Initial thoughts about “The DGSE: A Concise History of France's Foreign Intelligence Service” by Damien Van Puyvelde

 

I was alerted to the publication of this book about France’s premier foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure), after stumbling upon an interview with the author at a YouTube channel concerned with spying and terrorism. The book claims to trace “the agency's history from its early failures to its sweeping reforms and modern-day successes”. But given the brevity of the interview and the “concise history” of the book, I wonder how much of the book covers the homicidal history of its organisational ancestor, the SDECE (Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage), and, given the author’s mentioning of the DGSE’s role in blaming the Assad government for chemical attacks during the conflict in Syria, the extent to which France’s involvement in what was a “dirty war” is considered a success.

The DGSE traces its roots back to the Second World War with the creation in 1940 of the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action) in London. Its objective was to gather intelligence and coordinate the French Resistance. It was after two evolutions, first as the DGSS (Direction Générale des Services Spéciaux), 1943, and then as the DGER (Direction Générale des Études et Recherches), late 1944) that the SDECE was formed in 1947.

This was the same year that the U.S. National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which fully replaced the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that had been disbanded in 1945. An interim group named the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) had been established by President Harry Truman in 1946.

It is interesting to note that while the National Security Act did not explicitly provide the CIA with a paramilitary or covert action component, the SDECE merged components of existing military and civilian intelligence bodies. This meant that it would be charged not only with intelligence gathering duties but was legally enabled to use forceful means to attain its objectives.

Thus, the history of the SDECE is replete with involvement in the physical elimination of those designated as enemies of France. One of its victims was Felix-Roland Moumie, the Cameroonian anti-colonial revolutionary, who was assassinated in Geneva in 1960 by William Bechtel. Posing as a journalist, Bechtel poisoned Moumie with a lethal dose of thallium during dinner. Evidence gathered by the Swiss police and the issuance of an international arrest warrant did not lead to his extradition to face trial for murder. Bechtel died in Paris in 1988.

The SDECE also created "La Main Rouge", a covert paramilitary organisation which assassinated Algerian nationalists associated with the FLN (Front de libération nationale) and West German arms dealers who supplied the FLN with weapons during la guerre d'Algérie.

An offshoot of that war was creation of the OAS -organisation de l’armee secrete- after the failed putsch des genereaux of April 1961. The OAS sought to keep Algeria French, an objective they believed would be accomplished by assassinating President Charles de Gaulle. The SDECE’s elite paramilitary unit, Service Action, had been active during the Algerian war and its efforts were later directed at the OAS.

A turning point for the SDECE came in 1965 when it was discovered to have been involved in the kidnapping and disappearance of the Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris. The remarkable level of operational freedom it had developed was curtailed by subordinating it to the Ministry of Defence.

However, the level of state control came into question in the light of what came to be known as the Markovic Affair. Stevan Markovic, the Yugoslav-born associate of film star Alain Delon whose corpse was found in a garbage dump in the outskirts of Paris in October 1968. A salacious aspect to the scandal was a claim that Markovic had organised sex parties for the French elite and filmed them.

Rumours spread that one of those who engaged in these orgies was Claude Pompidou, the wife of Georges Pompidou who had served as de Gaulle’s Prime Minister between 1962 and 1968. Pompidou was the front-runner to succeed de Gaulle as president, and it is claimed that the rumours were spread by rogue elements within the SDECE who were bent on revenge for what they perceived to have been his clampdown on the SDECE after the Ben Barka Affair.

The plot to derail Pompidou’s bid for the presidency ultimately failed as he was elected as President in June 1969. Pompidou appointed Alexandre de Marenches to the role of director of the SDECE. The ex-army colonel was tasked to reform and purge it of corrupt and criminal elements. The idea was to steer the organisation away from its predilection for political meddling and state sanctioned executions into one dedicated to intelligence gathering, geopolitical analysis and counterespionage.

It would be interesting to know how many pages van Puyvelde devotes to this torrid history in opening chapter “Foundations”.

The SDECE was formally transformed into the DGSE by the administration of President Francois Mitterrand in April 1982. But this “fresh start” did not eradicate the old ways of dealing with those who presented a nuisance to the interests of the French state.

In October 1983, a suicide truck bombing of a barracks housing French military personnel on peacekeeping duties in Beirut took the lives of 58 French paratroopers. Service Action decided to take a retaliatory measure against Iran, the sponsors of the Lebanese Shia actors who were responsible for the bombing. A jeep packed with 1,100 pounds of explosives was parked outside of the Iranian embassy in Beirut.

However, the suspicious embassy guards caused the French operatives to abandon the vehicle, although soon afterwards, they fired a rocket from 100 yards in a failed attempt to detonate it. The incident harked back to the earlier uncompromisingly violent missions undertaken by Service Action during the SDECE “wars” against the FLN and OAS during the Algerian crisis. The Iranians identified France as the instigators of the attempted bombing and the head of Service Action was subsequently removed from his position.

But worse was to come.

In July 1985,while in pursuance of what was codenamed “Operation Satanique”, agents of the DGSE blew up of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace-owned sea vessel which had been protesting French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. A photographer who was covering the protest died. Feigning ignorance, President Mitterrand dismissed the DGSE’s director-general Admiral Pierre Lacoste, although Lacoste would later state that he had been given explicit permission to carry out the attack by Mitterrand himself.

This was a low point for the DGSE which could count the extradition back to France of Klaus Barbie - the “Butcher of Lyon”- as one of its early successes.

The profound and rewarding reforms of the DGSE to which Van Puyvelde emphasises came after the appointment on March 23^rd, 1989, of Claude Silberzahn as the organisation’s director-general. Mitterrand broke with the longstanding tradition of appointing military officers by opting for a career civil servant whom Van Puyvelde attributes as bringing “stability and modernisation” to France’s approach to external intelligence.

