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| Faith, folk and the far right |
Two faculty members of an American International University in London, Dominic Alessio and Robert J. Wallis, have demonstrated the poor quality of their research and their commitment to perpetuating outright falsehoods and scaremongering with the publication of a new book titled ‘Faith, Folk and the Far Right.’ The intention of the book seems to be to generate religious hatred and fear towards Heathens.
A number of demonstrably false claims are made about me in the book, all of which serve to prove the partisan, dishonest and sensationalist nature of the book as well as the sloppy research it is based on. I shall list some of them here:
- That I am a member of the Odinist Fellowship and that this charity is racist
FACT: My group, the Hearth of Devon is no longer affiliated with the Odinist Fellowship since 2023. The Odinist Fellowship is not a racist charity. - That I attended a “Fascist” event 8 years ago in Stockholm. Repeating an unsubstantiated claim by UK activist pressure group Hope not Hate, the authors describe an Identitarian event as Fascist, which ignores the actual definition of these highly distinct schools of thought.
FACT: I have never attended a Fascist event. - That Dan Capp, a musician who performed at my Pagan Futures Conference is “far right”
FACT: Dan Capp’s ideology is not right wing in any conventional sense and his music performance had no political meaning or lyrics at this conference. - "Rowsell’s videos include Ariosophic-inspired themes such as the ‘Real Hyperboreans".
FACT: None of my videos, including ‘Real Hyperboreans’ published 8 years ago, have any influence from Ariosophy. I reject Ariosophy entirely. The video references an outdated theory by Indian researcher Bal Gangadhar Tilak and then contrasts this with current genetic findings from four peer reviews scientific papers linked in the description. - "(Real Hyperboreans) purports to give a more scientific defence for the existence of an ancient and ‘robust’ Northern Eurasian civilisation."
FACT: I never described a civilisation among the primitive ANE Hunter-Gatherers of Siberia. - "he film suggests that the bloodline of these ‘Aryan’ peoples disappeared due to ‘race mixing”
FACT: I never said anything about race-mixing or bloodlines. I talked about the autosomal ancestry of ANE inherited by later peoples as was demonstrated in the linked sources eg. Nick Patterson et al,, Ancient Admixture in Human History, Genetics, Volume 192, Issue 3, 1 November 2012, Pages 1065–1093. - Then the authors mention an even older video, published 10 years ago, and claim that it “ends with a critique of international bankers that includes, alongside the narrative, a Nazi-era image of a Jew. What is more, the emblem of the production company at the end of the film, ‘Lucio Films’,is a crossed L and F, thereby resembling a swastika.
FACT: 10 years ago I commissioned a freelance video editor named Lucio to create this video. His logo is simply the letter L and F and any resemblance to a swastika is purely coincidental. The image they claim to be a “Nazi era image of a Jew” is neither, but rather a stock image licensed by Clker-Free-Vector-Images — Pixabay (CC0) and depicts a caricature of Scrooge from Dickens’ a Christmas Carol. It is widely used in modern left wing propaganda as an image of a white Western capitalist and did not exist in Nazi Germany. (very poor research!!) - They claim that a video, published 7 years ago, entitled ‘Hebrew Anglo-Saxons? Medieval Conversion Tactics’ is “anti-Semitic” and an ‘Ariosophic-inspired narrative’ and that I, Tom Rowsell “makes the ... argument that Jews used ‘propaganda and psychology’ to trick the heathen Anglo-Saxons into converting to Christianity”
FACT: At no point in the video do I say anything anti-Semitic or anything inspired by Ariosophy. I quote Christian sources by Christian authors who attempted to convert Anglo-Saxon Heathens. At no point do I attribute any of the quoted sources to Jewish authors or claim that Jewish people had any direct role in the conversion of the English people to Christianity. The video only mentions Jews in the context of the Biblical Hebrews that are referenced by early Christian authors in England. There were no Jewish people in Anglo-Saxon England.
The truth of my statements can be verified by simply watching the videos which are all still up because none of them breaches the YouTube terms of service. It is worthy of note that the authors ignored all of the dozens of videos I have made in the last 7 years. This should be seen as a tacit admission that nothing I have made is remotely racist in that period. The three older videos from much earlier are also not racist or anti-Semitic, despite what the authors claim, as can clearly be seen when viewing them.
Alessio has previously contributed to Mainstreaming the Global Radical Right: CARR Yearbook and to The Radical Right During Crisis: CARR Yearbook 2020/2021showing that he is primarily a left-wing activist and not a genuine scholar.
I urge all readers to write to Richmond American University London and to complain about these egregious, slanderous lies. enquiries@richmond.ac.uk
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