the materials that are available. Since France is a long swim—even for a Mexican—one turns to France's southern “neighbors” . . . making use of a little, good ole collective guilt over colonialism in the process. Indeed, one can already see this playing off of various parties taking place in Europe – where Jewish, crypto-Jewish, or philo-Semitic politicians like Geert Wilders co-opt nativist movements in a fashion that remains beneficial to Jewish interests, while Leftish Jewish groups join hands with Muslim organizations to condemn European racism.

Secondly, Jews have historically gotten along fairly well with their Semitic cousins. They did well for themselves oppressing the Visigoths in Spain, while acting as agents for their Moorish masters. Sure, there's some bad blood between them right now over the whole Palestinian thing, but that won't last. My personal theory in this regard is that the Zionists figure that giving Europe to Islam is a small price to pay for securing their Biblical homeland in its entirety. If the Jews in Europe are frightened by near-term anti-Semitism, all the better. They're having trouble convincing them to make Aliyah in its absence. And after a century or so, they'll be able to move back to what's left of Paris and enjoy the pleasure of manipulating the various, competing ethnies in the former, romantic capital of the world via petty politics, corruption, and manufactured intrigue.

Thirdly, the infusion of Islamic populations—and Islamic fundamentalism as described above—is part of the dysgenic process by which the populace of the Western world will be transformed into a permanently manageable herd. The Germany of 1933 was an unpleasant lesson (as was the Spanish Reconquista and subsequent Inquisition) of precisely what happens when one visits too much abuse on a homogenous and intelligent host population. Point #1 above deals with the whole “homogenous” part. The second part of this, final solution is to reduce the level of intelligence and knowledge of the host population to the point that it is no longer capable of engendering effective resistance. A friend of mine used to refer to this as the “São Paulo Model”. I used to scoff at it. I'm not so sure anymore. Certainly, the dumbing-down of education and culture is unquestionably useful in making the citizens of Western countries manageable and manipulable. This is a goal that is beneficial not only to alien powers. Limiting access to education is a tool used often and historically to control certain populations; women in Islamic countries being a useful example. But overwhelming intelligent populations with sub-intelligent ones seems like a logical extension of this—and a permanent one at that. No need to worry about controlling “evil” books and ideas when there's no one willing or capable of reading or thinking them.

Some might suggest that this is all too conspiratorial. But it doesn't have to be a “conspiracy” in the sense of an entire ethnic group getting together in auntie Ruth's basement to make plans that they put secretly into motion. More likely, it's an organic movement in a common and commonly beneficial direction, of a people united in their perception of self as “the oppressed outsider”. Some might also suggest that the Jewish community might feel unhappy or disappointed by the end product of these machinations. Aren't they happier within a French France or an English England than they will be in these countries, once the demographic time-bombs they've helped build explode? Maybe. But one of the greatest failures of Western man has been his ridiculous tendency to project his sentiments and sensibilities on others. The idea that the Negro (or the Japanese, or the Indian, and so forth) is just like him—but in a different, physical wrapper—is pathetic and fundamentally wrong. Is it not logical, in fact, that a people who are themselves products of thousands of years of history in crowded, chaotic, multi-ethnic cities would be more at home in such an environment than in the quiet, orderly, homogenous, “boring” communities that we Europeans find most comforting?

This unusual 2001 book is Guillaume Faye’s attempt at a manifesto for the European resistance, now finally available in English thanks to Arktos Media. It is also a manifesto for European rebirth, as otherwise it would not be called a manifesto.

As I stated in my review of Guillaume Faye’s other, recently translated book, Archeofuturism, and echoing Why We Fight translator Michael O’Meara’s own assessment, Guillaume Faye is one of the most creative proponents of the European New Right. He is also visibly more radical than Alain de Benoist, nevertheless a uniquely erudite and incisive mind (see here). And this is immediately apparent in the way in which this book has been organised: it begins with an assessment of the current situation in the West, with short and penetrating chapters rapidly discussing various features of European society (bureaucratism, Islamisation, museological conservatism, etc.); but then the narrative breaks and is followed by a dictionary of 177 essential terms (plus two additions by German translator Pierre Krebs), each meant as a tool or a weapon for the metapolitical warrior and political soldier. This in is turn followed by a concluding chapter, where Faye answers the question implicit in the title, and outlines—in general terms—his tactical and strategic recommendations.