One major focus of this change in approach which the author appraises as having been successful was French intelligence’s contrary position to those of the United States and Britain on the question of whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. While Richard Dearlove, the Head of MI6 -the British equivalent of the DGSE- privately admitted to his Prime Minister that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was “thin” but told him that this would be no problem because “intelligence and facts were being fixed (by the US) around the policy”, the DGSE advised President Jaques Chirac that no concrete evidence confirmed their existence. Chirac refused to participate in the military action, a move that was subsequently vindicated.

But while the refusal to go along with the Anglo-Saxon powers may have brought back memories of French independent action during the era of de Gaulle, events would later develop to the point where France and its intelligence service would fall in line with the geopolitical agenda set by the United States. A key step in this direction came in March of 2009 when President Nicolas Sarkozy reintegrated France into NATO’s military command structure, a reversal of de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw from it in 1966.

While Van Puyvelde appears to argue that the DGSE’s focus on anti-terrorism since the 1990s has been successful, the evidence indicates that this is strictly not the case.

Consider for instance the action taken by NATO in Libya against the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Early suspicions that this had been initiated by France were confirmed through subsequently released public records and parliamentary investigations which were undertaken after his overthrow.

There is evidence that the warnings provided by the DGSE to France’s political and military leadership of the consequent chaos that would inevitably ensue in the event of Gaddafi’s removal went unheeded. Far from stifling terrorism, Libya’s destruction led to the empowerment of terrorist actors in the service of the West. The destruction of Libya, then a secular state, while NATO effectively served as the air force of militias such as the al-Qaeda-orientated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was hugely ironic given its effect of enabling the spread of Salafist insurgent groups in the Maghreb, the Sahelian region and the Lake Chad Basin.

The ineffectiveness of “Operation Barkhane”, the anti-jihadist counterinsurgency conducted across the Sahel in cooperation with various states, was one of the key reasons given by those Sahelian states whose military regimes have expelled the French military as part of the wider agenda of breaking out of France’s shadow empire in Francophone Africa.

So far as the DGSE's role in Syria is concerned, Van Puyvelde references the DGSE’s exfiltration of a range of sample materials from the scene of a chemical attack allegedly carried out by the then Syrian state. But the claim that the Ba'athist government utilised chemical warfare against its own people is highly contested by journalists in the independent media.

Also contested is the framing by the Western mainstream media of the Syrian conflict as a product of the so-called “Arab Spring”. Far from being a grass roots rebellion by a groundswell of people wishing to overthrow a dictator to make way for a new democratic order, the Syria “dirty war” was in fact, as Roland Dumas, a former foreign minister of France, revealed in 2013 “prepared, conceived and organized” at least two years in advance of what became an insurgency.

And this insurgency, a concerted effort by the United States and its regional allies -The Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Israel- to overthrow Ba’athist Syria, was undertaken with home grown and imported Sunni Islamists bearing the ideology of al Qaeda.

Foreign intelligence agencies work towards promoting the interests of their countries, but they must work within the parameters of national foreign policy as set by their governments.

De Gaulle set out France’s traditional interests with great clarity. His words and actions indicated that France could not be a truly sovereign state if it was integrated into NATO’s military command structure. He acknowledged Russia -the word he used to describe the Soviet Union- as a civilisational state with which it was important to dialogue with and develop trade.

Again, it is difficult to see how he, unlike France’s contemporary political leaders, would have constrained French sovereignty by going along with the American project of seeking to destroy Russia and dismember it to control its natural resources. De Gaulle considered Red China, as he did Soviet Russia, to be a civilisational entity in relation to which France needed to deal with realistic pragmatism and not in the adversarial manner by which the United States and the collective EU insist it be treated.

The usefulness of the DGSE is thus constricted if the unique interests of state which it serves are undermined by the allegiance of France’s political leaders to an American-dominated supra-national military structure and to geopolitical policies which are geared toward preserving U.S. global hegemony, and in West Asia, U.S. insistence on the primacy of the interests of the State of Israel.

Interestingly, Van Puyvelde states that the DGSE maintains a mysterious level of cooperation with its Chinese counterparts, which apparently has managed to turn a number of DGSE officers over the years. That failing aside, it is perhaps a useful reminder of Reinhard Gehlen’s words that it “is the duty of every sophisticated intelligence service to keep open a channel of communication with the enemy”. Foreign intelligence agencies can be useful tools in repairing and promoting relations between ostensibly hostile nations. They offer a channel through which back-channel diplomacy may be conducted and they can cooperate when facing common threats.

This, arguably, should be the most important role the DGSE should play in the present circumstances during which the French political class, has willingly gone along with the post-Cold War American policy -encapsulated in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine- of seeking to prevent the rise of a global competitor capable of filling the vacuum left by the withered Soviet Union.

The resultant anti-Russian and anti-China agenda has only succeeded in uniting the Eurasian landmass leaving Europe, including the French, more dependent on the declining U.S. empire and delimiting the French foreign intelligence service to a role which includes aiding a Ukrainian proxy tasked with weakening Russia and indirectly supporting Islamist terror proxies including the militia which has taken power in Syria after the fall of the Assad government in 2024.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Ex-SAS Soldier Christian Craighead’s claim of persecution by a self-hating, Muslim-biased British Elite is a Sham

 

Christian Craighead -the pseudonym of a former special forces soldier of the British Army- was decorated for bravery for his part in rescuing many people during a terrorist attack by Islamists in Kenya in 2019. However, his attempt to have a book about the incident published in Britain was opposed by the government on the grounds of a confidentiality clause in his contract of employment. Craighead lost a legal challenge to the decision and in subsequent interviews has claimed that the state’s opposition to his memoir is predicated on the mentality of a self-hating British elite who favour Muslims over the indigenous British population, an outlandish claim that does not stand up to scrutiny.

On January 15^th, 2019, gunmen of the Somalian terror militia al-Shabab stormed the DusitD2 hotel complex in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. The operation began with a bomb explosion after which the intruders began hurling grenades and firing rounds at civilians.

