Putin With His New Model Wife?: Those responsible for false reports will pay It was quite possibly the greatest gift to journalists since bars started offering free Wi-Fi. Vladimir Putin, who steps down as Tsar of All The Russias this week, had secretly divorced his wife of 25 years, Lyudmila, and shacked up with a medal-winning rhythmic gymnast and model-turned-politician half his age who had hitherto been known principally for her "extreme flexibility."

The rumours had been circulating in Russia for some time, but only Moskovski Korrespondent newspaper had the balls to run with the story, which unsurprisingly went global with dizzying speed. After all, a quick Google Image search for the young lady in question, Alina Kabaeva, tends to turn up photos of a foxy-looking girl wrapped only in furs (courtesy of a photoshoot for the Russian edition of Maxim) or else pirouetting on the spot with one leg wrapped behind her ear. What, frankly, is not to like?

The only thing is, it wasn't true. Well, apparently. Not only did Mr Putin and Ms Kabaeva flatly deny the story, but, more to the point,  so did the newspaper's billionaire owner, Alexander Lebedev -- not noted as an ally of the outgoing President. And Moskovski Korrespondent is perhaps more accurately described as an ex-newspaper; immediately after the story was printed, its editor was fired and the presses shut down. Two weeks on, the paper's future is still in limbo. Lebedev has withdrawn his financial support, citing "conceptual disagreements with the newsroom" but insisting in a statement that "this has nothing to do with politics and is solely a business decision". But that's an entirely false dichotomy, because in Russia, criticizing your leaders is rarely good business.

Anna Politkovskaya And Alexander Litvinenko: Died mysteriously; Putin knows nothing At least the hacks in this case have merely lost their livelihoods. Many have been unluckier, most notably the crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose murder in October 2006 just might have been connected to her strident criticism of the regime's human rights abuses in Chechnya and elsewhere. Twelve days later, her friend and fellow dissident Alexander Litvinenko stood in the Frontline Club in London and issued a stirring denunciation of those he believed were responsible. "I'm totally confident", he said, "that there is only one person in Russia who could kill Anna Politkovskaya with her standing, with her fame. That is Putin." Five weeks later, Litvinenko himself was dead in the most macabre of circumstances.

Reporters Sans Frontieres estimated last year that 21 journalists had been murdered during Putin's reign, and while not all of these deaths can or should be laid at the door of the government, there is little doubt that exposing corruption and human rights abuses in Russia is not a great career choice. But outrages like the Politkovskaya murder are merely the most ugly symptoms of a much deeper malaise; press freedom is the canary in the mine for any democracy, and in Russia it died long ago. In 2003, Freedom House moved Russia from the "partly free" column to "not free" in its annual survey of press freedom. The following year, the same change was made in its general survey of civil liberties.

All five of the major TV stations toe the government line. Regional media is usually under the direction of local authorities. Coverage of government is uniformly bland and sycophantic; coverage of opposition scant and biased. (Think Fox News as parodied by the Simpsons.) There are few independent newspapers, and most of the larger ones are controlled either by billionaire oligarchs or companies like Gazprom or Promsvyazbank with close ties to the Kremlin. While Michael Moore and company were sounding off about the value of Cheney's Halliburton shares, these guys were creating a real live petro-dictatorship. Expose that, though, and there's no Palme D'Or waiting for you.

The curious case of Vladimir and his supple ‘girlfriend' is trivial by comparison, not least because it may really just be a tabloid invention to shift a few more copies. Yet in one sense it demonstrates a more chilling truth about the media in modern Russia. Beyond the headline cases of crusading journalists being locked up for attacking the government, or risking death to report on human rights abuses, there has been a more pervasive erosion of the very idea of an independent press. Never mind radioactive sushi or gun-toting assassins; now it takes only a threatening glance from those in power to shut your operation down. Once you live in that sort of a society you're screwed, even if she wasn't.

And, at the risk of stating the obvious, this doesn't just concern Russians, either; not with $100 oil, economic warfare against her neighbours, and ICBMs being paraded in Red Square, just like the old days. No, an executive unfettered by the kinds of checks and balances that stop BushCheneyCo from murdering you in your beds is bad news for everyone. The West is pinning its hopes on the new President, Dmitri Medvedev, being a new and more moderate voice, and not merely the puppet for a continued Putin supremacy. We shall see; but the signs aren't good.

As for Anna Politkovskaya, she predicted her fate long before it befell her. Her words should serve as more than a mere epitaph:

We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit.

