Putin’s Supporters in Europe and Anglosphere: Willing Dupes and Useful Idiots?

Article from the ECFR European Council on Foreign Relations in 2016 describing those aligned or allied with Putin’s Russia on both the European left and right, while the latter are adopted or supported by Putin’s Russia, with recommendations on what Europe could do, warning of Russia’s covert support for populist parties; post Brexit, pre Trump and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

‘Putin’s friends in Europe

The upsurge of populism in Europe has provided Russia with an ample supply of sympathetic political parties across the continent.

Fredrik Wesslau 19 October 2016

The upsurge of populism in Europe has provided Russia with an ample supply of sympathetic political parties across the continent. These parties – mostly from the far right but also from the far left – are pursuing policies and taking positions that advance Russia’s agenda in Europe. They tend to be anti-establishment parties ― some on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum ― that challenge the mainstream liberal order in Europe. Many of these parties are working actively to undo the European project. They are generally suspicious of the United States and want to reduce its influence in Europe.

In June ECFR carried out the first comprehensive survey of ‘insurgent’ parties in Europe. It found that, despite their differences, a majority of them are positively inclined towards Putin’s Russia and pursue policies that promote Russia’s interests in Europe.

While Russia is not responsible for the emergence of these pro-Russian parties, it has embraced them, especially as relations between the West and Russia have deteriorated. The parties are useful for Moscow in that they help legitimise the Kremlin’s policies and amplify Russian disinformation. At times they can also shift Europe’s domestic debates in Russia’s favour. But it is their politics of disruption – underpinned by their scepticism towards the European Union – that does most to destabilise European politics.

It would be a mistake to portray these parties as Russian stooges. The parties’ pro-Russian policies are underpinned by conviction and an affinity with ideological tenets of Putin’s Russia. But while the parties are not under Moscow’s control, the extent to which Russia directly supports them has become an increasingly important question, as tensions rise between Russia and the West. Russian influencing efforts in the West have come under particular scrutiny since the leak of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails in July was attributed to Russian meddling in US politics.

Alignment with Russia

To what extent do the insurgent parties align with Russia? A majority of the 45 insurgent parties identified by ECFR were favourably inclined towards Russia and sympathised with Russian positions. The most pro-Russian of these parties (of a significant size) on the far right are: the AfD, FPÖ, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, France’s Front National, Italy’s Northern League, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB). On the far left, the most pro-Russian parties are Cyprus’s AKEL, Germany’s Die Linke, the Czech Republic’s KSCM, Podemos in Spain, and Syriza. The Italian Five Star Movement and the Human Shield Party in Croatia also belong to the pro-Russian camp.

Voting patterns in the European Parliament shows that on issues such as Ukraine, the human rights situation in Russia, and association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, the Dutch PVV leads the pack in pro-Russian votes. UKIP, the Sweden Democrats, Italy’s Northern League, and France’s Front National come in a shared second place. Insurgent parties from the far left – Spain’s Podemos, Greece’s Syriza, and Germany’s Die Linke – are not far behind.

All of these parties, with the exception of Syriza and PVV, oppose EU sanctions on Russia and none believe that the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with Ukraine should be implemented in full. All the parties are Eurosceptic to varying degrees.

The pro-Russian stance of these parties derives largely from conviction and from an ideological affinity with Putin’s Russia. On the far right, many are attracted to Russia’s socially conservative values, its defence of national sovereignty, and its rejection of liberal internationalism and interventionism. On the left, many of the insurgents are attracted by Russia’s antipathy towards globalisation and its challenge to the US-dominated international capitalist order, as well as a nostalgic link to the Soviet Union. Both fringes tend to see Russia as a counter to the United States.

Friends with benefits

These parties have proven useful to Moscow in various ways. They have provided convenient sources of legitimisation domestically – and to some extent internationally – on issues such as Crimea. The Kremlin is able to point to them as “evidence” of Russia not being isolated and of there being supportive voices in Europe. This was seen during the referendum in Crimea in March 2014. While the OCSE did not send observers to Crimea, a group of European politicians from far right parties, including from the FPÖ, VB, FN, Jobbik, and Northern League, went there as observers. This was presented by Moscow as international legitimisation of the referendum.

