[1]
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
The kings of Europe used to pay clever men to pretend to be fools in order to make jokes to amuse the monarch and his court. They were called jesters. A man who pretends to be cleverer than he is, and who tells jokes in order to fool others into making himself rich – they are hucksters.
In the Jewish garment trade their merchandise is known as schmattes. This means “rags”; it was a Polish word before it was picked up in Yiddish — something cheap to make to be sold dear. By extension, peddling anything cheap and fast on false pretences is schmatte business. The Gentile word for this is a hustle.
For the merchandise Sir Lawrence Freedman of London has been selling, he has been well paid personally, and the corporation he used to run when he was a professor of “war studies” at King’s College is now a multimillion-pound business. To collect money for himself, and also for his son, Freedman has used company identities whose financial reports can be read at the UK Companies House registry. The operation optimizes on its tax liabilities to the UK Inland Revenue by following the advice of Judith Freedman, a professor of taxation at Oxford; she is Freedman’s wife [3].
The turnover, costs, tax, and profit lines of the Freedman businesses give a glimpse into how it possible for him to appear regularly in books, newspapers, and corporate conventions in order to announce, as he advertised last week in a London newspaper, that the new US military supplies for the Ukraine will give the allies time to “restore [Kiev’s] battlefield fortunes”; solve the Ukrainian “manpower problems…as new recruits don’t face the prospects of being sent to fight with insufficient ammunition”; “time before they will have the strength to start liberating substantial amounts of territory”; and time to compel President Vladimir Putin to “contemplate the possibility that [the war] might yet again swing towards Ukraine”.
The subjunctive “might” on the punchline is Freedman’s slip – he reveals he isn’t sure of the value of what he is selling.
Freedman was the British government’s official historian of the Falklands War and then a member of the Chilcot committee [4] of inquiry on the British war against Iraq. He has also been a career-long Russia threat faker and fighter of the war his side keeps losing, as he keeps insisting on the reverse [5].
This isn’t jestering, it’s huckstering. Freedman is for hire through an organ called All American Entertainment (AAE), which describes [6] itself as “a full-service talent booking agency, specifically focused on the needs of event professionals looking to book keynote speakers and corporate entertainment for their events.” His pro-US credentials for fighting the war against Russia, and his pro-Israel credentials for fighting the war against the Arabs and Iran have earned him an engagement at a Zionist-financed think-tank in Australia which calls [7] Freedman “the foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world.” Small world, if viewed from Sydney, Tel Aviv, or London.
Starting with a PhD entitled “The definition of the Soviet threat in strategic arms decisions of the United States: 1961–1974” – that’s the US targeting version of Russia — Freedman has monetized his war-fighting line through incorporation of a company called King’s College Business Limited, UK company number 02714181 [8]. Founded in 1992 with the name KCL Enterprises Ltd, it said it was an investment and commercial trading company without an express purpose, apart from making money. Freedman became a director in 1998 when he gave a home address in Wimbledon. On Freedman’s street, local realtors value the average house price at the moment to be £1.9 million; this is down 15% from its peak in 2017.
War with Russia has been much more profitable for Freedman. Losing the war, that’s to say.
In 2007 Freedman was chairman of the board of directors of KCL Enterprises when it was decided to make the King’s College brand name more visible. According to the audited financial report for that year, the purpose of the company was “to assist King’s College London to market its research and consultancy capabilities.” The report reveals that turnover in 2007 was £2.3 million; it then grew by 55% in 2008 to £3.5 million. “Administrative expenses” came to almost the same total, meaning the company was operating for tax and expense optimization through which directors and King’s College academics like Freedman were running their consultancy and other fees. When Freedman retired from King’s College at the end of 2008, he also left the company board. It has gone on to quadruple its turnover in 2023 to £12.6 million. War against Russia is very good for business [8].
[9]Source: UK Companies House [10]
Freedman meanwhile kept a seat as director of a subsidiary of the US government-funded RAND think tank called RAND Europe. This registered as a charity in the UK in 2001. In 2010 it was turning over £5.4 million in consultancy fees, including Freedman [11]. In more recent years the charity’s official filing reports [12] next to no money coming in or going out.
Another director’s seat was prepared for Freedman at an entity called the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. This was also a spinoff from King’s College, but it reported no employees, no turnover when Freedman joined in 2015. It has turned into a partnership [13] with US universities and a private Israeli university.
Freedman created his newest trading identity just after Russia launched the Special Military Operation in February 2022. This is named [14] by Freedman with his own name.
[15]Source: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/ [14]
This entity describes its business as “publishing of consumer and business journals and periodicals [and] media representation services.” Except for Freedman and son Samuel as directors, there are no employees. In its first year the company has reported holding cash at the bank of £105,669. At the same time, it reported owing creditors £60,556 and the tax and social security authorities £19,952. One of its products for sale is this [16]. According to Freedman junior, there are 41,000 buyers paying £35 per annum – that should amount to £1.4 million on the balance sheet [17].
