Matthew Carr's Blog, page 16

Not Me Guv

There are moments in the history of most nations when their leaders make bad decisions or decisions contrary to their own national interests, and there are some mistakes whose consequences are so completely at variance to the predictions made when these decisions were taken that no one dares acknowledge or take responsibility for them.

In circumstances like these, a government can do various things. It can compound its initial mistake by carrying on regardless, hoping that its idiocy will be forgotten, or that events will somehow fall together in such a way that it can tell itself and the public that its initial decision was right after all.

It can change course or even reverse its initial decision, though this does require genuine courage and humility, and may also call its credibility into question. Such reversals may not even be possible, because circumstances may have changed to the point when it can no longer go back on what has been done.

In these cases the country or the government concerned may prefer to draw a veil of silence over its initial decision. It might ignore its consequences, or lie about them, or it might blame someone else and refuse to take any responsibility for what went wrong.

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Given the combination of ideological fervour, wishful thinking and downright charlatanry that accompanied the UK’s exit from the European Union, it was never likely that the architects and cheerleaders of that project would take responsibility for that decision if/when it failed to bear out their expectations.

People who are stupid or arrogant enough to believe that they held all the cards are not the kind of people who are likely to admit that they never held any when reality calls their bluff.

Very few will recognise that they were incompetent, ill-informed, misguided, or delusional in the first place. And anyone who thinks otherwise should consider this week’s editorial in the Telegraph, which pronounced the death of Brexit, in a stunning (paywalled) piece which begins with this startling observation:

Let’s not beat about the bush. Brexit has become the madwoman in the country’s attic. Demonised, its spirit crushed, it looms over the UK like Mr Rochester’s wife, Bertha Mason, in Jane Eyre. Of course, Bertha - who sets fire to her husband’s bed and rips up Jane’s wedding veil -cannot be blamed for all the chaos she causes. A rebellious force of nature, she is driven to insanity by repression and neglect. So, too, has Brexit been turned into a national psychodrama. With no plan to unleash its potential, it can only fester, stoking tensions in Northern Ireland and strangling small firms with red tape.

As Brexit literary analogies go, this one isn’t bad. Some might prefer Frankenstein’s monster, or Mr Hyde, or the island of Doctor Moreau, but coming from a newspaper once synonymous with a certain crusty Colonel Blimp conservatism, and which lost its rightwing mind in fervid pursuit of the Brexit, the image of the madwoman in the attic is an eyecatching contribution to the national conversation.

Bear in mind that this is the newspaper that choked at even the faintest whiff of a soft Brexit, that supported every sleazy political manoeuvre and parliamentary sleight of hand required to get the hardest and purest of Brexits, that hailed every pitiful trade deal as the greatest deal ever, with headlines like this:

COMMENT

Don't be fooled by Remainers, the Australia trade deal is better than anything we had in the EU

The template deal puts a stake in the ground for the type of country Britain is becoming: an outward looking, global trading nation

MATTHEW LESH15 June 2021 • 1:11pm

Why be fooled by Remainers, you might ask, when you can do that for yourselves, or when a former minister of the government that negotiated that deal now admits that it was ‘not actually a very good for the UK’ after all?

Such admissions will try the patience of even the most ardent Brexiters, and this week’s shock horror piece, written by the Telegraph comment editor Sherelle Jacobs, is further evidence that the patience of Brexiters is becoming strained to breaking point.

Good Loving Gone Bad

Jacobs is the Telegraph’s deputy comments editor, and one of many rightwing sharks swimming in the swamp that Spiked has made its own, for whom support for Brexit dovetails seamlessly with climate change denialism, anti-lockdownism, anti-veganism, and whatever other destructive rightwing libertarian ‘cause’ can make money and headlines.

In 2019 Jacobs could be found defending a speech by Ann Widdecombe comparing leaving the EU to the ‘slaves’ rising up ‘against their owners’ - a disgraceful comparison that no halfway decent commentator would have touched with a bargepole. And in October 2021, Jacobs described the EU as ‘a 1950s Disney fairy-tale wrapped in Continental legalese’ and ‘a failed empire that has condemned itself to irrelevance’.

Writing at a time when the EU was locked in conflict with a very illiberal Law and Justice Party government in Poland, Jacobs naturally took the latter’s side, and rubbed her hands at the imminent demise of ‘a failed federation’ driven by ‘power struggles and vanity’ and ‘tormented by suspicion of Anglo-Saxon freedom.’

Yet now, two years later, Jacobs has discovered that Brexit ‘has not brought about the kind of national reset that millions of people expected. Instead, it is beginning to look slightly rubbish, even pointless.’ As a result ‘it is more likely that we end up rejoining the EU - and sooner than many people think.’

Now it turns out that the ‘empire’ has not collapsed and the ‘failed federation’ is no longer gazing enviously at our ‘Anglo-Saxon’ freedoms. And Brexit is pulling her hair out in the attic, while Rishi Sunak is downstairs in the drawing room, flashing his ridiculous plexiglass smile at Ursula von der Leyen and Leo Varadkar.

What else can a spurned wife do except burn the house down?.

Was Jacobs wrong then, to expect so much? Was she naive and even deluded? Of course not. Because the death of Brexit is never anything to do with the project itself, or the aspirations of Jacobs and her employers. Like Othello, she and her fellow extremists loved not wisely, but too well.

Generous to a fault, Jacobs exonerates what she calls the ‘alt-Remainers’, whatever they are, and a ‘Westminster system’ supposedly dominated by ‘people who were never all that enthused about leaving the EU in the first place.’

The real culprit, in Jacobs’s estimation, is the Tory Party - the same party which the Telegraph has clung to throughout all the convolutions of the last seven years. As Jacobs points out, the Tories ‘little over three years ago received a historic mandate to “get Brexit done” and now it seems that they didn’t get it done after all.

Instead, the Tories have turned out to be fatally-flawed instrument for turning the Brexit fantasy into reality, and missed all the golden opportunities that Jacobs insists were there for the taking.

So this is so much good loving gone bad, and now that the Tory thrill is gone, Jacobs really has the blues, and can only stare down from the attic and dream of ‘the emergence of a new centre-right party’ to pull the Brexit ‘revolution’ from the flames rising up all around her.

I don’t want to get into Jacobs’ tendentious arguments about the ‘opportunities’ that were missed; from the ‘big business lobby’ that supposedly opposed deregulation and low taxation, or her belief that ‘the Brexit debate has fixated too much on questions of trade’ instead of seeking to transform the UK into a ‘science superpower’ through the government’s Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, or the UK’s supposed addiction to ‘cheap labour’ that prevented it from forming a coherent post-Brexit immigration policy.

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One the one hand, the fact that such an article should have appeared in the Telegraph is something of a watershed moment, at a time when recent polls have made it clear even to many of its supporters, that the dream of Brexit has turned sour. According to a Statista poll published this month, 54 percent of British voters believed that it was wrong to leave the European Union, compared with 35 percent who thought it was the right decision.

And another survey commissioned by the Independent found that 65 per cent of voters now support a referendum with the possibility of rejoining the EU - an increase from 55 percent at the same period last year; that 54 percent believe Brexit was the wrong decision, compared with 46 percent last year, and that 54 percent believe that leaving the EU has made the economy worse - an increase from 44 percent last year.

Such conclusions might encourage some ‘alt-Remainers.’ But any such optimism should be tempered by the complete refusal in this shoddy cri de coeur to acknowledge that Jacobs and her newspaper might actually bear some responsibility for the gratuitous act of national self-harm that they proclaimed from the rooftops during our seven years in political hell.

Rather than engage in any reflection or self-analysis, Jacobs prefers to blame the Tory Party, and calls for something even more extreme to appear out of nowhere and make the Brexit fantasy real.

The idea that the likes of Richard Tice or any politician could fulfil such a role is unlikely, not to say delusional, even though the potential fragmentation of the Tories is definitely something that many of us might want to pull out the popcorn for, because never has political collapse been so richly-deserved.

But none of this means that rejoining the EU is as likely as Jacobs doomily suggests. Public opinion is still too volatile and too divided. The political class is too paralysed by self-interest or downright cowardice to acknowledge in public the disaster that many of its members know Brexit to be in private.

For the time being, the most we are likely to get is a closer realignment with the EU on purely technical grounds. This may ease some of the logistical problems caused by Brexit, but does not amount to a belated embrace of the European project.

Bad outcomes don’t always teach good sense, especially when there are so many bad actors willing to muddy the waters and turn Brexit even more than it already is, into a culture war where there are no winners, but only endless conflict.

As things stand, rejoining is likely to be the culmination of a positive political transformation in the country, rather than a means of achieving one in itself.

In other words, the UK will have to decide what kind of country it wants to be and agree on what kind of country it wants to be, and make its decisions about its future on a realistic and informed assessment of its best national interests and the best interests of UK society.

No single political party can bring about such a transformation by itself. Time has to pass. Lessons have to be learned and assimilated. Despite the abundance of charlatans in the Brexit process, it was the public that ultimately took the decision to leave, and it is the public that should make any future decisions on whether to rejoin or not.

If we reach a consensus that such an outcome is desirable, then it is very likely that a second referendum - enabled by some form of cross-party agreement - will be the final instrument by which such a decision is sent back to parliament. But it would be better and wiser to see it preceded by some form of citizens assemblies before such a vote takes place, so that the issues involved can be thrashed out at a community level.

