Russia and Anglosphere – Conservatives and Oligarchs – War vs EU and Future

Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (presently of CEU Wien).

Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.

A link of interest is in Hungary Central Europe where a few entities promote Christian nationalist conservatism, namely The Centre for Fundamental Rights (linked to US CPAC), MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute (linked to the Koch Network Heritage Foundation).  Further former Murdoch – Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson would promote both Hungary and Putin’s Russia (vs. Ukraine), with dog whistling of Soros via the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’, anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiment supported by Tanton Network, with a veritable ‘conga line’ of Anglo conservatives presenting in Hungary, in support. 

If one goes back in history with the Anglosphere, much was and is still shared with Russia’s regime and its former empire, including related to the British (& German) royal families, shared conservatism, religious orthodoxy, far right nativism or nationalism, authoritarianism, class order, fossil fuels and oligarchy.

If one then looks at the values, interests and talking points of major Anglo media outlets, think tanks in Koch Network, unspoken but dog whistled class order and eugenics of Tanton Network, are there similarities that make allegations of Russian influence on Brexit and Trump, seem unsurprising?

Using sociocultural issues to deflect and divide electorates for right wing power, e.g. modern immigration, authoritarianism to negate any dissent, then use Orwellian doublespeak for ageing voters to deny freedoms for younger generations, but how does this relate Russia and the Anglosphere apart from these obvious generic traits?

Climate science denial, anti-EU for Brexit to avoid constraints e.g. financial transparency, anti-money laundering measures, workers’ rights & unions, work health & safety, open society and empowered citizens. Central has been the US fossil fueled ‘libertarian’ Koch Network think tanks in US, UK and Australia, with media architecture helped by Rupert Murdoch while still unresolved, but Russian money and influence in UK politics, especially the Conservative party. 

Finally the use of events or grifters to inversely present pro-Russian narratives by blaming Ukraine, NATO, the EU and the west for provoking Russia through visitors platformed in Hungary.  The highest profile ‘geopolitical experts’ visiting and demanding ‘peace’ included Jeffrey Sachs linked to (originally) fossil fueled Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil/Exxon & UN ‘Sustainability’) and John Mearsheimer with the Charles Koch Foundation.

Another important area of shared interests, often presented alongside ‘peace’ and anti-EU platforms, is conservative Christianity, especially the US environment via the Council on National Policy which is described as ‘owned’, like the GOP, by Koch Network donors or investors; over years since Soviet times there have been links whether WCC, WCG or more recently ADF, while energising evangelicals, pro-life, Baptists and Catholics.

Who is manipulating whom?

From Inside Story:

‘Russia’s war with the future

Underlying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are existential fears of democracy, diversity, sustainability and the decline of patriarchy

What links Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous March on Moscow, climate denialism, the Nord Stream pipeline and vaccine scepticism with the jailing of Aleksei Navalny, the Russian Orthodox patriarch’s rants against “gay parades,” domestic violence and declining life expectancy in Russia?

In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna…

….Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.…

….Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleo modernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaia modernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”….

….Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

….Etkind coins the term “stop modernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaia modernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaia modern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe….

….Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaia modern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleo modernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaia modern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaia modernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.” 

Russia Against Modernity

By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press’

For more related articles and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, EU European Union, Evangelical Christianity, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Koch Network, Nationalism, Political Strategy, Russia, Tanton Network and White Nationalism click through:

The Tory donor, Soviet-born Billionaire and Fossil Fuel Interests Bankrolling British Politics – ByLine Times 

Conservative Christian CNP – Council for National Policy in US – Influence in UK, Russia and Europe

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Chomsky, US, Russian Propaganda and Faux Anti-Imperialist Narratives

Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

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Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

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Geopolitics – Horseshoe Theory – Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Anglosphere European Far Right and Left

Interesting article from Foreign Policy titled ‘Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine’ from mid 2022 discussing ‘Horseshoe Theory’ which is apparent not just in the US but the Anglosphere and Europe, especially ageing left and far right conservatives who call for appeasement.

On one hand we have those on the right who are complicit or have been compromised including GOP, Trump, Tucker Carlson, FoxNews, UKIP, Nigel Farage, alt right grifters, UK Conservatives, Hungarian PM Orban, Serbia’s Vucic etc. and Koch Network linked think tanks. 

