Tag: Trump

Our daughter vs Donald Trump: The First 100 Days

Rich Will1 Comment

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Our daughter was born ten days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. I sometimes wonder if the viral piece I wrote a few days before her birth, in which I predicted an imminent mental breakdown on the part of the new President, was actually more of an expression of anxiety about my own readiness to perform the demanding role of becoming a parent. Although sadly (?) my prediction about Trump has yet to come true (or maybe it has…), our daughter is doing wonderfully, and we’re coping magnificently with being parents, one day (or rather one night…) at a time. I thought this was an opportune moment to reflect on Trump/our daughter’s comparative progress so far in ten key areas.

1. Inauguration

Her speech was a great deal more coherent than anything Trump has come up with in the last three months. It went ‘whiirrrARRRGGGHHHNNNNGGGGGGGGAAARRGGHHH I’M ALIVE!!!!!’. Recently, gratifyingly, she has incorporated cooing noises into her vocal repertoire. This may be an attempt to reproduce the lilting and melodic voice of Paul McCartney (she’s going through a bit of a Beatles phase). When she was extracted she was, to my surprise, covered in all this white stuff, as opposed to her presidential counterpart, who has a strong lifelong preference for orange gunk. When it comes to knowledge of the rights and responsibilities of the President as defined by the Constitution of the United States of America, she’s miles ahead. Where Trump forced both the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General to write letters calling for the sacking of FBI boss James Comey in a desperate and catastrophically misguided attempt to cripple the investigation into his links with Russia, our daughter would have just looked around the room gurgling randomly and harmlessly to herself. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

2. North Korea

Given that she is unable to rationalise and is driven solely by the desire for simple selfish gratification, she would be able to relate to the behaviour of both leaders. I read somewhere once that as babies we often wish that our parents would die, because our fury at not having our needs met immediately is not conditioned by any mental conception of what that would imply for our own survival prospects. In a strikingly similar way, it’s possible that neither Kim Jong Un nor Donald Trump have any idea what the consequences of nuclear confrontation would be. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

3. Climate Change

She’s not been born into a normal spring. Any one of her cohort has a better and more responsible attitude to the climate crisis than any so-called adult and certainly much more of a mature understanding of basic climate facts and their consequences than anyone in the current US administration. If you asked her whether or not the US should withdraw from the Paris Agreement she’d probably look at you a bit blankly and then might, if you were lucky, give you a massive lopsided grin, one which would, in contrast to Trump’s mangled death beam, give you hope and faith in the future of the human species. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

4. Healthcare

Although in theory this is free in Italy, in reality it’s very expensive. You very often have to buy a ‘ticket’ in order to access services. Sadly our daughter hasn’t been able to change the situation in her first hundred days. She would nevertheless understand healthcare policy to be a very complex area, which puts her ahead of Trump, who thought it was all really, really simple. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

5. Immigration

Her father (me) is an immigrant, so presumably (although we haven’t yet discussed this in any detail) she feels instinctive solidarity with people who choose or are forced to cross national borders for prolonged periods during the course of their lives. Oddly enough, although Italy is, like all European countries, experiencing a sickening rise in xenophobic sentiment, no one has yet told her to go back where she came from and stop being such a parasite on essential public services. As for her, she’s never uttered the phrase ‘America First’ or talked openly about a ‘Muslim Ban’. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

6. Russia

While it’s unclear whether or not Trump has ever met Putin, I can say with some certainty that our daughter has had no contact with the Russian President/failed election meddler. At six weeks old she started grinning, mostly in response to others’ smiles. It’s unlikely she’d recognise Putin’s pseudo-Machiavellian smirk as a positive facial expression, as anything indicating goodwill. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

7. Mexico

She was conceived there and has a Mexican name. She would have difficuly grasping the concept of a wall but, like with healthcare, would at least appreciate the logistical challenges in building one between two particularly wide and mountainous countries. Trump is lagging way behind her on this second point. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

8. Suspended reduction of Federal Housing Mortgage Insurance Premium rates

Our daughter has no opinion of this and no influence on it that we know of. It’s certainly not her initiative. To be fair, though, I doubt it’s a priority for Trump either, given that it’s got nine words in it and several of them have more than two syllables. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