At the moment we are a long way from any of that. And before we get there - assuming we ever do - we can expect to hear more of the kind of bitter and ultimately cynical recriminations that the Telegraph offered this week, which imagines the future of Brexit as someone else’s boot, stamping on its face forever, and invites its readers to see themselves as victims, rather than instigators, of the tragedy that we have all been trying to live with throughout these wretched, wasted years.

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The Clowncar Putsch

Some years ago I heard a journalist on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent talking about his visit to Rio de Janeiro. I don’t recall what prompted his visit, but I remember that the journalist made a strikingly fatuous observation, to the effect that the violence of terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda was something you could never imagine in the laidback country of his gentle hosts.

This comparison stuck in my mind, not only because of the dubious contention that certain countries/regions are somehow more culturally disposed to extreme violence than others, and also because of the journalist’s seeming ignorance of even the most basic facts about Brazil’s very violent history.

Such ignorance isn’t unique. Many people tend to associate Brazil with carnival, the girl from Ipanema or Pele, Jairzinho and Tostao surging forward to the beat of samba drums, but there is another less uplifting Brazil that has always been there.

We are after all, talking about the last country in Latin America to abolish slavery - a country where the young Charles Darwin once heard a slave being whipped and was haunted by the sound for the rest of his life. The legacies of slavery are largely responsible for Brazil’s crushing racial inequality, and a recurring tradition of racialised violence that extends from the murderous slavehunting bandeirantes of the seventeenth century to the massacres carried out by Brazilian police in 21st century favelas.

In the 1960s, Brazilian ranchers, plantation owners, and government officials distributed ‘gifts’ of clothing impregnated with smallpox, influenza, and other microbes to Amerindian settlements in the Mato Grosso. Scores of Indians died as a result of what a former Interior Minister called a policy of ‘bacteriological warfare.’

Last year’s murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira brought the world’s attention to the killing of environmental and Indian rights activists that is still going on. Last but by no means least, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship for 21 years from 1964-1985 - a period that many Brazilians still remember with more nostalgia than regret.

The fascistic shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethos and militarised modus operandi of special police units like the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE) can be traced back to the ‘off-duty’ Brazilian police who began murdering criminals in the aftermath of the 1964 coup, dumping corpses in public places with letters of explanation signed ‘E.M’ for Esquadrao da Morte.

These ‘death squads’ were the model for the Clint Eastwood film Magnum Force, and they also provided the template that was subsequently repeated by dictatorships all over Latin American against political opponents.

As AJ Langguth’s seminal history of US police operations in Latin America Hidden Terrors once revealed, the Brazilian dictatorship was also something of a pioneer in the use of torture, developing techniques and methodologies that Brazil intelligence officers exported to the dictatorships of the southern cone and beyond.

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Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters tend to get misty-eyed at the thought of these decades of military rule. This is why Jair Bolsonoro - a former army officer himself who was once regarded as excessively aggressive and greedy by his superiors - taunted President Dilma Rousseff in Congress with the memory of her torture as a youthful leftwing activist.

It’s why he reinstated commemorations of the dictatorship in 2019, and why so many army and police candidates have won political office since Bolsonaro came to power.

Many of these Brazilian ‘populists’ would love to return to the good old days when Brazil was ‘secure’ and army torturers can once again subject leftists - a very wide category in Bolsonarospeak - to the ‘submarine’, the ‘parrot’s perch’ and other quaint military customs which democracy brought to an end.

They would be more than happy to see the army take over again, to shut down the lesbians and gays, the environmentalists and indigenous activists and bleeding hearts wringing their hands about the destruction of the Amazon or police massacres in the favelas.

Fascists are generally fond of these things, and it’s difficult to separate these yearnings from the vandalistic fury unleashed on January 9th, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters descended on the empty Brazilian Congress, the presidential palace, and the office of the supreme court, and trashed them.

As coups go, this one doesn’t amount to much. If the army and police didn’t intervene until too late to prevent the assault, nor did the military show any interest in using the ‘protests’ as a justification for taking power - at least not yet.

We don’t know who paid for the buses that brought hundreds of these supporters from across the country to Brasilia to show their support for the defeated president. Or why Brazilian soldiers and police allowed Bolsonaro’s supporters to invade public buildings, even though they had every reason to expect that something like this might happen.

Nor do we know the extent to which Bolsonaro or other members of his clan may have been involved in the preparation of the assault, or what role sleazy race warriors like Steve Bannon played in it.

Made in Mar-a-Lago

Nevertheless, everything about the clowncar coup, from the social media invitations and promotion that preceded it, to the half-pissed, half-ecstatic yobbery and destructiveness of the assault itself, bears the imprint of Trump’s clammy palm.

Naturally the Bolsonaristas deny this. Naturally they’re claiming that leftists are the ones who attacked public buildings and damaged artworks to discredit them. Nothing surprising about this. Trump supporters said the same thing in January 2020, and most of the Republican Party is still saying it.

If there’s one thing you can always guarantee about these people, wherever you find them, it’s that they are always the victims. They are always the hard-done-by children of the simple soil, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hoodwinked tool of the Matrix, the globalists, the ‘MSM’ or whatever.

Over here, in our no less chaotic, but not yet coup-prone island, members of this international fraternity of the damned were playing the same kind of game. Thus Julia Hartley-Brewer, the grand dame of clickbait trashtalk, dismissed suggestions that the ‘riots’ in Brazil had anything to do with the ‘pro-Trump Capitol riot.’ God forbid.

Got that? Hilary Clinton’s supporters were responsible. No doubt you remember the 2016 assault on the Capitol when Hilary unleashed her followers on Trump’s ‘deplorables’? Not to mention the equally violent assault on…something, by ‘Remoaners’?

It’s nice easy work, if you can get it, and in a world where truth, facts and even reality itself are all equally malleable, Baroness Fox of Griftington, the former hostess of The Moral Haze, had her own few cents of nothingness to add to the conversation:

This is the kind of trite gaslighting we have come to expect from someone who doesn’t care any more about Brazil than she does about her own country, but we should care what happens there. By ‘we’, I mean those who still remain to the left of Atilla the Hun - a diminishing category in these days of perverse political miracles and dismal wonders.

We should look back and remember that in 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew a democratically-elected government with the full support of the United States, that interpreted Jao Goulart’s attacks on the clube dos contemplados - the privileged ones - as ‘communism.’ As was so often the case during the Cold War and beyond, the cost of military intervention for the Brazilian people mattered less to the United States than the destruction of any government regarded as contrary to American regional interests.

Now Bolsonaro’s clowncar putschists are calling for a coup, with the support of the defeated president of the United States and his supporters, rather than the US government itself. Now, instead of tanks and disciplined soldiers, there are overfed, unruly white people in yellow shirts, trashing paintings to show their hatred of the new government and their love of Jair ‘Messias’ Bolsonaro.

In one sense, history really has repeated itself as farce, but no one should be complacent that this is the last of it. Clowncar coups can turn serious, especially if they take place in a country where a sizeable section of the population has never rejected the concept of a military dictatorship.

Now, more than ever Brazil needs a government that do something for the 33 million Brazilians who cannot afford more than one meal a day; that can halt and redress the environmental destruction that threatens the future of the entire planet.

It remains to be seen whether Lula can do this. The opposition from the Bolsonaristas will be fierce and intransigent, both in Congress and on the streets. The coalition that Bolsonaro built is very far from being defeated. It contains powerful political forces that will do everything they can to destroy and undermine the new administration, or reduce it a state of chaos in order to justify the stern hand of the military.

This time they didn’t succeed, but no one should rule out the possibility that they will try again, and those of us who have not yet succumbed to the populist temptation should hope that they fail.

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The Ballad of Andy and Greta

Credit: Leonhard Lenz

For those who believe in karma, or those who would simply like to believe that every once in a while some seriously bad people actually get their comeuppence, Twitter served up an unexpected spectacle in the dying days of 2022 that would be out of the reach of most Netflix scriptwriters.

This is a story that begins on Twitter but does not end there, and it begins on November 17, when Elon Musk reinstated the Twitter account of the notorious social media influencer Andrew Tate.

For those who don’t know, Tate is a former kickboxer-turned self-help male ‘influencer’, who has established a lucrative career as a savage and brutish exponent of the toxic antifeminist ‘manosphere’. In 2012 he was removed from the Big Brother tv show after a video surfaced showing him slapping and beating a woman with a belt.

Viciously sexist and anti-feminist, Tate has boasted that he sleeps with a machete which he pulls out when a woman accuses him of cheating. He has also engaged in victim-blaming, and accused women who get raped of bearing responsibility for what happens to them.

Earlier this year Tate suggested that he had moved to Romania partly in order to avoid being entrapped by fake allegations of rape. “I’m not a fucking rapist,” he declared in a video rant, “ but I like the idea of just being able to do what I want. I like being free.”

Tate contrasted Romania with a West overrun by feminism, where

“Any fucking bitch who works at Greggs you bought a pasty from, at some point in the future can destroy your life. This #MeToo bullshit has not protected women. It has destroyed the safety of men.”

In 2017 Tate received a permanent ban from Twitter for expounding views like these, but in November last year Elon Musk invited him back, as part of the billionaire’s personal crusade on behalf of humanity and civilisation.