They have also proven capable of shifting the centre of political discourse in Russia’s favour. In France, for example, former president and presidential hopeful, Nicolas Sarkozy, who belongs to the political mainstream has taken an increasingly sympathetic line towards Russia as presidential elections in 2017 approach. He has called for the lifting of sanctions against Russia and argued that Crimea has a right to become part of Russia. This line is part of his election strategy to adopt positions from the National Front in order to co-opt their votes.

But it is not just in matters of policy that these parties’ sympathies with the Kremlin are revealed. In them Moscow has also found convenient and willing conveyors of its anti-Western, anti-globalisation narratives. Several of the far right leaders, such as Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, are frequent guests on Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, with Farage reportedly having been offered his own show on RT.

The “Operation Liza” case in Germany, where a false Russian story of a 13-year-old Russian-German girl having been raped by immigrants was picked up and spread by members of the far right AfD and Die Linke, which has close ties to Germans of Russian descent, was a prime example of the role these parties play in amplifying Russian disinformation.

Finally, the anti-EU and anti-NATO strand of insurgent parties benefits Russia by weakening Western consensus and institutions. The Dutch referendum on the EU’s association agreement with Ukraine in April 2016 was an example of how insurgents in the minority were able to obstruct EU policy to Russia’s benefit. But this was most clearly seen in UKIP’s leading role in Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, with several Eurosceptic parties in Europe now following in UKIP’s footsteps and pushing for their own referendums on EU membership. Several parties, including AKEL, Die Linke, FPÖ, Golden Dawn, KSCM, and Jobbik are also opposed to the NATO alliance.

Russian support and the populist upsurge

But while it is clear that Moscow benefits from the pro-Russian stance of populist parties in Europe and in some cases uses them for propaganda purposes, it is less clear to what extent there is collusion. The notion that Russia might be funding agents of influence by providing financing to sympathetic parties in Europe has become more salient as relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated.

The most well-publicised case of a European political party receiving funding from Russia is the loan to Front National, which has aligned itself with Russia on a range of issues. It has recognised Russia’s annexation of Crimea and event sent observers to the Crimean referendum, providing international legitimisation for the Kremlin. 

Leaked SMS exchanges indicate that the Front National’s stance on Crimea was the subject of correspondence between Russian officials, who agreed that the party should be “thanked” somehow for recognising the results of the referendum in Crimea. While Front National has denied that there was any quid pro quo, eight months later the party received a loan of €9.46 million from the First Czech Russian National Bank ― a financial institution with links to the Kremlin. Marine Le Pen has publicly acknowledged the loan – equivalent to the Front National’s total revenue for 2013 – citing the party’s inability to secure financing from European sources.

The founder of Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has also received a €2.5 million loan through his company Cotelec, from a Cyprus-based company that is owned by a former KGB agent who was expelled from Britain in 1985 on charges of spying.

The loans to Front National seem to be a rare case of acknowledged Russian financing of a party.  But does it amount to collusion? Not necessarily since Front National would probably have taken pro-Russian positions in any case. But the money does act as an enabler.

There is circumstantial evidence and rumours of covert support for other radical parties in Europe, but little solid evidence exists in the public domain. The lack of information may not be surprising since this sort of activity typically belongs to the opaque world of intelligence services.

But even if one assumes that Russia does not provide financial support to any other party, the way Moscow uses them to legitimise its own narrative and spread disinformation is in itself a cause for concern. They become ― wittingly or unwittingly ― part of an increasingly assertive and hostile Russian foreign policy towards the West.

So what should Europe do?

To begin with, European leaders should recognise that dealing with domestic populism is the greater challenge. Today, anti-establishment politics are a fact throughout Europe. And the political tides are still moving in their direction; several more may find themselves empowered after elections in Germany, France, Netherlands, and possibly Italy, in 2017.

But while Russia is not behind the growth of populism, it is certainly benefiting from it. Insurgent parties have a right to take positions that align with those of Russia, within the limits of democratic politics. But covert Russian actions to support these parties and to spread disinformation undermine the democratic basis of European societies.

European law enforcement agencies should prioritise looking into Russian covert support for populist parties and taking steps to counter such support. European governments should consider publishing intelligence on this in the public domain. Voters have a right to be informed about whom they are voting for.