9. Bottle feeding

Trump apparently doesn’t drink alcohol. As Hasan Minhaj pointed out this week, that carries the bewildering implication that all his 3am tweets are written when he is sober. Perhaps one reason for his myriad psychological complexes and mental disorders is a traumatic failure to adjust to the different kinds of flow and teat involved in getting milky-wilky out of a bottle. Our daughter is responding slightly better each day but still has moments when she wants to stress VERY FORCEFULLY that she is AWARE that this bit of transparent plastic is NOT a part of mummy-wummy and she will NOT be accepting it as a permanent replacement. However, knowing the risks failure could one day represent for future global peace and security, we will have to keep insisting. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

10. Nappy habits

I’m at ‘work’ at the moment so I don’t know anything about the present contents of my daughter’s nappy. However, taking a quick look at Trump’s Twitter feed it appears that the President needs his diaper changing. OUR DAUGHTER: 10 DONALD TRUMP: 0.

So, on the basis on their performance in key areas over their first 100 days, OUR DAUGHTER gets 100!!! points, and DONALD TRUMP gets a big fat orange 0 despite having had ten more days than her to make a good impression. When I get home this afternoon I’ll give her an extra celebratory helping of milky-wilky from the bottle…or at least, I’ll try to. In the meantime, who on earth is going to be tasked with changing Trump’s nappy now that Nanny Comey’s gone?!

Donald Trump must really suck at chess

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I’ve always been a loser when it comes to chess. That thing of thinking several moves ahead, factoring in the plans and responses of the other player, all the psychological back-and-forthing…I guess it means in several important ways I’m just not at that intelligent. Someone else who’s not very clever is Clown-in-Chief Donald Trump, of whom someone, in a must-read article that contains no hyperbole or exaggeration whatsoever, just wrote: 

(There’s) a fundamental truth about Trump that I have been trying to get people to understand since he announced his latest presidential campaign in June 2015: Trump doesn’t know anything.

I also predicted some months ago that the intellectual and emotional demands of the job would be way beyond him:

Trump is utterly incapable of governing. He is a man who will clearly be unable to master the complex tasks inherent to the job. Being President of a large powerful nation involves dealing with huge amounts of detailed information. Although there is some limited evidence that Trump has some ability to understand short written sentences, there is no way that someone of his *extremely* restricted intellectual prowess will be able to read the morass of documents he will have to handle on a daily basis, or even to understand the most basic gist when they are explained to him. There’s also the question of workload. Here is Obama describing an average day in his life as President. It’s demanding stuff, and the mere fact that the word ‘intelligence’ is used three times suggests strongly that the new President will struggle…Much has been made of his lack of political experience but few have considered the possibility that this is man so lacking in concentration and stamina that he has probably never sat through an entire episode of the West Wing. (Neither have I, but no one has suggested making me President.)

Now he’s made a move that not only reveals that he doesn’t have a strategy – he doesn’t even know the basic rules of the game*. He doesn’t know what moves the cheap made-in-Russia orange-painted piece that’s called the ‘President’ but looks like a gormless orangutan is allowed to make.

His reasons for taking James Comey off the board are so transparent they would shame an 8-year-old having his first chess lesson with his grandfather. Every pawn in the world knows that Trump was grateful to Comey for stealing him the election. That’s not why he was sacked. Trump got rid of the FBI director because he’s investigating the Russian connections of the Trump election campaign. Trump doesn’t understand enough about being President to know that with very rare and apparently honourable exceptions, Presidents don’t sack the boss of the FBI.

In making a move which reveals that he doesn’t know how the game works, Trump has also demonstrated that he’s not capable of thinking more than one move ahead and has no ability to predict how his opponent will respond. I predict that at some point very soon he will, as I’m sometimes tempted to do when obviously losing, angrily sweep all the pieces away and storm off. The geopolitical implications of my doing that would of course be very limited. In the case of Trump, Republican leaders – as I argued a few months ago – have to step in and gently lead him away from the table before he wipes us all off the board.

 

* Trump has actually claimed to be “slightly, no, a lot better than you at chess”, whoever you are.

This is what I hope happens when Trump meets the Pope

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I like this Pope. Okay, he may not smoke dope and he’s got some pretty obnoxious views on what women should and shouldn’t do with their own bodies, but he’s also genuinely and deeply concerned about poverty, inequality, racism and climate change and has spoken out forcefully against those who perpetuate injustice in those areas. Now it’s been reported that he is to meet with Donald Trump, aka the worst person in the world, a human shaped-turd in an ill-fitting million-dollar suit with a badge on it that reads (tragically for us) ‘I AM THE MOST POWERFUL PERSON ON THE PLANET’.