Craighead, who was in the country on a training mission, heard the commotion and entered the complex and along with a Slovenian member of the Diplomatic Protective Services Tactical began clearing the floors of the office and car park buildings. He is claimed to have saved up to 700 people including Kenyans, Americans and Europeans. He also killed 2 of the terrorists. A Catholic, Craighead recalls saying a “Hail Mary” prayer before entering the complex. In all 21 people died and around 30 were left critically injured with one dying almost a year later.

Craighead was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for his actions. The medal is awarded to members of the British armed forces for bravery and ranks directly below the Victoria Cross and the George Cross which are the highest awards. He later sought to record his experience of the incident in a book. To do this, Craighead needed what is called an EPAW -Express Prior Authority in Writing- from the British Ministry of Defence to have his book cleared for publication.

His request was refused.

Craighead nonetheless persisted with the intention of publishing his manuscript and the British government put him on notice that it would seek to prevent its publication in the UK on the grounds that publication would breach the confidentiality clause he and others involved in sensitive work with national security implications. This includes special forces soldiers and operatives of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Service (MI6).

He argued that since his action during the Nairobi siege was voluntarily undertaken and not conducted as part of an official SAS mission, his efforts on the day did not come under his government employment confidentiality agreement. Nor did it infringe the Official Secrets Act.

In 2023, Craighead sought to challenge the government’s decision not to grant him an EPAW by means of a judicial review, claiming that his freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights was infringed. This is not an "absolute right" but a "qualified right" which can be denied in many circumstances.

The government's rationale was that publication of Craighead’s book could harm the "operational effectiveness" of the United Kingdom’s Special Forces (UKSF), harm morale in the military and damage relations between the UKSF and other states.

The substantive hearing was heard in private because "any public discussion of the lawfulness of the Defendant’s national security assessment would reveal the information which the refusal of EPAW was designed to protect, thereby defeating the object of the hearing."

Craighead lost the High Court action and was denied leave to appeal.

He has gone ahead to have the book published in the United States by Simon & Shuster. Although the government have stated that they will take action in the American courts which would mean that he would be barred from obtaining royalties from book sales.

Incredibly, part of Craighead's response in interviews undertaken since the loss of his case has been to frame government opposition to his publication as an example of wokeness gone mad. In one interview he claimed that his case represents the persecution by the ‘woke Establishment’ of a White, Christian, working-class Briton who killed Muslim terrorists.

He also believes that his association with President Donald Trump has played a part in this. Craighead now lives in America where he is a signed-up adherent to the MAGA movement. Trump heard of his exploits in Nairobi and invited him to become part of his security team in 2024.

Craighead has expressed the belief that the self-hating elite in Britain which are seeking to destroy their country tolerate Muslim rape gangs in Britain but have no tolerance for those such as him who kill Muslims.

But his arguments, designed to fit into the White identitarian narrative which pervades the MAGA and British patriots’ movements, are decidedly overly emotional and incoherent.

For one, the British government's clandestine support of extremist Islamist which have been tasked to overthrow a range of mostly secular Arab governments in West Asia and North Africa have caused much mayhem in Muslim countries. These unending "regime change" wars in countries such as Syria and Libya have cost millions of Muslim lives.

Craighead appears to be unaware that his magus, Trump, invited the self-proclaimed President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to the White House where Trump made a gift of Trump cologne to al-Sharra and perfume for al-Sharaa’s spouse. Al-Sharaa, a deputy Emir of ISIS in Iraq and then the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria shares the same Salafist-Jihadist ideology with the terrorists of al-Shabab who carried out the Nairobi attack.

To be specific both are al-Qaeda.

The claim that the re-branding of al-Nusra as HTS signified a shift from terrorism to democracy belies the fact that al-Sharaa, whose nom de guerre is "Mohamed al Jolani", remained on the list of terrorist wanted by the US until just after his militia emerged to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the sanctions-stricken Syrian state.

Trump referred to al-Sharaa, a man involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter.”

To his discredit, Craighead has resorted to denying the commission of war crimes in Afghanistan even though the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan has determined that the SAS were responsible for unlawful killings between 2010 and 2013. Testimony and evidence presented to the inquiry alleged that the killings of unarmed Afghan civilians -including women and children- were covered up.

His assertion that the governing elites of the UK have "destroyed Britain" has the ring of truth. But it appears to be founded on the belief by those within the identitarian crowd who blame Muslim and non-White immigration for the maladies of the Western world.

If so, Craighead should be reminded that Muslim and non-White migrants did not create the deleterious financialised economic system which exported manufacturing abroad and has encouraged rising levels of personal debt. Neither are they responsible for low birth rates among White Britons. They are also not responsible for the endless wars embarked upon by NATO which has contributed to the migration of Muslims to the West. These wars have also contributed immensely to the huge levels of sovereign debt.

A final word.

It is worth noting that while Craighead speaks about the initial suppression of information related to Muslim rape gangs in the UK, he must surely be aware of the same British government's decades long suppression of rapes committed by British troops against Kenyan women while stationed in that country.

There is also the case of the murder of a Kenyan woman named Agnes Wanjiru in 2012. It was only after a decade of foot-dragging by the British authorities that the suspected soldier, Robert James Purkiss, was arrested in 2025 and faces extradition which he is presently contesting.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Ukrainian Mystery: The Death of British Army Major Paul Wilks

The UK Ministry of Defence has announced that British Army Major Paul Wilks has died "in a tragic road traffic accident in Ukraine, away from the frontlines, on 12 September (2026)."

One must wonder about the veracity of the official cause of his death.

The MoD also claimed towards the end of 2025 that Lance Corporal George Hooley of the British Army had died in Ukraine while "observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability away from the front line."

