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I haven’t talked about movement drama in a while. That’s because there hasn’t been much drama in a while. But when it rains, it pours. Over the last month, there has been a series of scandals and controversies that kept the conversations lively around the White Nationalist water cooler. Among them:
- Eric Striker leaves The Right Stuff.
- Nick Fuentes does a stream with Richard Spencer.
- Andrew Anglin withdraws his support for Nick Fuentes.
- The National Justice Party folds.
Some of these probably deserve their own article, and others don’t. But I will be combining them all into one article, because if you take all these stories together, there is a thread running through them. It appears that in December 2023, the Optics War, an issue which in many ways defined the American dissident Right over the past six years, has come to an end.
It started as a feud between The Daily Stormer and the Traditionalist Workers’ Party about the utility of public rallies, but then later expanded into a broader philosophical debate on strategy encompassing a range of issues, including how to tailor the message, who the target audience is, populism versus vanguardism, infiltration versus outsiderism, and what to do about unstable personalities and anti-social elements within our ranks.
The Optics War
What was the “Optics War”? That depends on who you ask, because everyone has their own version of the story. I can only give you the story as I saw it. Feel free to give your own version in the comments.
The Optics War proper began in late 2017, in the aftermath of Charlottesville. A main criticism of Charlottesville was that it was “trying to do the Internet in real life,” and a lot of it did not translate well. Many of the habits that had developed within the Alt Right when it was still an underground phenomenon became untenable once the scene entered the national spotlight. The culture of ironic fedposting that one could get away with before 2015, when no one was paying attention to us, led to some people being criminally charged once the Alt Right went under ZOG’s microscope. Charlottesville is now universally accepted as a disaster, but for a time, there were still a lot of people clamoring for another one. There were also those who claimed that if swastika flags had been a problem there, it was because there hadn’t been enough of them. For the dissident Right to get to the next level, something had to change.
More than anyone else, Ricky Vaughn and The Daily Stormer (Nick Fuentes was still a minor figure at this time) stepped forward and demanded a rebrand. Their proposal was American Nationalism. To understand their rationale, you must recall a major news story from the time: the National Football League’s (NFL) national anthem protests. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested what he considered to be a white supremacist police force by kneeling in front of the American flag during the national anthem. It sparked a national debate, many white Americans stopped going to NFL games, and matches began to be played in stadiums that were half-full. The American Nationalist argument was that the American flag is already seen as a symbol of white supremacy, and that since white Americans have a strong emotional attachment to it, we should drop all the Nazi imagery and replace it with Americanism.
People who agreed with this position were called “AmNats,” or by the more derogative term “optics cucks.” People who opposed this rebrand and preferred to draw inspiration from European fascism were the “NatSocs” (National Socialists), or the more derogative term “wignat.”
Ricky Vaughn and The Daily Stormer crew demanded that certain anti-social and bad-optic personalities should be shunned and marginalized. At first, this list of people was relatively small: Chris Cantwell, Paul Nehlen, Patrick Little, and a handful of Siege readers. But the biggest and most controversial of those on their list was the Traditionalist Workers’ Party. A feud between them and The Daily Stormer broke out on The Right Stuff’s message board and raged for weeks. Vaughn was also doxed during this period. Just as things were reaching a boiling point, the infamous “cuckbox incident” happened — if you know, you know — which resulted in an AmNat victory.
This resulted in what I like to call The Treaty of Cuckbox, wherein AmNat demands were met. One of the terms was that those who had participated in and/or condoned Vaughn’s doxing would be banished from the movement forever. The optics question then died down for a time as the Alt Right’s attention shifted to the ongoing Internet Bloodsports fad that had emerged on YouTube.
The Optics War picked up again in mid-2019, when relations between The Daily Stormer and The Right Stuff (TRS) broke down over TRS violating the terms of The Treaty of Cuckbox. A bizarre audio recording of a TRS guy talking about trannies also came to light. Stormer then threw its support behind America First as the anti-TRS. At this point the Optics War became movement-wide, with nearly everyone being forced to choose a side if for no other reason than because engaging with one camp would result in being shunned by the other. In the end, the resulting sides were roughly The Daily Stormer and America First and its associates on the AmNat side, versus The Right Stuff, Richard Spencer, and later Patriot Front on the NatSoc side.
