Guinea versus Ghana: A Forgotten ‘Cold War’ Crisis After the Overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah

“It is in Guinea that we shall stop the criminal hand of imperialism which strangles Africa.”

-Ahmed Sekou Toure, President of Guinea, quoted in the March 1^st, 1966, edition of Le Monde, in reaction to the overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

Saturday, October 29^th, 1966.

A Pan-American World Airways flight enroute to Lagoa is making a stopover at Accra Airport. On board are the foreign minister of Guinea, Louis Lansana Beavogui, and three diplomats on their way to a pre-summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity’s Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Also on board are 15 Guinean students who are scheduled to disembark at the aircraft’s next stop at Lagos where they will study English as part of a cultural exchange agreement between the governments of Guinea and Nigeria. Shortly after its landing, the languid atmosphere is shattered by the arrival of a detachment of Ghanaian security officers who noisily roam the aisle of the aeroplane seeking all the Guinean nationals on board. Demands for identification and threats are exchanged with protests and physical resistance. Newspaper dispatches would report that the security officers “dragged 19 kicking and screaming Guineans” from the plane. Some had clung to their seats and had to be carried from the airliner. They were arrested and taken to places of detention. What followed were 7 days of highly charged threats between the governments of Ghana and Guinea, as well as frenzied mediation efforts conducted by the OAU to resolve the crisis. It was a crisis which the Guinean President Sekou Toure had reason to believe had been engineered by the United States, which led to a rise in anti-American sentiment in Guinea that culminated in mob violence, house arrests and the expulsion of members of the U.S. peace corps from Guinean soil. Thirteen years before the seizure of its embassy by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran, the United States had to handle a hostage crisis while the three-year old OAU discussed the possibility of expelling Ghana from the body. This extraordinary episode of state-sponsored kidnapping and high-drama diplomacy was rooted in fierce personal loyalty and inter-state political antagonism that played out against the backdrop of the global ideological Cold War. 

The setting to the incident was the overthrow of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah earlier that year on February 24^th. Nkrumah had been on a foreign tour of nations when news of his deposing reached him soon after his arrival in China. In the following days, he made his way to Guinean exile where his ally President Sekou Toure would make him honorary co-president.

It was the least that Toure felt that he could do.

When in 1958, Toure had rejected Charles de Gaulle’s offer to join the Communaute francaise, famously uttering the words “Il n'y a pas de dignité sans liberté: nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l'esclavage," the French had retaliated by withdrawing its civil servants along with professional and technical experts. Widespread sabotage of equipment also occurred. The French took everything from telephones and typewriters to furniture and electric light sockets. They also took government records. Guinea faced economic catastrophe, but an injection of $10 million from Nkrumah’s treasury significantly relieved the burden.

Nkrumah had been overthrown by a junta which had had received covert assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and which explicitly sought to position itself as an ally of the United States. This radical realignment of Ghana’s foreign policy and economic doctrine almost certainly guaranteed an adversarial relationship with Guinea which along with Nkrumaist Ghana and Modibo Keita-led Mali had formed a socialist bloc of nations in West Africa.

However, what later developed between Guinea and Ghana went beyond conventional rivalry and competition. It degenerated into outright enmity because Nkrumah was not subject to the typical conditions of exiled political leaders who are often foresworn to disengage from overt political conduct. Toure had enabled Nkrumah’s use of the radio waves to criticise the policies of the Ghanaian military regime on his “Voice of the Revolution” programme which was broadcast under the aegis of Radio Conakry. Nkrumah’s frequently strident oratory irritated Ghana’s military rulers who from the beginning began to supress and persecute his followers, as well as those who were felt to have been close to his government.

Beyond irritation was the not irrational fear of the junta that Nkrumah’s penetration of Ghana’s airwaves through his sermons from Conakry could form the basis of a future insurrection. This scenario along with a threatened Guinean military invasion were taken seriously because of repeated pronouncements by both Nkrumah and Toure. For instance, shortly after Nkrumah’s arrival in Conakry following his overthrow, he declared that “I have come here on purpose to use Guinea as a platform to tell the world that very soon I shall be in Accra, in Ghana”, adding that he would overthrow the military government to “teach them the lesson they deserve”.