European governments should introduce stricter regulation of political party financing, notably when that financing is from foreign sources, and increased transparency requirements in relation to funding. A stricter implementation of national corruption and money laundering legislation would also go some way to countering illegal money transfers.’

For more related articles and blogs on EU European Union, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Russia and White Nationalism click through:

Russian Brexit Coup by Putin and Compromised British Conservatives

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

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

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

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

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

Afghan and Islamic Refugees – ADL – The Great Replacement Theory – Nativist Conservative Media, Politics and Public Discourse

With recent events in Afghanistan i.e. the collapse of the coalition supported regime while the Taliban reemerge, we again have observed more political agitprop in Europe, Australia, US, UK etc. focused upon immigration, refugees, Islam and Renaud Camus’ ‘The Great Replacement’ based on Raspail’s ‘Camp of the Saints’ and eugenics.  

These factors have become mainstreamed in and by white Christian nationalist governments with media support, for political and electoral advantage in targeting ageing and/or nativist electorates.  

However, this has reached the point that governments which chose to become involved in Afghanistan or Iraq are now constrained in what responses or solutions they can offer genuine refugees, due to political or electoral kick back from mainstreaming ‘The Great Replacement’, too successfully.

From ADL the Anti-Defamation League report on “The Great Replacement:” An Explainer

Once largely relegated to white supremacist rhetoric, “The Great Replacement” has made its way into mainstream consciousness in the past several years. From the chants of “Jews Will Not Replace Us” on the University of Virginia campus to then-U.S. Rep. Steve King’s tweeted protest, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s complaints that the Democratic party is attempting to “replace the current electorate” with “third-world voters,” the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived.

The following provides an introduction to “The Great Replacement:” Where it began, how it feeds into white supremacist grievances and which “mainstream” personalities have used it to score points and signal (not so subtly) their nativist point of view.

Origin Story

• “The Great Replacement” theory has its roots in early 20th century French nationalism and books by French nationalist and author Maurice Barres. However, it was French writer and critic Renaud Camus who popularized the phrase for today’s audiences when he published an essay titled “Le Grand Remplacement,” or “the great replacement,” in 2011. Camus himself alluded to the “great replacement theory” in his earlier works and was apparently influenced by Jean Raspail’s racist novel, The Camp of the Saints.
• Camus believes that native white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by non-white immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, and the end result will be the extinction of the white race.
• Camus focused on Muslim immigration to Europe and the theory that Muslims and other non-white populations had a much higher birth rate than whites. His initial concept did not focus on Jews and was not antisemitic.
• The “great replacement” philosophy was quickly adopted and promoted by the white supremacist movement, as it fit into their conspiracy theory about the impending destruction of the white race, also know as “white genocide.” It is also a strong echo of the white supremacist rallying cry, “the 14 words:” “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
• Since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S. the replacement theory is now associated with antisemitism.
• The night before the August 2017 the Unite the Right rally, white supremacists, marching across the University of Virginia campus, shouted, “Jews will not replace us,” and “You will not replace us,” clear references to Camus’ theory.

Use By Individual Extremists

• In October 2018, white supremacist Robert Bowers killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, after writing a Gab post blaming Jews for bringing non-white immigrants and refugees to the U.S.
• In March 2019, white supremacist Brenton Tarrant livestreamed himself killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand. Tarrant also released a manifesto online called “The Great Replacement,” an homage to Camus’ work.
• In April 2019, white supremacist John Earnest killed one and injured three at a synagogue in Poway, CA. In a letter he released online, Earnest claimed that Jews were responsible for the genocide of “white Europeans,” and cited the influence of Bowers and Tarrant.
• In August 2019, white supremacist Patrick Crusius opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, TX, killing 23 people and wounding almost two dozen. In a manifesto, Crusius talked about a “Hispanic invasion” and made reference to the great replacement.

