Much mirth was had on Friday night’s edition of Have I Got News For You when host Lee Mack inadvertently accused Jeremy Hunt of money laundering. The current minister in charge of privatising the NHS has bought a whole load of houses in Southampton to the tune of £50 million, but not declared it in the register of members’ interests. This breaks parliamentary rules, as Mike reported on his blog. Mack went a bit further, and frightened the Beeb’s lawyers and producers by inadvertently claiming that Hunt had been accused of money laundering. He hasn’t, as the producers and the lawyers told him through the microphone in his ear and by autocue. He then got frightened over whether it would be the programme or himself that could get sued for libel.
Hislop, however, was perfectly willing to repeat the accusation. He said that the legislation that Hunt had violated had been brought in specifically to deal with money laundering, and so that was what Hunt was doing. ‘Trust me on this. I never lose’. That last must have been said ironically, as Hislop and Private Eye have lost libel cases so often that it was a case for major celebration over a decade ago when he actually won one. Mack hurriedly repeated the statement that Hunt had not been charged with that offence, while Hislop said ‘But that’s what he’s been doing.’ Ah, the fun of watching arguments on panel games, and a host terrified of m’learned friends coming down on him.
But this also raises an interesting point. Amongst their various donors, the Tories have been taking money from Russian oligarchs. These men were very highly placed managers and apparatchiks under the old Soviet system. Hence they were able to buy up their particular industries and state enterprises, often at knockdown prices, when it was all privatised by Yeltsin. And there’s a conflict of interest here. When Putin came to power, he allowed them to retain their ownership on one condition: absolute loyalty to him. It’s been described by Russian dissidents and academics as ‘industrial feudalism’. Alexandra Politovskaya, the murdered Russian democracy activist said that as long as this system continues, there is no freedom, no democracy, just the strong man in the Kremlin.
Exactly true. So although the Tories want some kind of confrontation with Putin, including war, a sizable portion of their rich donors don’t.
But there’s also the possibility of personal danger to Hunt himself. Russia is a very corrupt society, and the Communist era was certainly no exception. The Russian journalist Arkady Vaksberg described just how corrupt Russian officialdom was in his book The Soviet Mafia. Vaksberg was a Jewish Bulgarian, who worked for TASS, the official Soviet news agency. Several times he risked censure and arrest for uncovering massive corruption within the Communist party. And it went all the way to the top, right to Brezhnev himself and his son-in-law. Vaksberg describes talking to exhausted, demoralised Soviet generals, who had spent days trying to arrange emergency transport for food into areas hit by famine. They then found out that all their efforts had been wasted. There was no famine. It all had been a scam by the local party chiefs and apparatchiks to misdirect funds and goods, and enrich themselves.
And money laundering was one of the many tricks the corrupt Communist chiefs were into. In one of the these scams, the embezzled money was laundered through the Soviet hotel chains on the Black Sea coast, run by a powerful Georgian lady nicknamed ‘Iron Bella’. Again, millions of roubles were involved. After this was busted wide open, and those responsible were sacked and led off to the gulags, Iron Bella mysteriously disappeared.
But everybody knew where she went. As they said in the Godfather, she sleeps with the fishes. The joke at the time went, ‘Nobody knows what happened to all those roubles, but everyone knows Iron Bella’s at the bottom of the Black Sea’. Quite.
If Hunt has been doing a bit of money laundering, an offence for which he has not been charged, and it comes from Russian oligarchs, then it might be advisable for him to avoid any coastal holidays for the time being.
One of the most frightening developments in contemporary international politics is the rise of extreme Right-wing, nationalist and indeed, explicitly neo-Nazi movements across Europe – from Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, PEGIDA and the Alternative fuer Deutschland in Germany, and similar regimes in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Ukraine. Germany has some legal protection against extremist radicalism in the Basic Law. Under the Grundgesetz, the only political organisations that are tolerated are those which recognise democracy. It was introduced after the War as part of the denazification process, and has been used against the extreme Right and Left. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the NPD, or National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi outfit, and earlier in the 1950s it was invoked against the KPD, the German Communist Party. They survived by reforming, and inserting a clause into their constitution stating that they recognised a period of democracy in the development towards Socialism. I also wonder if some of the Islamist firebrands that were thrown out of the Federal Republic a few years ago weren’t also deported because their preaching violated the Basic Law. After all, if anything violates a law protecting democracy, it’s the preachers’ violent denunciation of it and demands for the establishment of an absolute caliphate.
There have been attempts by the UN to pass laws against the glorification of the Nazis and the Third Reich. Michelle, one of the commenters on this blog, posted this comment about them, and the countries that either voted against the motion or abstained.
Countries at the UN vote on fighting the forces of international Nazism “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”
For most people and nations, passing laws against the glamorisation of the Nazis and everything they stood for really isn’t a problem. The horrors committed by the Third Reich are widely known, at least in the West, and the regime has been consistently condemned by mainstream media and politicians since the War and its attendant horrors, particularly the Holocaust.