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In the month that followed Tate swaggered back onto Twitter and beyond. On GB News Dan Wootton invited him on his show to discuss his views on, and Piers Morgan also solicited his views on Markle during a longer interview on his programme.

You might expect even quasi-respectable pundits to maintain some distance from someone with Tate’s record and reputation, but when it comes to Meghan Markle, anyone will do, and Andy did exactly what was expected of him.

He dismissed Markle’s allegations about racism on the grounds that he was mixed race and it has never happened to him. He accused Markle of an unwillingness to be ‘perspicacious’ and ‘self-reflective’ which had led her to engage in gratuitous attacks on the ‘age-old institution’ of the Royal Family

Wootton - a presenter who would be quite happy to solicit a negative take on Meghan from Jeffrey Dahmer - beamed happily as Tate told him that Markle was using racism as a ‘cop-out’ to conceal the fact that she was merely a ‘dislikeable person.’ If Markle was not a victim, Tate assured Wootton that he was, having escaped attempts by ‘the Matrix’ to silence him:

Once the mainstream media decides that you are a dangerous person because you inspire people to think. They’re going to come along and they weaponize virtue, they’re going to choose a buzzword you can’t argue against and slap it on you, whip it up in the media machine and try to convince the world you’re somehow a dangerous person, a bad person, and that your ideas should be ignored.

Yep, that’s what happens when you ‘inspire people to think’, the Matrix will come for you. Not that the Matrix would have had much trouble locating a man who seemed determined to use his Twitter platform to beat his chest in public, while bullying random Twitterati with messages like this:

Many people would consider that Anthony won this unwanted exchange, but these are not the people Tate appeals to, and so he decided to have crack at Greta Thunberg. At this point, things went suddenly pear-shaped for Andy, producing an exchange that has already reverberated through the furthest reaches of the hellscape that is Elon Musk’s Twitter:

Ouch. Many people laughed a lot at this deft response, which went straight to the heart - ok maybe not the heart exactly - of Tate’s alpha male posturing. As things stand, Greta’s tweet has become the most popular tweet in the history of Twitter, with 3.9 million likes.

As perspicacious as he is, Andy clearly sensed that he had lost face as a result of his exchange, despite efforts from his fans to make him feel better:

https://t.co/9YaDhmXT6W— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) December","full_text":"She ain’t ready. ","username":"Cobratate","name":"Andrew Tate","date":"Wed Dec 28 21:12:25 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"Andrew Tate and Grata Thunberg need to stop flirting and just fuck already","username":"jakeshieldsajj","name":"Jake Shields"},"retweet_count":4143,"like_count":94688,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}">https://t.co/9YaDhmXT6W— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) December" target="_blank">Andrew Tate @CobratateShe ain’t ready. Jake Shields @jakeshieldsajjAndrew Tate and Grata Thunberg need to stop flirting and just fuck alreadyhttps://t.co/9YaDhmXT6W— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) December" target="_blank">9:12 PM ∙ Dec 28, 2022https://t.co/9YaDhmXT6W— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) December/likes" class="likes">94,688Likeshttps://t.co/9YaDhmXT6W— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) December/retweets" class="retweets">4,143Retweets

Such witticisms were not enough to redress the balance of power, and so it came to pass that after more than 12 hours, the Cobra came up with this video response - part-prize fighter/part Hugh Hefner redux, but mostly idiot - in which he smoked a VERY big cigar and bragged once again about his ‘dinosaur-destroying’ car collection, while seemed to believe that Thunberg had given him her real email address:

@GretaThunberg \n\nThe world was curious. \n\nAnd I do agree you should get a life ❤️ https://t.co/eOxIGB0mBT ","username":"Cobratate","name":"Andrew Tate","date":"Wed Dec 28 21:26:23 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/..., please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg","u... Thunberg"},"retweet_count":23278,"like_count":272361,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/...Andrew Tate @CobratateThank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis @GretaThunberg The world was curious. And I do agree you should get a life ❤️ https://t.co/eOxIGB0mBT Greta Thunberg @GretaThunbergyes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg9:26 PM ∙ Dec 28, 2022272,361Likes23,278Retweets

If this gruesome posturing was intended to be the last word, it wasn’t. Within hours of this tweet, Tate and his brother were arrested by Romanian police on suspicion of sex trafficking and led away in handcuffs. There were rumours on Twitter that the pizza box in Tate’s video had alerted the police to his presence in the country, prompting another droll observation from Thunberg:

Whether or not the pizza had anything to do with it, the charges against the Tate brothers are serious. If proven guilty, they face some serious jail time. Needless to say the way, this not the way Tate is spinning it.

Andrew Tate @CobratateMy unmatched perspicacity coupled with sheer indefatigability makes me a feared opponent in any realm of human endeavor.For every domain the Matrix shuts down, we have dozens ready to replace it. Find The Real World here:jointherealworld.comThe Real WorldThe universe has blessed many of you with the chance you’d been hoping for.9:55 PM ∙ Jan 1, 2023151,229Likes10,808Retweets

Some of Tate’s followers needed no invitation:

Everywhere. It’s going on everywhere, I tell you. Even the Taliban are supposedly worried about Andy, according to the former Miss Jersey-turned ‘anti-woke’ journalist Sameera Khan:

And let’s not forget the feminazis

Maybe one day Andy will write a book entitled ‘Feminists Made Me a Pimp’ or maybe not, but his antics have posed something of a problem for the many people on the right who loathe Greta Thunberg. Even before Tate’s arrest, Julia Hartley-Brewer took time out from skinning Dalmatians to attack a teenager who she has attacked many times before:

Brewer’s spleen clearly got the better of her here, because she later deleted that tweet and removed the word ‘autistic’, followed by a mealy-mouthed explanation which seemed to blame Thunberg for the fact that she had used the word as an insult.

Leaving that aside, why would rightwing pundits ‘choose’ the lifestyle of a known misogynist and alleged sex trafficker over a teenager who wants to save the planet from environmental devastation and has become the voice of her generation?

It’s a difficult one. Let’s consult one of our foremost moral philosophers, Professor Brendan O’Neill, from the hallowed Spiked University. O’Neill grim countenance can generally be found on tv talk shows, muttering imprecations about ‘metropolitan elites’ regardless of the issue at hand, but even he struggled with Tate.

In a tortuously-argued piece in the Spectator, O’Neill rejected any notion of ‘moral equivalence’ between Thunberg and a ‘proud misogynist’ arrested on suspicion of human trafficking, before reaching the conclusion that Tate and Thunberg are both equally ‘nihilistic’.

After briefly flirting with the idea that Tate and his followers might actually be a danger to society and trying on a sincerely-felt moral position for the first time in his life, O’Neill effortlessly shrugged it off and reverted to his default position, concluding that Thunberg and the Greens are in fact worse than Tate and his followers:

Three billion human beings still live in dire poverty. To oppose economic growth in such circumstances – as the Greta-inspired green movement does – is far more reckless and threatening to humanity than Tate’s posturing could ever be.

There is worse where this came from. On Fox News, the loathsome Tucker Carlson has repeatedly defended Tate and sharing his conspiratorial allegations. No one should be surprised by this. Tate is the most googled man on earth. His TikTok videos have millions of followers. A number of teachers have issued warnings about the impact his videos have had on young boys.

Tate is a particularly depraved and cunning product of our networked era, who has pushed the absence of regulatory boundaries to the limit. But he is also a creature of the right.

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There is a reason why he has spent time with men like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, and why these men like him. As Hope Not Hate and others have pointed out, Tate’s misogyny blurs seamlessly into homophobia, antifeminism, anti wokeism, and other foundational nostrums of the far right.

For these movements, Tate is always going to be preferable to Greta Thunberg. Some will ignore or play down his toxic views on women, but others will support him because of them, just as they did with Donald Trump.

This because some men - maybe many more than we like to think - actually want to behave with the ‘freedom’ that Tate and Trump embody, whether such freedom applies to the way they treat women, or the right to drive cars with ‘huge emissions’ across a dying planet.

Tate appeals to the same sense of shackled majoritarian victimhood that feeds into so many of the new culture wars, and he also appeals to a certain notion of male victimhood, and the idea that men have been emasculated and ‘feminised’ that goes with it.

His ranting about ‘the Matrix’ reaches into the same dank conspiratorial pond that has spilled over into extreme right and ‘mainstream’ conservative politics in the last two decades. In constituencies that regard ‘virtue-signalling’ as an insult, monstrosities like Tate will always prosper.

And that is why I said at the beginning of this article that this is not simply a Twitter story. On the one hand Tate is a living argument for regulation and de-platforming. But he is also a symptom of societies that are in danger of losing their moral bearings, that celebrate power and domination over empathy and equality; of reactionary movements that cannot accept women as equals or even as fully human, and would rather embracer to the most primitive notions of masculinity in order to put them back in their box.

They will fail, but it’s the task of those who believe otherwise to make sure that they fail quickly, before they can cause any more damage. Because even if we can celebrate the downfall of one monster who over-reached himself, there are plenty more to take their place, and they will find plenty of followers in our age of rage-filled fakery.

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Goodbye 2022

Writing about the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus, the cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin famously compared History to the image of ‘an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating’. In Benjamin’s metaphor, the face of this ‘the angel of history’ is always ‘turned toward the past’ so that ‘where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’

As much as I like that striking image, I want to offer a variation for our own particular ‘chain of events’. Imagine that the History we are living through has a face like the Mona Lisa. She wouldn’t necessarily be as beautiful - if you look around the world right now it’s possible to draw very different conclusions.