Use By Politicians

• In April 2019, Heinz-Christian Strache, campaigning for the Freedom Party of Austria ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election,  endorsed the “great replacement” theory.
• The Identitarian movement, a white nationalist movement in Europe, has promoted the “great replacement” theory. Martin Sellner, the head of Generation Identitaire in Austria, is a particularly vocal promoter.
• Marine Le Pen, a far-right French politician, also promoted the idea of the “great replacement.”
• In March 2017, then-GOP Congressman (IA) Steve King tweeted his support for Geert Wilders a well-known anti-immigration activist from Europe.  “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” the Congressman wrote. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The tweet, which won praise from white supremacists, was a clear reference to replacement theory. In August 2018, King gave an interview to a far-right magazine in Austria, in which he promoted the “great replacement” theory.
• In an interview on Fox News Justice with Judge Jeanine in July 2020, GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed that an “attempted cultural genocide” was occurring in the US and that the left wanted to “replace America.

Use by Media/Tech Personalities

• In July 2017, Lauren Southern, a Canadian far-right activist, released a video titled, “The Great Replacement,” promoting Camus’ themes. That summer, Southern was involved in “Defend Europe,” a project lead by European white nationalists to block the arrival of boats carrying African immigrants. Southern’s video further popularized Camus’ theory.
• In October 2018, on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham said, “your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.”
• In October 2019, Jeanine Pirro was discussing Democrats’ hatred of Trump on Fox Nation’s The Todd Starnes Show. She declared, “Think about it. It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals that will vote for the Democrats.”
• On April 8, 2021, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host explicitly promoted the ‘great replacement” theory. Carlson discussed “Third World” immigrants coming to the US who affiliate with the Democratic Party. He asserted, “I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World, but they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.”
• On April 11, 2021, Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, posted on his own platform: “Now today the ADL is trying to cancel Tucker Carlson for daring to speak the truth about the reality of demographic replacement that is absolutely and unequivocally going on in The West. These are not ‘hateful’ statements, the objective facts that can no longer be ignored.”

For more related blogs or articles on Demography, Evangelical Christianity, Immigration, Media, Political Strategy, Population Growth, Populist Politics and White Nationalism click through.

Global Warming – Climate Change – Eco-Fascism

With the science of climate change and global warming under attack as Australia experiences bushfires not seen before in scope and intensity, there are now clear links between white nationalism and niche environmentalism, or ‘eco-fascism’.  According to many this has included long term support from fossil fuels oligarchs’ foundations in promoting eugenics and anti-immigrant sentiment as an ecological solution.

Fossil Fuels and Eco-Fascism (Image copyright Pexels)

Jeff Sparrow in The Guardian Australia presents a summary of his recent book Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre below:

 

‘Eco-fascists and the ugly fight for ‘our way of life’ as the environment disintegrates

Genuine fascists remain on the political margins, but we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy.

Earlier this year, when the fascist responsible for the El Paso massacre cited ecological degradation as part motivation for his killing spree, many considered him entirely deranged.

Eco-fascism sounds oxymoronic, a mashup of irreconcilable philosophies.

Yet, while eco-fascists violently oppose contemporary environmentalists, they often appropriate ideas from the past of the environmental movement.

In the United States, the first conservationists – men like Teddy Roosevelt – were wealthy big-game hunters trying to preserve creatures they liked to shoot.

These elite enthusiasts for “the manly sport with the rifle” blamed impoverished arrivals from eastern and central Europe for “pot hunting” – that is, for killing game for food or money rather than for fun. But they also saw immigrants as polluting America’s racial stock, making an explicit parallel between “lesser races” and the invasive species threatening native animals and plants.

On that basis, Julia Scott from the Daughters of the American Revolution could speak at the National Conservation Congress of 1910, urging attendees not only to protect flora and fauna but to conserve “the supremacy of the Caucasian race in our land”.

You can get a sense of the centrality of eugenic theory to the early movement from the career of Madison Grant, the most important environmentalist of his generation.

We can thank Grant for saving the American bison, the bald eagle, the pronghorn antelope, the Alaskan bear and the fur seal, as well as, according to his biographer, contributing to the preservation of elephants, gorillas, koalas and many other charismatic species.

But Grant also campaigned for the racist Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, and wrote the bestselling The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History, an impassioned defence of white supremacy that Hitler described as his personal “bible”.

The book’s popularity in Germany was not coincidental. Grant, like many of his colleagues, derived his environmentalism from a conservative Romanticism, the philosophical source for Nazi concepts about the importance of Lebensraum (living room) and Blut und Boden (blood and soil).