It has become fashionable in recent years to talk of the rise of intolerance in Europe. Jewish groups warn that anti-Semitism has returned to mainstream political discourse, often under the banner of opposition to “Zionism”; meanwhile, the Left prefers to focus on the wave of Islamophobia unleashed by 9/11 and subsequent Islamist terror attacks in Madrid and London. And indeed there is plenty of evidence to back up these fears, if you look for it; antisemitic incidents show a year-on-year increase, Muslim war graves are defiled in French cemeteries, and mosques seem to cower behind ever-higher fences, their windows protected from vandalism by ugly wire grilles.

"Who Comes Last?": Vote Northern League and the darkeys won't cut ahead of you Meanwhile, across Europe, parties of the far right seem to be doing well in countries like Belgium and France, Austria and Poland. Italy’s Northern League provides the most chilling example; the party that set up uniformed vigilante patrols to “police” immigrant areas in Turin and Piacenza last autumn now finds itself a key player in coalition negotiations following Silvio Berlusconi’s victory in the recent Italian elections. Led by Umberto Bossi (whose idea of a humane immigration policy is to insist that naval vessels coming across boatloads of illegal migrants fire a warning shot before sinking them), La Lega Nord hope to see the post of Deputy PM go to stalwart Roberto Calderoli, who last year suggested a “pig day” to prevent the building of new mosques in Italy, taking swine along to proposed sites to “walk up and down on the land where they want to build, after which it will be considered ‘infected’ and no longer suitable”. Combined with Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance, a “post-fascist” party which draws its support largely from the south of Italy, it would be British understatement to say that Berlusconi’s new government will contain men and women of extremely questionable views.

And yet, as egregious as these instances of intolerance are, they should be put in their proper context. Antisemitic incidents in Britain certainly show a worrying upward trend, but the 547 such incidents recorded in 2007 included 328 instances of “abusive behaviour” as against 114 “assaults,” of which one was categorised as involving “extreme violence.” An additional problem is that the incidence of such attacks tends to be linked to “trigger events” in the Middle East, such as the war in Iraq or the Israel-Hezbollah conflict of 2006, and often seem to be carried out not just by neo-Nazi skinheads but also by Muslims. This scarcely makes them less serious, but it does mean that mainstream politicians have an interest in downplaying the gravity of antisemitic incidents for fear of seeming Islamophobic. Many European Jews feel marginalised and fearful as a result.

On the political front, the most recognisable far-right leader in Europe, Jean-Marie Le Pen, embarrassed France by making the Presidential run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002, but his Front National has collapsed as an electoral force, as did Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria after their brief spell in the limelight at the turn of the century. In summary, there is plenty of intolerance to be found, in Europe as everywhere else, but it is perhaps an exaggeration to say that it is on the march.

The relative electoral success of fringe parties can certainly be attributed in large partJörg Haider: No threads are too fine for the master race to fears about immigration, particularly Muslim immigration from Turkey and North Africa, and justifiable fears about terrorism combine with distrust of a political elite that seems to ignore the concerns of “ordinary” voters --- and a helping of good old-fashioned racism --- to tempt many into the arms of extremists. But just as crucial, the electoral systems in many European countries tend to give fringe parties a key role as kingmakers in unwieldy coalition governments. The publicity this attracts is often wildly disproportionate to their actual influence; a party that gains 5 or 6 percent of the vote can, thanks to proportional representation, find itself hogging the cameras for weeks after an election. In some cases, mainstream political parties agree that they will not go into coalition with extremists come what may; the Flemish Vlaams Belang, for example, is the object of a self-denying ordnance among other parties called the Cordon Sanitaire, and the governing Fianna Fail party in Ireland resolutely refuse to contemplate coalition with Sinn Fein --- for the time being at least. Many others, such as Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, are not so discerning.

Furthermore, fascists (however defined) are just smarter than they used to be. Far-right leaders in Europe these days sport sharp suits and college degrees; the Holocaust deniers, lunatics and skinheads haven’t gone away, of course, but by and large they’ve been relegated to the shadows. Incendiary rhetoric tends to be the exception rather than the rule; soothing bromides about preserving the British/French/Italian “way of life” sit cheek-by-jowl with the sort of motherhood-and-apple-pie inanities common to all political manifestoes. This smooth evolution has seen parties like the British BNP softpedal their historical antisemitism in favour of an aggressive anti-Islamic message; indeed, and with admirable chutzpah, they are currently courting London’s Jewish vote in the run-up to local and mayoral elections on Thursday. (They’re unlikely to get very far with such tactics; memories of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Battle of Cable Street run deep.)