But one must speculate about whether both died from Russian missile attacks or drone strikes aimed at, for instance, at one of the command centres in Ukraine. The Ukrainians depend on American and British intelligence capacities to target locations in Russia. The Franco-British Storm Shadow, a long-range, air-launched cruise missile, doubtlessly requires British assistance in training Ukrainian personnel to use them and in setting up precision targeting.

NATO is knee deep in helping Ukraine prosecute what is in effect a proxy war against Russia.

Back in 2024, a high-ranking Polish army officer, Brigadier General Adam Marczak, died in Ukraine with his obituary stating that his death was caused by "unexplained natural causes". Other reports related that he was apparently killed by a Russian strike on a Ukrainian military command centre in Chasiv Yar.

Perhaps we will get to know the truth after this tragic war is over.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Burkina Faso’s Gold Boom: Capitaine Traore Must Abandon the Resource Rental Economic Model

Recent media reports of the AES state of Burkina Faso exporting a$10 billion worth of gold in 2025 have marvelled at a feat which could have vey positive effect on the Sahelian nation’s economic development. However, while many have commented on the opportunities for making vast improvements to the country’s infrastructure, none have mentioned the fact that maximising the extraction and exporting of a range of minerals can form the basis of financing Burkina Faso’s a route to achieving industrialisation and a transformation from the resource rental economic model to that of a productive and independent economy.

The military leaders of Burkina Faso need to understand that earning billions if you continue to utilise a resource rental economy will get you nowhere in the long run.

Maximising the mining of Burkina Faso's minerals which include Zinc and Lithium would collectively bring in billions of dollars (or Yuan) which must be used as a first step to financing a plan for industrialising Burkina Faso's economy.

No incurring of usurious Western Bretton Woods-institutional debt or debt from Chinese loans.

The income from mining these minerals would form the basis of developing an industrial plan for payment of electrical generation capacity, steel capacity, and non-ferrous smelting capacity.

Concomitant to this would be the cost of mechanising agricultural production and a programme of mass education. The agricultural revolution must aspire way beyond peasant farming and the educational revolution must go beyond basic goals in literacy so as to encompass vocational-technical training and university and post-graduate level education.

Also, given that Burkina Faso like other Sahelian states face problems related to water scarcity, the programme ought to invest in the creation of a Great Man River project as accomplished in Libya under the leadership of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.

If this were accomplished, Burkina Faso would be on its way to transforming itself from a rent resource economy into a productive one with the advantage of being in a position of being able to extract their own raw materials and convert them into global standard products under one currency regime.

The USSR and South Korea accomplished this respectively under Stalin and Park Chung Hee.

Traore and his co-leaders need to learn from the mistakes of the economic programmes of Nkrumah in Ghana and Nyerere in Tanzania. The former relied on international finance loans which created a state of indebtedness and the latter's peasant-is-king ideology was not only unambitious in scope but also created a cycle of debt with the Bretton Woods institutions.

In retirement Nyerere would complain that Tanzania did EVERYTHING that he was advised to do and yet the country ended up spending whatever meagre income it had on servicing debt which of course is the intent of the Bretton Woods institutions.

It is time for African leaders to move beyond the resource rental model and for their populations to demand that they do so. An important consequence of building an industrial society would be to put Burkina Faso in a position to be militarily self-sufficient. This is important considering the jihadist insurgency bedevilling the Sahelian region and the threat of recolonisation. The rulers during Japan's Meiji era understood this through their slogan Fukoku Kyohei: "Rich country, strong army".

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Nathan Cofnas and his “race realism” revolution

Nathan Cofnas, the academic at the centre of the storm surrounding the late Cambridge academic Jason Arday, is an unabashed proselytiser of what is termed “race realism”. He is also part of a network which is actively promoting the rehabilitation of eugenics as a discipline of study and a core determinant of social policy. Cofnas believes that genetics determine average cognitive and behavioural differences between racial and ethnic groups, and as such should be used as the crux of dismantling prevalent ideologies which have enabled Western societies to operate under the basis of equality of all. He has directed his theories mainly at Black people who he claims would be unable to compete in a sphere of activities save those of sports and entertainment. But Cofnas, an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew, has one particular impediment to his intended “hereditarian revolution”. This is the cooperation of those White identitarians who consider Jews to be a separate and hostile group who work against the interests of Whites. In 2018, Cofnas published a paper aimed at rebutting the works of Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, who argues that Jews practice a form of hyper-ethnocentrism which they use to outcompete other racial groups including Whites in whose societies they form a “hostile elite”. MacDonald is widely considered to be the intellectual guru of a large segment of White nationalists. Cofnas’ engagement of MacDonald’s work can be argued to have been an attempt at converting MacDonald’s followers and co-opting them into a philosemitic white nationalist movement. It failed signally. The irony that Cofnas, a Jew whose European antecedents were victimised by 19^th century “race realist” notions of Jews as a people with ineradicably flawed biological traits, cannot go unremarked. And he will have to contend with the logic that in the “non-woke” marketplace of ideas he envisages, such thinking, along with that pertaining to the group evolutionary strategy applied by MacDonald to Judaism, will also necessarily have a place in the public discourse.

In an article titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” which was published at his substack page in 2024, Nathan Cofnas, the fervent “race realist” and supporter of eugenics set out a plan to end “wokism”. It is a task which he believes will involve a “siege of the institutions” and “legal reforms”. And central to such an effort is the need to undermine what he refers to as the “equality thesis”, which if successful will destroy the “intellectual basis of wokism” and provide “the elites a reason to join the (political) right.”

The key to undermining this “equality thesis”, as he puts it, is to bring public discourse on racial differences to the mainstream where over the course of time he believes the notion of intellectual and moral inequalities between races will find wide acceptance.

Cofnas’ strategy is centred on pointing to studies which attribute to Blacks lower intellectual abilities than Whites. The taking down of the late Jason Arday, the Black Cambridge Professor of Education, who resigned and was later found dead after a trial by media instigated by an article written by Cofnas, has been marketed by Cofnas and his right-wing network as a vindication of his views.

