QAnon – Blood and Porridge

Yes, folks, it’s time for a rant…

There’s nothing I can say in response to Russia’s Vladimir Putin-orchestrated invasion of Ukraine – at the time of writing in its 16^th day – that hasn’t been said already by decent-minded and properly-informed people the world over. The invasion has been brutal and wholly unjustified and by masterminding it Putin has shown himself to be a vile, despotic thug. Although the evidence for that summation of Putin’s character had been overwhelming already.

Yet, over the years, Putin has acquired in the West a faithful coterie of groupies, toadies and sycophants. And now, post-invasion, no matter how hard they try to backtrack and dissociate themselves from him, they shouldn’t be allowed to escape their status as Putin fanboys and fangirls. Instead, they should be treated with the contempt they deserve. Though even if Putin hadn’t existed, I’m sure they would have developed into horrible people anyway.

Let’s take a look at some of them.

When it comes to Putin worshippers, where else can you begin but with that human slough of venality, mendacity, crassness and pig-ignorance Donald Trump, 45^th president of the United States and, sadly, quite possibly its 47^th one in 2024 too? The romance between Trump and Putin was always one-sided. Basically, Trump wanted to have Putin’s babies, whereas it was obvious to everyone (apart from Trump himself) that Putin regarded Trump as a contemptible but highly useful moron.

Donnie and Vlad first became an item in 2013 when Trump was lined up to host the Miss Universe competition in Moscow. He tweeted: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?” Puke. According to the dossier compiled by British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, while Trump was in Moscow Russian intelligence spied on and recorded him romping with local prostitutes. If this actually happened, then Trump became Putin’s new best friend whether he wanted to or not.

After that, Trump’s sycophancy towards Putin was relentless. In 2014, he enthusiastically backed Putin’s annexation of Crimea. Putin, he claimed, was “absolutely having a great time.” By 2015 he was nosing around for a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. As president, in 2017, he reacted to news that Putin was forcing a cut in personnel at the US Embassy in Moscow by commenting jocularly: “I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down on payroll… I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people, because now we have a smaller payroll.”

Meanwhile, according to former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, Trump envied Putin’s ability to kill off his critics and opponents. Thanks to checks and balances in the US constitution, Trump wasn’t allowed to do this himself, though of course if he gets a second crack at the American presidential whip in 2024, those checks and balances might not exist much longer. Grisham has stated her belief that Trump “admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him.”

Trump’s starry-eyed attitude towards Putin and Russia contrasts with his attitude towards Ukraine. When the Russians were widely accused of meddling in the 2016 presidential election that brought him to power, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort glibly turned the accusations on their head and blamed the Ukrainians for hacking into Democratic National Committee computers. In 2019, Trump delayed sending Ukraine 400 million dollars’ worth of military aid, which had been approved by Congress, because he wished to exert pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He wanted Zelensky to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, son of his presidential-election foe Joe Biden.

And late last month, when Putin’s forces rolled across the Ukrainian border, Trump was initially awestruck in his response. “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine… Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful.”

What a bawbag.

© Stewart Bremner

Of course, Trump’s grovelling before Putin is representative of the American far right, who see Putin as a virile embodiment of values the West has sadly lost and should be aspiring to regain. After all, the super-manly Vlad hates gays and transexuals, believes a woman’s place is at the stove, goes to church regularly (but obviously pays no attention to that wimpy, hippy New Testament stuff about loving thy neighbour and the like), has black belts in judo and taekwondo, is pals with Steven Seagal, wrestles with bears, and poses for totally non-embarrassing photo shoots on horseback naked from the waist up.

No wonder that at a recent American white nationalist conference, which was also attended by Republican Party nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene, white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes implored the crowd: “Can we get a round of applause for Russia?” Other far-right American brown-nosers of the Putin derriere have included Ku Klux Klan leader David Dukes (Russia is the “key to white survival”), Ann Coulter (“In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognisably European”) and Steve Bannon (“Putin ain’t woke…” Well, bully for him, Steve!)

One malignant thread that’s woven through the rancid tapestry of American right-wing thought is the QAnon conspiracy theory. Predictably, QAnon’s adherents have swiftly incorporated Putin, Ukraine and the invasion into their warped belief systems. Putin, they’ve claimed, is really on the side of the angels. His forces in Ukraine are trying to take out biolabs that the US has placed there. And in these biolabs, the US President’s Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci, Dr Evil himself, is attempting to create a new, deadly virus that’ll replace Covid-19. I don’t so much despise people who buy into the QAnon cult as feel sorry for them, though I feel sorrier for their unfortunate families. But I feel sorriest of all for the mild-mannered Dr Fauci. The poor guy’s had to put up with garbage like this for the past two years for the sin of simply trying to do his job.