Faye communicates his thinking in a direct, high-velocity prose, which, in spite of its evident erudition, and much to O'Meara's credit in the English edition, is energetic, angry, and intense. The latter, however, owes in no small measure to the fact that, while Faye may be intellectual heir to a tradition of cultural pessimism, best exemplified by the Weimar-era Conservative Revolutionary writers, he is far from yet another purveyor of doom and gloom. On the contrary: for Faye, nothing is set in stone; history for him is an open, dynamic field where anything is possible, where the unthinkable may well become thinkable and the impossible possible, if the will is there to make it so. Similarly, we must credit Faye’s rejection of antiquarianism, folklorism, and museological traditionalism: blood memory, Tradition, and race are essential for the vitality of European culture, but for him a culture condemns itself to rigor mortis when it allows tradition to degenerate into traditionalism, into a cult of the past, into conservatism; a vibrant European culture is faustian, constantly renewing, futuristic, even if necessarily rooted in archaic values and ancestral heritage. Moreover, Faye is openly contemptuous of academicism and pretentious intellectual masturbation and stresses that any metapolitical discourse that is produced must serve a concrete purpose in the real world, must find translation into action, and must aim to produce meaningful political gains.

Readers of Archeofuturism will recognise here many of the themes occurring in the aforementioned book: the fact that the modern world created by the egalitarian modernists is doomed to perish, having generated through its design a convergence of catastrophes; the fact that the Left’s conception of history as a process of continuous development and endless economic progress is a myth, not to mention environmentally unsustainable; the fact that many of the regionalist movements are nevertheless part of the problem, being Leftist, egalitarian, antiquarian, and aracial; the fact that Europe is being aggressively colonised by the poor peoples of the South (the Third World), and particularly by Islam; the fact that Islam is—as far as he is concerned—Europe’s principal enemy, with ambitions to conquer the continent; the fact that (in his mind) the United States is Europe’s main adversary; the fact that our present establishment leaders are active if not complicit in the destruction of Europe, and have made a virtue of just about everything—political correctness, xenophilia, devirilisation, homosexuality, materialism—that spells the death of European culture; his vision of a Eurosiberian imperium, purged of Third World colonisers, and comprising a hundred or more autonomous regions; his vision of a multi-tier world economy; his vision of a hierarchical, aristocratic society that is nevertheless fluid, with each man being master of his own destiny; his vision of an economically and technologically advanced imperium, where both the politics and technology serve the Volk, rather than being determined purely by economic factors; and so on.

Mention here of an European ‘imperium’ may remind American readers of Francis Parker Yockey, who used the same term. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two thinkers with regard to the age of absolute politics: for Yockey, the United States was a European outpost, and the Jews the arch-enemy of European civilisation; for Faye, the arch-enemy is Islam and the United States Europe’s prodigal son, but an adversary because of its will to impose on Europe its system of materialist economism and its tactical alliance with Islam to weaken Europe as a rival superpower. It may seem perplexing for some to see Faye speak of the United States as pursuing an alliance with Islam, given the former’s pro-Zionist Middle-East policy, but Faye is thinking about initiatives such as the United States’ backing of Turkey’s entry into the European Union—in other words, the alliance is tactical, not sincere, and purely about perpetuating power.

This is where I diverge from Faye, with whom I otherwise have found nearly complete concurrence: like Yockey, I see the United States as a far-flung European outpost. The country was founded, organised, and Europeans; its culture is European, even if distinct from that of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Poland, or Spain—even if it has superficially incorporated some West African elements, and even if somewhat forgetful of the Ancient and Mediaeval tradition and thus primarily a growth of Enlightenment-era English and French philosophy. The latter was instrumental in the creation of the (Afro-)American system that Faye scorns, but this is not to say that, where it matters (racially), the United States, like Canada, is to be considered part of Europe, part of a European imperium. By contrast, Yockey saw Russians as non-Europeans; and this is here where I diverge from the American.