Arday, a neuro-divergent individual, was evidently easy pickings for Cofnas and his confederates who would surely have targeted any other Black academic at Cambridge who was vulnerable to an accusation of being a so-called “DEI hire”. The impression, however false, that Black academics at Cambridge and other universities owe their positions to a form of affirmative action rather than their qualifications and professionalism, will have been implanted in the minds of a swathe of persons who will be susceptible to this line of thinking given the backdrop of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment.

Cofnas and his backers will be hoping to exploit an increase in White identitarianism as an essential component in his quest for an “hereditarian revolution”.

But Cofnas, a man of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, has a huge stumbling block which is not apparent to the many who have only recently become familiar with his work. One of his greatest desires appears to be to co-opt a huge segment of White identitarians into the race realist movement of which he is a part. These people do not consider Jews to be part of what they believe to be the biological and cultural family of the European race. This impediment to his dream of erecting a philosemitic White Nationalist movement is found in the work of perhaps the preeminent White Nationalist intellectual, Kevin MacDonald, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.

It is important therefore to explore Cofnas’ motivation for challenging MacDonald’s extensive work on Jews in the context of evolutionary psychology, considered by many in the academic field to be every bit as pseudo-scientific as Cofnas’ race realist research. It is also essential to point out the deep irony of Cofnas’ affinity for biological racism only in so far as Jews are not targeted.

He is doubtless aware that the bulk of the 19^th century pioneers of scientific racism were explicitly anti-Jewish. Wilhelm Marr the German journalist whose 1879 pamphlet Der Seig des Judentums uber das Germentum coined the term “antisemitism” (Antisemitismus). Marr’s efforts marked a clear separation between anti-Jewish sentiment which was a religious-based animus and that which was a secular one related to biology and race.

The British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, like Marr thought of Jews as an alien people who were a destructive force on German society. The core ideas of his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century  discarded the philosemitic tendencies of Arthur de Gobineau and provided a clear template for the Nazi movement in the following century.

Chamberlain formed a key influence on the American Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist, who developed the racial concept of Nordicism. Nordicism was an intra-European form of racism which designated a three-tier hierarchy in which the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian people were placed above, respectively, the Alpine race and the Mediterranean’s. In his book The Passing of the Great Race, Or, the Racial Basis of European History, stated that only members of the highest tier Teutonic races should be allowed to enter America and that the others were “intrusive elements”. Grant characterised Jews as an “inferior” and a “worthless racial type”. His beliefs were later adopted by the anti-Jewish German National Socialists who developed from these descriptions the classification of Untermensch.

It is worth noting that most of the race realists of the 19^th century and early 20^th century like Cofnas believed in eugenics, a phrase coined by Francis Galton. Borrowing from evolutionary concepts developed by amongst others his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton used these ideas to argue that “more suitable races” should be encouraged to outbreed “less suitable” ones. Eugenics formed an integral part of the ideology of Nazism which placed a premium on what was termed Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), with the greatest threat to the supposed racial purity of Germans coming from Jews.

The endpoint of race realism and its eugenical counterpart came in the Nazi policy of methodically exterminating Jews through the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern part of Europe and in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau where Dr. Josef Mengele, a committed eugenicist, performed a range of inhumane experiments on Jews.

It is of course a vastly different world in which the Jewish Cofnas lives in, one in which he can arrogate his hope that once his “hereditarian revolution” is completed, he will be made the Dean of a “race science and eugenic department at Harvard”.

The post-war acceptance of Jews into the full spectrum of American society has made them a less conspicuous target for racial animus. The use of the term “Judeo-Christian values” has been effectively utilised to reflect a kindred relationship between Jews and the majority Christian nation of America even though, as the late Rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner noted, it is a "theologically and historically" inaccurate term used by non-believers.

Nonetheless, it is believed to have been popularised during the anti-fascist efforts in the 1930s and 1940s of liberal inter-faith groups and continued through to the 1950s when it served as a counter to “godless communism”. Its revival during the 1970s when it began to be used by the Christian right, also played a part in dimming old attitudes against Jews and it is still used today by those seeking to draw a distinction between traditional Western values and the values of recent non-Christian immigrants.

This backdrop of acceptance has led to a reformation of sorts among a segment of the contemporary proponents of race realism which for so long served as fertile ground for anti-Jewish sentiment. The Jared Taylor-led American Renaissance has since its inception in the 1990s always accepted Jews of White European descent as members. For Taylor, they “look white”, have been contributors to Western culture and can therefore be an asset in promoting White nationalist views.

This acceptance of Jews is fiercely disputed by many in the White nationalist movement to whom Kevin MacDonald functions as a kind of spiritus rector. MacDonald's primary academic interest lies in the field of evolutionary psychology, a scientific approach that studies human cognition and behaviour through the lens of evolutionary biology.

And it is from this discipline that MacDonald developed the concept of “group evolutionary strategy”, the theory that specific cultural, religious or ethnic groups utilise shared social and genetic practices to maximise their collective survival and success. In the final chapter of his 1988 book Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis, MacDonald analysed the Spartans to argue that human groups can cohere together and form highly collectivized "group evolutionary strategies". It was received in niche circles of academia as a serious experimental effort aimed at bridging mainstream developmental psychology with evolutionary biology.

But reactions were different when he turned his quill to the study of Jews.

His thesis on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy was outlined in his book titled A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy which was published in 1994. MacDonald argued that Jews are extremely ethnocentric and display high levels of cohesion and aggressiveness in the pursuit of group interests which have enabled them to out-compete non-Jews for resources. The book also argues that Jews specifically aim to dominate the economic, academic and cultural institutions of White societies. Jews, he contends, have inspired and led a series of radical social movements which have served to undermine these societies. Among the most harmful he asserted has been the support given by Jewish groups and politicians to immigration policies which threaten White culture and the White gene pool.