The following is the scenario which I hope will play out when they meet up.

Setting: A room in the Vatican, sparsely furnished with just the odd bit of velvet on the chairs, nice plush drapes and a couple of crucifixes and the like on the walls. On the left there is a line of seven people wearing suits, some of whom have bulges in their jacket pockets and three of whom are known members of neonazi organisations. To the right there stand three monks, two archbishops, a couple of swiss guards, a cardinal and one or two deacons. Pope Francesco and Donald Trump are sitting next to each other on two of the velvet-backed chairs.

THE POPE (addressing the hangers-on): EXEUNT!
(they all leave, except one)
THE POPE (looking slightly irritated): EXIT!
(the last one leaves)
TRUMP: I…
The Pope reaches over and with a surprisingly swift jab breaks Donald Trump’s nose. The Commander-in-Chief gasps and puts his tiny hands over his face. The Supreme and Sovereign Pontiff stands up and, demonstrating astonishing agility for an eighty-year-old man, pulls his left leg full back and kicks over the tycoon’s chair. The 80’s playboy’s huge bulk goes crashing backwards and his head lands with a sickening thump. He’s making a curious keening sound, like a man very unused to being subjected to physical violence. The Bishop of Rome as head of the Roman Catholic Church turns to face the wall, takes two steps towards it and then swiftly turns and executes a full body slam on the alleged child rapist’s torso. From the look on the robber baron’s face, which is rapidly turning purple and emitting wheezing noises, there seems to be some damage to his internal organs. When the heel of the His Holiness’s right boot makes contact with the tax avoider’s chin, there’s a snapping sound. The real estate mogul is really suffering now – it’s not even clear that the reality TV show star is conscious. The climate liar has blood pouring out of what is left of his nose and his jaw is at an unnatural angle to the rest of his face. The Holy Father stands over the pretend billionaire’s bloated and beaten face breathing evenly, then reaches down, rips off the mendacious mafia frontman’s wig, then steps to the window and hurls it down to the cheering crowd watching the battle unfold on huge screens down in Saint Peter’s Square. As the tinpot tyrant lies whimpering on the floor, the religious leader formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio strides over to the immense oak door and raps on it sharply, crying ‘DA MIHI IPHONE!’. He grabs the smartphone with pontifical impatience and shoots a smily selfie with the rapidly soon-to-be-former autocrat expiring in the background, then tweets it to his 10.6 million followers. Within ten minutes it has received many more likes than any other tweet in human history and the Combover Con Artist, aka the Orange Hitler, aka the Cheeto Benito, aka King Leer, aka the Last of the Mango Mohawkans, aka Fuckface von Clownstick, is no more.

FIN

Are Republicans and the ‘alt-right’ now our allies against Trump?

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Rand Paul, the alt-right and probably some guy in Idaho who’s covered his mom’s basement in swastikas and ‘Make America Great Again’ posters have suddenly decided that Donald Trump shouldn’t be President. The fact that for the last year they have continued to support him in the face of dire warnings that he was absolutely unsuitable in every possible way didn’t fase them in the slightest. They have gone along with all the most deranged and hateful things he has done in office without blinking. In fact, they’ve cheered him on over the Muslim ban, the cancellation of Obama’s climate measures, his attempt to destroy the healthcare system, and his appointment of lifelong nazis, outright morons and billionaire swamp-creatures to some of the most powerful positions on earth. They’ve sneered at every one of his detractors and victims, and aggressively dismissed any suggestion that he’s personally corrupt.

Now, as it happens, he has done exactly what we – people who think and feel – knew and said he would, ie risk a global war in an act of puerile petulance. As soon as the media quite rightly pointed out his hypocrisy over Syria – criticising Obama for not having done what he himself was explicitly and repeatedly opposed to – he, in his teeny tiny fizzing-on-and-off brain, has decided to dispatch missiles over which we knew and said again and again and again that he should not have control.

Far-right Republican politicians and the teenage trolls of the hipster KKK are grievously offended on behalf of their idol: Putin. He, rather than this demented orange playboy prick, is their anointed Hitler. Now they’re showing up in progressive forums online asking for admittance to the resistance. They want to replace Trump with someone even worse as soon as possible.

Should they be welcomed as part of the burgeoning movement against the kind of worldview of which Trump is the culmination? Are anti-Trump supporters going to accept white supremacists as part of their networks? Will such groups therefore be asking their non-white members to leave to make way for a bunch of actual full-on no-holds-barred fascists?