Finally, there’s the ultra-right – which isn’t the same as ‘ultra-correct’ – American broadcaster Tucker Carlson, who’s been so enthusiastically pro-Putin that TV outlets like Russia 1 and Russia Today have aired his ravings to the Russian public as evidence that lots of Western folk actually approve of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In one plea for Putin tolerance, Carlson lamented, “Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?” Supposedly, the answer to these questions is ‘no’, which makes him fine in Carlson’s eyes.

Tucker Carlson, who appears on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network, is what in American television parlance is called an ‘anchor’. He’s also something that rhymes with ‘anchor’. Come to think of it, he’s something that rhymes with ‘Tucker’ too.

More ranting will be done in a future post, when I move onto the topic of Putin’s British pals.

From twitter.com/campbellclaret

© CBS News

“It’s a disgrace, there’s never been anything like that. You could take third-world countries, just take a look, take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we’ve been going through in this country. It’s a disgrace.”

So spoke President, now almost Ex-President, Donald Trump at a rally at Washington DC on January 6^th. This was before the rally’s attendees launched an assault on the US Capitol while members of Congress were meeting there to certify Joe Biden becoming the 46^th president and Trump’s successor.

Bravely, Trump used the pronoun ‘we’, which normally means ‘me’ as well as ‘you’, when he declared: “…we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to the Capitol…” Then, bravely, he didn’t accompany his supporters when they marched off to confront and fight their way past the Capitol’s police force (many of whom, as it happened, were suspiciously reluctant to do their jobs). Instead, bravely, Trump headed back to the White House where, bravely, he watched the ensuing carnage on TV.

In his speech, Trump claimed that November 2020’s presidential election, when Joe Biden won 72 more electoral college seats and 7,250,000 more votes than he did, and which everybody from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice – not to mention the judges who chucked out 60-odd lawsuits filed by Trump in protest – agreed had been held fairly, was even more fraudulent than an election held in a third-world country. Even more!

I guess I should credit Trump for using the term ‘third-world countries’, which is an improvement on his previous term for less-well-off parts of the planet, ‘shithole countries’. I doubt, though, if he’ll ever evolve to the point where he refers to them as ‘developing-world countries’, or even less-patronising terms like ‘low-and-lower-middle-income countries’, or ‘the global south’, or ‘the Majority World’.

As somebody who’s spent much time living in (what I’ll call) low-and-lower-middle-income countries, I have to say I’ve never seen a spectacle as humiliatingly ridiculous as the one in the Capitol following Trump’s rabble-rousing speech on January 6^th. I’ve lived in North Korea under Kim Jong-Il and Libya under Colonel Ghaddafi, dictators whose perpetual self-aggrandisement led to some ludicrous sights indeed. But nothing I saw in those places compares to last week’s scenes, where American politicians fled from their chambers while doors buckled, windows imploded and police and secret-service officers were pushed back by an inexorable, invading tide of white supremacists, Nazis, militiamen, crackpot conspiracists and MAGA nutjobs.

It resembled the start of a zombie-apocalypse movie – the bit where a live TV broadcast, announcing the emergency and urging calm, is interrupted by the studio staff looking into the lobby and screaming off-camera, “They’re here! They’re here!” Though this wasn’t so much Dawn of the Dead as QAnon of the Dead.

© Sony Soho Square

And during my time in what Trump thinks of as ‘shithole countries’, I’ve never seen performers from such a theatre of the absurd as those who were centre stage in the Capitol when, temporarily, the mob occupied it. The QAnon-shaman guy with the buffalo furs and horns and the painted face, resembling the figure on the cover of the 1993 Jamiroquai album Emergency on Planet Earth after it’d spent a night sleeping in a skip. The other guy with the furs, plus glasses and a dead beaver on his head, looking like the world’s shittest Davie Crockett. The guy in the bobbled ‘Trump’ hat who walked off with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, now under arrest and subject to a thousand jokes on social media about when he’ll ‘take the stand’. The guy with the Santa Claus beard and the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ T-shirt, whom one right-wing idiot later tried to deflect criticism from on social media by suggesting he might actually be an ‘Auschwitz survivor’… Hold on, though. Someone celebrating Auschwitz in 2021? That’s not absurd. That’s frightening.

Indeed, after the initial absurdities broadcast on the initial news reports, there came more frightening accounts of what’d happened. A police officer died of injuries sustained while being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher. Another officer, a black man, had to offer himself as bait and lure a racist mob away from the senate entrance, so that those inside got a few extra minutes to evacuate. (While these things were happening, other officers, clearly sympathetic to the mob’s intent, were dismantling barriers to let them pass and posing for selfies with them.) Journalists were attacked. A makeshift noose was strung up outside. Masked figures roamed around carrying zip-tie handcuffs, apparently planning to take hostages.