I have skipped over a lot for the sake of brevity. The full story of the Optics War would be longer than War and Peace. If it were a movie, it would have a cast of thousands and star Charlton Heston. But that is the gist of it.
The End of the Optics War
The “Optics War” started winding down about a year ago, but not for the reasons people hoped. There was no epiphany where everyone said, “This infighting is pointless! Us pro-whites should all be on the same side!” What actually happened was that the rank-and-file on both sides became progressively disillusioned with their leadership. After both America First and the TRS-associated National Justice Party underwent a series of scandals, many loyalists began to wonder if their side really had as much moral superiority over the opposing camp as they had thought. In 2022, Fuentes lieutenant Jaden McNeil broke with America First (AF) and became AF’s leading critic, and a few months later, OG TRS personality Johnny Monoxide left and became a similar thorn in their side. Several Fuentes loyalists likewise left in the wake of the Ali Alexander scandal. These people might not have dropped out of the dissident Right, but they dropped out of the Optics War.
It should also be said that there are some people who never took a side. The British dissident Right in particular remained neutral, and some, such as Mark Collett and Ed Dutton, engaged with those on both sides. Keith Woods notably never chose a side, and even today supports both America First and Patriot Front. The Optics War was thus a distinctly American phenomenon.
The Breakup of the AmNat Alliance
Nick Fuentes announced earlier this month that he would be doing a livestream with Richard Spencer. This was in flagrant violation of The Treaty of Cuckbox. Spencer’s name was on the list of banned people, along with Matt Heimbach and Al Capone. Spencer wasn’t even allowed into the parking lot.
A wise man once told me, “A movement that is unable to shun bad actors is like a movement with AIDS.” At times, what constitutes a “bad actor” might be a matter of opinion. But the only thing harder than defining what a “bad actor” is, is explaining how Richard Spencer is not one. Spencer destroys everything he touches and has done more harm to the pro-white movement than Tim Wise could ever dream of. The Overton window shift we saw in 2023 could have happened five years earlier were it not for Richard Spencer.
Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer responded to the news of the Spencer-Fuentes stream by withdrawing his support for Fuentes. You can read Anglin’s official statement on it here. Anglin stated that he had been having some misgivings about Fuentes for some time, and that the Spencer stream was merely the last straw. Other issues cited were Fuentes’ inability to maintain the support of loyalists and Fuentes’ promotion of certain unsavory characters into positions of prominence, with predicably disastrous result. Anglin stressed that he does not consider Fuentes an enemy, but that Fuentes’ missteps, which have been increasing in both frequency and severity, makes America First something that he is unwilling to invest any more in.
For many years, the Daily Stormer-America First axis was the driving forces behind one side of the Optics War — and now it has been dissolved. With that, the dream of “centralizing” the dissident Right is dead. This dream goes back to the 2015 Alt Right movement, which aspired to become a unified front. Then came the Optics War, where there were two movements competing for preeminence. Now we are returning to our roots, where we are a collection of independent outlets that engage with some people and not with others based on our own particular criteria.
The Collapse of the National Justice Party
I don’t know all of TRS’ inner workings and what their rationales were, but my reading of the National Justice Party was that it was a response to America First’s political action conferences. It was a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. Starting in 2019, Fuentes was beginning to expand his operation from the Internet into the real-world space, and so there was intense pressure for the NatSoc side to do the same. In other words, it was a product of the Optics War.
Signs that there were major problems within the NJP began to become visible about a year ago, when NJP founder Greg Conte had a massive and messy falling out with the rest of the NJP leadership and made many bold accusations of mismanagement. I didn’t follow the story all that closely, but from what I understand, Conte did not come off particularly well, and many were willing to give NJP the benefit of the doubt that Conte was simply unhinged or bitter.