Hell, no. Trump was never any more than their puppet. Now his strings have snapped they want our help to build a new one. Fuck that. They are our enemy.

Instant Psychopath Test: is this “fake news”?

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It’s a relief to see that the world as a whole can still respond with horror and revulsion at the sight of something as unambiguously horrifying and revolting as the chemical attack on civilians in Syria. A Kremlin spokesperson nonetheless dismissed it as “fake news”, implying it had been staged to discredit the regime. Pro-Putin propaganda outlet Infowars blamed the supposed attack on George Soros and other Jews.

According to University of Kent psychologists Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton in the British Journal of Social Psychology, “At least among some samples and for some conspiracy theories, the perception that ‘they did it’ is fueled by the perception that ‘I would do it,’”. In the case of Vladmir Putin, he already has done something similar.

Here are some facts about what Putin was responsible for in 1999. They are facts because they cannot be disputed by any reasonable means. The Russian Government has failed to put together any other plausible explanation. 

(If you are among that growing number of people who are inclined to automatically dismiss such features of reality as the violence and corruption of the powerful or the findings of science with regard to the climate, you are probably in need of some form of therapy. Luckily it’s never been easier to seek out such help. Google ‘mental health services’ in your area. You may be directed to a practitioner who is willing to negotiate a lower rate. Tell him or her that your short-term objective is to read some facts about Vladimir Putin without allowing your judgement to be clouded by denial. That will give you a reasonable and not too ambitious goal to work towards.)

In September 1999, on the eve if elections to choose Boris Yeltsin’s successor, a series of explosions took place in four apartment buildings in Russia. They killed hundreds of civilians and were swiftly attributed to Chechen terrorists. However, local police in a town called Ryazan arrested secret service (FSB) agents planting a bomb in a fifth building. The head of the FSB claimed it was a ‘training exercise’, but was unable to explain why the explosives being used were real. There was a quick cover-up, and amidst a febrile atmosphere Putin was elected three days later and soon started a new war in Chechnya. A number of those who continued to investigate the bombings (including Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko) were subsequently murdered. Putin’s Government has gone on to assasinate dissidents at home and abroad and to murder journalists and anyone else who tries to share information about real events.

It’s also become very expert at disseminating false news stories. One key figure in Putin’s regime is Vladislav Surkov, the former Deputy Prime Minister, who in that role “directed Russia like a huge reality TV show”:

He would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. (from The Atlantic.)

Such insidious propaganda is not just for a domestic audience. During the US elections targetted individuals with false news stories via Facebook, as The Washington Post documented. 

Again, these are facts. If you’re interested in this area then you need to take them on board. Otherwise they will sink your case.

One tool apparently used to spread disinformation is Facebook groups. Rachel Maddow reported on one ‘pro-Bernie Sanders’ group that is based in Albania, while the Daily Beast details how Putin’s operations targetted those who think of themselves as ‘progressive’. This may explain why so many posts in such (ostensibly anti-Trump) groups dismiss out of hand any suggestion of Russian involvement in the US elections.

The bombings in Saint Petersburg followed two major anti-government protests. The images of death and destruction will have the effect of allowing the Government to clamp down on such dissent. Two days later came the chemical attack in Syria. Even such a malignant, deluded narcissist as Trump felt compelled to condemn it. His way of doing so (implying immediate military action in order to satisfy his insecurity complex wrt his predecessor) is incredibly dangerous. I’ve argued here several times that Trump’s Presidency is and remains an impossibility. In such a prominent role, consistently disrespecting the truth gets you into trouble. Up until he became President, Trump led a mostly consequence-free existence, and it seems he has only got this far by following the dictats of Steve Bannon, an actual psychopath whose explicit short-term goal is to provoke a world war. The fact that in response to this sudden geopolitical crisis they have sidelined Bannon suggests that know they will also have to get rid of Trump. Somehow.

As for Putin, he’s a monumental liar. Does saying that somehow mean that I think that Hillary Clinton is morally impeccable or that I believe the recent history of the US with regard to foreign interventions to be free of reproach? No, it doesn’t mean any of that. Bizarre as it may seem to some who think of themselves as ‘progressive’, opposing Putin and opposing Trump are highly compatible. Putin, like Assad, is a brutal tyrant who murders ordinary people to achieve his political objectives. He’s no friend of anyone who regards themselves as even remotely progressive. And anyone who professes to ‘believe’ the Kremlin’s claim that the chemical attack is ‘fake news’ is probably either in the pay of the Russian Government or in dire need of psychiatric treatment, or both.

