Yellow Journalism?

My erstwhile colleague Milo Yiannopoulos has announced that he has come out of retirement. My, how that news has taken me back. I have a feeling that it was around this time of year, and the year was certainly 2009, when I was deemed no longer fit to share a platform with Yiannopoulos, or with James Delingpole, or with The Much Honoured Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie and his entreaties of the then Queen to recognise the peerages that had been created by the Stuart claimants in exile. When he was a Policy Adviser to Michael Forsyth as Secretary of State for Scotland, did Warner try that one on the Orangemen of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party? Perhaps because two of its stalwarts have since been raised to the peerage, there will never be another Telegraph Blogs. Not even under the House of Nahyan.

Well over a year later, I am still laughing. Could anything have been funnier than that the Daily Telegraph had begged the State for protection from the “free” market? Yes, there was one thing even more amusing than that. A Conservative Government had granted it. By Statute. Someone should have tabled an amendment exempting Israel from that ban, just to force a vote and see what would have happened. And now, the Labour Party that voted for that Bill in Opposition is in government and allowing the offending acquisition to proceed after all. The press must be so free that you needed the Government’s permission to part-own it. If a publication were that important, then it could not possibly be allowed to go bust. We would all have to pick up the tab. You read it here first, as you very often do.

Telegraph columnists appear to have the answer to every problem in Britain and even in the world. It is a wonder that no Telegraph columnist has ever become Prime Minister. Had that happened, then it could only have ended well, if it would already have ended at all. Having been hooked by the horses, by the hats, and by the horses in hats, then Telegraph readers may expect to continue to be fed comment that seasoned journalists from other English-speaking countries could not tell from The Guardian in blind tests. In my direct experience, that is quite the game in certain parlours. If Telegraph, Guardian and Times readers alike wanted to know what their sages really thought, then they would read the Financial Times and The Economist, in which the Establishment talked to itself on the assumption that no one else was listening.

Only last year, the Statute Law was changed on a cross-party basis to stop the United Arab Emirates from acquiring a small-circulation newspaper. Apparently, these things are now the Government’s business. If you thought that there was now a Labour Government, then ask yourself why it would care in the least who owned the Telegraph, which is still always described as “influential”. Influential over whom? But the Emiratis are now considered among the “moderates” in the Middle East. They are undeniably old friends of Britain, whatever that may say about them or about us. So the tack has been changed to a Yellow Peril. RedBird IMI is now suddenly somehow Chinese. You know, the China that is actively encouraged to own any British infrastructure that it happened to fancy, and which the Crown Prosecution Service recently conceded in open court was not an enemy within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act. The Times and the Sunday Times have just named Durham their University of the Year 2026. When did you last go to Durham? You really should.

Would that there were anything to this Yellow Peril, since the Telegraph might then provide some context to the coverage, necessary in itself, of the awfulness of the regime in China. The enemies of that regime are not very nice, either. Defined as the present People’s Republic, “China claims Taiwan” is reversible. Indeed, defining itself as the Republic of China, Taiwan does not claim jurisdiction only over China as it now exists, although it does claim all of that. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, it also lays claim to all of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Myanmar.

The dispute is real between India and China over Arunachal Pradesh, currently in India, and the Aksai Chin plateau, currently in China. In 2020, it led to their first fatal confrontation since 1975. Taiwan lays claim to the lot, including the part of Aksai Chin that is in Tibet, and including the part that is in Xinjiang. As conventionally portrayed, you cannot support both Taiwan and Tibet, or both Taiwan and Xinjiang. Ask them in Taipei, and they will tell you that they are the Republic of China, of which Tibet and Xinjiang are integral parts. As for Taiwanese independence, the United States would never bring on a Third World War by recognising it, so that is just that. Satisfying no one, the present situation will still be in place long after we were all dead.

The founder of Taiwanese nationalism, Lee Teng-hui, was a volunteer Second Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army until the very end of the Second World War. He always regarded Japanese as his first language, and Tokyo as the cultural capital of his wider civilisation. The dictator of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, Park Chung-hee, had been an officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that had occupied Manchuria. These are the heroic Asian Tigers of successive generations of the same neoliberals who have always lionised Augusto Pinochet. Their economic system neither requires nor upholds democracy.