But then more of the NJP’s top guys started leaving. One of them was apparently kicked out for having a threesome with two chicks from the party’s female wing. My first reaction to this was, “Finally! A dissident Right sex scandal that is actually heterosexual in nature!” Although upon further thought, the scandal is still potentially gay from the perspective of the two women.
The Tony Hovator scandal was a bit like the Ali Alexander scandal in the sense that he had displayed a number of red flags even before they brought him on board. One thing we have seen in Nick Fuentes’ loyalty and purity tests is that when those in an organization are made to take such tests, bad actors will simply memorize the answers beforehand. One of the initial reasons for the Optics War was the issue of how to marginalize unstable personalities in the movement. The NJP chose purity tests, but in the end were brought down by those unstable personalities that they failed to weed out and who were allowed to gain far too much power.
The most shocking departure from the NJP was Eric Striker, who was not only one of its founders but also a fan favorite on the TRS network. Whatever one may think of Striker, his personality and influence on TRS was undeniably profound.
In many ways, the history of TRS can be divided into pre- and post-Eric Striker. Before Eric Striker, the most persistent criticism of TRS was that it was not taking White Nationalism seriously, being more concerned with juvenile pranks and treating everything like a big joke. It was TRS guys who started doing the Roman salute during the infamous Hailgate incident in November 2016, for example. A few weeks later, TRS published an article advocating for the global extermination of all non-whites. Many were left thinking, “Bro, can you at least try to take this a little seriously?”
Eric Striker was an odd choice for TRS because he possessed none of the spirit of mischievous fun which, for better or worse, defined them in their early days. Striker was many things, but he’s not funny and doesn’t claim to be. He’s anti-whimsy. After Striker’s departure, however, TRS went from being the guys who used to piss people off by being unserious to taking themselves way too seriously. The tone became angrier and more confrontational. Humor was deemphasized in favor of serious deep dives. Part of this may have counter-branding in order to set themselves apart from Nick Fuentes’ middlebrow populist approach. Either way, TRS drifted further away from the spirit that made it popular in the first place.
Striker was also extremely divisive. People either love him or hold him up as an example of everything wrong with wignatism. He’s humorless, angry (he frequently loses his temper in debates), and has a penchant for unironic LARPing. His loss might be a short-term blow for TRS, but it also makes a course correction more likely.
Interestingly, one of the other pieces of gossip this month is that America First’s AFPAC4 conference, originally scheduled for December 18, was cancelled. Once the crown jewel of the America First movement, the future of AFPAC is uncertain. AFPAC 2 and 3 were major coups because Fuentes was able to bring in elected officials from the national stage, a feat unlikely to be repeated post-Kanye. He might still be able to do an impressive all-e-celeb AFPAC where he gets Alex Jones and other big-name Internet personalities, but it would still be seen as a step down in prestige from the days when he had sitting Congressmen. It’s also notable that Patriot Front has not held a march since May. It may be that real-world activism in general is not as cost-effective as it was in the immediate post-Elon era.
Therefore, if NJP existed as a NatSoc response to AFPAC, there might not in fact need to be any response any longer if we have in fact seen the last AFPAC.
Some say TRS is finished, but I’m uncertain. What I will say is that I don’t see a path forward for them that does not involve them making peace with Elon-Twitter/X. If they do, who knows? We’re in an era where anything can happen. There have been some stunning overnight successes on Elon-Twitter/X. Also, the Internet is a big place. I had come to think a while ago that Nick Fuentes had no more bridges left to burn, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t keep winning over new admirers. It’s almost become trendy to virtue-signal your support for free speech by saying, “I support free speech . . . even for Nick Fuentes!” Many of these new admirers come from adjacent spheres. One might think that they only like him because they don’t know his history, but such people are not particularly invested in the internal dynamics and drama of the White Nationalist scene, besides the fact that dissident Right scandals are rather tame compared to those elsewhere on the Internet.