He followed this book with Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements both of which were published in 1998. In 2005, he also wrote a long paper in his journal, the Occidental Quarterly, titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR”, a review of Yuri Slezkine’s 2004 publication The Jewish Century.

MacDonald’s books were met with silence by the academic community until Kevin Hannan reviewed The Culture of Critique in the December 2000 issue of the academic journal Nationalities Papers. Hanna’s method of review was to describe chapters and summarise MacDonald’s main arguments. He concluded that the book was "well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict."

Thus, it was not until 2018 when Cofnas wrote an academic review paper on the Culture of Critique for Human Nature that MacDonald’s work was challenged in a well-known peer-reviewed academic journal, albeit that it was not in a top-tier general science journal.

Titled "Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald's theory", the essence of Cofnas’ rebuttal was to accuse MacDonald of misrepresenting and cherry-picking facts in constructing his arguments. MacDonald made a detailed 42-page reply in the Occidental Quarterly and following Cofnas’ rejoinder issued another 42-page reply in which he concluded that the thesis he presented in Culture of Critique “remained unscathed from Cofnas’ critique”.

While MacDonald’s comment may be adjudged as self-serving, it is worth pondering on Cofnas’ insistence on engaging with MacDonald. Was his motivation solely rooted in the spirit of engaging in academic debate? Did he believe that he could either convert MacDonald or the anti-Jewish segment of the White nationalist movement into a following a philosemitic path? Or was he motivated by a tribalistic concern?

Certainly, MacDonald appeared to think that tribal sentiment played the major role in this. In the conclusion of his second reply, MacDonald noted a clear “abusive tone in Cofnas’ writing, organised, it would seem, around defence of Jewish honour.” An aura of desperation surrounds Cofnas who in the year he wrote his academic critique of MacDonald’s book also co-wrote an article for Quillette titled “What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong About Jews”.

Cofnas continued his efforts in a paper titled "Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy," published in January 2023 in the journal Human Nature. Betraying feelings of angst, Cofnas bemoaned MacDonald’s role as editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly in regularly publishing “nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews."

Cofnas’ focus on DEI and academia is an interesting one. While White identitarians such as MacDonald are in agreement about what they consider the unfairness of affirmative action policies to Whites who are denied appointments or admissions to less qualified minorities, they also adamantly criticise what they claim to have been the wholesale takeover of America’s Ivy League colleges by Jews.

MacDonald’s thesis that unlike economically high-achieving groups such as the “overseas Chinese” of Far East Asia, Jews seek to convert such economic power into the control of politics, culture and academia. This is a frequent point of examination in White nationalist circles.

The backdrop they argue is that Jews have displaced America’s traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite which has been translated into what they perceive as “Jewish domination” of Ivy League colleges.

Cofnas has used the quota system employed by the Ivy League against Jews as evidence that Jewish overrepresentation in elite spaces is not the result of a co-ordinated group evolutionary strategy but the result of a high average IQ people who have persisted in the face of overt discrimination.

But his framing of the now overruled policies regarding affirmative action as solely a Black and White issue in which Black admissions infringed upon the rights of better qualified Whites has been misleading in some key respects. For one, the applicant’s gender was also considered and females, the majority of who were White, benefitted from that system. Cofnas’ has also been disingenuous in interviews when implying that Blacks were the root cause of Harvard’s discrimination against Asians.

Some background is needed here.

The legal action brought by a group of Asians against Harvard which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision which ruled against “race conscious” affirmative action policies was based in large measure on the work of Ron Unz, a multimillionaire ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur, whose assay "The Myth of American Meritocracy" was published in 2012.

One key point of evaluation on Unz’s part was the following comparison of Asians and Jews:

Based on factors of objective academic performance and population size, we would expect Asians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to one at our top national universities; instead, the total Jewish numbers across the Ivy League are actually 40 per cent higher. This implies that Jewish enrolment is roughly 600 per cent greater relative to Asians than should be expected under a strictly meritocratic admissions system.

Moreover, he stated that figures pertaining to Jewish admissions rose sharply in defiance of the trend of what he termed the "collapse" of Jewish academic achievement which began from the late 1990s and 2000s.

Unz’s finding of Jewish overrepresentation and that White gentiles had become grossly underrepresented in Harvard admissions, was he asserted based on institutional bias or favouritism. MacDonald of course, found Unz’s work to be a validation of his thesis on Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the quest for ethnic dominance. The massive overrepresentation of Jews at Harvard and other Ivy League universities he argues cannot be justified even allowing for correcting by IQ.

Although mainstream media acknowledged the centrality of Unz's arguments to what was a successful legal case brought by Asians, his argument regarding Jewish overrepresentation at the expense of whites was referred to as "inaccurate" and even "antisemitic", a charge which Unz, himself an ethnic Jew, rejects. Charges of “antisemitism” do not override the fact that the beneficiaries of anti-Asian discrimination could not be pinned on affirmative action practices in favour of Blacks and Latinos.

Nathan Cofnas is for his part consistent in maintaining that selecting students be strictly based on a standardised test which purely examines cognitive ability. He is doubtlessly aware that the “personality test” at Harvard back in the 1920s as a device to weed out Jewish to impose a strict Jewish quota.

But he also rigidly refuses to accept any proposition of Jewish bias, something which many White identitarians do not accept. Apart from what they believe to be the officially unexplained reasons for the colossal level of Jewish overrepresentation; they perceive the factor of Jewish tribal favouritism in the appointment of Elena Kagan as Dean at Harvard’s Faculty of Law in 2003. Kagan was depicted as been grossly underqualified for the job role, largely because of her lack of published work and represented as the beneficiary of an appointment by then Harvard President Larry Summers – himself a Jew- although Summers is claimed to have consulted widely with faculty and students prior to making his decision.

Kagan was also criticised for her handling of the inquiry into whether Professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarised from Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial when writing a book titled The Case for Israel. Dershowitz was unfairly exonerated in the opinion of many including Professor Norman Finkelstein, Frank Menetrez, a legal scholar and the writer, Hilton Obenzinger.