When the far right swaps the goosestep for the soft sell, many would argue, the need for vigilance is only redoubled; and I wouldn’t disagree. But the evidence tends to show that so-called electoral breakthroughs by “post-fascist” parties are usually one-off events, triggered by dissatisfaction with “politics as usual”, and rarely sustained. The situation varies from country to country, but so long as governments address their citizens’ concerns rather than merely paying lip service to them, there is unlikely to be a concerted shift in support towards these groups. Extremists in Europe are not so much resurgent as merely repackaged.

You can tell a lot about people from the company they keep. Out beyond theJuly 7 London Bombings: Obvious inside job fringes of sane political debate, where Bilderbergers and Illuminati run the Zionist Occupation Government with the help of mind control and black helicopters, far right and far left come full circle and eventually meet somewhere round the dark side of the moon. Generally, it doesn’t do to expose the cranks to the bright light of public scrutiny; it is, after all, what they secretly crave. But sometimes it’s necessary; sometimes it must be done.

And so it is with one Nicholas Kollerstrom, 9/11 “truther” and conspiraloon, who manages to combine the earnest belief that the World Trade Center was brought down in a US Government “false flag” operation with a thriving line in writings on astrology and crop circles, and still finds time to hold down a research fellowship at University College London, one of the UK’s top universities. So far, so harmless; British academia has its share of fruitloops. A little more troubling is that Kollerstrom is a self-described Holocaust denier who pops up on websites like that of the “Committee For Open Debate On The Holocaust” with gems such as this plea for “balance” in teaching about the events of 1939-45:

Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some forty-five thousand volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there. Let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, some of which still exist, where the postman would collect the mail twice-weekly.

The investigative blogger “Unity”, at the website Ministry of Truth, has a full rundown on Kollerstrom’s writings and, in particular, his consistent citing of anti-Semitic sources such as Simon Sheppard, who was expelled from Britain’s far-right BNP for being too right-wing (!), or the website “Judicial, Inc.”, which peddles the splendid theory that Hezbollah is an Israeli front to justify continued military activities against Arabs. (“Who is dumb enough to fire some useless rockets...?”). As an alternative to sifting through the dross of the primary sources, it is valuable stuff, and we should be grateful to Unity for getting his hands dirty in a sewer that most of us would not wish to trawl ourselves; it is thankless work.

What I find interesting about characters like Kollerstrom, though, is not so much what they believe, which is common or garden lunacy, at once remarkably nuanced and depressingly one-dimensional; rather, it is the utterly predictable way that these disparate fringe beliefs always seem to join up so seamlessly, despite their ragged edges. 9/11, 7/7, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the Holocaust (or rather the “Holocaust”) and much more besides --- all are connected in a tapestry far too densely woven for Occam’s famous razor ever to unpick, and all, needless to say, lead back to one particular group of people. (A hint: their name starts with "J.") There are many scholarly volumes, you imagine, to be written on the particular brand of credulousness that leads people to embrace such outlandish belief systems; indeed, I imagine there are plenty out there already.

It should be noted that, while he is happy to aver his denial of the so-called Holocaust, Kollerstrom denies any involvement with far-right groups; his political affiliations are to the Greens and --- of course! --- George Galloway’s ‘Respect’ Party. Like I said; if you head far enough to the left, you’ll eventually emerge on the far right, as anyone old enough to have played Pac-Man will tell you. One wonders if his outlandish views raised any eyebrows at the political meetings of the so-called “anti-racist” Respect Party he attended. One fears they did not.

Some limited good may come of all this. The forum at the centre of much of the conspiraloon discussion of 9/11 in Britain, nineeleven.co.uk, has now announced a blanket ban on discussion of the Holocaust on its messageboards (much to the vitriolic rage of its regular posters) --- though the day when they realise that they’re all wasting their lives is, you suspect, a long way off. For their part, UCL appear to be entirely blameless in all of this; they have been alerted to the presence of a self-confessed Holocaust denier on their research staff, and action may well be under way to address the situation. But episodes like this remind us that the Truthers are out there. Keep watching the skies...

Boston is home to few Orange marches There were, to put it mildly, a few raised eyebrows at Jamie Kirchick’s recent suggestion (albeit made very much in passing) that Irish Massachusetts might be tempted to tip towards the Scots-Irishman John McCain in November. As Daniel Koffler pointed out on these pages a few weeks ago, most Irish immigrants to the fledgling United States were of Protestant, and usually Scottish, lineage, and coined the phrase “Scots-Irish” only when Catholic emigrants began to flood into America during the great Famine of 1845-51. So, on the face of it, Catholic Boston --- which is more Irish than the Irish themselves (I almost wrote plus royaliste que le roi) --- would be less likely to vote McCain, not more.