TRS could attempt the Autumn Groyper method of creating an anonymous account and then letting it filter through word of mouth that it’s you. Elon does not seem to be cracking down on such ban evasion, even when an account is held by Nick Fuentes. It could be that TRS is higher on his blacklist than Fuentes, and thus they would still get banned, but it would be worth a try — and I don’t see any alternative.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that now that the Optics War is over, the wignats and optics cucks are going to come together and become one big, happy family. Grudges will still be held and old criticisms will still ring true. Disagreements will also persist. All I am saying is that the Optics War as a saga has run its course. Elon Musk buying Twitter was a black-swan event that completely changed the paradigm. Under intense censorship and stagnant audience growth, there was an incentive to fight over the scraps, but on Elon Musk Twitter/X, there’s enough room for everyone, and thus there’s no need to fight.
Musk has effectively taken the issue of optics out of our hands, and going forward, he will be the one who decides what optics you can get away with on the most important platform in the world.
I see the role of the dissident Right for the foreseeable future as that of the think tank which more mainstream Rightists steal their ideas from. And I’m fine with that. For years, people have longed to see the dissident Right “go mainstream” and have /OurGuys/ out there, all over the national media, but I’ve come to think that it might be better to just let purple-pilled folks such as Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson soak up the brunt of the establishment’s ire while the dissident Right flies under the radar as a steadily growing word-of-mouth phenomenon.
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Dunstan and Dershowitz would be a good TRS show in the wake of the Strike n Mike split.
Never trust anyone who is anti-Hitler, pro-Putin or pro-Christian.
Who was stupid enough to go on record with this?
I always thought the best part of the Charlottesville organizing was the advertisement that they wanted only fit and healthy looking demonstrators and would all the fatties please stay away. The swastikas and National Socialist flags were stupid but it is an impossibility to amass a throng with no idiots included. If you want to be an organizer you need to consider this at the top of your agenda.
In hindsight the movement went on precisely one event too long. Sad that Henrik Palmgren didn’t sidestep the episode.
A boring tempest in a teapot
Henrik, if I recall, showed up with drones for aerial footage, but his iPhone was hacked and disabled, so he couldn’t use the drones. The whole episode was extremely bizarre. The police corralled the protesters towards the counter-protesters, ensuring that a skirmish would ensue. A Virginia State Police helicopter crashed, killing two officers, and the guy who crashed his car was sentenced to life plus 419 years. It hardly seems like an organic event, but if it was a fed-op, it seems that it didn’t go according to plan
Would it have stopped doing such events until it was forcefully stopped as happened then?
One thing to take note of, heck, it’s even one of (((Alinsky’s))) rules: “7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” So, I like the analogy of a lesson learned although not always followed since WWII that bombers should not repeat runs over an alerted enemy. As I recall this was the third rally at Charlottesville, and it was stupid to assume the enemy would not come up with counters for it after the second rally showed it was not a one off.
Hell on Earth
Video Link
Video Link
Do me a favor and defend Operation Barbarossa.
You’ve obviously never heard of Victor Suvarov.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov
Mr Unz and others at UR have done several articles on the Suvarov hypothesis. Please read.
Did the Germans ever expect that Operation Barbarossa would be successful? An alliance with the British was their last hope. Once that proved impossible, they shifted their focus from the west to the east. The operation was launched on the Sunday of All Saints, and many Christians saw the invasion as God’s retribution for what the communists had done. The invasion force had volunteers from over a dozen countries.
It would have taken a miracle for them to succeed. Their goal was, rather, to buy time for Western Civilization to defend itself. Stalin intended to conquer clear through to France’s Atlantic ports. Without the enormous sacrifice by the German people, all of Europe would have fallen behind the Iron Curtain. The situation (own nothing and be happy) that freedom-loving people of the world are currently facing would have arrived 80 years earlier.
The operation was named Barbarossa because he is the old man of the mountain, a German emperor who did not die, but fell asleep and will awaken. It was hoped that resistance to world government would arise again in the future to finish the battle, which is why the German leader said, ‘My spirit will rise from the grave. One day people will see that I was right.’