And there is the case of Jared Kushner’s entry into Harvard even though administrators at his high school, the Frisch School, noted that his grade point average and test scores did not meet standard Ivy League requirements. Kushner’s 1999 admission occurred after his father Charles Kushner had made a $2.5 million donation to the university the previous year. The White identitarians naturally bemoan the lack of a demographic breakdown of the ultra-wealthy parents who utilised this admission method referred to as “development cases”.

They also view Steven Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, as a Jewish academic who like Cofnas is keen to promote the idea that any form of Jewish attainment and high representation in institutions and in movements is solely down to high Ashkenazi IQ. They fault Pinker for hypocrisy given his endorsement of a 2005 research paper titled NaturalHistory of Ashkenazi Intelligence which posited the theory that the higher average level of verbal and mathematical intelligence found among Ashkenazi Jews has a genetic and an evolutionary basis.

Given that the central thesis of the paper veered on the path of evolutionary psychology applied to an ethnic group, many in the MacDonald-influenced White identitarian movement found Pinker’s approval to be extremely hypocritical. Pinker was on record as dismissing MacDonald’s work as lacking scientific credibility and of been beneath the threshold of academic attention-worthiness. He followed up his endorsement by giving a public lecture titled “Jews, Genes and Intelligence” in which he expounded on the aforementioned paper’s proposition that selective breeding had resulted in superior intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.

His appearance on an episode of Aporia Magazine’s podcast outlet attracted criticism because of Aporia’s advocacy of scientific racism, as indeed has been his connection to Steve Sailer, a figure described as “far right”. Pinker was claimed to have been a member of Sailer’s Human Biodiversity email discussion group, and as an editor, he included an essay of Sailer’s in a book focused on science and nature writing.

Pinker, it should be noted, implicitly supports eugenics. He has defended the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on American blacks, stating that the experiment was a “one-time failure to prevent harm" in the future. It is astounding that Pinker would offer such justification for such a shameful episode in American history when he or any reasonable person would be repulsed at the idea of justifying Dr. Mengele’s experiments on Jews in the same or similar fashion.

He is a fervent supporter of Cofnas on the grounds of “academic freedom”, first signing a letter to the London Times in May 2024 which urged Cambridge University’s Faculty of Philosophy to call off their investigation into his comments about race and genetics, and more recently signing and inviting other scholars to sign a petition protesting the University of Ghent’s suspension of Cofnas regardless of their opinions about Cofnas’ views.

To conclude, the resurrection of race science by Nathan Cofnas and his enthusiasm for eugenics must surely be viewed with great irony given the pathway both created for the attempted annihilation of European Jewry in the mid-20^th century. The aggressive and snide direction of his race realist views at Black people while expressing denial and revulsion at those who seek to apply theories of race realism to Jews can only be viewed as rank hypocrisy.

It is possible that present trends in North America and Europe toward anti-immigrant sentiment and a noticeable polarisation in views on race and religion may form a large reason for Cofnas’ confidence in pushing his race realist agenda. But while the idea of collectively renouncing unfair practices in the academic sector regarding hiring staff and selecting students is one which fair-minded and rational people would agree, Cofnas’ push, at the behest of his backers, to achieve meritocracy on the basis of biologism is a dangerous one. Such a reconfiguration of social policy would run the risk of creating racial hierarchy and segregation in the public sphere. And while he may think that assertions of the high IQ status of the ethnic group to which he belongs will ensure that they will fare well in a system organised around biological determinism, his dispute with White nationalist adherents of Kevin MacDonald demonstrates how sorely mistaken he will likely be.

The lessons from history of what his people endured ought to weigh heavily on his mind, as should the adage:

“Be careful what you wish for.”

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

The Jason Arday Affair and the probing of academia

The recent furore centred on the late Jason Arday has brought into focus the question of whether what is termed EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) policies are consistent with fundamental ideas about meritocracy and fairness. A strict definition of what EDI entails negates the proposition that such policies inherently equate to anti-white discrimination and the compromising of standards. However, allegations that Arday, appointed with much fanfare as Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor, had plagiarised parts of his doctorate thesis alongside claims about the value and scholarship of his papers and teaching competence have served to create an atmosphere designed to render suspect the credentials of black academics. This was the objective of the race realist network behind Nathan Cofnas who served as the “whistleblower” whose evidence would take Arday down. But if an academic deserves to be scrutinised, such scrutiny should not be conducted in the form of trial by media. Arday should have been examined by the same standard procedures afforded to other academics who have been accused of plagiarism and even of financial impropriety. Further, a probe of the university sector ought not to be delimited to the alleged perversion of the objectives of EDI but should encompass a range of issues including those related to questions of propriety in hiring faculty, as well as in financial management. Lessons must be absorbed from the apparent flaws in Cambridge’s procedures in investigating misconduct and the manipulation of the media by an organised group of people who were bent on waging a malicious campaign against a neuro-divergent individual.

Consider for instance the case of Dr. William O'Reilly, an associate professor of modern history at Cambridge. In 2018 an article was published in his name in the Journal of Austrian-American History. However, it was later discovered in 2021 that his article contained large segments of two essays that had been copied from one of his undergraduate students. The former student made a complaint to the university showing that more than 12 pages of O’Reilly’s journal submission were wholesale reproductions from his undergraduate papers.

The investigating panel was left with no choice but to uphold the complaint.

It is important to note that the university’s disciplinary guidelines consider plagiarism to be a form of “serious or gross misconduct” which will “normally merit dismissal”. O’Reilly faced a disciplinary tribunal which accepted the charge of plagiarism but after two-years of investigating and deliberating ruled that this had been “the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate”. 

O’Reilly kept his job.

Consider also the story about Professor George Holmes, the university vice-chancellor who was dismissed for financial corruption involving over £1 million and other misconduct. Holmes had been suspended in 2025 following allegations raised in The Mill, a Manchester-based investigative news outlet. Arrests followed in relation to allegations of fraud, money laundering and bribery.