But she would wear the same enigmatic, inscrutable close-mouthed smile. She would be looking not at you, but somewhere past you or through you, towards a future that you can’t see, perhaps because she doesn’t actually see anything, or because that gaze really does contain secrets, designs and patterns that you can’t read, but can only speculate about.

This isn’t an agreeable position to find yourself in, when you try to think how your short life fits into all this. It would be comforting to imagine things differently, to believe that our complicated and chaotic present is moving towards some desired and desirable point. History is filled with the wrecked dreams and aspirations of people who once believed that the future favoured them.

This is an entirely understandable human impulse, but it is often based on a great deal of illusion and self-deception, because it is impossible to say that the world will be a better place tomorrow than it is today. It might be even be a lot worse.

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We have no idea whether good will triumph and evil will be defeated, even if we like to believe it. We don’t know if justice will prevail. As smart as we are, we can’t predict that intelligence and rationality will one day vanquish stupidity and irrationality and make us wiser. We don’t whether some transcendent notion of the common good will eventually overcome the insane inequalities and brutal political divisions of the present and enable us to solve the many problems - on a small and large scale - that humanity is struggling to overcome right now.

We don’t know whether the world can be saved, or whether it can be healed and repaired. We might try and learn ‘lessons from History’ to guide us towards the future, but History won’t necessarily reward us for paying attention to it. History doesn’t grant holidays or truces or even weekends in Centre Parcs.

If it did, we wouldn’t have had a year like the one that is coming to an end. Because if there was ever a year when the world needed History to be on its side or at least lighten up a little, it was 2022. After two years of a lethal pandemic which has - to date - killed nearly 7 million people and infected some 658 million, the world needed time to catch its breath, to take stock and build resilience, to learn positive lessons, or just have some time out from the cascade of crises that just keeps on coming.

Instead the year had barely begun when it found itself facing the prospect of a world war - a nuclear war - when the tyrant Putin plunged Ukraine into a conflagration whose consequences he had clearly not anticipated or planned for, and which very few governments around the world had anticipated or planned for.

That war shows no sign of abating, after nine months of devastating violence, in which the Russian army has displayed all the vices of the Red Army and none of its virtues, to the point when it has been deliberately destroying Ukraine’s national grid and plunging millions of people into cold and darkness in order to compensate for its multiple failures on the battlefield.

As the world knows well, the economic fallout from the Ukraine war has pushed national economies already strained by the pandemic towards into recession, simultaneously exacerbating a global energy crisis whose consequences - as always - have fallen most heavily on those least able to bear them.

Other wars have been even more destructive in terms of the loss of human life, without attracting the same level of political and media attention. In Yemen a ceasefire in October brought a month-long respite from an eight-year civil war. In August a five- month ceasefire between Ethiopian and Tigrayan forces broke down, and in November another ceasefire was signed, which may or may not bring an end to a two-year war in which as many as 600,000 people may have died.

None of these conflicts has had the same global impact as Ukraine, where NATO and the European Union have been waging what is in effect a proxy war against the Russian invaders. To call it a proxy war doesn’t mean that Ukrainians are mere pawns in a geopolitical game. For Ukraine this is a war of national self-defence, a war for their right to exist as a people, and they have fought it with admirable skill and bravery.

But that doesn’t mean that the war is anything less than a catastrophe, because war is always a catastrophe, and this one has come at a particularly inauspicious time. In the country that I live in, the war has enabled a corrupt, degraded and incompetent government to blame its failures on Putin, while also distracting from its ruinous Brexit, and the moral failings of a man who became the first Prime Minister to be forced out of office, essentially, because he broke the laws that he himself made and then lied about it afterwards.

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This welcome outcome was followed by a wasted summer in which the Tory Party planted its tattered, moth-eaten flag on a crumbling mound of ideological manure, only to find itself touching the void once more, when Liz Truss and her equally absurd co-conspirator Kwasi Kwarteng clambered onto the summit to take a selfie only to find themselves toppling into a crater of their own making.

Today, as 2022 gives its final croak, we remain in the grip of an anaemic Tory technocracy, in which not being Liz Truss has become a qualification - perhaps the only qualification the Tory Party has left - to rule a country with a government-of-dunces.

Meanwhile bewildered and rudderless country is watching its health service, its education system and its railways teetering on the brink and wondering why nothing seems to work. For the first time in history, nurses have gone on strike, alongside railway workers, lawyers, postmen and women and ambulance drivers, in a desperate attempt to get the fair wages that they should have been given without having to ask for them, and also to save a National Health Service that now faces the greatest crisis in its history.

Today, 1 in 4 junior doctors are planning to leave the NHS, an incredible figure that represents a threat to millions of lives and a moral, societal and political failure on an epic scale. None of this has anything to do with Putin or Ukraine, or boat crossings in the Channel, even if this malignant, glassy-eyed zombie government and its troglodyte backbench minions would like you to believe otherwise.

That said, this is not a government that has any reason to feel positive about its own future. The Tory Party is in deep crisis, and that is something that all those who want this country to be better than it is, and live up to the best of what it is, can only celebrate - however tentatively, because the beast is not dead yet.

The same can be said of other countries that have fallen victim to the national-populist disease. In the US the forward march of MAGA was halted in the midterms, and the machinery of justice is clanking inexorably towards the Orange Mussolini. In Brazil, Bolsonaro lost.

So you might think History is winking at you at this point, but the defeat of Trump does not mean that Trumpism has been defeated, let alone that the good - or at least the better - guys will win. In Brazil, the defeat of Bolsonaro was far narrower than a government with such an appalling record should ever have achieved. In Italy, an actual fascist party was voted into government. In the Philippines, voters replaced the murderous thug Rodrigo Duterte with ‘Bongbong’ Marcos - the son of a dictator who was once removed from power in a popular uprising - while the magnificent Maria Ressa faces the prospect of years in jail.

These alarming reversals of fortune are not just a Filipino problem. Across the world, too many democracies look frayed and fagged out and, and so do the rights and freedoms attached to them.

Anyone who thinks these rights don’t matter should consider what happened to the Russians who protested the war, or the young men and women who have confronted the Iranian security forces in the streets day in day out for the last few months.

Democracies will remain in peril until governments can show their citizens that governments are there to help them and do things for them, beyond building ‘walls’ or sending refugees to Rwanda or bussing migrants to the vice president’s house.

So by all means let us take comfort from the fact that some of these movements failed to achieve their objectives;that degenerate politicians like Johnson and Trump may not return to power; that the polls suggest a massive Tory defeat.

If the nationalist-populist tide really is ebbing we should do everything we can to drain it further. We should not allow ourselves to be sucked into meaningless culture wars by the endless parade of grifters who these movements have thrown up. We should not be distracted by idiotic conspiracy theorists propagated by malignant clowns. Nor should we despair that so many clowns exist.

We don’t know yet whether the grim events of the last few years have been an aberration or whether they may yet produce even more disastrous and disturbing outcomes than we have seen already. We don’t know what is coming, and we can’t know, and it’s because we don’t know that we can still put our shoulders to the wheel in whatever way we can, and try, always, to make this world better than it is, and as good as we want it to be.

We can think about the kind of world we want to see. We can dream and we can find ways to put our dreams into practice. We can re-imagine the kind of societies we want to see, and find ways to work towards them. The world might be salvageable or it might not. The future might be better than the present or it might be worse. But it’s precisely because we don’t know these outcomes that we can rouse ourselves to work for the ones we want.

History may not be smiling at us, and sometimes it is most definitely laughing at us. But we can still look towards the future as a place to begin again, or put bad things right, hoping for the best while all the time knowing that the worst is also possible.

Because whatever you might think of History, and whatever it thinks of you, it’s only when shrug your shoulders and walk away from it that you guarantee that the bastards will win, and that you have no chance of saving anything or putting anything right.

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If You Hate Meghan Markle, Clap Your Hands

I generally don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Royal Family. And I wouldn’t normally write about the tribulations of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, were it not for the fact that so many people never seem to stop thinking about them and telling the world how much they loathe them.

I don’t share these sentiments. Revelation: I quite like Harry and Meghan. I support many of the causes that they support. I like the fact that Meghan once denounced sexism as a young girl and worked in a soup kitchen when she was thirteen years old. I like the fact that she uses her platform to call out racism and exclusion. I admire the couple for standing up to the British tabloids and the House of Windsor.

Harry once upon a time looked poised to become another upper class lout. He has shown courage, honesty and vulnerability in his attempt to remake himself, and his devotion to his wife is something to be respected, not condemned. That said, I had no particular interest in the Netflix documentary series. I eventually ended up watching a couple of episodes, because it was impossible to look at a newspaper or go on social media without coming across someone who had an opinion about it.

It also didn’t escape my attention that most of the show’s critics are people I have zero respect for, so if they hated the series then I thought it must have something to recommend it.

What I saw did gave me no reason to revisit my previous opinions. I saw two flawed but vulnerable people trying to process the often painful and frightening events they have been through together. They came over as warm and human. Compared with other things going on in the world, these experiences may not seem especially significant, but privileged people can experience their own traumas.