What is most refreshing, and what makes this book especially important, despite Faye’s errors, is the fact that it rejects conservatism: for Faye, there is nothing left to conserve, firstly because what we have today is corrupt and not worth conserving, and secondly because conservatism equals exhaustion, stasis, and therefore death. Following an organic view of history, Faye believes in moving inexorably forward, loyal to our traditions and blood memory but also constantly renewing ourselves, rather than being paralysed by nostalgia. Faye is not yet another critic of modernity with an in-depth knowledge of what is wrong, yet without solutions; for Faye, a diagnosis is about finding a cure, not a cathartic reaction or a theoretical exercise. Faye also leaves the field open to possibilities (‘anything is possible’, and ‘where there is a will, there is a way’, he says); he is by no means a determinist: race is important, but not enough; there needs also to be a will to power, the will to fulfil the collective destiny. Those who get lazy, or get tired, disappear. Leaving out chance, survival is in the hands of the deserving. And not everybody deserves to survive. Therefore, it is up to us to determine whether our future is in a museum or in the stars, a discredited race of losers in the enemy’s textbooks or the masterful authors of universal history.

Overall this is a fairly successful attempt at crafting a manifesto for European rebirth in the XXIst century, if probably a bit too long and too crammed with ideas to be immediately digestible. However, Faye envisions a multi-pronged strategy, with many actors occupying many niches and waging the revolutionary war in many different ways, some overtly, some covertly, each according to his interests and abilities. Therefore, he would most likely see this book not as a total solution, but as a necessary yet not sufficient contribution to the struggle. Certainly, readers of all levels will profit from it.

You can obtain your copy from here (America) and here (Europe).

Interesting development at the International Monetary Fund, is it not?

Over the past few days we have seen news reports about IMF head, 62-year-old Dr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, having been embroiled in sex crime allegations. Yesterday we found that he had been charged by the New York police of ‘criminal sex act, unlawful imprisonment, and attempted rape’. The criminal sex act, apparently, consisted of forcing a hotel maid to give him oral sex.

Formerly an academic, Left-wing politician, and French finance minister, he was regarded as a possible Socialist candidate for the French presidency, a position for which he was expected to announce his intention to run soon. He hoped to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as the French head of state.

Now, as per the tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, a man is innocent until proven guilty (unless, that is, he is facing the tax authorities, in which case he is everywhere and always guilty until proven innocent, and even then he remains under suspicion and kept secretly under the microscope). Yet, when we consider that this gentleman, who is married, was already criticised in 2008 for a steamy affair with Piroska Nagy, a married economist and subordinate member of staff; that the IMF board acknowledged at the time that many female members of staff were unhappy with his behaviour, even after being cleared following an investigation into his role in Mrs. Nagy’s departure and severance package; that around this time the press carried reports about his having acted ‘like a gorilla’ after inviting an unnamed actress to his Paris flat; that in 2007, Tristane Banon, a then 27-year-old French journalist and writer, accused him of attempting to rape her in 2002, an accusation against which he pressed no charges and but which she has now decided to pursue; and that he had to fight charges of corruption in two financial scandals in 1999, related to Elf Aquitaine and a student mutual insurance—when we consider this past history, things do not look very good.

Unless there is a spectacularly rapid denouement in his favour, we can safely consider him finished in French politics. This is the verdict of not only his opponents on the Right, including Marine Le Pen of the Front National, but also those on the Left, who have spontaneously effervesced with theories of a Right-wing conspiracy (Americans who lived through the sordid revelations of Clinton presidency will find this has a familiar ring).

In Europe voters tend to be slightly more forgiving of politicians’ ‘amorous peccadillos’, which I would rather call gross personal betrayals. In the United States, at least until the advent of the Bill and Monica affair, the suggestion of marital infidelity resulted automatically in political fulmination. At least, that is how it was traditionally seen from Europe. But in Europe, a politician could survive revelations of marital infidelity, the latter being regarded, perhaps self-servingly, as a personal matter, unconnected with ability to do the job.