For all our cross-party determination to emulate China’s nightmare surveillance state, we tolerate and even indulge the far worse human rights records of, in one notable case, the state that has been setting off bombs on our streets, and which will now stop doing so, if it will, precisely because it was now allied to China, therefore making peace with Iran, making peace in Yemen, joining BRICS, and accepting yuan for oil. We shall see. We would rightly arrest and imprison in Bradford, Birmingham or Tower Hamlets those who have been arrested and imprisoned in Xinjiang. That there are a lot of them is just because there are a lot of people in that part of the world.

Before 1959, Tibet was not an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. But Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. “Dalai” is a family name; only a member of the House of Dalai can become the Dalai Lama. Well over 90 per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the “autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.

There has never been an independent state of Tibet. Likewise, there is nothing remotely new about the presence in Tibet of large numbers of Han, who are ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense, and of other Chinese ethnic groups. The one-child policy never applied in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a problem. It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama baldly as “their spiritual leader”. Relatively few would view him as such. In particular, Google “Dorje Shugden” for, to put at its mildest, some balance to the media portrayal of the present Dalai Lama. Or read what remains the greatest hit of The Lanchester Review.

The Buryats, with the Chechens noted as exceptionally cruel Russian fighters in Ukraine, are followers of the Dalai Lama. Moreover, he has never condemned either the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq. For more on Buddhism as no more a religion of peace than Islam is (no less so, but no more), then see Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, and beyond. In fact, an examination of the relevant texts shows that violence in general and war in particular are fundamental to Buddhism. Tibet is particularly striking for this. A rare balanced treatment of Buddhism and violence was broadcast in August 2013. The subject is also addressed in great detail here. Suella Braverman would indeed press the nuclear button. It is the Catholic Church that permits either Christian pacifism, a minority view at least since very early but never condemned, or the just war doctrine to which most of us adhere. Nuclear weapons are not compatible with either.

And whatever it is that those demonstrators periodically waving the old colonial flag want in Hong Kong, then it is not the democracy that they certainly never had in those days. The question is never quite asked of where those flags might have come from. Those demonstrations always last until they have quite clearly failed, even though they are barely repressed, or what have you, by the standards of Hong Kong under Harold Wilson. Unlike those uprisings against poverty and its consequences in the 1960s, these supposed uprisings obviously enjoy little or no wider public support. They would now be illegal in England and Wales under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.

The All India Forward Bloc, founded by Subhas Chandra Bose of the Indian National Army that fought for Hirohito, not only still exists, but is still in alliance with the Stalinists of the Communist Party of India, with the Maoists of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and with the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India, a rather familiar-sounding half-digestion of Trotskyism by Bengal’s pre-existing Anushilan movement of not just Hindu, but explicitly Brahmin, nationalists. They are all campaigning for his birthday to be made throughout the country the public holiday that it already is in several states, and statues of him are a common sight. He has featured on stamps six times, and on coins three times. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport is the aviation hub for the whole of eastern and northeastern India. There is also a Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Island. Yes, an island. He has always been recognised among the fathers of the nation by the India to which both main parties in Britain are so keen to cosy up, the India that is run by the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi’s Nazi-linked assassins.

Japan itself is run by people who believe, “that Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated,” as well as that the comfort women were not coerced. The first of those, at least, has been a widespread view in several of those countries at the time and since. Indonesia, as such, is a direct product of it, since the Japanese-backed rulers of the Dutch East Indies simply declared independence under that name at the end of the War. See also Park Chung-hee and the Lee Teng-hui. The fall of Singapore, one of Winston Churchill’s two great catastrophes along with Dunkirk, did in fact lead to the loss of the British and Dutch Empires in Asia and the Pacific.

But let there be no Orientalism here. Payton Gendron wore the same Sonnenrad symbol as Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. If it is not the Sonnenrad, then it is the Wolfsangel. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until less than a month ago, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. Pointing out a few of these facts may be a role for the new Daily Telegraph.