My understanding is that they thought it would be successful, and tactically as envisioned it was, destroyed something like a five million army. And Stalin bears a lot of responsibility for this, all the way down to have slaughtered so many Red Army officers that the survivors had to be told the most basic of concepts in their orders, like concentration of effort. See also the pre-war fate of the deep operation concept the Red Army had developed and having to relearn it in the field.
Where Operation Barbarossa catastrophically failed was in the initial strategic conception including the lack of a schwerpunkt, that it would be enough to end the Red Army as an effective fighting force.
By the end of that phase the Germans had used up a great deal if not most of their combat power in the very very wide front, and logistics was getting ever more terrible, don’t forget half of it from rail heads was moved by horse. They did have winter clothing eventually brought along, but it didn’t get far enough forward by the time the weather changed enough, in part from Hitler ordering the maximum effort forward before they would have to pause. They also had to do things like figure out how to lubricate equipment for the greater extremes of cold than they’d previously been accustomed to; both sides slowly adapted to reality.
But Russia had quasi-infinite strategic reserves that could fight or hold this depleted and strung out force and was still able to manufacture stuff like tanks. Which lacked the total fit and finish that Hitler was looking for but were effective in both quality and quantity; see for example the iconic and influential T-34. Some of that was from hasty removal of factories and I assume their workers before the Germans overran them.
Thank you for your response, in which you make several valid points. I tend to focus more on the meaning of events, and how they are connected, but this can lead erroneous conclusions.
Britain is always portrayed as the lone bulwark against totalitarianism at Europe’s darkest hour. This is a load of rubbish, because the British started WWII by provoking Germany. It was the German nation that stood alone, since both of its main allies, Italy and Japan, failed to deliver. The Japanese attacked the Philippines, leaving the Soviet far-east secure and unthreatened, so the Red Army was able to re-deploy and oppose Barbarossa.
Mussolini had some kind of agreement with the Roman Pontiff. The Pope had been under threat for decades, following Italian unification, until Mussolini gave him Vatican City. Then, Italian troops attacked countries with no strategic value–Ethiopia, the Balkans, and Greece. All three countries are some form of Orthodox Christian, denying the primacy of the Papacy.
The Germans had to bail out the Italians in North Africa and Greece. It depleted resources and delayed the launch of Operation Barbarossa. When the Operation was finally underway, many of Axis participants saw it as a holy war against the atheists, who did not value human lives and saw people as expendable.
When we look at the world today, with the decline of Christianity and the celebration of vices, where freedom is suppressed in the name of democracy, it becomes easier to see WWII as some kind of battle between good and evil, and evil won
Did the Germans ever expect that Operation Barbarossa would be successful?
From the evidence, it seems highly probable to me that the Soviets were about to attack Germany. Germany realised this in time and attacked before Soviet operations could commence. Operation Barbarossa was a hastily prepared operation prompted by absolute necessity. In these circumstances, were the Germans even thinking about success or failure ? They had one course of action dictated by necessity.
What they thought afterwards is another matter.
You:
But Russia had quasi-infinite strategic reserves that could fight or hold this depleted and strung out force and was still able to manufacture stuff like tanks. Which lacked the total fit and finish that Hitler was looking for but were effective in both quality and quantity; see for example the iconic and influential T-34. Some of that was from hasty removal of factories and I assume their workers before the Germans overran them.
You have to take into account the massive amounts of materiel and goods being shipped and transported by plane to the Soviet Union by the United States under Lend-Lease. Everything from munitions to food to whole factories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Remember, this started in October 1941, months before the German Declaration of War after Pearl Harbor. It can easily be construed as an act of war against Germany, and it was surprising that Germany waited so long to reply. Lend-Lease continued until September 1945 and is estimated at $11.3 bn. Even Wikipedia admits:
Stalin told Nikita Khrushchev that Lend-Lease enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Germany.
The post-War Soviet threat- massively expanded in Europe and Asia, and armed with nuclear weapons- was a direct consequence of the policies of the Roosevelt regime.