Toure for his part did not hide the fact that he considered the Ghanaian military regime to be an illegitimate one consisting of “traitors of Mother Africa”. Three days after Nkrumah’s overthrow he noted in a broadcast on Radio Conakry that Guinea “must consider itself in a state of war”. He would go on to state that he would mobilise and integrate into the Guinean armed forces a sizeable number of ordinary Guinean men and women who would liberate Ghana.

It was under these circumstances that the Pan-American plane had been stormed and its passengers apprehended.

Beavougi and the diplomats; Fily Sissoko, Abdoulaye Diallo, and Kassory Bangoura, were taken to Whistler Barracks in Teshie Camp, several miles from Accra, while the students were held at another army post a few miles away. The students would later allege that they were subjected to beatings and torture. They also claimed that valuables which had been confiscated from them by the police were not returned.

In a press conference held on Monday, October 31^st, Lieutenant General Joseph Ankrah, the Chairman of the National Liberation Council as the Ghanaian junta styled itself, justified the action by claiming that the members of the 81-strong Ghanaian contingent which had followed Nkrumah into exile were being “held against their will” by the Guinean government and demanded that they be allowed to leave Guinea. Failure to accede to this would mean that the 19 Guinean citizens, who Radio Accra described as “hostages”, would remain in detention.

It was a stunning assertion by a state of its right to blackmail another state.

Ghana’s actions clearly violated both the spirit and the letter of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which was signed in 1961. Article 29 provides that “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest of detention.” The protection encompasses situations where the diplomat is in transit in a third-party country to which they are not accredited. Article 40 afforded them such protection notwithstanding that they did not have Ghanaian visas because they did not intend to leave the plane at Accra.

During his press conference, Ankrah sought to remind the world that Ghana had been victim of what he termed “undiplomatic acts” by the government of Guinea after the coup which had brought him to power. Guinean security forces had raided the Ghanaian embassy and permission given to Ambrose Tankey, the head of Nkrumah’s security guards, to sign cheques on embassy accounts. Further, the Ghanaian ambassador and his wife had been removed from an airliner and briefly arrested. While Guinea’s earlier conduct in the aftermath of Nkrumah’s overthrow had violated the convention, it did not give the Ghanaian regime the right to do the same. The presence of the Ghanaians attached to Nkrumah in Guinea even if they were being held against their will did not give Ghana the right to arrest the Guinean students who did not have diplomatic status because non-of them were subject to an international warrant of arrest or were wanted by the Ghanaian authorities or were under suspicion of having committed an offence while on the flight.

While an infuriated Toure denounced the Ghanaian regime, referring to them as “that stooge of the imperialists”, his wrath was mainly directed at the United States which he blamed for orchestrating the crisis. He claimed that the United States was “entirely responsible” for the apprehension of the Ghanaians from the aeroplane and demanded America strongly condemn the Ghanaian government and ensure the Guineans were released and transported to their original destinations.

Toure knew of the suspicions at the time -later confirmed- of CIA involvement in the anti-Nkrumah coup, and his loathing of the junta’s obsequious trait of aligning itself with U.S. foreign policy objectives in return for receiving favours from the Americans informed his unwavering conclusion that the Americans had overseen Ghana’s action. Indeed, in a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson dated March 12^th, 1966, Robert W. Komer, then a senior staff member of the U.S. National Security Council informed Johnson that while Nkrumah had been doing more to undermine American interest than any other Black African, “the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-American.”

Toure’s heavy suspicions were justified.

He believed that the United States, acting in concert with Pan-American Airways, had tipped off the Ghanaian authorities about the presence of the Guinean passengers on the flight. The American input was vital because back in the 1960s, the automated sharing of passenger manifests was practically non-existent for routine international flights. Airlines compiled paper manifests which were carried on board. The tradition was not to hand over a passenger list during a fuel stop provided the passengers remained on the aircraft or in a secure transit lounge.

Toure’s indignation at the United States was manifested by the retaliatory measures he would take over the course of a few days. Three days after Robinson McIlvaine, the American ambassador had handed his credentials, he was summoned to the Guinean foreign office which announced that he was being summarily put under house arrest. His fate was shared with the local Pan-American Airlines representative and other staff members of the U.S. embassy who State Department spokesman, Carl Bartch announced had been placed under what he termed “office arrest”. Describing the situation as “serious”, Bartch noted that most Americans in Conakry were in protective custody with police guarding their homes. 