Modern eco-fascists still draw on the same Romantic contrast between the sublime hierarchies of nature and the supposedly effete degeneracy of modernity.

They also exploit the legacy of a tendency influential in environmental circles in much more recent times.

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published a book called The Population Bomb, in which he argued that ecological destruction – and, indeed, almost all social problems – could be attributed to overpopulation.

As the historian Thomas Robertson notes, few signs of a mass environmental movement existed when The Population Bomb first appeared. Yet, “by the spring of 1970, Americans could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper without seeing mention of ecology and the environment”. That year, the first Earth Day attracted an astonishing 20 million people to environmental teach-ins, a result attributable at least in part to Ehrlich.

Today, his influence – and that of population theory more generally – has waned considerably, not least because the rate of world population growth has slowed substantially while his predictions of ever-worsening famines in the 1970s proved spectacularly wrong.

But progressive environmentalists also recognised the succour populationism provided to the extreme right.

The attribution of ecological destruction to demographic growth obscures the social relations through which, for instance, a mere 20 fossil fuel companies can be linked to more than one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the modern era.

Worse still, arguments that (in theory) blame all people often (in practice) target particular people: usually the poor and the oppressed.

The Population Bomb itself opened with Ehrlich describing how he’d understood the case for population control “emotionally” during a visit to Delhi where, he said, the streets “seemed alive with people” and the “dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect”. At the time, Delhi housed some 2.8 million while the population of Paris stood at about eight million – and yet it would be difficult to imagine Ehrlich reacting with equivalent disgust to crowds on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

Other populationists came to oppose not just fertility but also immigration, on the basis that, if the teeming masses from poor nations moved to the rich world, they’d adopt a western resource-heavy lifestyle. As a result, as academics Sebastian Normandin and Sean A Valles argue, America’s modern anti-immigrant movement “was built and led by – and in some cases is still led by – a network of conservationists and population control activists”.

The vast majority of greens now disavow the environmental populationist John Tanton, who, according to Susan A Berger, constructed many of the anti-Mexican organisations relied upon by Donald Trump as he electioneered for his border wall during the 2016 poll.

Yet the argument that ordinary people, rather than social structures, should be blamed for climate change still circulates – and invariably pushes in rightwing directions.

Think of the El Paso shooter and the document in which he justified his racial massacre.

“If we can get rid of enough people,” he wrote, “then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

The glibness with which he advocates environmental murder marks the El Paso perpetrator as distinctly fascist.

Fortunately, genuine fascists remain on the political margins in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, we can increasingly imagine the space that eco-fascism might occupy. When asylum seekers fleeing floods and famines arrive on Australian shores in their millions, how will politicians respond?

Unless there’s a radical shift in the political culture, they will, presumably, rely upon the strategies perfected during decades of bipartisan anti-refugee campaigning, deploying the familiar arsenal of boat turnbacks, naval patrols and offshore detention, albeit on a much, much larger scale.

In other words, they’ll embrace an approach already advocated by European racist populists like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, who posits massively intensified border policing as a “realistic” response to the inevitability of the environmental disaster.

Just as the stop-the-boats campaigners of recent decades depict refugee advocates as indifferent to drownings at sea, the supporters of “green” border policing will denounce climate activists for sabotaging “practical” responses to climate change with their utopianism.

It’s not difficult to imagine “eco-authoritarianism” or what Naomi Klein calls “climate barbarism”: a politics centred on the state making “our way of life” sustainable as the environment disintegrates. Future governments committed to this project will be able to draw upon the vast array of coercive powers they’ve acquired over the past decades: draconian anti-protest laws; secret trials and imprisonment; the deployment of the army to quell civil disturbances; and so on.

Eco-fascism represents a related but distinctive tendency. It will emerge not through the state but as a political movement, with people like the El Paso perpetrator violently defending climate privilege against immigrants, environmentalists and progressives.

We’re nowhere near that point yet. But it’s a lot less unimaginable than it should be.

Jeff Sparrow’s new book, Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre, is out now through Scribe.’

 

For more blogs and articles about white nationalism, environment and population growth click through.