Meanwhile, there was the jaw-dropping contemptibility of Republican politicians such as Ted Cruz, the Texan cowpat, and Josh Hawley, a man who physically and spiritually resembles Miguel Ferrer’s scumbag executive in Robocop (1987). Even after the insurrection, they kept on parroting Trump’s honking-mad claims about election fraud and they voted against Biden’s certification. Obviously, this is because they want to secure the support of Trump’s deranged base when they launch their own bids to become president in 2024. With Cruz and Hawley, it’s not so much ‘we the people’ as ‘me the people’.

I suppose I should react to this with schadenfreude. The USA has a long history of promoting revolutions and insurrections in other countries. The most notorious of many examples were the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which the USA and its little sidekick the UK orchestrated in 1953 (and which begat the Shah of Iran, which begat the 1979 revolution, which begat the Ayatollah, which begat the Iran we know and fear today), and the 1973 coup d’état it engineered against President Salvador Allende that resulted in the murderous, fascistic rule of General Pinochet. Now it’s embarrassingly fallen prey to an attempted coup of its own.

Still, all the sanctimonious blather about the USA being the mother of democracy and the shining light for other nations to follow, often propagated by Hollywood movies, does worm its way into your consciousness no matter how hard you try to resist. So although the idea of American democratic righteousness is more myth and propaganda than reality, seeing its political heart get trashed by Jamiroquai-shaman guy, beaver-on-head guy, lectern-guy, etc., was rather sad.

From twitter.com / schwarzenegger

Incidentally, if the notion that the USA is the great champion of democracy is cheesy guff, it was appropriate that a few days later Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of cinema’s greatest proponents of cheesy (though enjoyable) guff, went viral in a video in which he praised American democracy. Arnie even likened its resilience to the sword of Conan the Barbarian. The sword’s blade, he explained, becomes stronger the more it’s tempered by punishment. (Sorry, Arnie, but I seem to remember Conan’s mantra being to ‘crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women’. Which doesn’t sound terribly democratic to me.)

But returning to the topic of low-and-lower-middle-income countries… From 1999 to 2001 I worked in Ethiopia. When I arrived there, most Ethiopians’ experience of the outside world was via an antiquated TV set kept in a wooden cabinet in the neighbourhood coffee shop or bar, which gave them access to two terrestrial channels. The channels’ output seemed to consist mainly of clips of traditional Ethiopian dancing, English football matches that’d taken place three weeks earlier, and reruns of Jake and the Fatman (1987-92).

Within two years, however, satellite TV had arrived with a vengeance. Suddenly, those same people were being exposed daily to dozens, if not hundreds of channels crammed with glossy adverts and pop videos dripping with opulence – fancy cars, penthouses, jewellery, designer clothes. It was all phoney nonsense, of course. Most people in other countries didn’t live like that. But how was your average Ethiopian expected to know? And how, I wondered, would this impact on the psychology of a people whose country was then, and still is today, pretty impoverished? (In 2018 its GDP per capita was ranked 167^th in the world.)

As it turned out, I should have been more worried about the Americans and how they’d cope with rapid advances in communications technology and especially with the sudden arrival of social media. For now we have vast numbers of Americans taking Trump’s twitter ravings as the gospel truth. Also, vast numbers of them believe the insane drivel that is the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, whereby Trump is battling a worldwide network of paedophilic, baby-eating Satanists who control everything, especially everything that’s liberal.

Whoever Biden appoints as a successor to Betty DeVos, Trump’s wretched Secretary of Education, will urgently need to promote 21^st century skills like critical thinking and digital literacy in the nation’s schools. Otherwise, thanks to social media and the Internet, the USA will collectively disappear down an extremist rabbit hole or get locked into a far-right echo chamber.

Ironically, Trump, so disdainful of ‘shithole countries’ in Africa and elsewhere, is probably closest in his vanity, bluster and puffed-up preposterousness to some of the infamous dictators who ruled certain African nations after the end of colonialism. I’m thinking of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko who, while most of his subjects lived in poverty, built a palace that became known as ‘the Versailles of the jungle’, travelled using a fleet of costly Mercedes-Benz motor cars and hired Concorde for shopping trips to France. What Trumpian things to do. I’m also thinking of Uganda’s Idi Amin, described in 1973 by his country’s American ambassador as ‘racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous and militaristic.’ That sounds like Trump down to a T.

By the way, talk of Idi Amin makes me think of the 2006 movie The Last King of Scotland, based on the 1998 novel by Giles Fodden. In that, a hapless, vain and dim Scotsman, played by James McAvoy, cosies up to Amin, played by Forest Whittaker, at the start of the latter’s career and soon gets more than he bargained for.

Thinking of The Last King of Scotland’s imaginary scenario, I’m somehow reminded of the real-life scenario here:

Anyway, America, one week has passed since the Capitol insurrection. You’ve got just one more week to go before Biden gets inaugurated and the Orange Blob, hopefully, is cast off into powerlessness and obscurity.

You’re halfway out of Crazy Town. Hope you make it. Good luck.

Tag: QAnon

It’s time Putin’s pals were put in the bin (Part 1)

Trump-town riots