While Lend-Lease was very important to the Soviet Union, per your words and link it didn’t start as such until October 1st, a bit over three months after Operation Barbarossa started. Before then “paid for in gold and other minerals.”
Wikipedia further states 7 January 1942 as the Official end of the Operation, and a meager 360,778 tons shipped to the Soviets in 1941, compared to in the following years 2,453,097, 4,794,545, 6,217,622, then down to 3,673,819 in 1945 seeing as how that year Germany was defeated rather early, not sure how much they got for helping with Japan.
I’m assuming that 360,778 tons helped but wasn’t decisive in 1941 (might be wrong if they got enough trucks and got them into service, which would be iffy given the low level of mechanical aptitude of the Soviet population), especially as it would be weighted towards the end of the year since it all took time to set up especially with the paranoid and always somewhat hostile Soviets, convoys took time to travel etc.
My above stated picture only covers the strategic failure of the initial German operation, not following periods, like the 23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 Battle of Stalingrad which at some point was “often regarded as the turning point in the European theatre of war.” In general, my guess is that failure to defeat the Soviets during or not long after Barbarossa doomed Germany, they weren’t going to win a long war against so much of the rest of the world, including the productive USSR and very productive in war materials US. And they had to assume the US might help.
Addressing your previous comment, if Barbarossa was so essential (not denying the Suvarov thesis, just haven’t seriously considered it yet), why did they delay it to bail out Italy in Yugoslavia and Greece? Wikipedia also says:
The latter two sound like operational and strategic necessities, for example Finland’s recapture of its territory was very important in the Siege of Leningrad, the former not so much if Germany believed it was facing an existential threat, vs. a threat it could handle in its hubris. And or Hitler was not willing to give up any German/Polish soil, not willing to trade land for time to better prepare.
Another take is from memory, don’t use the cited distance very far at all, is that the USSR was the first country German invaded with more than six hundred kilometers of depth. Whatever the figure, it was quasi-infinity more, and Barbarossa didn’t make capturing Moscow an essential goal, again, no schwerpunkt.
There are a lot of bones of contention in this matter which will keep true historians busy for years to come. Many documents are still secured in the Kremlin archives, rather like many the American documents on Pearl Harbor are still unavailable to the public. In both cases, these documents may never be released, or may be deemed lost ( ie destroyed ).
Here is one of Ron Unz’s earlier articles on the Suvarov hypothesis. It’s not long and is very informative. I would advise you to read it.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-stalin-almost-conquered-europe/
As the article notes:
And the Soviet superiority in numbers was even more extreme, with Stalin deploying many times more tanks than the combined total of those held by Germany and every other nation in the world: 27,000 against just 4,000 in Hitler’s forces. Even during peacetime, a single Soviet factory in Kharkov produced more tanks in every six month period than the entire Third Reich had built prior to 1940.
This leads to another issue that is rarely touched upon. The Treaty of Versailles had severely restricted the size of the German military and military production. It was only from 1936 that Germany started seriously to re-arm. By contrast, the Soviet Union had been on a course of massive military expansion from the mid-1920s. Even the Holodomor and other famines did not affect the massive increase in armament spending year on year. It is often claimed that America now spends more on Defence than the other 5 countries immediately below it. In the 1930s, the disparity was even sharper. The Soviet Union, in real terms, spent more than the rest of the World combined.
This leads to another issue – the great extent to which this was enabled by American capitalists.
It may surprise you, but people like Henry Ford had abandoned their opposition to International Jewry by the mid 1920s, if not earlier. Similarly, he had gone soft on Communism, too.
https://www.rbth.com/history/330523-why-ford-car-company-left-russia
In 1930, the KIM Moscow Automobile Plant opened in the USSR, where assembly of the Ford A passenger car and Ford AA truck got underway.
In 1932, U.S. specialists were involved in the construction of an entirely new Soviet car plant, which soon became known as the Gorky Automobile Plant. The plant produced the legendary GAZ vehicles, built using Ford technology.