Then on the (US style) ‘left’ we have supposed geopolitical experts, intellectuals or academics of the ageing left calling for appeasement under the guise of abstract ideological arguments, ignorance of events on the ground and calls for negotiation.  These include Kissinger & Chomsky, Mearsheimer, Sachs, Ritter et al., but behind all these are right wing think tanks, networks or links including Nixon-Koch, Charles Koch, Rockefeller Foundation, Rand Paul Institute etc.?

What are some of the commonalities or shared interests? Antipathy towards the EU European Union & pro Brexit, tepid on commitment to NATO, pro fossil fuels, anti-woke, anti-LGBT, pro Christian, anti-immigrant, ‘great replacement’, patriarchy, corruption, low or no regulation, 0.1% given privileges and protection? 

From Foreign Policy:

‘Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine

The discourse surrounding Russia’s war on Ukraine has created strange bedfellows.

By Jan Dutkiewicz, a policy fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School, and Dominik Stecuła, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.

JULY 4, 2022,

Since Russia attacked Ukraine, unprovoked, on Feb. 24, the discourse surrounding the war that has emerged in the United States has created strange bedfellows. Although the majority of the American public, led by U.S. President Joe Biden, have thrown their support behind Ukraine, many on the left and right alike have rushed to defend Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime or, at the very least, have urged the United States not to intervene in Ukraine’s defense.

Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News and host of the most popular show on cable news in the United States, has been spouting pro-Kremlin talking points for months (and is frequently rebroadcasted on Russian state television). Other right-wing figures regularly spew out anti-Ukrainian disinformation and rail against sending heavy weapons to the country.

Meanwhile, the luminary of the American intellectual left, Noam Chomsky, has invoked former U.S. President Donald Trump as a model of level-headed geopolitical statesmanship for his opposition to arming Ukraine. Left-wing sources—such as Jacobin, New Left Review, and Democracy Now!—have hewed to a party line that blames NATO expansion for Russia’s invasion and opposes military aid to Ukraine.

Online, armies of left- and right-wing accounts find fault with Ukraine’s politics, policies, and president. In Congress, seven of the most fervent conservative Trump supporters voted alongside progressive champions Reps. Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush against banning Russian fossil fuels; even more surprisingly, Omar and Bush are joined by so-called squad members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib as well as the far-right fringe of the Republican Party in opposing the U.S. government seizing Russian oligarchs’ assets.

All of these developments highlight a bizarre alliance between the two ends of the political spectrum. The question is: Why?

What we seem to be seeing is a modern-day version of the horseshoe theory of politics, where the far left and far right find themselves in uncanny alignment. Although historically maligned, the theory seems to hold remarkably well when it comes to U.S. opinion on the Russia-Ukraine war. This doesn’t have much to do with ideological symmetry, however, or even Russia or Ukraine, for that matter. Rather, it has everything to do with the fraught state of U.S. politics, where relying on simple notions of “left” and “right” or “conservative” and “progressive” no longer serves a useful heuristic for understanding political developments.

The horseshoe theory of politics was introduced by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye, who believed that the political ideological spectrum—traditionally construed as a linear progression from some form of socialism or democratic collectivism through a bourgeois-liberal center and on to some form of totalitarianism or fascism—was not a straight line between ever-more-distant political positions but rather something like a horseshoe, with the extremes bending almost magnetically into conjunction with each other.

Based on his observation of the alignment of fascist and communist parties in early 1930s German domestic politics and then on the Nazi-Soviet alignment in the international sphere, perhaps best embodied by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he believed that the political extremes have much more in common than a traditional interpretation of the political spectrum might suggest….

…Since Russia invaded Ukraine this year, the vast majority of Americans from both parties have supported the U.S. government’s position: They support providing military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and surprisingly, there is even considerable bipartisan support for welcoming Ukrainian refugees to the United States. But Russia has found vocal allies too.

The close ideological and financial relationship between many far-right European parties and the Kremlin is hardly a secret, making their support for Putin’s genocidal campaign par for the course. But considerable elements of the American right, including members of the Republican Party, have openly sided with Russia since the invasion.

The GOP has historically wielded its anti-Soviet (pre-1989) and anti-Russian (post-1989) position to great political effect. This is, after all, the party of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” In 2012, then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia the United States’ primary geopolitical foe and a country that “always stands up for the world’s worst actors.” Fast forward to 2022, and Republicans—including Trump; his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; (soon to be former) Rep. Madison Cawthorn; Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; Fox News personalities, such as Laura Ingraham; and conservative influencers, such as Candace Owens—have all broken from the party line to heap scorn on Ukraine and U.S. efforts to assist it.