In the land they left behind, three hundred years, several civil wars and that infamous famine only exacerbated the divide between the native Catholic community and the largely Scottish Protestant settlers (who started arriving in 1610, which in Irish terms is the day before yesterday). The original “two state solution” of 1921 has taken the best part of another century to settle into uneasy peace, and to the uninitiated, the ancient feud is all but incomprehensible. To take an example more or less at random, Northern Ireland is one of the few places where you will see the Star of David being flown in solidarity with Israel - a nation whose robust response to terrorism, as Protestants see it, has led to unjust vilification the world over - whilst Catholics, who see themselves as a people oppressed, fly the Palestinian flag in response.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that this is a story of byzantine complexity, peopled with protagonists possessed of extremely long memories, and two communities that are quite distinct and, historically at least, mutually antipathetic. (Which makes Hillary’s achievement in bringing peace to the island all the more remarkable.)

McCain’s pitch to the Scots-Irish constituency, on the other hand, is not terribly subtle. That the war hero chooses to tour the nation on a "No Surrender" Bus may not trip too many alarm wires in the average voter, but to any self-respecting Ulsterman, though the words to the old song vary depending on who you ask, the resonance is immediate and unambiguous. (It commemorates the defense of Derry against the besieging forces of the Catholic James II in 1689. Remember: long memories.)

“The cry was no surrender
But come when duty calls
With heart and hand and sword and shield
We'll guard old Derry's walls”

But memory can also play tricks. I well remember, on my first visit to New York some years ago, being astounded to hear the Orange anthem, “The Sash My Father Wore,” playing in a Manhattan pub which otherwise appeared the very epitome of hardcore expat republicanism, right down to the painting of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands on the wall. My drinking companion, a large man from Cork, growled at me to keep my counsel; it wouldn’t do, he said, to point out the owner’s naivety when we were guests in his establishment (and, not incidentally, consuming the first of several beers on the house). Experiencing the hyper-patriotism of Irish-Americans at first hand is a little like watching Mel Gibson’s ludicrous Braveheart in a crowd of Scottish nationalists: As the music swells and the eyes around you grow more misty, it seems almost rude to point out that a chisel-jawed William Wallace shagging Queen Isabella of France is just ahistorical tripe. It doesn’t pay to delve too deeply into the details.

Rangers v. Celtic: Fans had to be barred from singing IRA anthemsIrish-Americans, of course, are far from being the only offenders in this regard. From Diaspora Armenians and Cuban-American exiles in America to Palestinians in London, or Greeks whose families were forced from Asia Minor, a romanticised version of home always jostles for space with a heightened sense of victimhood and hostility to the historical oppressor. Any immigrant community has to work hard to maintain their unique identity; through religion, through art and music, food, holidays, even sports teams. “Where e'er we go”, as the Pogues once put it, “we celebrate the land that makes us refugees”.

Jews are better than most at hanging on to these golden threads of identity, thanks to an unusually rich cultural and religious heritage which stands proudly apart and passed down, through ties of blood, whether the next generation likes it or not. For the rest of us, with the passage of time, the threads binding us to our homes loosen one by one; each generation less religious than the last --- in Christian communities, at least --- and our traditions and languages diluted through assimilation. (Let’s just say I’d be surprised if Kim Kardashian speaks much Armenian.) And so we replace these gaps with a pastiche of symbolisms; the tales become taller, the ballads louder, and the outrages perpetrated against ancestors all the more brutal, until you are faced with the grotesque spectacle of collection plates for the IRA being passed around well-to-do Massachusetts soirees.

Is there anything distinctively “Scots-Irish” about McCain’s rhetoric? Well, maybe. Certainly it is likely to go down well among those of his fellow countrymen who share the faith of his fathers, but to the extent that it does so, that may be because it speaks to broader, more populist ideas of patriotism and service to one’s country (“something greater than myself,” etc. etc.), and pitches his tent squarely on blue-collar territory. Scots-Irish tend to live in red states like the Carolinas and Virginia anyway; Massachusetts is less likely to be swayed by exclusionary sloganeering that reminds Irish-Americans of all the things they don’t like about their Protestant neighbours.

At the very least, John McCain should be cautious about the buttons he chooses to press. No-one ever made a buck betting against the Irish.

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