Technically that may be the case in some cases. But my view is that if someone in a position of responsibility cannot at the very least remain faithful to his spouse, despite having sworn eternal honour and fealty in front of family and friends and the law, if that person is capable of this level of betrayal, motivated by nothing more than base instinct and momentary pleasure, how can we expect him to remain faithful to his principles, to put base temptations for the sake of moral rectitude? Irrespective of whether or not he is found innocent now, a man in Strauss-Kahn’s position, one of immense responsibility, involving and affecting thousands of millions of people, would be expected by those of us with a traditional outlook to be of far, far better character than the average man—almost a Hyperborean. Not, in other words, a servant of the Demiurge.

New York Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne,

said the allegations had been made by a 32-year-old woman who worked at the hotel, which has been identified as the Sofitel near Times Square. His accommodation there was described by the New York Times as a luxury suite costing $3,000 per night (£1,900).

"We received a call that a chambermaid in a hotel in midtown Manhattan had been sexually assaulted by the occupant of a luxury suite at that hotel, and that that individual had fled," Mr Browne told the BBC.

"The maid described being forcibly attacked, locked in the room and sexually assaulted," he said.

Speaking to Reuters, Mr Browne gave more details on the allegations against Mr Strauss-Kahn.

"She told detectives he came out of the bathroom naked, ran down a hallway to the [suite] foyer where she was, pulled her into a bedroom and began to sexually assault her, according to her account."

"She pulled away from him and he dragged her down a hallway into the bathroom where he engaged in a criminal sexual act, according to her account to detectives. He tried to lock her into the hotel room."

Mr Strauss-Kahn then made his way to the airport but left his mobile phone and other items behind, Mr Brown said.

"It looked like he got out of there in a hurry."

By the time police established that the occupant of the room was Mr Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief was on board an Air France plane at John F Kennedy airport, about to depart for Paris.

"Our detectives requested of the airport authorities that they stop the plane from leaving, went to the airport and took him into custody," Mr Browne said.

"If our officers had been 10 minutes later he would have been in the air and on their way to France."

The woman has been treated at hospital for minor injuries, said Mr Browne.

Plato—he who argued for eugenics to breed a better race of leaders—would have stroked his beard and thought, ‘I told you so.’

What strikes me about the BBC’s news reports their sensitivity. In the midst of all the bloodcurdling allegations, we find that they still have time to think about Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s emotional state, and report his lawyer stating that he was ‘tired but fine’. In fact, the reports I have looked at have been extremely temperate and punctiliously balanced, even obscurely sympathetic, given the nature of the allegations and past behaviour.

Who is Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

Of Sephardic and Azhkenazic Jewish origin, he was born in 1949 in a wealthy Paris neighbourhood, son of a legal tax lawyer and member of the Masonic order Grand Orient de France and of a Russo-Tunisian journalist. During the 1970s, Dr. Strauss-Kahn was an academic, having obtained a degree in public law and a PhD and an agrégation in economics.

In his youth he joined the Union of Communist Students (Union des étudiants communistes, UEC), which is part of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF, Movement of Young Communists of France), and which is close to the French Communist Party. He subsequently joined the Centre d'études, de recherches et d'éducation socialiste (Center on Socialist Education Studies and Research, CERES), and later became involved with the Socialist Party, led by his friend Lionel Jospin, also founding Socialisme et judaïsme.

He became an elected deputy in 1986, then Chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, and then again Minister for Industry and Foreign trade. Defeated in the elections of 1993, he was appointed Chairman of the Groupe des experts du PS (Group of Experts of the Socialist Party), founded a law firm (DSK Consultants), and worked as a business lawyer.