A number of tropes that recur in this right-wing critique is the claim that NATO expansion forced Putin’s hand and led to the invasion as well as that money spent on military aid to Ukraine would be better spent on domestic issues, even if those issues include the continued militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, as suggested by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley….

…When it comes to Ukraine, many tankies have embraced a pro-Moscow position and parroted Kremlin talking points, perhaps failing to disambiguate between Russia, an authoritarian capitalist-oligarchic state, and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, an authoritarian communist state. These positions include the false claim that Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan protest movement was a U.S.-backed coup, which has been shared directly by elected officials like DSA-backed New York City council member Kristin Richardson Jordan in the form of links to online tankie disinformation. But similar claims have also been made by QAnon-boosting GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and seemingly serious leading scholars, including Chomsky and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer….

….Mearsheimer’s work is instructive here. A highly influential scholar of international relations, Mearsheimer is known as one of the leading proponents of the “offensive realism” school of analysis of world affairs. This school argues that states, especially great powers, will act rationally to maximize their military power in an anarchic world system, meaning that they are likely to react violently to perceived threats to their security.

Mearsheimer’s most influential contribution to the debate about Ukraine—other than his musings that U.S. support for the 2014 Euromaidan protests constituted a coup—is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was directly caused by NATO’s expansion into Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, including its overtures to Ukraine. According to offensive realist analysis, Russia’s attack heads off this U.S.-led expansion. Despite the fact that this theory has been widely challenged since the conflict’s first day, Mearsheimer’s explanation has traveled widely.

He has aired his ideas in a guest column for the Economist and in an interview with the New Yorker, and his work has been mentioned by critics of U.S. policy in Ukraine from think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, whose funding sources include both billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Koch Foundation, and the Koch-funded and Sen. Rand Paul-backed Defense Priorities as well as leftist publications, such as the openly socialist Monthly Review, the tweedy Current Affairs, and the trusty social democratic standby the Nation. Mearsheimer has also been retweeted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs…

….To see leftists conceding that Kissinger has a point and Republicans handing it to Chomsky has been quite something. But, the argument goes, if Chomsky and Kissinger (and Mearsheimer) agree, then they must be right. But they’re not. Putin said so himself when he recently compared himself to Peter the Great, claiming Russia’s right to expand into its previous colonies and dropping the pretense that Western provocations had much to do with his decision to invade Ukraine…..

…For all their disparate political goals and motivations, what unites the far left and far right is their relationship to U.S. politics. What unites them is an opposition to what they perceive as the faults of the status quo, a distrust of the establishment, and crude anti-Americanism.

On the political right, the actions of legislators like Greene, Cawthorn, Rep. Paul Gosar, or Rep. Matt Gaetz—all of whom oppose U.S. support for Ukraine against Russia—seem to be driven by a profound dislike of the United States as an ethnically and racially diverse democracy, a country where Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, is the law of the land (at least, for now).

Many on the far right despise that reality and recognize the ideological proximity of their political goals to what they see as Putin’s accomplishments, including making life extremely difficult for Russia’s LGBTQ community. His general anti-wokeness has been lauded by former Trump advisor and current MAGA influencer Steve Bannon. The Russian propaganda machine has been remarkably well versed in the language of U.S. culture wars, and there is a widespread perception that Putin and Russia are allies to the MAGA wing of the GOP on that culture war front….’

More blog and articles click through Koch Network, Nationalism, Political Strategy & Russia.

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Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

Putin’s Russia – Dugin – Alt Right – White Christian Nationalism – the Anglosphere and Europe

Neo Conservative Rasputins? Putin and Dugin – Trump and Bannon – Johnson, Brexit and Cummings

Growth of Conservative Hard Right Wing or Nativist Authoritarian Regimes

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

Strange Conservative Political Links – The Anglosphere, Hungary and Russia

Another informed article from Szabolc Panyi in ByLine Times titled ‘Strange Allies Hungary, Russia & the UK’ highlighting the links of Anglosphere conservatives on the right including visitors, fellows and politicians presenting at or liaising with their counterparts, think tanks and institutes.