Brexit and the Climate

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The noted child psychologist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott wrote that the greatest danger to the child’s developing self is that it be faced with demands for precocious adaptation to the environment. The parents must protect the infant at all costs from aspects of reality that are incomprehensible or beyond its grasp, and gradually present the world in manageable doses.

On the 58th day of our daughter’s life, the US President signed an order which cancelled all the previous Government’s regulations regarding Climate Change. On the same day, several members of the British Parliament who had campaigned for the UK to leave the European Union walked out of a select committee meeting because the facts they were being presented with in relation to the consequences of Brexit were ‘too gloomy’.

I see that the top trending topics on social media right now are ‘Messi’, ‘Ken Barlow’ and something called ‘Skeletor and He Man’.

We’re going to have a hell of a job in a number of years trying to convince her that not all adults are completely fucking stupid.

Do you still think Putin is on the left?

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So, you’re a progressive. You wanted Bernie Sanders to win the Presidential election and were disgusted to see how he was cheated out of the nomination. You were delighted to see that the underhand and frankly treacherous machinations of the Democrats backfired. Not that you wanted Trump to win, of course, but what the hell did they expect, and who’s to blame? Instead of promoting a program for change, they pushed the same corrupt, neoliberal, pro-corporate warmongering agenda that stained the Obama years.

In the case of Russia, you’re sick of all the misinformation and scaremongering. It’s not so long ago that the US was persecuting supposed Russian agents and ruining the lives of anyone considered a ‘red’. What’s changed? Pro-Clinton newspapers and TV networks are trying to make up for the terrible mistake they made in choosing a corrupt candidate by undermining a democratically elected Government – not one to your liking, obviously, but the only way to get rid of it is to choose a genuinely popular candidate with a proper radical agenda the next time round.

In any case, who believes what the mainstream media says any more? People can see through their fake news bullshit. There are alternative news sources, ones that let you know what’s really going on behind the scenes of this farce.

Personally you like Russia Today. It has some genuinely brave alternative voices, people like Max Keiser, Abby Martin, Glenn Greeenwald and Ed Schultz. You’ve come across people online – mostly shills for Clinton – who claim that it’s just a mouthpiece for the Kremlin. More russophobic propaganda, you think. Putin is demonised in the MSM but he’s a geopolitical pragmatist, and he also dares to challenge some of the most powerful interests on earth – NATO, the EU and the entire corrupt financial establishment in the form of families like the Rothschilds. That’s why he’s become the latest embodiment of evil. The disinformation in the so-called liberal Western media about Russia’s involvement in Ukraine has been particularly disgraceful.

It’s partly thanks to RT that you’ve been broadening your outlook, following political developments in other countries. The US is not the centre of the world! You thought it was a shame that Geert Wilders didn’t win the Dutch election. His call for the Netherlands to leave the EU and NATO was too dangerous for the political establishment and so he was painted as a racist and the sitting candidate (a right-wing neoliberal) was shoehorned back into power.

With Le Pen, you’re not so sure. You agree that there’s a problem with Islamic terrorism, and it’s one that the EU doesn’t seem to have a response to. But you also remember that she comes from a tradition (in her party and in her family) of fascist ideology, including holocaust denial. Now, you’re no fascist and you’re no antisemite. You oppose what Israel is doing with the settlements and the occupation – you’ve sometimes thought about going there to volunteer in some capacity – but you’ve certainly got nothing against Jewish people. Bernie Sanders himself is Jewish!

You open Facebook and there’s a post from Infowars (you enjoy hearing about what Alex Jones says about Clinton, but you avoid watching the vidoes where he goes on his syphilitic rants about Trump). The post has a photo which shows Vladimir Putin on the right, holding hands with an actual full-on holocaust-denying antisemite aspiring fascist demagogue to the left. Putin is (for him) smiling broadly.

And you? Where are you in this picture? Are you, as you have always assumed, on the left, or have you somehow ended up supporting the far-right?

It’s probably about time you stopped watching RT.

I love Russia

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Apparently there’s recently been a worldwide explosion of ‘Russophobia’. According to Alex Jones of infowars.com, hundreds of thousands of expats in Europe and elsewhere have decided to return home in the last couple of years because of anti-Russian sentiment.