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Their accounts of what happened were sometimes surprisingly moving, and also occasionally precious - as I would have expected from a woman who once compared her wedding to the end of apartheid. I don’t need slushy music playing over every scene in a documentary to make me feel something, thank you very much. And I can’t help but cringe when someone reads out a message from Beyoncé praising them for their courage and vulnerability.

Nevertheless it’s their story, and they have the right to tell it the way they see it. And whatever reservations I may have about the way that they have presented themselves, they are so much better and so much nicer than many of their critics.

They may be rich and privileged, but they are at least able to empathize with people who not rich. These are not people who, when a woman like Ngozi Fulani complains about racist treatment from a member of the Royal household, would turn on the complainant in order to reject her accusations. They aren’t people who would call striking ambulance drivers ‘shitbags’, or revel in the deportation of refugees to Rwanda.

These were my impressions and I don’t expect people to share them, or even pay attention to them, but those who want this country to have even half a chance of becoming a humane and decent society again, should most definitely pay attention to the hatred and outrage that has been directed against them.

The Outrage Machine

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the two of them really are the spoilt, narcissistic, duplicitous attention seekers their enemies say they are. Let’s say that Meghan is a ruthless and calculating ‘gold-digger’ who has manipulated a noble prince of the blood into betraying his own family.

Even if all this were true, why does it matter, or rather why does it matter so much? What explains the constant stream of vitriol, indignation, snarky insinuation, and open abuse about the couple, day after tedious day, week in, week out?

Why do some of the worst people and the worst institutions that British society has to offer talk obsessively about what Meghan and Harry have said, about their lifestyle and opinions, about the clothes they wear, or their body language, or their children? In the last week alone the Daily Mail had a front page story in which ‘Royal insiders’ claimed that ‘stress’ caused by Harry and Meghan’s quarrel with the Royal Family had a ‘detrimental effect’ on our elderly monarch.

This was the latest iteration of the ‘Meghan killed the Queen’ narrative, and as always, there is nothing to prove any such thing. Meanwhile, in the illustrious pages of theSun, boorish saloon bar rent-a-mouth Jeremy Clarkson could be found declaring that he hated Meghan on a ‘cellular level’, before comparing her to the serial killer Rose West, and announcing his wish to see her paraded naked up and down the country so that angry crowds could cover her in excrement.

Once upon a time, such middle-aged 4Chan/Incel-level outrage would have been confined to the Internet fringe, but here was the editor of the Sun happily waving it through.

Elsewhere a gaggle of performatively-outraged pundits on GB News were accusing Meghan of treachery and ‘treason’. Even Lord Frost came slouching out of his dank reactionary swamp to accuse Meghan and Harry of ‘smearing’ millions of Brexit voters in their series. Both the malevolent GB News presenter Dan Wootton and Piers Morgan - an attention-seeking bullying braggart who knows so much more about narcissism than Harry or Meghan could ever teach him - have invited the kickboxer-turned-’influencer’ on their shows to discuss his ‘views’ about Markle.

Morgan and Wootton are seassoned Meghan-stalkers, who you can only imagine must be sticking pins into Meghan dolls at night in their bedrooms or possible doing something else with them. But Tate is a man who has said that rape victims ‘bear responsibility’ for their attacks, who was once ejected from Big Brother after a video surfaced showing him hitting a woman with a belt, and who has bragged about his willingness to use violence against women.

Yet here he was dismissing Markle’s accusations of racist treatment by the Royal Family or the British media, as evidence of her unwillingness to be’ perspicacious and self-reflective.’

If you say so, belt-boy. Elsewhere Nigel Farage could be found accusing Meghan of dishonesty - you at the back, stop sniggering - and Alex Jones’s sinister, basement-dwelling former sidekick Paul Joseph Watson could be found tweeting about impossible it was to believe anything Markle says.

These are people you need to wash your hands just thinking about, and I haven’t even mentioned the grown-up Mean Girls pundits, like Camilla Tominey, Sarah Vine, Alison Pearson or ‘royal biographer’ Angela Levin, who churn out malicious gossip and cod-psychological ruminations about the Sussexes on an almost daily basis.

Beyond these ‘respectable’ outlets, there are the depraved Twitter and YouTube anti-Meghan hate accounts identified by Bot Sentinel, which ‘ fabricate falsehoods about Harry and Meghan and strategize about how to disseminate conspiracy theories and disinformation on other social media platforms.’

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No wonder police have investigated ‘disgusting and credible’ threats on Markle’s life, and no wonder she looks traumatised when she talks about them.

All these individuals, newspapers, and trolls are part of an outrage machine that reaches from the front pages of the daily newspapers, to tv chat shows, YouTube videos and Twitter. The machine has been operational for some time, from the ‘(Almost) Straight Outa Compton’ and ‘Harry’s girl is a porn star’ stories that greeted the couple’s engagement, to the gimlet-eyed ‘analyses’ of Markle’s fashion choices, or the idiotic speculation about why she cradled her ‘baby bump’ that never attached itself to Kate Middleton.

Some of this hostility was due to British snobbery, and the morbid relationship of veneration/possessiveness/ownership between the British public and the Royal Family. Markle’s humble and mixed-race background immediately defined her as an outsider. And if you don’t believe that race had anything to do with the hatred directed towards her, consider the racist subtext in some of the Mail’s early coverage of the royal engagement.

Or check out some of the Tweets in the Bot Sentinel report. If race has been a factor in the anti-Meghan campaigns, it isn’t the only factor. Much of the hostile coverage she received - particularly but not exclusively, from female columnists - was steeped in jealousy, envy and resentment.

Some of this hostility was based on Markle’s political opinions. Markle may not be Rosa Luxemburg, but she has never been what a Royal woman should be. Princess Diana once pushed that role to the outer limits, by associating herself with campaigns against mines and cluster-bombs.

As we all know, the rightwing press loves our cluster-bombs, but it could put up with Princess Diana - just - because she was still an insider, however uncomfortably so, and this was long before the culture wars and the ‘war on woke’ had became a thing.

The ‘Woke’ Duchess

But Markle had strong opinions from the start, and causes and charities she wanted to support, and they weren’t the causes that the rightwing media wanted anyone, let alone a member of royalty to involve herself in.

When Markle guest-edited Vogue, and designed a ‘woke’ cover featuring Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Aherne, Greta Thunberg and other ‘women of change’, she was condemned by a range of right-wing pundits from Sarah Vine to Melanie Phillips. The Sun’s “Meghan Markle slammed for ‘wading into politics by promoting Trump-hating celebs’ in ‘left-wing’ edition of British Vogue,” gives the tone.

Naturally Piers Morgan was part of the chorus, decrying ‘ Me-Me-Meghan Markle's shamelessly hypocritical super-woke Vogue stunt’ [which] proves she cares more about promoting herself than the Royal Family or Britain.’

Is Morgan aware of Freud’s theory of projection? Probably not, and it wouldn’t much difference if he was. But Markle’s ‘wokeness’ has become another reason to hate her, and transformed her into another target in the pseudo-culture wars, through which the right seeks to keep its constituency whipped up into a state of permanent outrage.

Whether she intended it or not, she has joined the statue pullers, the ‘Critical Race Theorists’, the National Trust ‘activist-historians’ who want us to ‘hate our history and our culture. This is why her mock-curtsy enraged so many people, and why it provoked one member of the voluminous conservative Twitterati to exclaim ‘Our culture is not your costume.’

It’s why Fox News joined in the condemnation of the couple last week, and why the former Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly - a woman who ought to know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of misogynistic abuse - has jumped on the the anti-Meghan bandwagon and accused Harry and Meghan of ‘dishonouring the Queen’.

It’s impossible not to detect a distinct whiff of white fragility emanating from this relentless denigration of a woman who really represents no serious threat to the institutions they claim to be defending. And some of the more extreme viciousness directed against Markle on social media echoes the similar treatment directed at other women whose public profiles are associated with feminism and or left or left-of-centre politics.

When Caroline Criado-Perez had the temerity to suggest that Jane Austen appear on £10 notes, she was bombarded with death and rape threats. Gina Miller was also targeted with viciously misogynistic racist abuse for her political interventions over Brexit. The Filipino journalist and campaigner Maria Ressa has been subjected to an orchestrated hate campaign, supported by the then-president Rodrigo Duterte, of which these sample words taken from hundreds of tweets and Facebook posts give a flavour:

Last but by no means least, the anti-Meghan hate machine is a profitable enterprise. This certainly explains some of the troll accounts which have dedicated themselves entirely to her reputational destruction, one of which was created by a female former-brothel owner who monetised her YouTube at one point to the tune of some $44,000 a year.

Nice, but toxic, work, if you can get it. And many individuals and media outlets have realised that you can get it, as long as you don’t mind wading through the gutter to do it. These include nearly all the GB News presenters, who can’t stop talking about Meghan even when they tell their viewers to ignore her and they’ll go away, and a whole range of individuals and media organisations that don’t want her to go away.

On the contrary, they want her to be there, so that the hashtags they help generate will direct traffic towards their sites. Meghan-hatred transforms non-entities into somebodies, like the horrid little troll Sophie Corcoran, who appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show this week. According to some pundits, British people hate Meghan because she attacked our ‘beloved Queen’, as one GB News presenter put it this week, but ‘love’ has nothing to do with this industry of hate.