Not only are there allegations and warnings about links to Putin’s Russia e.g. US conservative Anne Applebaum warned visiting fellows of the Danube Institute after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and before the Hungarian elections, funded by the Hungarian government (3 April 2022, Twitter), but appear to be links with Koch Network think tanks and media.  The latter not only involves Murdoch’s FoxNews, Tucker Carlson, CPAC, Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage et al., but links to RT and (K)GB News (supported by the Legatum Institute in Dubai?).

Further, Australian conservatives linked to the Danube Institute and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium include former PM Tony Abbott, his advisor former Ambassador to Hungary Mark Higgie, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and NewsCorp commentator Greg Sheridan.  

The common link between the former conservative politicians are ‘libertarian’ Koch Network think tanks in Australia, especially the IPA Institute of Public Affairs which is allegedly funded by a mining oligarch, and promotes climate science denial.  Further, all are indirectly supported or platformed by Australia’s right wing media oligopoly, led by Murdoch’s NewsCorp and also ideological contributions from The Spectator Australia, seem to be promoting Tanton Network nativism, ‘great replacement’, immigration restrictions and eugenics, at least of class. 

There appears to be many shared interests with Anglosphere networks with Orban and Putin including climate science denial, anti-EU, equivocal on NATO, authoritarianism, media control, hobbling education, encouraging patriarchy, ‘family values’ and of late complaints, of not just ‘woke’ but miscegenation due to immigration and refugees.

Strange Allies Hungary, Russia & the UK

Szabolcs Panyi  18 October 2022

Szabolcs Panyi looks at the affinities between British Conservatives and Viktor Orbán in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

On the eve of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was scheduled to be in Budapest. The trip was called off at the last minute – journalists were told on 23 February that a reception for Truss at the British Embassy had been cancelled.

In recent years, senior members of most Western governments have tended to avoid Hungary’s capital, keen to side-step meetings with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His tarnished reputation both as a pro-Kremlin strongman and an anti-migration populist had turned him into a black sheep of the European Union. 

The relationship was slightly different for the UK, however. Regardless of Orbán’s cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his theoretical ability to soften the EU’s position towards Brexit had made him an ally of Boris Johnson’s Government. 

When I ask British career civil servants about British-Hungarian relations, some usually signal their personal dismay – labelling it a ”pragmatic relationship”. In May 2021, when Johnson was criticised for hosting an increasingly isolated Orbán – criticism which, to some extent, even Downing Street shared – Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng defended the meeting as “completely reasonable”. He said UK leaders “have to speak to all sorts of people, all sorts of leaders across the world whose values we don’t necessarily share.”

At the heart of this pragmatic relationship lies a deep contradiction. 

Orbán’s attacks on the EU and its institutions have been fully in line with the usual Brexiteer scapegoating of Brussels. But the Hungarian Prime Minister’s pro-Russian and pro-Beijing policies are clearly working against the UK’s security and foreign policy interests. 

This hasn’t prevented a string of consecutive Conservative Governments from trying to court Orbán. What remains unclear, however, is what that courting has actually achieved.

However, Hungary’s NATO loyalty is under much greater scrutiny since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

At the start of the war, Orbán’s Government loudly opposed any kind of military support for Ukraine. Budapest not only does not provide Kyiv with any kind of arms or military equipment, the country has even banned weapons transfers through its territory to Ukraine.

And while almost every European leader has visited Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv at least once, Orbán not only stayed away, he even listed the Ukrainian President as one of his ”opponents” following the Hungary’s April elections.

Hungary initially offered support on Russian sanctions. But such support soon petered out. Threatening to veto the European Union’s sixth sanctions package, Orbán managed to negotiate a full exemption for Hungary from the bloc’s oil embargo against Russia. Official explanation was that the Hungarian economy just cannot do without Russian oil. 

Orbán then threatened to sink the whole sanctions package again. This time, he wanted to save Patriarch Kirill – the KGB-linked, warmongering head of Russia’s Orthodox Church – from being sanctioned with an asset freeze and travel ban. He succeeded. Early last month, his successes emboldened Hungary to attempt to lift sanctions on three Russian oligarchs, including Alisher Usmanov, Arsenal FC’s former shareholder.

Hungary is now openly questioning the rationale of any kind of sanctions against Moscow, claiming the moves have backfired and are hurting the European economy. While other NATO countries have cut official ties with senior Kremlin officials, Orbán’s cabinet members are still meeting with Russian counterparts on a regular basis, whether it is about discussing gas deals with Gazprom or negotiating a nuclear power plant extension with Rosatom.