Shamefully, I myself have never actually been to Russia, although I’ve nearly made it a couple of times. In winter 2007 I was offered a month-long job in a (presumably frozen) forest near St Petersburg teaching kids ‘on a campsite’. Since I was suffering at the time from what Russians call toska it sounded ideal. I’ll be able to see St.Petersburg, I mentioned to the interviewer. Hmm, maybe with…a chaperon, was her response. And when I asked who was organising the whole shebang, she sort-of-smiled and referred vaguely to ‘some…businessmen’. In the end I got a job working for Fetullah Gülen so it didn’t happen.

Russian stereotypes for my generation weren’t of heroic workers or freezing gulags but of the catastrophic consequences of economic collapse. In the 1990s Russian society was depicted as a hellish environment to survive in, one of ragged post-Soviet citizens gathered round salvaged oil drums for warmth, drinking bootleg vodka out of shoes whose laces their beleaguered grandmothers were out trying to sell on the streets whenever they weren’t in their furniture-stripped apartments making webcam porn for foreign cents. The country was synonymous with dodginess in the form of a resurgent mafia taking the place of broken state institutions. If it wasn’t dog-eat-dog then it certainly involved people doing just that. I once had a delicately-featured 17-year-old student from Siberia who, in a class discussion on weird things we’d eaten, told a mesmerising tale of the time she and her friends drunkenly killed and ate a dog. She may have just said it to have a laugh. I’ve found that Russians have a mordant sense of humour and a very strong sense of the absurd.

For years I told that story, vaguely aware that in doing so I was perpetuating a lazy stereotype of scary Russians. In reality I always enjoyed hanging out with them. At about the same time as the abortive St Petersburg trip I was teaching what is still one of my favourite ever classes. It was huge fun largely thanks for the presence of two Russian women: Tamara/Toma, a budding fashion designer bursting with wit and ebullience, and Natasha/Natalya, who on first meeting I was inclined to dismiss as a sloane but who turned out to be one of the most emotionally intelligent people I’ve ever met. I also spent about 18 months teaching private classes to a student called Vlad, an aging computer whizzkid as laconic as he was wise. Toma and Natasha helped me through a difficult break-up, while Vlad and I mostly ended up talking about the works of José Saramago, on the subject of which I was writing a dissertation at the time. I’m enormously grateful to all three of them.

Perhaps I’ve just been lucky, but the Russians I’ve known have almost all had an in-depth knowledge of and an appreciation for the wealth of culture that their country has given the world in the form of literature, painting, theatre and music. Most have been happy to discuss and draw lessons from Dostoevsky, Chekov, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky and many more. At the level of fiction and cinema in particular Russia seems to be one of those cultures (akin to the Spanish-speaking world) which is so vast and dense you’d never really need to leave. Two more recent novelists who have influenced my understanding of not just Russia but also life and the world are Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin. The former is like a cross between Irvine Welsh and Thomas Pynchon, and the latter’s novel ‘The Day of the Oprichnik’ is a futuristic dystopian fable as troubling as it is entertaining. As for film, the 2014 movie ‘Leviathan’ depicted the dismal reality of daily struggles for human dignity in the face of powerful and evil forces, in the form of an epic biblical parable. The film faced a campaign of vilification in the Russian press as a result. Similarly scripture-heavy is the brand-new release ‘The Student’ which I will, baby daughter permitting, endeavour to see as soon as possible, which may well not be til at least 2035, but still. There’s a moral seriousness to a lot of contemporary Russian cinema which I for one find extremely beguiling but would be deeply inappropriate for a newborn child who doesn’t even recognise Peppa Pig yet.

I was also lucky a few years ago to spend time in London with members of Chto Delat, a (genuinely) radical art/activist collective from St Petersburg. Their elaborate dialectical critiques (most often presented in the form of newspapers and films on themes such as Brecht, the political role of the Avant Garde, the Right to the City) I find both profoundly disorientating and deeply enlightening. The risks they take to produce and present their art surpass by far any challenges faced by artists in the UK or the US, with their publications seized by the State and members harassed and arrested. Together we organised a protest outside the Russian embassy in support of two antifascists arrested on an environmental protest. I hope that if I ever do make it to Russia this won’t turn out to be a problem and I don’t have to remotely post a series of gulag diaries. In fact, that’s quite a good point. Let’s just pretend I never mentioned it.