With Radio Conakry filling the airwaves with denunciations of U.S. complicity in the kidnapping of their countrymen and women, a wave of anti-American feeling was stirred without much difficulty. On October 31^st, a demonstration was held outside the U.S. embassy in which Radio Conakry claimed there had been “50,000” participants. They shouted slogans such as “Down with the Yankees!”, “Yankee’s get out of Africa!” and “Down with American Imperialism!” Other slogans chanted included “The Imperialist Plot Will Not Succeed in Guinea” and “Down with the Accra Puppets!” Meanwhile, a mob stormed the residence of McIlvaine where they broke windows and furniture as his wife and their two children cowered under an upstairs bedroom. He had been allowed to travel to the embassy without a guard.

Toure’s directives were of course strictly in breach of international law.

The Guinea-Ghana crisis presented a severe test for the OAU. As delegates began gathering for the impending summit in the marble splendour of Africa House in Addis Ababa, there was a notable growth in support of the expulsion of Ghana from the OAU. Others felt that the OAU should be neutral on the matter. But led by Emperor Haile Selassie, the organisation set about the task of finding a solution because it would be inconceivable that the conference could go ahead while the Guinean diplomats remained in Ghanaian custody. Selassie had been quick to dispatch his justice minister to Accra in the hours following the seizure of the Guineans and by Monday, November 1^st, the organisation had assembled a three-man team to proceed to Accra and Conakry. They were Justin Bomboko, foreign minister of Congo-Kinshasa, Vice President Joseph Murumbi of Kenya and John Nelson Williams, the Sierra Leonean minster of information.

The OAU team departed on November 2^nd  and arrived in Accra the same day. They called on Ankrah to give them a full account of his grievances against Guinea, and they interviewed three Ghanaian security guards who had recently arrived from Guinea.

The key issue for the team was of course to discover first hand whether the Ghanaians, housed in the Villa Syli compound in Conakry were being held against their will. This was put to rest when every member of the Ghanaian entourage explicitly stated they were in Guinea by choice and expressed deep loyalty to Nkrumah. They all signed a voluntary declaration refusing to return to Ghana under the military regime. On his return to Addis Ababa, Murumbi reported that he was satisfied than none of them had been intimidated by the Guinean government. “At the moment,” he said, “they have good jobs and are quite content.” The mission concluded that Ghana's claims of unlawful detention were entirely baseless.

The findings made the stance of Ankrah -by now in Addis Ababa- untenable.

On Saturday November 5^th, the three elder statesmen of the organisation: Selassie, President William Tubman of Liberia and President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt met with Ankrah in a closed conference which lasted for almost four hours. When they emerged from the meeting the contrast between the grim exterior of Ankrah and the smiling trio of Selassie, Tubman and Nasser could not have been any starker. The Black American newspaper the New York Amsterdam News opined that “three skillful elders cornered a bristling stallion (and) tamed him.”

Ankrah had no alternative other than to order the immediate release from detention of the Guinean hostages. Thus, ended a saga which some observers felt had the potential for destroying the organisation.

Toure had emerged victorious but remained dissatisfied with the OAU. Despite President Nasser sending a special aircraft to Conakry to bring him to Addis Ababa, Toure refused to attend the OAU conference in person because he asserted that the “insult” to Guinea was “not wiped out” because Ankrah and the Ghanaian delegation had not been barred from attending the summit. Instead, he sent an observation team led by Leon Maka, the President of the Guinean National Assembly to enlighten what he described as “friendly delegations” about the poor treatment suffered by the Guinean “hostages” while they were in Ghana.

Toure’s indignation at the Americans was not satiated. Earlier on November 2^nd, Edward M. Korry, the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia handed a letter to Diallo Telli, the OAU Secretary General, which expressed disapproval of Ghana’s action. It had, Korry admitted, been “contrary to accepted international practice”. It also protested Guinea’s reprisals directed at the United States.

But Toure was not finished with the Americans.

On November 8^th, he announced that he was expelling the contingent of U.S. Peace Corps from Guinea. The 64 corpsmen, staff and their dependents were given one week to leave. Personnel of the U.S. Information Service were also instructed to depart Guinea. The Guinean government also declared Pan-American Airlines “off-limits” in the country, in other words, the airliner’s landing rights were revoked.

The action, taken against peace corps, an organisation created by President John F. Kennedy, a man whom Toure respected and admired, took many by surprise. It was the final measure taken in expression of Guinean disapproval of what Toure believed to have been American connivance with Ghana’s detention of its diplomats and students.