It may be directed at one woman, who you can choose to like or not like, but the hatred is the point here, and it can be transferred to anyone, from a striking nurse to Anthony Facui. It is galvanising, bracing hatred, emanating mostly from the conservative/extreme-right political spectrum, which seeks to whip up as many people as possible into a state of permanent outrage and victimhood that can extend from Brexit and anti-lockdown protests, to climate change denialism, and the vicious denigration of striking nurses and ambulance-drivers.

There is some irony in the fact that Harry and Meghan are being accused of damaging the Royal Family, when they may well have represented a final opportunity to reform and modernise the institution of the monarchy in the new era of ‘Global Britain.’

Instead, the throne is now occupied by a bumbling, arrogant, and tone-deaf king who has not yet had the courage to condemn the orchestrated bullying of his son or his daughter-in-law.

And I can’t help thinking that this refusal to speak out may have negative consequences for the victims of this machinery of hatred, but also for the institution that those who operate it claim that they want to preserve.

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Seeing the North

To any podcast listeners amongst my subscribers, I want to draw your attention to the final episode of Series I of the podcast ‘Grim Up North: A Podcast About the North, from the North’ that I co-host with the poet and photographer Adrian Scott.

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The title of this episode is ‘Seeing the North’’ Adrian and I have been looking at some of the artists, sculptors and photographers who have depicted the North of England in their work, or who have been influenced by the North in their artistic journeys.

Amongst other things we look at the photography of Bill Brandt, Don McCullin, Fay Godwin and Martin Parr; at Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth; at Lowry and Hockney, George Cunningham and Theodore Major. The list of possibilities is endless, and it was hard to narrow it down.

We have devoted special attention to the visionary paintings of the Wigan-Theodore Major:

And we’ve focused on the 1930s group of miner-painters from Ashington in Northumberland, who became known as the Pitmen Painters.

We made a road-trip/pilgrimage to Ashington to discuss their work, and you can hear the results in the podcast.

You can download the podcast here or on Spotify, iTunes and other streaming platforms. We absolutely loved enjoyed discussing these fabulous artists and their significance for the North, and I hope you will too!

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Tiny Monsters

Politically-speaking, the 21st century is a weird, unstable and frequently disturbing era. After the last few years, I probably don’t need to tell anyone that. But whenever you think you’re beginning to get used to how weird it is, something will inevitably come along to surprise you. Take the so-called ‘Reichsburger Plot’ which made headlines last week, when the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) announced that it had arrested more than two dozen members of a right-wing extremist terror cell in raids across the country.

The news that far-right extremists were apparently plotting to bring down the German government wasn’t especially surprising in itself. Violent far-right extremism is not a new phenomenon in the Federal Republic, but the scale of the 3,000 personnel police operation made this particular plot instantly newsworthy, and so did the high-profile arrests.

The ‘cell’ included a 71-year-old minor member of the German nobility named Heinrich XIII of Reuss or ‘Heinrich the Race Driver’ as he is known to his family because of his fondness for fast cars, with a hunting lodge in Thuringia where the plotters plotted whatever they were plotting.

According to Der Spiegel, Prince Reuss was at the centre of a ‘motley crew of politically radicalized Germans who have a weakness for conspiracy theories and reject the legitimacy of postwar Germany’ and planned to overthrow the German government.

It’s not clear how far advanced this plot was, but it included special forces soldiers and police officers, a former MP from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a pilot, a lawyer, a gourmet chef, a tenor singer, an entrepreneur and a doctor.

All these men and women were members of the ‘Reichsburger’ or ‘Citizens of the Empire’ movement - a German variant on the US ‘Sovereign Citizens’ movement - which believes that the Federal Republic is not a state but a corporation, called the ‘BRD GmbH’ (Federal Republic of Germany Limited Liability Company) that was illegally imposed on Germany after WW2

Curiously, the ‘empire’ that the movement wants to restore is not the Third Reich, but the German second empire that laasted from 1871-1918. These good reichsburgers believe that the Third Reich was never formally dissolved in 1945, and that ipso facto, the German state is still a foreign occupation government.

At first sight, Prince Heinrich and his pals would make excellent material for a Netflix comedy series or a fascistic opera bouffe, with their ridiculous plan to ‘crush’ the German government. Even by 21st century standards, the Kaiserreich is an outlandish and unlikely political project. Whatever role the gourmet chef and the tenor singer were expected to play, it’s not clear why the movement planned to establish a department for ‘spirituality and healing’ in its putative revolutionary government, or why it recruited an astrologer to oversee ‘transcommunication.’

This is political Wacky Races material, with the Prince as Dick Dastardly or Toad of Toad Hall-turned-putschist, but the cell was well-armed, and even if its madcap scheme to assault the German parliament was doomed to fail, people could have been killed.

The Reichsburger movement is much larger than Racing Heinrich’s madcap plotters, with some 19,000 estimated members, one of whom killed a policeman and wounded three others in 2016.

And the Fourth Reich is only one goal in a heterogeneous movement that overlaps with other movements and ideologies, including QAnon, the German anti-lockdown and anti-vaxx Querdenker (‘lateral thinker’) movement which sprung up during the pandemic, the anti-Muslim Pegida organisation, white nationalism, neo-Nazism, ‘Identitarianism’, antisemitism, and even Green politics.

Many of these ideologies were represented at the anti-lockdown 29 August 2020 ‘Sturm auf Berlin’ (storming Berlin) rally outside the Reichstag, in protest at ‘Angela Merkel’s reign of terror’ where more than 300 people were arrested.

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There was a time, in the late sixties and early seventies, when sections of the left regarded the (West) German state as an illegitimate occupation government, and the successive iterations of the Red Army Faction carried out violent attacks on representatives of the state and American military power.

In the 1990s Horst Mahler, one of the leading members of the RAF, surprised his country by popping up as a neo-Nazi. Now, in Germany as in so many other countries, it is the extreme-right that has turned towards pseudo-revolutionary politics, and we should bear this global picture in mind as we shake our heads in wonder at the amusing antics of Racing Heinrich and his highflying insurrectionists.

According to the German security services, the prince and his pals had spent more than a year planning a ‘Day X’ assault on the federal parliament building, modelled on the Trump insurrection of 6 Jan, 2020. Many members of the Republican Party still refuse to accept that Trump bore any responsibility for those events and even deny that an insurrection even took place.

Only last week the psychotically nationalist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene addressed a meeting called by the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC), in which she denied any involvement in the events of 6 January, telling the gathering ‘ If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed. Yeah. See, that’s the whole joke isn’t it?’

Many people will not find this message as reassuring as Steve Bannon and a number of other leading white nationalist figures who attended that meeting did. Not to mention the speech from the NYYRC president Gavin Wax, who baldly proclaimed:

‘We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets.’

Some members of this global insurrectionary movement have already begun to wage their own ‘wars’, from the white supremacists who have murdered Muslims, Jews, Hispanics and people of colour to prevent ‘racial extinction’ to the Bolsonaro supporters who staged their own 6 January in Brasilia on Monday.

That same day six people, including two police officers, were shot dead at a rural property in Queensland owned by a conspiracy theorist named Gareth Train, who had taken to ‘ark homesteading’ in order to ‘survive tomorrow.’ A former headteacher, Train was a regular visitor to conspiracy websites and once posted

When it becomes clear that we are in a time like no other and you head into the wilderness to escape persecution, know that my wife and I will offer refuge to all brothers and sisters.

Train was one of those killed, after executing two police officers in cold blood who had come to carry out a weapons search. Once again, this combination of conspiracy thinking and armed ‘resistance’ is not new in itself. Precedents can be found in the Posse Comitatus and militia movements of the 1990s who engaged in acts of ‘leaderless resistance’ against the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ and the ‘New World Order’.

But ideas like this are now part of a global movement, whose messages have been magnified and empowered in the age of the Internet and Social Media, to the point when the most insane ideas and conspiracies are now readily available to a ‘borderless’ global audience. In technologically advanced societies supposedly undergoing the ‘Fourth Industrial revolution’, it is startling and unnerving to see how many people appear to be entirely impervious to the benefits of mass education, and cling fervently to the most grotesque and ridiculous conspiracy theories that seem to explain everything and yet generally fail to prove anything.

Hundreds of thousands of people now believe that world governments are secretly murdering children in order to harvest life-expanding adrenochrome from their innocent organs; that the sleazy sexual predator Donald Trump is engaged in a secret battle to save the children of America from a paedophile network that includes Hilary Clinton; that the UN is engaged in a secret plan to flood the world with refugees and migrants; that vaccines, masks and quarantines are sinister plots by which the ‘global elite’ aims to ‘control’ and ‘dominate’.

Some of them want to hang public health officials, like Anthony Fauci; others, like the billionaire troll Elon Musk, merely want to ‘prosecute’ him. Across the world you can find protesters blockading urban spaces in protest at vaccine mandates. Or worshipping homicidal ‘influencers’ like Romana Didulo, the self-styled ‘Queen of Canada’ whose name is an anagram for ‘I Am Our Donald’, and who has called for the execution of government officials involved in vaccine rollouts.

Expert cryptographers of the 21st century’s chaotic and disintegrating world, these truthseekers find sinister order in chaos, and detect the hidden hands of devilish conspiracies everywhere. They might be QAnon ‘bakers’ assembling the hidden truth from the ‘crumbs’ that Q throws them. Or ‘sovereign citizens’ who believe that the US government has given every American citizen a ‘strawman’ corporate identity at birth that overrides their ‘real, sovereign identity’.