Those who do dare to oppose the abuse of the powerful in Russia exhibit enormous courage. The suffering and fortitude described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is almost beyond compare. Some of that bravery lives on in Pussy Riot, who in return for standing up against the Church and the State were sentenced to endure similar conditions in an actual full-on Siberian penal colony.

Their crime was to stand up to the patriarchal arrogance of a president who seems to take pride in the very worst aspects of Russian history: Tsarism, pogroms, showtrials and the gulags themselves. Those Russian individuals and institutions who exhibit the enormous courage required to resist his autocratic rule, who publicly object to the corruption, racism, homophobia, misogyny and state terrorism he promotes are labelled ‘anti-Russian’ and ‘foreign agents’ and driven out of their homeland – or, even worse, forced to stay. Now, through the Kremlin’s media outlet Russia Today and its useful bigots overseas such as Alex Jones, this bullying of anyone who opposes Putin has taken on international proportions. The Russian President may not be the megalomaniac psychopath that some of his detractors like to make out, but that his rule is brutally repressive and that he has plans to expand it overseas is beyond any doubt.

In the meantime, if US Republicans and neofascists want to go looking for anti-Russian prejudice, they need to look at the history of their own families and their own political traditions. For decades US mainstream culture portrayed Russians as less than human. A far-right xenophobic hate merchant like Alex Jones has no concern for the people of Russia. And anyone who, like him, implies that criticisms of Putin or attempts to investigate his seedy connections with Trump and Exxon is a manifestation of ‘Russophobia’ is, like the Russians say, “полон дерьма” – full of shit.

I’ve thought of a great way of dealing with the “alt-right”. It’s called “shush-pat”.

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altright-you-say

Jacques Lacan said of the student revolutionaries of 1968 they were looking for a new father. By contrast, the so-called alt-right appear to be seeking someone to breastfeed them. In this excellent lengthy article about hanging around with fanboys of that pro-pedophile sociopathic freak Milo, Laurie Penny writes:

I enjoy most respectful conversation, and these boys are scrupulously polite to me. They were polite to me a month earlier when I slept on their tour bus — right until a door closed between me and them, and they immediately started talking loudly, to each other, about the crass and anatomically implausible things they wanted to do to me. Intellectually, they must have known that I could hear them, but these kids grew up on the Internet, the world’s locker room, where if you can’t see a woman, she doesn’t really exist. The one grown man on the bus started yelling at them to go the hell to sleep — “there’s a girl back there!”—and they yelled back that they’d let me sleep if I let them “suck my titties.” It’s no surprise to hear that they’re still yearning for the teat, but these babies had best be careful where they go slobbering for the milk of human kindness. I’m just about dried up.

Now it turns out she was spot on: milk is indeed a Thing among alt-righters. Nazis have been using it as an emblem, because it’s ‘pure’ and, er, Asian people don’t drink much of it. They have apparently been pouring it over each other in celebration of its and their ‘whiteness’. This taste for moomoojuice seems to have inspired this remarkable work of art. Where Hitler called for Lebensraum, his latest disciples are after milky-wilky.

It eloquently demonstrates the infantile nature of the whole project. They want someone to mother them. Perhaps Le Pen fits the bill, or maybe Trump himself, given the famously female cadences and rhythms of his speech. It also explains why they have a thing about cartoons. Their undeveloped brains and nascent eyesight are unable to deal with anything more cognitively demanding, hence their emotional attachment to a white supremacist equivalent of Peppa Pig and Teletubbies (one which happens to be green, but still). There’s also something distinctly ‘Lord of the Flies’ about their inhouse media outlet, Breitbart. And as Laurie Penny points out they, like punks, have no actual understanding of what Nazism is, they’re just trying to annoy adults by any means necessary.

As it happens I am currently undergoing a crash course in dealing with infant hysteria. I am developing my skills in calming down my six-week-old daughter and sending her to sleep. Her screaming has been honed by evolution to be as distressing as can be, as she alone has no means of dealing with hunger, tiredness or discomfort. Her screeching, like that of the überbrats of the new far-right, has no actual meaning beyond that.

Luckily there’s a solution (beside feeding her, naturally): shush-pat. This technique, invented by the currently ubiquitous childcare guru Tracy Hogg, consists of tapping her firmly on the back while saying ‘shush’. It’s simple and it works. With (sometimes immense) repetition it soothes and comforts her. Eventually her eyes close and her breathing slows. She’s totally relaxed which means we can be too (actually we lie awake for hours worrying that she might explode into fury at any moment, but you get the point).