Both cases involving O'Reilly and Holmes did not bring anywhere near the level of scrutiny put on Jason Arday. In the period between late July and early August after an article written by Nathan Cofnas at his substack page, almost 200 articles were written about a miscellany of allegations against Arday. These included those published by broadsheets such as the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph.

The argument that Arday's case contained elements of Baron Munchausen Syndrome or that he was a "Walter Mitty"-type character does not justify the aggravated level of scrutiny heaped on him by the British media. By way of contrast, William O’Reilly who also had unflattering allegations made about him outside of his confirmed plagiarism was treated much differently. Student journalists of Varsity, the oldest of Cambridge University’s main student newspapers, who decided to follow up on the university’s upholding of the complaint of plagiarism in 2023, claimed that they were threatened with legal action by O’Reilly. Earlier in 2020, Varsity reported on O’Reilly overseeing a disciplinary process involving a male student accused of rape and sexual assault. This despite the claim that O’Reilly had a “close relationship” with the accused student and that O’Reilly himself had been accused of sexual assault by a student. O’Reilly denied the allegations and no action was taken by the police.

This media blitz only served to stimulate the level of opprobrium directed on Arday by racial identitarians who are convinced -and seek to convince others- that blacks in positions in academia, including Oxbridge have obtained their jobs without merit. This was of course the aim of Cofnas and his “race realism” backers who favour a return to the biological racism of the 19^th century, as well as the rehabilitation of eugenics as a field of study and an essential factor in the formulation of social policy.

It is possible that the Jason Arday affair is being used by certain interest groups and some sections of the media as a route towards the shaping public sentiment to favour a probe of the university sector. There would be nothing new about investigating key institutions designed to serve the public.

The policing sector for instance, has periodically been subjected to both formal and press scrutiny over concerns such as bribery and other corrupt practices. The police were also subject to scrutiny after the handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence which culminated in the Macpherson report declaring the London Metropolitan Police as “institutionally racist”.

Yet, while a probe of universities concerning the unfair hiring of minorities is conceivable, the idea of limiting this to the employment of minorities would not be sound given the circumstances surrounding the likes of Dr. O’Reilly and Professor Holmes.

An objective investigation or series of investigations into the university sector would need to encompass issues related to undisclosed plagiarism and financial impropriety alongside biased practices pertaining to the appointment and promotion of staff.*

And those who believe in the message orchestrated by the instigators of the campaign to destroy Arday will be almost certainly disappointed to discover the falsity that Black representation in British academia is down to biased hiring. This supposition is quite ironic given that many have complained of disadvantages linked to obtaining appointments, getting promotion, and receiving funding for PhDs from research councils.

While there is truth to the perception that the majority of British academics are left leaning in views on politics and social policy, this does not mean that conservative and right-wing ideologies are totally shut out. James Orr, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity, is an example of the right-wing presence in academia.  

Orr, until recently the Head of Policy of the Reform Party from which he was suspended for allegedly discussing ways of obtaining foreign funding, was already revealed to have been part of such a network. The aim it appears was according to the independent media outlet the Byline Times to “bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project.”

Orr’s appointment was claimed to have been accompanied by a clandestine donation by Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantier, who has links to figures involved in the propagation of “race realism” and the politics of the “dark enlightenment”, the anti-democratic political concept posited by Curtis Yarvin.

His academic career at Cambridge has been sullied by accusations of neglecting his contractual obligations due to his commitments with the Reform Party. There appear to be instances in which complaints have been made been made about his conduct which have not been acted on and he has had a grievance against him for academic negligence and misconduct partially upheld. Moreover, the evidence thus far appears to reveal a morally compromised man who while teaching ethics was willing to circumvent electoral law.

The Arday affair with its frenzied press attention and breathless social media commentary presents an unfortunate case study of background orchestration and partisan evaluation before all the facts have been rationally assessed. Cambridge in their attempt to provide a fairy tale story of a black man who overcame a socially disadvantageous background and a disability appear to have failed to exercise their due diligence prior to appointing Arday. There also appear to have been flaws in the way they have dealt with complaints against O’Reilly and Orr.

The priority must be for Cambridge to put its house in order and for the mainstream media to acknowledge their role in the sensationalist campaign against Arday which was prompted by a network composed of elements dedicated to projects related to scientific racism and eugenics.

* Putting aside the question of plagiarism, these issues will become increasingly relevant as the sector grapples with present and future challenges. These include the many English universities whose indebtedness threaten them with insolvency, and the demographic trend of declining numbers of teenagers within the population. The consequence of this phenomenon is already being felt in the United States and there is an increasing awareness that Britain’s “enrolment cliff” is fast approaching.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

An Interview with Trillblack Channel on the Recolonisation of Africa

I was interviewed yesterday on a livestream by the Trillblack channel where I discussed neocolonialism.

Among the topics covered were:

. The assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese political leader, and of the Cameroonian politicians Ruben Nyobe and Felix-Roland Moumie.

. France's use of its colonies to rebuild its economy after the devastation of World War 2 and the creation of its "Shadow Empire" after granting them "independence" under the auspices of the French Community.

. How the creation of the EU was based on the concept of "Eurafrica", a paternalistic relationship between Africa and Europe which is predicated on exploiting the mineral resources of Africa.

. The distinction between "open" and "closed" societies in the context of the survivability of governments which the CIA or other intelligence agencies wish to effect "regime change".

. The distinction between "white chauvinism" and "white supremacy" and how it fits into the post-World War global construct and rising anti-immigrant sentiment and white identitarianism.

. Operation Legacy: a secret British Colonial Office programme  from the 1950s to the 1970s to destroy, hide, or remove official documents that could implicate the British Empire in wrongdoing before its former colonies gained independence.

The show is hosted by Isaac Sable (nom-de-plume).

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.