These people regarded the profits they could make in the Soviet Union – which, frankly, would have been very limited and difficult to repatriate – above all other considerations. For a few kopecks profit, they transferred world class American technology to the Soviet Union. By any analysis, this was a very bad deal.
This was especially true in military-related developments. American interests were heavily involved in building metallurgical plants and other factories necessary for the Soviet military-industrial complex. Fred Koch, father of the brothers, was one of many American engineers involved in such work.
I did write previously that the massively expanded post-War capabilities of the Soviet Union were a direct consequence of the policies of the Roosevelt Regime. It would be better to say that the rise and expansion of the Soviet Union was the consequence of American government and business policies in the first half of the 20th Century in particular. In the 20th Century, the Soviet Union was America’s Golem, just as Israel is in the 21st Century. Do Americans ever learn ? Seemingly not.
Quite to the contrary from my earliest reading about it: part of the scheme of grain confiscation was to sell it on the world market to buy tools etc. for heavy industry including making war materials.
You’re greater thesis I’ve not investigated beyond my readings about the FDR administration. Which characteristically gave the USSR diplomatic recognition with nothing in return, after which Soviet subversion went into high gear against US society per se according to Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America by Kent Clizbe and other sources. Per him, that effort died with its agents late in the 1930s in Stalin’s purges, but the seed had been planted and later the effort would be renewed as Yuri Bezmenov has famously detailed.
A good source book is Wind over Sand: The Diplomacy of Franklin by Frederick Marks. I bring it up primarily to tamp down enthusiasm over our someday finding more in archives. He found all over the place including in the US significant items having pages removed or entirely missing. That didn’t work so well for his topic because there would general be at least two sides to something diplomatic, but for what you’re looking for a lot of German archives were of course destroyed in the course of WWII.
And the Russians after a brief opening clamped down; who knows when we’ll get another peek at them, and if they’ll suffer some of the same treatment. Today they’re still very big on the Great Patriotic War: Putin recently dedicated a memorial to it and note his framing the war in the Ukraine as being against Nazis. Any archival material that would show they sparked it by working to resume their invasions of Europe would be … inconvenient.
There is a retired East German general called Bernd Schwipper, who spent a couple years in the 90ies in the Moscow archives trying to ascertain Stalin’s war plans before the German invasion.
Since he spoke Russian fluently and due to his job was familiar with Soviet military doctrine, he was in an ideal position to solve this riddle.
According to him a Russian Invasion of Germany was imminent and would have taken place in july 1941, if operation Barbarossa had not taken place in June 1941.
He wrote a book about it, that is only available in German.
He wrote another book, that detailed, that the Germans knew a Russian invasion was immanent.
Thanks for the sources referenced by you. They’re new to me and I’ll try and obtain copies.
What you said at the end is very relevant.
And the Russians after a brief opening clamped down; who knows when we’ll get another peek at them, and if they’ll suffer some of the same treatment. Today they’re still very big on the Great Patriotic War: Putin recently dedicated a memorial to it and note his framing the war in the Ukraine as being against Nazis. Any archival material that would show they sparked it by working to resume their invasions of Europe would be … inconvenient.
The thaw immediately after the end of the Cold War is well-known. Heck, they even let David Irving appear on television and defend his views. There was something similar in Russia.
Ron Unz has said that the fable ( ie fictitious story or narrative ) concerning WWII is central to the moral and legal legitimacy of Western states, In the West, the Holohoax has been heavily embedded into that fable since the late 1960s.
Since the early 1990s that fable has been challenged mainly by the dissentient right. Hence, many states have criminalised ” Holocaust denial “. Obviously, this is completely contrary to any claims that the West supports free speech.