British Right-Wing Pundit Support

One would think that such moves from Hungary’s government would instantly trigger a wave of criticism from British right-wing pundits. These are, after all, the same people who praise the Conservatives for standing up to Putin. 

However, the Orbán Government has invested in winning over key figures in right-wing and alt-right circles in the UK in order to prevent hostile op-eds, TV and radio commentaries. 

The methods include lavish study trips, personal meetings with Hungarian Government figures, and offers of speaking fees and fellowships by government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGOs). For many years now, self-proclaimed Thatcherites have come to Hungary to wine, dine and live on Hungarian taxpayer money without any remorse whatsoever. 

To name a few examples: former Thatcher policy writer and speechwriter John O’Sullivan is heading a taxpayer-backed Hungarian think-tank called the Danube Institute. Roger Scruton, the late Conservative philosopher has a small coffee shop chain named after him in Budapest.

Scruton’s close friend, Douglas Murray – who once met Orbán alongside former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon – is a regular guest at Government-sponsored events, and one of Orbán’s most influential British fans. Eurosceptic historian John Laughland, a regular fixture on Russia Today, is currently on a half a year, €10,000 per month fellowship at the state-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. Laughland was recently detained and questioned at Gatwick because of his Russian ties. 

The list goes on

Besides the reliable – and rarely disclosed – flow of Hungarian public money behind a large amount of Orbán apologism in British punditry, there are another common characteristics. They emphasise Orbán’s “anti-woke” and “anti-migration” ideas and present them as a role model to the UK. At the same time, his supporters never speak or outright downplay the importance of Hungary’s increasingly pro-Kremlin tendencies fully at odds with Great Britain. 

In that regard, Kwarteng’s defence of Orbán’s visit to Downing Street last year was in a way much more honest – he at least admitted the relationship was just about some common interests.’

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There are far more significant opponents of the single market than Johnson, but many concur with his anti-immigration rhetoric which was neither original nor temporal but deep seated Anglosphere eugenics i.e. dog whistling of refugees, immigrants, population growth, low income, women, minorities etc.. 

Such tropes were used to get the Brexit vote over the line to exit EU regulatory constraints on financial transparency, trade agreements, environmental regulation, security & intelligence sharing, work health & safety and labour rights; Russia and others share similar interests and reservations.

US or Anglo led nativism operates in a parallel universe with the, often fossil fueled, libertarian socio economic ideology promoted by The Republican or GOP, UK Conservatives or Tories and Australian LNP Liberal National Conservative Parties, along with many others in media and/or have influence e.g. climate science denial and blaming ‘immigrants’ for environmental ‘hygiene’ issues.

This anti-immigration ideology can be traced back to Thomas Malthus, Thomas Galton who developed ‘social-Darwinism’ and later Madison Grant, then fast forward to 1970’s ZPG Zero Population Growth, white nationalist John Tanton, then Tanton & Koch Networks’ symbiotic and codependent relationship and tactics, to keep the more enlightened centre right through left out of power.

In the case of the UK 55 Tufton Street seems to be the fulcrum of such transAtlantic links and rumours of Russian influence, via Koch Network think tanks i.e. IEA, Global Warming Policy Foundation now NetZeroWatch, TaxPayers’ Alliance and an alleged Tanton Network NGO cited in the article, Migration Watch. 

This suggests more than just Johnson, who is an enabler, but more deep seated ideology of the past promoting a nativist libertarian Anglosphere but opposed to liberal democracy and open society aka the EU, and in fact quite authoritarian when sole or SME business interests are ignored.

Article from ByLine Times:

The Single Market Taboo Won’t Last Forever

Martin Shaw 7 June 2022

Martin Shaw explains why a softer Norway-style Brexit was derailed by Boris Johnson’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and how the tide may be slowly turning

In his bid to retain power, Boris Johnson told Conservative MPs that his victory would prevent a reopening of the UK’s membership of the European single market which would follow his defeat. This was a reference to the proposal by Tobias Ellwood, one of his critics, to deal with the mounting problems of Brexit (plummeting trade, damage to agriculture, a looming trade war over the Northern Ireland protocol): “All these challenges would disappear if we dare to advance our Brexit model by rejoining the EU single market (the Norway model),” Ellwood argued. 