But not for long. The following year, Raymond Lévy, director of Renault, invited him to join the Cercle de l’Industrie, a Brussels-based industry lobby. Billionaire Vincent Bolloré and Louis Schweitzer entered his circle of friends. Bolloré is a well-known corporate raider and industrialist with media interests and substantial positions in the economies of Ivory Coast, Gabon, Cameroon, and Congo, and also a long-standing friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Schweitzer was Lévy’s successor at Renault, of which he was CEO until 2005, and also Chairman of AstraZeneca, and non-executive director of BNP Paribas, Electricité de France, Volvo AB, and L’Oréal.

As Minister of Economics he implemented a wide privatisation and a partial deregulation programme, despite this running against the Socialist Party’s official ideology. An increase in GDP and reduction of public debt resulted in personal popularity. In the late 1990s he joined, as finance minister, Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, ‘responsible for steering France towards the era of the Euro’.

He supported the infamous European Constitution of 2005, so arrogantly promoted by bureaucrats and politicians at the time (there was no real examination, just promotion, despite its wide-ranging powers). Said constitution incorporated the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which banned eugenics, prohibited collective expulsions, guaranteed the right to asylum, and adopted totalitarian equality and humanism as a core principle.

As head of the IMF, Dr. Strauss-Kahn proposed giving Special Drawing Rights a stronger role as a method of stabilising the global monetary system, and as a possible replacement for the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. Some have seen this as a move towards a world currency, consistent with Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s earlier championing of the Euro.

The BBC profiles him as a man of ‘easy charm’ who ‘seduce[s] with words’.

No doubt Kevin MacDonald would find Dr. Strauss-Kahn a case worthy of his attention, but, that aside, the picture that emerges here is clearly that of a typical ‘champagne socialist’: a globalist, former communist, who nevertheless stays in luxury hotels; rubs shoulders with powerful industrialists, billionaires, and heads of state; and lives a fabulously privileged and rarefied lifestyle, out of the public purse—a suave, elegant, smooth-talking philanderer, aligned with a political party whose policy is to take from the talented and hard-working in order to give to the talentless and the indolent, who all the same draws a six-figure salary (plus an opaque pension scheme), in a nearly all-powerful position obtained through presidential favour.

I doubt any of my readers will be surprised by any of this. All the same, it bears highlighting, for the fact that a man with such obvious character flaws, with such glaring contradictions between stated ideology and real-world behaviour, has been so handsomely rewarded by the system, funded out of our collective and individual pockets, is symptomatic of the system’s level of corruption. In a non-corrupt system, where character was as important as ability, such a person would not have been able to talk his way undetected into the highest echelons of international finance; such a person would have been weeded out long before. Champaigne socialists—Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are famous examples—are but one of the various miasmic bacteria that contaminate the Western body politic in our Iron Age. Indeed, the French establishment now worry about the effect this this affair could have at a time of unprecedented distrust for politicians.

Whatever the outcome of this specific crisis, I will not be shedding tears for the political death of this champagne socialist.

On January 23rd, 237 illegal immigrants, escorted by extreme leftists, boarded on a ship from Chania, Crete to Piraeus and from there they traveled to Athens city center where they occupied the building of the Athens University Law School.

Their demand was that of amnesty for all illegal immigrants living currently in Greece. Such a demand—if met—would have contravened the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum but, more importantly, would have been a suicidal own-goal. It would apply to hundreds of thousands of people (moderate estimates talk of 470,000 but illegal immigrants in Greece may well be twice as many, or even more) and it would once again send a signal to all countries in the world that Greece still is ‘soft touch’ on immigration and that if someone, somehow, makes it in the country and stays in long enough, he/she will be legalized sooner or later.

The incident also raises the question why people of the Left are willing to support people who are in the country illegally and organize such stunts which promote demands which are against the rule of law and against the country’s interests. The reply to this has two strands: the first is ideological and the second is political. The people who organized and supported the occupation of the Law School building, be they members of parliamentary parties or not (some of them were, some others were not), are ideologically fixated to a neo-communist worldview. Not only do they not support the Constitution and parliamentary democracy but their actual aim is to overthrow it and to turn Greece into a socialist “people’s republic” (of the Cuban or Venezuelan sort). Their extremism is more apparent now as their moderate comrades, not agreeing with such extremist views, have left them and formed a new socialdemocratic party. Moreover, these people have a perverse view of cosmopolitanism which results in a total rejection of all things Greek (be it the Greek nation, its history, its culture etc). That’s why they unreservedly support a maximalistic view of multiculturalism and want to impose it on the country’s unwilling population.