In the case of Ukraine, it’s not hard to see why the country voted against the ban. Modern Ukraine’s national hero is Stepan Bandera, who led the campaign against what he viewed as the Russian/ Soviet occupation of his country during the Second World War. Ukraine had broken away and tried to seek independence after the First World War, but was then annexed by the emerging Soviet Union under Lenin. Unfortunately, Bandera attempted to gain Ukraine’s independence by allying and collaborating with the invading Nazis, though he was briefly interned in a concentration camp. See this documentary.
It’s less obvious why supposedly democratic nations, like America and Canada, that have never had to make a terrible choice between occupying totalitarian governments, should vote against the motion. Or why Britain should have abstained. One solution to the problem is that since before the Second World War, the British and American security agencies have recruited extreme Right-wing eastern European nationalists as part of their strategy to contain the Soviet Union and the rise of Communism. John Burns in his review of Stephen Dorril’s MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate: London 2000) in Lobster 40 notes the involvement of both the British and French intelligence services in the Intermarium movement. This was a Roman Catholic lay organisation, formed in Paris in the mid-1930s, which had as its goal the creation of a federation of stretching from Lithuania in the north to Croatia in the Adriatic, with Poland at its centre. The organisation’s chief, Otto von Habsburg, was given a subsidy of £50,000 a month by the head of MI6, Menzies. Habsburg later moved to the US, and the British tried to get the Americans to take over its funding. It officially died the death when Molotov rejected it on the grounds that it was anti-Soviet, a view which was then conceded by the US.
The scheme was supported after the War by the Vatican, where many senior priests and clergy took the leadership of the organisation. It became one of the first organisations that openly campaigned for the release of Waffen-SS Prisoners of War. The movement’s headquarters moved to Rome after the French lost interest in 1946. They then moved to the US, where they were heavily involved in CIA anti-Communist front organisations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. The article states that these became the bases for the liberation movements in those countries sponsored by the CIA and MI6.
The article also discusses the involvement of the British and American intelligence services in the Promethean League. This was formed shortly after the Russian Revolution, and was a conspiratorial independence movement for all of the minorities in the Soviet Union. However, the most prominent members were the Ukrainians and Georgians. By 1925 it was also receiving financial support from MI6’s Menzies. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess were also involved in this, and duly kept their Soviet masters well informed. It ceased to exist by 1949, but supplied many of the personnel for later, anti-Soviet eastern European nationalist groups, most notably the Belorussians and Ukrainians. These formed another organisation, INTEGRAL. This, according to Dorril, was a deliberate attempt to invoke the memory of the ‘integral nationalists’ of 1930s Europe, who held Fascistic views about race and culture. Stephen Dorril himself, writing in Lobster 15, states that MI6 used former collaborators with the Nazis in its anti-Communist operations in Latvia and Albania. See his review of Anthony Cavendish’s Inside Intelligence (Palu Publishing Ltd 1987), pp. 1-3, (p.1). Lobster’s long term editor, Robin Ramsay, also discusses the very strong Nazi element in WACL – the World Anti-Communist League, which includes Conservatives, anti-Semites, Nazis and the leaders of South American death squads. He states that CIA involvement in the organisation has always been strong, and that every now and then there are hints that the dividing line between it and the Agency has now ceased to exist. Ramsay also notes that Radio Liberty, one of the CIA financed stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union, was transmitting increasingly anti-Semitic material from Ukrainian emigres.
Ramsay also states that it the Ukrainian community in Britain, which formed the backbone of the World Anti-Communist League. It was led here by Yaroslav Stetso. Stetso styled himself the former Ukrainian Prime Minister. He was also the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, or ABN, which was formed after the War and financied by the British and US intelligence agencies. In Ukraine itself, Stetso had been part of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had collaborated with the Nazis and took part in pogroms and atrocities against the Jews. At WACL’s AGM in 1986, General Singlaub told the assembled Rightists that Stetso’s widow had received a personal message of condolence from Ronald Reagan praising her husband’s contribution to the struggle against tyranny.
The same issue of Lobster also carries a review of Scott and Jon Lee Anderson’s Inside the League (Dodd, Mead and Co., New York 1986), on WACL. This again notes that in this country, the League was headed by Stetso and the ABN ‘a bunch of Nazi-collaborators, murderers and anti-Semites funded after WW2 by the US and British governments’. It also is very pessimistic about Britain actually doing anything about the remaining former Nazis living in the UK, as to do so would risk exposing their links to MI5, MI6 and the mandarins at Whitehall.
There is also a review of ‘Date-Line Washington: Anti-Semitism and the Airwaves’, by Lars-Erik Nelson in Foreign Policy 65, Winter 1986. That also discusses the way the involvement of Ukrainian ex-pats in Radio Liberty under Reagan has also resulted in the broadcaster becoming anti-Semitic, while at the same time these groups are whitewashing history, claiming that they didn’t collaborate with Nazis, form a Ukrainian division in the SS, or assist in the persecution of the Jews and the pogroms.
From this, it looks very much like ‘No’ vote by the US and Canada, and Britain’s abstention, was due to a desire to preserve the links between the intelligence services and extreme Right-wing groups in countries like Ukraine. As well as to avoid anyone starting to do anything dodgy, such as invoking such a law to examine such links.
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