It has to be said that none of the other 147 MPs who voted against Johnson endorsed Ellwood’s idea. Tom Tugendhat, the leadership hopeful of what passes for the Conservatives’ ‘liberal’ wing, was one of the first to disagree, while Mark Harper, chair of the parliamentary Covid-deniers and another probable contender, slapped him down: “The UK voted to leave the EU. That meant leaving the Single Market and putting an end to freedom of movement. The end.”

Yet Ellwood is manifestly right. Leaving the EU itself ended Britain’s participation in the union of peaceful European democracies just when it was threatened by far-right reaction within and without. But it was leaving the single market which caused the most economic damage and created the intractable difficulties in Great Britain-Northern Ireland relations. Ending freedom of movement, one of the market’s four main pillars, has contributed seriously to these harms.

Why the UK Left the Single Market

Formally, leaving the single market was not a necessary consequence of leaving the EU; it was not on the ballot paper in 2016. In principle, it was possible for the UK to retain many of the benefits of European integration through the ‘Norway option’ which enabled non-EU states to be part of the market, an idea which Leavers from Nigel Farage to Johnson had flirted with at times, and which had been central to the only serious economic prospectus for Brexit. Yet this was comprehensively rejected by Theresa May’s government and lost out in the hung parliament of 2017-19.

Harper’s comments help explain why this happened, and why the idea of reviving the UK’s single market membership will arouse fierce resistance on the right. 

Ending freedom of movement was not most Tory Leavers’ original motivation; many prioritised undiluted national sovereignty and a surprising number the ability to make independent trade deals. But these were not ideas which aroused mass support. Instead, as Farage and UKIP showed over a decade, it was only when leaving the EU was linked to anti-immigration politics that it became popular. His argument was that the EU’s freedom of movement had allowed the mass immigration of East Europeans; his slogan ‘Take Back Control’ echoed ‘immigration control’. 

The key to understanding the single market issue is that in the referendum, the Vote Leave campaign led by Conservatives including Johnson and Michael Gove took over UKIP’s approach lock, stock and barrel – they even pinched Farage’s slogan although they kept their distance from the man himself. Under the direction of Dominic Cummings, they used extensive racist propaganda, strongly echoed by the Tory press, to mobilise a coalition of mainly anti-immigrant and outright racist voters and push Leave over the line. This development of the campaign was key to the intimidating atmosphere of its final weeks, which produced a wave of hate crime against Europeans, Blacks and gays as well as the murder of Jo Cox. 

May’s insistence on the centrality of ending freedom of movement. “Let’s state one thing loud and clear”, she said in 2016, “we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again.”  Her ‘letter to the nation’ in 2018 – “We will take back control of our borders, by putting an end to the free movement of people once and for all” – did not just reflect her personal views or her role in the hostile environment policy. Rather, the Leave victory transmitted this anti-immigrant climate of the referendum to the heart of her government. 

Theoretically, Leave’s narrow 52:48 win pointed to a compromise soft Brexit. But politically the single market and freedom of movement were the last things that May (or any incoming Tory leader) could embrace in 2016-17. Retaining freedom of movement would have split the Tories and incited a Farage-UKIP revival, while ending it divided Labour. Johnson agreed; it was vital for the UK not to ‘surrender’ on immigration, he said as he resigned from May’s government the same year, going on to attack Muslim women in his drive for power.

The anti-immigrant symbolism of Brexit, reinforced by the new restrictions which came with the exit from the single market at the end of 2020, led to a substantial reversal of EU migration to the UK. This was the right’s greatest victory in six decades of anti-immigrant campaigning. With May’s and Johnson’s help, Farage’s campaign had succeeded where Enoch Powell’s 1968 call to slow and reverse Black migration had ended in failure.

Continuing Resistance to Freedom of Movement

This victory certainly shifted the ground of immigration politics. Johnson took advantage of it to quietly dispense with the net migration target which was such an embarrassment for Cameron and May. Even the compensating increase which is occurring in non-EU immigration has aroused little political attention, with the hostile campaigning of Migration Watch seeming increasingly irrelevant. Indeed liberal commentators emphasise that attitudes to immigration are now more positive than they have been for a long time. 

As voters rue the Brexit bureaucracy that entangles them in all European contacts, while the losses of nurses, carers, airport and farm workers cause pressures that ministers struggle to explain away, could the time for rejoining the single market have come? There are, unfortunately, reasons for caution about such a conclusion, even if Johnson eventually goes. 