The fable is also central to the moral and legal legitimacy of Russia and Eastern European countries as well, especially Poland. It is not the same in all countries. In Russia, the Soviets initially claimed that it was an unprovoked attack which the Nazis aimed to destroy the Soviet people. Then something odd happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Victory_Day_Parade
The first military parade on Red Square in honor of the defeat of Nazi Germany took place with the participation of the Soviet Armed Forces and a guest appearance by a small detachment from the First Polish Army on 24 June 1945. It was the longest and largest parade in the Soviet capital, lasting hours and utilizing 40,000 Red Army soldiers as well as 1,850 military vehicles. It took place over a month after the victory actually took place on 9 May, the day of Germany’s surrender. Intensive preparations for the parade took place in late May and early June in Moscow.
However, there were only 3 other parades in the whole time span of the Soviet Union, 1965, 1985 and 1990. Rather odd for what many claimed was the Soviet Union’s finest hour. Even odder that Stalin, who died in 1953, never authorised another one.
After the 1945 parade, Victory Day became obsolete in the Soviet Union, with parades only being held on major jubilee, in part to make favor for the October Revolution Day parade which took place every year in the winter. In the decades that followed, 3 parades were held: in 1965, 1985,[4][5] and 1990.[6][7][8]
Wikipedia’s explanation as to why there were very few Victory Days in the Soviet Union thereafter is unconvincing, especially we you understand what followed. Since 1995, there has been a large Victory Day parade every May 9th. It is a central part of the Russian WWII victory cult. In some ways, it is like the despicable Churchill war hero cult pushed by despicable establishment hacks in Britain. In Russia, the fable claims that the Nazis aimed to genocide the Russian people, the Jews were only collateral damage. It is pretty obvious that the Soviet authorities seldom repeated the Victory parade as they did not want to enflame Russian nationalism. Now that Russia is unencumbered by the Soviet Union, we’ve got the full monty.
Obviously, the fable is not going to last much longer. Already it is fraying at the seams. The only question is whether it expires before or after the Muslim takeover of Europe. Adolf Hitler is highly regarded in the Islamic world. In a Muslim France, 100 years from now, the fable might run as follows. Hitler was a brave man who tried to save Europeans from the Jews. But he was overthrown by America, Britain and the Soviet Union, all controlled by the Jews. Europeans were subject to Jewish rule thereafter, until brave Muslims defeated the Jews and their allies. The remaining Europeans gladly accepted the religion of peace, and recalcitrant Jews were exiled to French Guyana.
Patriot Front hasn’t done a march since May? They did one in Austin, TX in June 2023, Columbus, OH in October 2023, and Kansas City, MO in November of 2023 as is evidenced on their telegram channel. Such an inaccurate statement as that in your article can only be done out of bad faith as Patriot Front publicizes all of their actions.
“(1) how to tailor the message, (2) who the target audience is, (3) populism versus vanguardism, (4) infiltration versus outsiderism, (5) and what to do about unstable personalities and anti-social elements within our ranks.”
1. Be honest. People can sense liars. Being moral is best when it’s genuine. Being nationalist is best because heritage matters.
2. Americans. Changing your message to appeal to conservatives or liberals violates #1.
3. Both. Radicalizing or moderating your message for appeal violates #1 and #2.
4. Both. Use anonymity to keep/recruit positions in businesses and communities, and hold politically radical positions in the public space.
5. Exclude them.
That’s how PF skipped the six year “Optics War.”
Americanism isn’t good because people like it. It’s good because it’s host to the best traits of our ancestry. Conquest, virtue, traditition, statesmanship, etc. The fact that it’s familair and liked by many is a result of the success of these traits, not their convenience.
“Wignats” called PF “Amnats”, and vice versa. PF was never associated with Spencer aside from a single podcast interview and TRS was supportive of PF but only as spectators in infrequent commentary.
Patriot Front has been the one, single, consistent activist organization growing and developing under stable leadership since 2017. The practice of anonymity, real-world efforts, and a patient and meritocratic leadership structure filters out bad actors, wannabe celebrities, and those with little self control.
The whole narrative theory of the Optics War here has no place for Patriot Front within it, at least not in its current form.
Saying PF, with it’s American aesthetics and rejection of NS imagery, is NatSoc is silly. Especially when put into the same category as TRS and Richard Spencer.
Verifiably false.
ZOG = the eye of Sauron