Eagerly scanning our dismal horizons for evidence, they join the dots that connect China and the Wuhan Lab to the ‘scamdemic’; the ‘Great Reset’ and the World Economic Forum; George Soros and refugees; the IPCC and the coming ‘climate change lockdowns.’

In his Theses Against Occultism, Theodor Adorno once excoriated the American occultists and spiritualists of the late forties, and the ‘regression to magic’ that he saw as a product of late capitalism. In words that continue to resonate in our own era, Adorno observed how

The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within. the bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands.

Today our digital and our ‘real’ worlds are awash with ‘little fortune-tellers’ who believe they have discovered the secret forces behind the seemingly endless succession of traumatic and bewildering events that have marked the history of this century. And these grifters and zealots are no longer lurking in the fringes.

Some of them have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. Some of them are presidents and billionaires. Some have become rich by crowd-sourcing conspiratorial snake oil to a credulous and often bewildered and confused audiences who crave all-encompassing theories of everything, preferably with a heroic narrative of freedom against tyranny, good versus evil, attached to them.

Adorno once mocked the ‘ill-mannered hobgoblins’ and the ‘worthless magic’ offered by spiritualists and mediums who ‘take speculation to the point of fraudulent bankruptcy.’

Substitute ‘occultism’ with ‘conspiracy theory,’ and many of these observations apply to our own collective regression to a new technological dark age. Perhaps some member of the German security services had read Adorno when they called their operation against the Reischburger cell Operation Klabautermann - Hobgoblin.

Or perhaps they simply had a sense of humour. But before we get too carried away laughing at Prince Heinrich and his pals, remember that there are many people who also see hobgoblins everywhere and anywhere.

And it remains one of the greatest challenges of our time to find ways to put an end to this vicious toxic nonsense that is spreading across the world, and find our way back to a politics founded in rationality, the restoration of the social fabric and the common good, before more people are killed and more damage is done by foolish men and women who went out into the world chasing monsters, without realising that they had become monsters themselves.

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You've Never Had it So Bad

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the anonymous narrator of the grieving widow Roderick Usher is invited to spend time with his old school friend at the Usher family home. It being an Edgar Allan Poe story, the visit doesn’t go well: Usher’s twin sister is showing signs of catalepsy; Usher himself has fallen victim to some mysterious neurotic wasting disease that makes any sound or light or colour unbearable.

Even the ancestral home has slipped into ennui and morbid paralysis. Approaching it, ‘through a singularly dreary tract of country,’ the narrator feels ‘an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.’

Many of us will have experienced similar sensations with regard to the Conservative Party and the twelve years of calamitous misgovernance that the party has inflicted on the nation. But now Tories themselves appear to have been afflicted with the ‘air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom’ that surrounded the House of Usher.

It’s true that not all of them are gloomy. This week Matt Hancock, looking sprightly from a diet of camel’s penis and sheep’s vagina, resigned before his local constituency party could sack him. With his weird combination of banality and slippery amorality, Hancock is a more disturbing figure than anything Poe came up with, and his claim to have discovered ‘a whole new world of possibilities’, that will enable him to find ‘new ways to reach people’ outside politics is as dishonest as you would expect.

Hancock’s resignation letter would be as worthless and meaningless as the man who wrote it, except that it follows a string of similar announcements from Tory MPs. Dehenna Davison, William Wragg, Sajid Javid, Chloe Smith, Crispin Blunt, Charles Walker - all these MPs have announced they will not be standing at the next election, and regardless of what they say about their need to spend time with their families, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that, like Hancock, they are leaving before they are pushed.

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Other MPs have been courting their constituents with renewed vigour in an attempt to prevent this outcome. Liz Truss - the political equivalent of Roderick Usher’s cataleptic sibling - no longer posts Instagram photos showing her staring into the face of destiny or wearing pussycat bows.

Now she is back in Norfolk - humble, honest Liz in humble, honest Norfolk - campaigning for a local hospital as she tries to reassemble the still-smoking ruins of her political career. Steve ‘Hard Man’ Baker, Simon Clarke, and Boris Johnson have all made the same pilgrimages back to the constituents who polls suggest are already turning away from them.

Some of them were found on ‘small business day’ last Saturday expressing support for the small businesses they have so comprehensively undermined and ignored these last seven years. Rear-Admiral Penny Mordaunt took a different tack, rocking up in Portsmouth to boast about opening three new ‘food pantries’ - a popular Tory hobby that always comes with a photograph and never seems to address the issue of why more than two million people now rely on food banks after twelve years of Tory governments, in one of the richest countries in the world.

@GreaterTheBook. Paulsgrove and Baffins now up and running. \nHuge thank you to @TheHive_Project @portsmouthtoday @CircularIT @portsmouthnews @StCuthbertCofE @PaulsgroveC @coopuk @PegasusPrince2 @LewisGos92 ","username":"PennyMordaunt","name":"Penny Mordaunt","date":"Wed Dec 07 09:44:33 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/...Penny Mordaunt @PennyMordauntI’m opening 3 new Food Pantries in Portsmouth North with the proceeds from @GreaterTheBook. Paulsgrove and Baffins now up and running. Huge thank you to @TheHive_Project @portsmouthtoday @CircularIT @portsmouthnews @StCuthbertCofE @PaulsgroveC @coopuk @PegasusPrince2 @LewisGos92 9:44 AM ∙ Dec 7, 20221,047Likes162Retweets

None of this seems able to lift the funereal gloom amongst the rank and file. In parliament, Tory MPs sit, like Roderick Usher, ‘gazing upon vacancy for long hours in an attitude of the profoundest attention’, unmoved by the attempts of their ineffectual leader to rouse them from their torpor.

Beyond Westminster, Tory members are deserting the party in droves, while Farage and Tice - the Burke and Hare of post-Brexit politics - scour the country warning of migrant invasions and ‘climate lockdowns’ and dreaming of outflanking the ‘Consocialists’ from the right.

Farage and Tice may be getting above themselves, but the polls point again and again to a Tory wipeout in the next election. Some pundits predict that the ‘most successful party in the Western world’ will be out of power for at least ten years, while changing demographics suggest that the party’s traditional bases of support amongst well-off, middle class southerners will no longer be enough to bring it back to power for even longer.

Regardless of what reservations we may have about their successors, this is a prospect that can only be welcomed by the millions of us who never voted Tory, and the growing numbers of people who did but now wish they hadn’t. Because rarely has political annihilation been so necessary or so richly deserved. And never has a political party so comprehensively unravelled itself.

Only three years ago, a smirking Boris Johnson held up a pint in Tony Blair’s Sedgefield seat and promised a ‘One Nation Conservative government…a people’s government.’ Now the man who promised to ‘get Brexit done’ has gone, and Brexit has turned to dust in his hands and brought his party to the brink of destruction.

Brexit was always incompatible with the notion of a ‘One Nation’ Conservative government. Having driven the more intelligent and moderate critical voices out of the party, Johnson led a parliamentary cohort that owed its allegiance only to him, until his behaviour made such allegiance detrimental to its own political interests. When Johnson’s MPs turned against him, the party lurched even further to the right and further away from One Nation Conservatism with the Truss/Kwarteng mini-budget.

When that fantasy burst, nearly taking the economy with it, some of the same MPs who had once voted against Johnson and voted for Truss, began calling for Johnson to return. Instead they got the Sunak/Hunt tandem, whose impact on Tory political fortunes has so far been zero.

Throughout this calamitous tale of ideological zigzags and policy U-turns, and downright fantasy, the Tory Party has attacked or abandoned nearly all the ideas and institutions it once claimed to stand for. The Union, business, farmers, the church, the national interest, fiscal rectitude and responsibility - all these traditional hallmarks of Toryism have been discarded, to the point when not even Tories seem to know any longer who or what they represent and what their party stands for.

This poverty of ideas is also reflected in the quality of the politicians who represent them - a dismal procession of chancers, opportunists, ideologues, abject loyalists, charlatans and incompetents who seem to have no allegiance to anything except themselves, or to the parasitical hangers-on who see the Tory Party as a conduit to peerages and contracts.

No wonder so many Tory MPs look stony-faced. Most of them seem to have no idea what they want, and those who do have no idea how to get it. In their headlong pursuit of Brexit-at-all-costs, they have dishonoured themselves and inflicted immeasurable harm on the country they claim to love.

Beyond draconian and increasingly fascistic proposals to ‘stop the boats’, rhetorical assaults on ‘wokedom’, or absurd attempts to blame Labour for our ongoing ‘winter of discontent’, they seem to have no coherent arguments about anything at all.

These MPs are the architects of Brexit and the beneficiaries of Brexit; too cowardly and self-interested to acknowledge the almost daily evidence of the negative impact of Brexit, let alone think their way out of the calamity they are responsible for.

No wonder their party is crumbling, and its representatives sit staring into oblivion. Like Poe’s anonymous narrator they can feel the ‘fierce breath of the whirlwind’ as the rotten building that they built collapses around them.

And the rest of us can also see it, as we limp on through this bleak winter. And no matter what comes next, we can only look forward to the election that will finally bring the House of Tory down, when we take our cue from Margaret Thatcher and shout ‘Rejoice, rejoice.’

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The Courage of Matt Hancock

A year is a long time in politics. Well let’s face it, even a month can often push our memories and attention span to the limits as we try to orient ourselves in a world where 24 hour rolling news cycles and scrolling in search of novelty make it difficult to remember anything beyond the here and now.