However, another incident involving his hardline attitude had at some point during the height of the crisis, but which was only brought to public attention after it had ended. A few days after the Conakry demonstrations, Guinean troops seized an American cargo ship, the De Mundo, soon after it berthed at Conakry port. The ship’s radio room was shut down, and the crew was prevented from going ashore. The incident occurred around the time that another ship carrying 500 tons of U.S. aid for Guinea unloaded its cargo in Dakar, Senegal. The sequence of action and reaction remained uncertain, but an American source claimed that the unloading of Guinea-bound cargo at Dakar had been in reaction to the conduct of the Guinean army in Conakry. The State Department is said to have insisted that it reload and proceed to Conakry after the withdrawal of the Guinean troops from the seized ship.

The question of American aid to Guinea unsurprisingly became an issue. Why, American columnists asked, should the Toure, now viewed as a Marxist-believing ingrate, be allowed to benefit from such assistance? They reported that since 1962, Guinea had received up to $60 million in economic help from the United States with half of it consisting of surplus farm products.

This had been an issue for some long before the events of late 1966. In a syndicated column written which appeared in the Columbus Ledger Enquirer in June 1962, Fulton Lewis jr. excoriated the Kennedy administration for sending millions of dollars in aid that included the provision of “American experts and modern radio equipment”, as well as funding to schools respectively for “one for African administrators” and “the other for vocational students”. All of this, Lewis noted, was being done to win Toure over from the Soviet camp.

But what was not mentioned by Lewis and most of the others who criticised the Johnson administration was continuing such aid was what Guinea was giving to the United States. This was the granting of bauxite mining rights to U.S. companies in the lucrative Boke region.

The American government, which in August of 1966 had announced that it was contemplating a drastic reduction of aid commitments to Guinea, announced on November 2^nd that it was suspending aid to Guinea. This may have been the trigger for the Guinean authorities to send in the army to secure what they assumed would be the last batch of aid the country would receive. But aid to Guinea would continue while it was gradually wound down. The activities of the American mining companies would remain unaffected.

The state of relations between Guinea and Ghana would remain fraught for a good number of years. A major step towards the thawing of relations occurred after the death of Kwame Nkrumah in April 1972. President Toure, who gave his friend a state funeral the following month in Conakry, had initially fended off the entreaties of the Ghanaian military regime led by Colonel Ignatius Acheampong to have Nkrumah’s body returned to his homeland. However, after negotiations, Nkrumah’s body was released to the Ghanaian authorities and he was buried in his hometown of Nkroful. And four years later, fully a decade after he had been detained on the orders of the junta led by Lieutenant General Ankrah, Louis Lansana Beavogui, by then Toure’s Prime Minister, visited Accra where he held talks with Acheampong aimed at solidifying bilateral and regional relations.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Soviet-era media versus the contemporary Western Ministry of Truth

As a current affairs obsessed-child, I did often laugh in amusement when listening on shortwave radio to the strident, unyielding tones of the voices of Soviet newscasters when announcing the USSR's triumphs in heavy industry and crop harvesting. I knew that they were perennially jamming radio signals emanating from "enemy capitalist states".

But fast-forward to the contemporary situation.

Why does the U.S.-led West seek to do what the USSR did? It bans channels such as RT and Press TV from the Internet and TV platforms.

The EU for its part enforces draconian measures on the likes of retired army Colonel Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer who worked for NATO, simply because his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine does not conform with the Western political class and the mainstream media? Baud was sanctioned even though his books only used Ukrainian and Western originated source material and he declined repeated offers to appear on various Russian media outlets.

NathalieYamb, the Cameroonian-Swiss activist, has also been sanctioned for "spreading" so-called "Kremlin narratives" and calling for Francophone African states to reject France's shadow empire on the continent. She also asserts that her specific criticisms of French President Emmanuel Macron played a major part in the decision to have her sanctioned.

The imposition of sanctions means that persons such as Baud and Yamb are not allowed to travel within the EU member states. Apart from travel bans, their assets are frozen and third parties who help them are subject to punishment.

The banning of media platforms and sanctioning of individuals are redolent of the sort of actions typified by the "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes to which the EU professes to be opposed.

Western governments and the EU are in effect acting in the manner  of an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.

Rewind back to the little boy who chuckled at Soviet broadcasting style and Soviet clamp downs on the information space:

It would have been inconceivable to him that decades later he would only be able to tell certain truths as he saw it on Russian media.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

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.