For almost a year, the largest country in the world has been expelled from the world’s notable part. After the Russian actions over Ukraine, the US, the UK, and the EU have imposed an unprecedented amount of restrictions against this Bear Awoken; perhaps now even Iran faces less external obstacles in economy or diplomacy than Russia.
The Atlantists’ ultimate goal is clear: to isolate the Kremlin — or at least to make such an impression. And really, all parts of the Western societies, more or less, perform various hostility against Moscow, up to absurd cancelling of the human heritage such as Dostoevsky’s novels or Tchaikovsky’s music.
All parts of the West except one. The persons who are as banned as Russia, the persons who are as shamed as Russia, the persons who neither can use Western financial platforms to gain money for their civic projects as if they were Russian militants.
I mean the very special social group whom Mainstream Media call ‘far-right radicals’, ‘nationalists’, ‘fascists’, and so on — not to mention that in the West-backed Ukraine, the real neo-Nazi under swastikas are marching across the streets every year, which nobody cares.
If you look at a stereotypical Western far-right activist 2-3 decades ago, you would recall somebody similar to a member of the current Ukrainian nationalistic Azov battalion: a Nazi-tattooed mobster with Mein Kampf under his pillow at night, struggling for ‘white race purity’ at day, and investigating a hoax ‘Jewish conspiracy’ at class time.
But the modern Western far-rights — or, precisely, the people who are called ‘far-rights’ by the media — are something quite another. They have Africans and Asians among their teams, they support Israel against its Muslim neighbours; and at the same time some of them favor Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as the latter proclaims himself ‘the Protector of Muslims’: a public figure whom the Christians, according to their opinion, are desperately lacking. Because yes, the New Rights consider themselves as protectors of Christianity — on the contrary to suspicious experiments of Third Reich’s or Ukrainian nazists with paganism and other occult esoterics.
And, for the most interesting, this New Western Rights support Russia. If you listen to their public statements, you would hear — oh, wait, it would be hardly to hear anything. One of their leaders, a British independent journalist Tommy Robinson — who used to sit in the same prison with Julian Assange for the political activism — is banned on most media platforms except Telegram, a crypto-messenger with the Russian roots. Perhaps these New Rights’ Telegram channels — tiny in comparison to mainstream media — are the modern analogue of Iskra (Rus. Sparkle), a marginal newspaper founded in 1900 by the future Russian revolutionary and the future Ataturk’s ally Vladimir Lenin in a desperate attempt to overthrow the old order by the 3,000 poorly-printed copies of his outlet.
But just listen to this. At his recent Telegram livestream on January 6, 2023 — dedicated to the second anniversary of the US Capitol Storming — Tommy Robinson, together with other alternative journalists from both sides of the Atlantic, hardly criticised the West for its double standards over the Ukrainian Crisis and the Capitol Storming.
‘9 years ago, in 2014, armed street activists overthrew democracy in Ukraine, occupied its official buildings’, Tommy Robinson said. ‘The same people, who are now intending to imprison the January 6 protesters, celebrated that Ukrainian events and called it democracy when the Ukrainian radical groups overthrew the elected government’.
Another participant of Tommy Robinson’s livestream, an American alternative journalist Tayler Hansen, called the actual US domestic politics ‘a totalitarian nightmare’ and ‘a dream for totalitarian state’ — meaning inadequate charges against over 800 persons who mostly peacefully protested in and outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Same way, Hansen labeled the Ukrainian crisis as a ‘money laundering project’ for the White House which provides Kiev multibillion aid from American taxes.
Similar views has another British New Right, the leader of the Britain First movement Paul Golding. So far he is less than marginal, his Telegram channel counts 19,000 subscribers, but previously, before total ban, his Facebook page used to have hundreds of thousands of fans, according to his own claims.
In his Telegram — literally the last bastion of alternative (neither good, nor bad, but alternative) opinion in the UK — Golding satirizes the mainstream anti-Russian narrative: ‘So Ukraine fired a missile at Poland, killing several Poles, but it’s Putin’s fault’, he wrote on November 16, 2022, when the Ukrainian rocket attacked its Western neighbor — an assault Russia initially was blamed for.
I can go on, but the situation is obvious: the Western New Rights support Russia or at least maintain neutrality in the Moscow’s fight with the West. While, ironically, their love is mostly one-sided: Vkontakte, the Russian analogue of Facebook, has banned both Tommy Robinson and Paul Golding for an unknown reason.
And if you want a philosophical explanation, remember my comparison between Tommy Robinson and Vladimir Lenin. In the last 100 years, the world has turned upside down: the political lefts have turned into the political rights, and vice versa.
Don’t you see a similarity between the previous far-right and the current far-left? The old-school German Nazi divided people into privileged and unprivileged groups, such as the white race and all others — while the modern American Democrats divide people into privileged and unprivileged groups, such as transgenders and all others.
So, love them or hate them, Tommy Robinson and all his banned legion are the modern analogues of Lenin and Ataturk, struggling against censorship and inequality. The far-rights standing for racial brotherhood against the Western democratic bombardments of Serbia, Libya, and Iraq: doesn’t it sound absurd? No more absurd than the Iranian Shahed 136 kamikaze drones conducting strikes at the Ukrainian military objects now.
The author is an Adjunct Professor at the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg, Russia)
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