The weakness of anti-immigration attitudes has a lot to do with the disappearance of overt anti-immigrant campaigning and the fact that anti-immigrant voters believe they have won. 

The political racism of the right and their press has not gone away; it has merely refocused on the soft, visible target of helpless Channel asylum seekers. Have Johnson and Priti Patel got their electoral interests wrong by pandering to this with their outrageous Rwanda scheme? While public attitudes to immigration have softened, British Future’s polling shows that 45 per cent, disproportionately among the Tory/Leave electorate, still want more controls. 

Against this backdrop, Ellwood’s call may be a step too far not only for the Conservatives, but also for opposition parties which aim to appease residual Brexit supporters. Well before the referendum, prominent Labour politicians wanted to compromise on freedom of movement; afterwards, even the ‘anti-racist’ Jeremy Corbyn abandoned it along with the single market. Keir Starmer shows no interest in entering the new debate, while the Liberal Democrats, chastened by their 2019 failure, also seem wary. In choosing their candidate for the Tiverton by-election, they passed over members prominently associated with their pro-EU stance.

Rising to the Free Movement Challenge

Yet the road back to the single market cannot avoid the principle of free movement. There would be rich rewards in restoring this. Awareness of the restrictions that Brexit has imposed on British people is growing, while Europeans in the UK remain profoundly dissatisfied with the Settled Status scheme. As the failure of limited visa schemes has shown, European workers need more than short-term rights if they are to be attracted to the UK. Attitudes to free movement are much more positive when it is explained as a mutual benefit rather than a ‘threat’.

Since Johnson’s hold on power remains tenuous, the debate which Ellwood has re-ignited could find fertile ground in the coming months. However it requires a new boldness from liberals and the left. Campaigning for free movement will involve opening up the current balance of migration policy – a compromise on the far right’s terms – and confronting positions which have become entrenched in the political mainstream. To answer the objection that free movement merely advantages white Europeans, it must address the bureaucratic nightmares that the immigration and asylum systems create for non-EU migrants and refugees as well as those which have arisen from leaving the single market. 

There will certainly be vigorous pushback, but this is a debate which cannot be suppressed as the momentum mounts to remove not just Johnson but the whole discredited Conservative party in the next two years.

Martin Shaw is a political sociologist and author of Political Racism: Brexit and Its Aftermath (Agenda 2022).

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US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Interesting article by Nick Cohen suggesting sanctions for Murdoch’s Fox News, and highlighting influence through to the left in the Anglosphere, where there is support for Putin’s Russia and his interests.  

Seems to be shared white Christian nationalist interests and issues between Putin’s Russia, the GOP representing business, libertarian ideology of Koch Network think tanks and also the left, not to forget many Conservative and some Labour MPs compromised by Russian influence, like many of the far right in Europe.

These pivotal interests or issues that should concern the nominal or ideological left, at least in the Anglosphere, are antipathy towards the EU, liberal democracy, open society, human rights etc. while supporting Brexit, Trump, fossil fuels, climate/Covid science denial, doubts and delays to transition; and attacks on civil society through dog whistling of women’s, men’s, LGBT, etc. rights and ridiculing the ‘left’ for ‘wokeness’, ‘cancel culture’ etc.

‘Fox News deals in Kremlin propaganda. So why not freeze Rupert Murdoch’s assets?

Nick Cohen

If NewsCorp’s owner were Russian, there would be no hesitation in applying sanctions

If the west could find the courage, it would order an immediate freeze of Rupert Murdoch’s assets. His Fox News presenters and Russia’s propagandists are so intermeshed that separating the two is as impossible as unbaking a cake.

On Russian state news, as on Fox, bawling ideologues scream threats then whine about their victimhood as they incite anger and self-pity in equal measures. Its arguments range from the appropriation of anti-fascism by Greater Russian imperialists – the 40 countries supporting Ukraine were “today’s collective Hitler”, viewers were told last week – to the apocalyptic delirium of the boss of RT (Russia Today) Margarita Simonyan. Nuclear war is my “horror”, she shuddered, “but we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak”.