How would this work with the alt-right? It’s hard to say. I personally have no inclination whatsoever to cuddle Steve Bannon, and although Trump himself appears desperately in need of a breastfeed I’m not about to lift him out of his cot and hand him to my wife. In any case the most outspoken Trump supporters (of whom the angry young men of the alt-right are a self-styled postmodern Hitler Youth) only exist online, where they trade in a currency of memes, mostly originating on 4chan (“the internet’s hate speech hit factory”). Most can only communicate in bright, colourful images with slogans written in big letters. Shush-pat could be an effective antidote to their unsolicited and unwarranted venom and denial, whether they happen at that particular moment to be be sticking up for rape or torture or murder or pedophilia. These are, after all, not rational adults. They are no more open to reasoned arguments and the sober presentation of factual evidence than a hungry newborn baby is. They are, in fact, not post-factual but pre-conceptual. They are screaming for attention and consolation and they need to be told, patiently but firmly, to shut up. I offer the above hastily-assembled collage as a contribution to the cause.

What’s behind the rise of the global far-right? Climate denial.

Rich Will4 Comments

immagineI’ve argued repeatedly here that if you want to understand the rise of the global far-right movement you have to put climate denial at the centre of the picture. The chief protagonist in the conspiracy in the decades-long campaign to forestall action on global warming in order to protect corporate profits is Exxon Mobil. They knew in 1978 that the activities of companies like theirs would raise global temperatures by 2-3%, so they funded and coordinated campaigns designed to spread doubt, employing tactics and experts from the tobacco industry to do so and setting up“institutes” devoted to outright climate denial.

(This is not guesswork or conspiracy theorising. It’s verified and verifiable fact. If you have any doubts whatsoever about what I’m saying please do your own research, obviously steering clear of climate denial sites funded by Exxon Mobil, which as it happens is a very large proportion of them. Use reputable news sources instead – here is a useful map of them.)

So what’s the connection with the global far-right? I’ve argued that repressed fears about the future have been finding expression as rage directed at targets identified by far-right politicians, all of whom have – not by coincidence – climate denial as a central part of their programmes. However, there are also links at institutional and individual levels. Last month I wrote:

Anyone curious about Trump’s connections to Russia and what interests lie behind them does not need to go trawling through Wikileaks documents or hope that some hitherto unseen videotape comes to light. The fact that Putin has regularly been seen in the company of the man who Trump appointed his Secretary of State is troubling in itself.

….but it turns out I didn’t know the half of it. Democracy Now drew my attention to a recent article by the author and climate scientist Joe Romm, in which he wrote:

While Trump may not be able to destroy global climate action and the landmark 2015 Paris climate deal all by himself — as he pledged to do during the campaign — he probably could do that with help from Russia and the trillion-dollar oil industry.

So much is explained by Trump’s Secretary of State choice. Media reports now say it will be Rex Tillerson, CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil, which had made a $500 billion oil deal with Putin that got blocked by sanctions.

Stalling the biggest oil deal ever did not just “put Exxon at risk,” as the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow explained last week this deal was so big it was “expected to change the historical trajectory of Russia.”

(Again, if you have any doubts, please read the links. The original report is from the Wall Street Journal. Is ithe WSJ a left-wing fake news outlet pushing a left-wing agenda? No, it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is, as it happens, a climate denier. The article obviously slipped under his radar.)

I wrote in November 2015 that “it is simply impossible to imagine anything companies like Exxon and Shell would not do in order to protect their future incomes.” On the evening of Trump’s inauguration I argued that the Trump administration represents a coup by the climate denial industry and its backers in Big Oil. I was right.

In 2014 Naomi Klein wrote in ‘This Changes Everthing’ that we can no longer afford the illusion that small, gradual changes will be enough to save our stable climate. The antics of companies like Exxon Mobil have ensured that the only hope we now have is in mass social movements which seek to seize the power of those corporations and their political servants. Counter-revolutions happen not just in response to successful insurrections, but also to failed ones, to the threat of a political challenge. This reactionary wave, which has so far brought us Brexit and Trump and is quite possibly about to install a Holocaust denier as President of France, is a response to our failure to build those social movements. The immortally wise words of Sven Lindqvist (written in relation to genocide) encapsulate perfectly where we stand in terms of our responsibilies to our climate:

You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.

The conclusion I draw is: we have to make Climate Change an absolutely central theme in the struggle to defeat the global far-right movement.