The neo-communists’ plans have not found much electoral support among Greeks. And that’s where the political strand comes in. For them the immigrants (especially the illegal ones) represent the new proletariat which will act as a battering ram in bringing down the regime of parliamentary democracy. By supporting the large and continuous influx of illegal immigrants (and their ex-post facto legalization) they shatter Greece’s homogeneity and they erode its national identity and social capital. That way they slowly but steadily destroy the pillars which support the Hellenic Republic. Moreover, out of the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants they can gain new recruits who will swell their ranks, new voters (ex-post facto legalized immigrants had the right to vote in the recent local elections) and even new foot-soldiers for when they decide it is time to plunge the country into anarchy and make their final push in order to storm the Winter Palace…

Everyone is entitled to have midsummer night dreams – but not at the expense of the rest of society. What is even sadder is the fact that multiculturalism in any shape or form has turned out to be an utter failure all over Europe. The more pluralist approaches of the UK and the Netherlands have failed in the same way the civic approach has failed in France and the ethnocentric approach has failed in Germany. For example, the riots and the ethnic clashes in the towns of the English North in the Summer of 2001, the suicide bombings of July 2005 by British Muslims in London, the continuous failed terrorist attempts, the signs of disenchantment towards immigrants by the native population, the increasing radicalization of British Muslim youth, etc. are signs of the irreparable failure of multiculturalism in the UK. Similar lists could be made for all aforementioned countries.

Unfortunately, these lessons have not sunk-in in the heads of Greek neo-communists. It seems that what the rest of Europe has realized it has turned out to be a big problem, the neo-communists still consider it as a good solution and as a necessary means for the creation of their socialist utopia!

PS: On February 4th the Minister for Education Ms Anna Diamandopoulou speaking in Parliament on the Law School incident, said that, in her opinion, the occupation was part of a plan organized by left-wing groups which aimed to cause bloodshed in Athens that evening or the following days. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Swedes are among the leaders in a sad Western European competition to be the first nation in the 21^st century without a state. Swedish politicians have embraced multiculturalism so thoroughly that a ”National Day of Sweden” was instituted as a holiday in 2005—so as to give multiculturalists the opportunity to display Africans dressed in Swedish national costumes. The entry of the Sweden Democrats to the parliament last fall may have begun to change the situation, but even they are afraid to assert nationalism openly, focusing instead on defending ”Swedish values” from anti-semitic and homophobic Muslims.

It took me a long time to recognize what the word ”identitarian,” which features prominently on the Swedish website Motpol, is actually supposed to mean. Identitarians use slogans like ”100 % identity, 0 % hate,” which makes it sounds like a play on words to dodge the accusations of ”racism” that are bound to come. But then it came to me that people living in the postmodern, post-national, mass-democratic societies of the West actually need an ideology to articulate the thoughts and feelings that at other times have been considered natural. In our age, love for one's own kin and the country one grew up in actually need to be explained in terms of an abstract concepts.

”Identitarianism” as an ideology sees its enemy in the global, miscegenated consumer society that has been forming in the West and is spreading around the world. But it also covers radical traditionalist ideas, while eschewing National Socialism. One must point this out in Sweden, because it is one of the countries where actual National Socialists have been after WWII, and where any conservative or nationalist movement is attacked by its associations with ”former Nazis.”

Irrespectively of the exact content of their ideology, Motpol has a number of interesting writers who comment on German nationalists and conservative revolutionaries of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, paneuropeanists, and other ”New Right” thinkers; they also discuss traditional Nordic folkways. I wanted to get to know these intellectuals in the nationalist or right-wing scene in Sweden and bought a ticker for ”Identitarian Idea,” a one-day seminar organized by Motpol.