Russia would never give genuine western journalists airtime. But it can always find a slot for its favourite quisling: Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. He pushes out Russian propaganda lines or perhaps creates his own lies for Russia to use. Ukraine, not Russia, is the real tyranny. Nato provoked poor Vladimir Putin. The west is plotting to use biological weapons. Last week, he floated the theory that the war was not the result of an unprovoked invasion by a colonialist dictatorship but of the Biden administration’s desire to avenge Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

It was a big hit in Moscow, reported BuzzFeed’s Julia Davis. “State TV propagandists loved it so much, Russia’s 60 Minutes included it not once, but twice in their evening broadcast – neatly bookended by the Kremlin’s war propaganda.”

Putin’s appeal to both the far right and the Chomskyan wing of the far left in Europe and North America is worthy of a study in itself. He was a dream for ultra-reactionaries: a white, Christian strongman, who was anti-liberal and anti-EU. His victories heralded a world in which might was right and morality was for losers.

In Europe, Russia’s atrocities have forced everyone from Arron Banks and Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini to find urgent reasons to change the subject. In the US, there remains a market for Putinism among a large minority of Republican voters. Their yearning for dictatorship, as evidenced by the support given to denying legitimate election results and to the fascistic forces that stormed Congress, is greater. The hatred of liberals in power is deeper.

Murdoch is boosting Russian morale and, conversely, undermining Ukrainian resolve by supplying a dictatorship with foreign validation. Do not underestimate its importance. Russians who suspect their TV anchors are state-sponsored bootlickers are more likely to believe foreign commentators who assure them that the lies they are hearing are true. 

Reporters risk their lives but Putin cannot fire or imprison Fox News presenters, steal their wealth or poison them with Novichok. Russian forces will not reduce their towns to rubble, rape them, torture them, burn them alive in theatres or shoot them in the head by the side of forest roads. Murdoch and his employees have nothing to fear from Putin. Their endorsement of Kremlin war propaganda carries conviction because it is freely given.

Murdoch boosts Russian morale and undermines Ukrainian resolve by supplying a dictatorship with foreign validation.

As useful to Russia is the wider chilling effect. I have seen journalists start off making eloquent and plausible critiques of the left’s hatred of free speech, for instance, or its tolerance of regressive religion, only to find that careers in the worst of the rightwing media come with a price tag. To succeed on Fox News in the US, they don’t have to agree with banning abortion or denying climate change but they must never make their objections public.

The UK’s sanctions regulations include among the reasons for freezing an oligarch’s assets “obtaining a benefit from or supporting the Government of Russia”. The Biden White House promises to punish those “responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putin’s war on Ukraine”. On both interpretations, there is a plausible prosecution case for freezing the assets of Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

Because it is a media conglomerate, sanctions would be an attack on free speech. I say this plainly because so many writers and political actors pretend that they are not demanding censorship when that is precisely what they are doing. Nevertheless, in this case the threat to freedom is minimal. Murdoch would not be punished for revealing embarrassing truths about the west but for spreading demonstrable lies for a hostile foreign power.

If you still feel queasy, imagine if Murdoch’s media organisation were exactly as it is today and producing the same arguments the Kremlin uses to justify its crimes. The one difference is that Murdoch is Russian rather than Australian. I don’t believe there would be the slightest hesitation in removing him and his family from control of their businesses. Indeed, the UK, EU and US have already announced sanctions against Russian broadcasters and individual journalists. I have not heard anyone claim that they are attacking press freedom, rather than trying to cripple the propaganda capacity of a warmongering state.

The Murdoch empire contains the Times and Wall Street Journal, whose Russian coverage has been admirable, and HarperCollins, which with a bravery few other publishers would match, fought off a vicious legal assault by the Russian oligarchy and their pet London lawyers against a critical study of Putin’s power.

But good deeds count for nothing in assessing the desirability of sanctions. The tycoon Oleg Tinkov spoke for many rich Russians when he denounced the “massacre” in Ukraine and called for an end to the “crazy war”. The oligarchs the west has sanctioned are losing their fortunes and what little influence they had. Of course they hate Putin’s strategy. Western governments don’t care because, as Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institute explains it to me, they know that a large portion of oligarchical wealth is at Putin’s disposal. Their private thoughts and, when they dare risk assassination attempts, public protests are irrelevant. The need to end war in Europe comes first.

Tender-hearted readers may object that Murdoch is now 90 and may well not be in full control of his organisation. But surely this is an argument for removing him? If in his dotage he is allowing himself to become a cross between Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose, it would be a kindness for western governments to save him from himself.

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