Former Donald Trump White House strategist and 2016 campaign chairman Stephen Bannon has been active in Europe trying to stir up far-right political agitation. His latest move has been to announce the creation of an international organization of the far-right in Brussels, known simply as “The Movement.” It is not known where Bannon is getting the funds to start The Movement. In the past, Bannon has received generous subsidies from the billionaire father-daughter team of Robert and Rebekah Mercer. The duo funded Bannon’s former media enterprise, Breitbart News.
According to an interview Bannon gave to the normally anti-Trump Daily Beast, he envisages The Movement being something more than the current grouping of 43 far-right Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the EU-subsidized parliamentary bloc called “Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy.” In next May’s European Union parliamentary elections, Bannon is striving for the far-right parties to win a third of the 751 seats in the EU Parliament.
For the EU-wide election, Bannon and The Movement plan to use the same sort of social media and data mining micro-targeting and push-polling employed by the Trump campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Bannon clearly sees The Movement as a force beyond EU politics. He has recently supported the cause of imprisoned English Defense League former leader Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was sentenced to 13 months in prison earlier this year for contempt of court over “breaching the peace.” In 2015, Robinson founded PEGIDA-UK, modeled after the German anti-Islamic group, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA). Robinson, like other members of the European far-right, has eschewed the traditional anti-Semitic nature of neo-Nazi groups like the British National Front—of which he was a member—and embraced Israel, even going so far as calling himself a Zionist. Robinson said he left the EDL after he discovered that among its ranks were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Robinson’s imprisonment has become a cause célèbre for the European and American far-right. UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader and MEP Gerard Batten and Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders have expressed support for Robinson. Trump’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, the former governor of Kansas, has pressured the British government to release Robinson. Only in topsy-turvy Trump America could a “religious freedom” envoy come to the defense of an avowed racist like Robinson.
While visiting London in July 2018 to lend political support to the far-right and during Trump’s visit to the UK, Bannon told LBC Radio that Robinson has “got to be released from prison,” adding that he didn’t believe that Robinson “was a bad guy.” Former UKIP and pro-Brexit leader Nigel Farage, who has been stumping in the United States for pro-Trump Republican candidates, was also present for the Bannon interview and tried to convince Bannon that Robinson broke the law and was paying the price. LBC radio host Theo Underwood said that Bannon confronted him after the program about his questioning Bannon’s support for Robinson, yelling, “Fuck you. Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.”
Robinson’s release from prison has also been taken up by arch-neocon and anti-Muslim Daniel Pipes, U.S. Representative and far-right conspiracy theorist Paul Gosar (R-AZ), German Bundestag member Petr Bystron of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, and Donald Trump, Jr.
Bannon, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, gave an indication of the type of far-right agitation he plans for Europe. He told the paper that former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson should challenge Theresa May for the post of prime minister.
On his trip to the UK, Trump indicated in an interview with The Sun his support for English nationalism. Trump said, “You don’t hear the word ‘England’ as much as you should. I miss the name England . . . I think England is a beautiful name. And you don’t hear it very much anymore. But [is] playing as ‘England.’ That’s very interesting. That’s good.”
The Movement appears to be the creation of a “Fascist International” secretariat right in the middle of the capital of Belgium and the European Union. Ever since the end of World War II, neo-Nazis and fascists have dreamed of a Fourth Reich.
Nazi SS officers, realizing that the Third Reich was collapsing near the end of World War II, established a secret network to spirit SS officers and other Nazis out of German-occupied territories to Latin America and the Middle East. Once safely ensconced in Argentina—where President Juan Peron welcomed them—and other nations, including Brazil, Syria, and Egypt—via way stations in Switzerland and Spain—the former Nazi officials would set about to lay the groundwork for the Fourth Reich.
The secret Nazi network was called ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen) (Organization of Former SS Members). The existence of ODESSA was discovered by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps at the end of the war.
Bannon plans to spend half his time in Europe after November 2018. In March 2018, Bannon addressed the far-right National Rally conference in Lille, France at the invitation of its leader, Marine Le Pen. Bannon told the conferees, “Let them call you racist . . . wear it as a badge of honor.” Giving the French far-right a preview of his coming attraction, Bannon said, “What I’ve learned is you are part of a worldwide movement that is bigger than France, bigger than Italy, bigger than Hungary, bigger than all of it.” Bannon’s “worldwide movement” has become exactly that—a movement that will be headquartered in Brussels.
Also in March of this year, Bannon took his traveling neo-Nazi road show to Italy. Bannon stepped into a major controversy during talks to form a coalition government between the far-right Northern League (Lega) and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S). Italian President Sergio Mattarella rejected the coalition’s choice for Paolo Savona, a pro-Brexit and anti-EU activist, for finance minister. Sardonically, Bannon called the president’s decision “fascistic.”
In normal times, Bannon’s efforts to recreate a Fourth Reich in the form of a Nazi International would earn him a bullet to the back of the head, courtesy of Mossad or the former Soviet KGB. In these times, Israel and Russia are actively supporting efforts to create an international organization of fascist and neo-Nazi parties, all committed to opposition to Muslims, the European Union, human rights, and international law.
A major difference between ODESSA and The Movement is that ODESSA operated in the clandestine shadows, financing itself through import-export firms in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, and Damascus, not out in the open with an international secretariat in a major city like Brussels.
Once consigned to the fringes of politics, neo-Nazi and fascist parties are making headway around the world. The Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) is now a member of the Austrian coalition government. The Lega, formerly the Northern League, which favored secession of Padania from Italy, is part of the governing coalition in Italy. The Dutch government depends on the support of the far-right Freedom Party of Wilders. Other far-right parties have achieved substantial political power in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Belgium, and Hungary. Bannon smells the resurgent odor of fascism and Nazism in Europe and is seeking, thanks to some deep-pocketed backers, to capitalize on it.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2018 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
He’s very probably getting his funding from intelligence agencies within the USA and possibly some others in Europe, as well as or in addition to, funding from the heads of the banking cartels and corporations (i.e. millionaires and billionaires – themselves used as fronts and agents of influence for the intelligence community). The aim is to present Europe’s electorates with a choice between an extreme right treat as such by the propaganda apparatus of the state, and an extreme right presented as moderates in the form of the established, ‘centrist’ parties, portrayed as saving Europe from extremism (watch for the words populism and populist taking on pejorative meanings and being associated with fascists/communists, along with any other word that refers to genuinely populist movements that have the potential to interfere with the plans of the elite.