Samuel Freedman has listed himself in several parallel employments. One of them is as senior advisor and trustee of the Ambition Institute, a £21 million contractor to the UK government for coaching teachers [18]; and director and executive at the Holocaust Educational Trust. Created as a charity in 2019, three years later in 2022 it took in more than £6.5 million; spent £2.8 million; and grew richer with £8.4 million in the bank or in investments.
This money was spent on promoting the defence of Israel and of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and fighting political, media and courtroom criticism by labelling it antisemitism of the German kind. In its latest financial report, Freedman junior’s group claims [19]“the Hamas massacre on the 7th October [2023] in Israel was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. There has been a huge surge of antisemitism on our streets, online and even in the classroom…we will continue to work to ensure that young people know where antisemitism can lead, and that this hatred has no place in British society.”
Freedman senior’s hatred for Russia has an official place in that society – his clients include the British government and the Crown, which has rewarded him with a knighthood and other medals. These have been officially gazetted [20]“for service to Defence Studies” That’s military camouflage — Freedman teaches offence and attack against Russia, not defence.
Why pursue the Freedman money trail so precisely? Because jesters don’t get degrees and tenured professorships from universities; Buckingham Palace doesn’t create knights of the realm with seats on its Privy Council [21] for ignoramuses. Money, however, can explain how a career of making mistakes in the war against Russia can last so long, and of repeating the mistakes so lucratively that there is no profit in correcting them.
For example, in 2018 Freedman published a book called The Future of War: A History. Four years into the NATO advance across the Ukraine towards the Russian border, these were the lessons Freedman aimed to inculcate:
- US air superiority — “It is a long time since [US forces] have faced serious threats from the air”.
- US firepower – “in most contingencies [the US] would enjoy an overwhelming advantage in firepower.”
- US technological superiority in precision-guidance weapons, drones, and robots enables the US military to conduct wars which don’t risk popular resistance or Congressional disapproval because there is “minimal risk of casualties.”
[23]Source: https://johnhelmer.net/ [22]
On Freedman’s table of most frequent references to his evidence, there’s himself on top; followed by a former Marine colonel and several others from Pentagon and NATO-financed think tanks. References Freedman doesn’t agree with, he disparages; for example, he tags Noam Chomsky as a “left-wing polemicist”. Edward Luttwak, an American strategist of Israeli background and consultancy rival of Freedman’s, is dismissed with the line: “there were obvious counter-examples to Luttwak’s examples.”
In 2023, following the first year of the Special Military Operation, Freeman produced a book he called Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. In this work Freedman’s principal source of military evidence is himself: 24 citations. As his source on the Russian General Staff, only the New York Times is more often cited – 37 times. After the newspaper and himself, the authorized state reporter Bob Woodward gets 15 cites; the Washington Post, 15; RAND and the BBC tie with 7 each; followed by NATO’s Bellingcat disinformation operation with 4. Read more here [24].
[25]Source: https://johnhelmer.net/ [24]
As the 20th century American hustler (jester) Larry Flynt once taught to the US Supreme Court, a hustle can be repeated over and over to great profit if it draws laughter, criticism, and acrimony [26]. There has been no criticism of Freedman’s war against Russia, and no acrimony over his defeats. Also no laughter — except in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus.
In last week’s Financial Times [27], the Japanese-owned mouth organ for war against Russia, China, Iran, and Palestine, Freedman continues irrepressibly for the clientele, unstoppable by the evidence:
- “Chronic shortages in ammunition and air defences had led to limited but potentially significant Russian advances.”
- “Manpower problems, which remain chronic, should be eased as new recruits don’t face the prospect of being sent to fight with insufficient ammunition.”
- “A variety of projects to get extra ammunition, Patriot air defence systems and F-16 aircraft to Ukraine are moving ahead.”
- “It will take time to recover from the difficult first months of this year… it is going to be some time before they will have the strength to start liberating substantial amounts of territory.”
- “For now, Ukraine’s best way of keeping up the fight against Russia is to carry on with the sort of attacks it has been mounting regularly of late. These have used long-range drones against oil refineries and other targets with some strategic value in Russia…”
- “Putin must now contemplate the possibility that it might yet again swing towards Ukraine.”
[28]Source: https://www.ft.com/ [27]
Freedman reveals no evidence that he has studied the position maps of each of the five Russian army group operations along the line of contact, the daily Ukrainian air alarm maps and strikes of the Electric War campaign [29], and the reporting from both sides of the deep penetration attacks between Kiev and Lvov. Freedman appears not to read the Russian military bloggers, their Ukrainian counterparts, or the US aggregators republishing both. The difficulty of covering up the westward acceleration of the defeat is visible across the frontier in Poland. Fearful of a new surge of Ukrainian refugees into Poland, the Polish Border Guard stopped publication of its cross-border counts on April 19 [30].
So long as this is the battlefield assessment of “the foremost authority on modern war in the English-speaking world”, what more needs to be said in English? Battlefield Russian isn’t a language Freedman can understand. It’s unprofitable for him to click for automatic translation by Translate.ru [31].