So it may seem like time travel to go back to April 2020, when care homes across the country were effectively abandoned by the government as Covid ran riot across the country. By 24 April that year, 4,000 care home residents were dead, and the Manchester Evening News reported despairingly that ‘people are dying - while staff beg for help that never comes.’

This was a grim time, even grimmer than many of us knew, when patients were released from hospitals into care homes without having been tested for symptoms, to be looked after by care home staff who didn’t have protective equipment.

In some cases hospital patients actually tested positive before being sent to care homes, but the care homes weren’t informed. A senior nurse in a Manchester care home told the Manchester Evening News what happened as a result:

For those with COVID-19 it's a horrible, slow painful death. We have to lie to families and tell them they were settled, comfortable and peaceful. We can't tell the truth because it will break their hearts even more. They are short of breath, their lungs fill up and they are basically drowning. Some of them need suctioning to clear the phlegm and secretions. They have temperatures which create hallucinations, they are extremely agitated. They see people, animals, they try to grab out. They have abdominal pain. We try to settle them and comfort them and we just can't.

By June that year, 20,000 elderly and disabled care home residents had died after contracting Covid, even though Matt Hancock, the Minister for Health and Social Care, assured the nation at the time that the government had thrown a ‘protective ring’ had been thrown around care homes.

It turns out it had done no such thing. And in April this year the High Court found that the Department of Health and Social Care had broken the law through its failure to protect hospital patients who were discharged into care homes without being tested for Covid beforehand.

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This followed a High Court ruling in February 2021 that Hancock had personally acted unlawfully by failing to publish details of PPE procurement schemes involving millions of pounds.

Such a record of lethal negligence, incompetence, and dishonesty ought to be a permanent stain on the reputations of all those who allowed it to happen. But these are not normal times, and this month the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who left office in disgrace having broken the rules set by his own government, underwent a metamorphosis that show how far from normal we have all travelled.

I’m referring to Hancock’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - that strange mixture of vicarious S&M and desperate fame-whoredom, in which the British public gets to humiliate and punish mostly B-list celebrities who actively seek to be punished in the hope of making money or becoming more famous than they are.

No one can be surprised that Matt Hancock would find this kind of ambiguity appealing. After all, this is a man who has already shown an ability to smirk and cry on camera at the same time.

The announcement of his appearance followed a public snubbing from Rishi Sunak, who ghosted Hancock while he waited near the front of the queue to shake his hand. There was no handshake and no job. Technically, Hancock was out for the political count, forced to act as a diligent constituency MP while bracing himself for the oblivion which is waiting for most politicians, and which perhaps could have benefitted the country more had it swallowed up Hancock much earlier.

But Hancock understood the times better than the times understood him. Many years ago, the great educationalist Neil Postman warned that American politics and education were being debased by television into a permanent form of entertainment that made serious public and political debate impossible.

As Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), ‘Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.’

Postman wrote these words in 1985, at a time when the cult of celebrity and the world of ‘good looks, celebrities and commercials’ was still in its infancy, in this country.

These were years when you could still expect politicians to resign, and when those who resigned in disgrace were expected to stay gone. In the late 1990s, some Tory politicians discovered a new way to recover from a wrecked political career. The pioneers were Christine and Neil Hamilton.

Celebrity Washing

In 1997 Neil Hamilton - a politician on the far right of the Tory party - was ejected from his Tatton seat as the embodiment of ‘Tory sleaze’, when he was found to have taken payments to ask questions in parliament on behalf of rich clients. That should have been the end of Hamilton’s career, but faced with her husband’s ignominious and shameful exit from politics, his intrepid wife discovered a way to turn ignominy and shame to their advantage.

Within a month of the Tatton defeat, the Hamiltons appeared on Have I Got News for You - the programme in which everything and everyone is always amusing, forever, and no one is ever beyond the pale.

This was the beginning of the couple’s transformation into ‘media personalities.’ At times they seemed to be everywhere. You could find them in pantomimes and chat shows and the Edinburgh Festival. They were interviewed by Louis Theroux.

They sang their own England fan song ditty for the 2006 World Cup. They reached the final on Masterchef and came third in - wait for it - I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. In addition to appearances on Loose Women and GMTV, Christine Hamilton even had her own BBC show, and became the face of British Sausage Week and a judge on Mr Gay Torbay.

They sought attention, and attention heeded the call. The more they appeared, the more their past faded into the distance. Who cared that Neil Hamilton had once wandered around parliament with brown envelopes stuffed with cash?

Instead of skulking in the dark, they became media personalities - ‘characters’ created by television for an age of television, who amused viewers with throwaway chat, and defiant and zany insouciance towards anything approaching a moral compass.

In short, they were ‘celebrity washing’, and that is clearly the trajectory that the Right Dishonourable former Secretary of State is now following. Politically, Hancock is finished, and he was already finished when he decided to walk away from a job that he is still being paid for, and accept £400,000 to appear on I’m A Celebrity and another £45,000 to appear on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.

There are those who think that this makes him a bit of a card - or something even greater. Tony Blair - a man so courageous that he once went to war because the most powerful country in the world told him to and because he knew that a lifetime of limitless wealth awaited him if he did - has praised Hancock for his bravery in disappearing into the jungle, telling an interviewer.

When you’ve been through the wringer as he has, and you know, as a politician who’s got to a certain level in politics, he’s probably got quite a lot of courage to go and do something like that. And I mean, people can attack him or whatever... But, you know, it takes a lot of courage to go do something like that. I wished him well from the outset.

Is it the Catholic in Blair that interprets Hancock’s willingness to eat animal anuses and have himself smeared in slime or covered in insects as some form of monkish penance or personal redemption? Would he like to go into the jungle too?

Whatever the answers, courage is not the issue here. You want to talk about people who have ‘been through the wringer’? Then consider the care home workers who watched people die and cared for them even at the risk of their own lives because of Hancock’s catastrophic mistakes.

If we want to speak about courage, we should be talking about the nurses who worked week after week in the same dangerous circumstances, without proper protection, while Hancock’s department handed out dodgy PPE contracts to his mates.

Now some of these nurses cannot even afford to feed themselves, yet how we clapped them when it suited the government to associate itself with them, and how quickly we forget them when it didn’t. Because collective amnesia is the aim of Hancock’s brazen celebrity-washing and there is nothing courageous about it.

This is a man on the game. A game that he is playing at our expense. A man - or should I say a media personality now? - with an eye for the endless grift and his own self-advancement, and the scruples of an alleycat.

Is it courageous to hire a PR team to lobby for votes on TikTok and give step-by-step instructions on how to vote so that you can win a reality tv show? No it isn’t, but in this country right now, let no one think that slime doesn’t pay. Hancock has a book coming out, and now that he has become a ‘character’ he will sell a lot of copies. And he will probably end up on Have I Got News for You, because for millions of viewers, he was amusing, and for millions of viewers being amused is the only thing that matters when it comes to politics or anything else.

Who cares if the families of Covid victims express their fury at Hancock’s appearance and demand his resignation? Like the care home workers and the nurses, they aren’t famous.

But Hancock is. And if his constituents decide to throw him out, as Neil Hamilton’s once disposed of him, he won’t care.

He might shed a tear in public, but he’ll also be smiling, because even as he listens the cheers of the opposition, he will also be hearing the chink chink of a cash register and the canned laughter from a tv show, and he will know, even if millions of us don’t, that in the end the joke is on us.

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Qatar Dreamin'

The greatest global sporting spectacle in the world has begun, and whatever happens in the next month, the 2022 FIFA World Cup hasn’t been accompanied by the kind of delirious expectation that we tend to expect on such occasions. If it’s true, as the Qatar 2022 icon David Beckham reminds us in his mind-numbingly banal promotion video, that ‘Every sporting competition begins the same way, as a dream,’ then this is one dream a lot of people don’t seem to want to share.

Beckham is getting a lot of money - a cool £150 million by some accounts - for churning out emollient Qatari propaganda, so you can’t blame him for the smirk on his face and his predictions that the World Cup will make the world a ‘more tolerant and inclusive place’ - or his willingness to overlook any evidence to the contrary

This is what celebrity sports branding is about after all, and it’s not as if Beckham’s mercenary ambassadorship is some kind of anomalous exception to the preening narcissism and limitless avarice that his post-football career is based on.

Of course, many other people will also be making a lot of money out of this spectacle, including the sports commentators who have criticized Qatar’s human rights or LGBT rights record or its treatment of migrant workers, but have still gone on to cover the tournament. And then there are the FIFA officials who have defended that record or deflected from it, not to mention the Qatari government, which has threatened to withdraw its investments in London in response to criticism from the Transport for London authority.

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Meanwhile Emmanuel Macron - no doubt thinking of the billion-dollar fighter plane deals that France has signed with the Qatari government - has tried to calm things down, insisting that football ‘shouldn’t be politicised’.

It’s certainly unusual for a World Cup to begin in such an acrimonious atmosphere, when commentators criticise the host nation on air and even the disreputable Sepp Blatter agrees that FIFA should never have awarded the competition to Qatar. But it’s not the first World Cup to be held in a questionable country, and it’s certainly not the first time that sport has been ‘politicised.’

In 1936, the Nazis turned the Olympic Games into the first global ‘sportswashing’ event. In 1968 Mexican security forces shot down more than 300 students only days before the Olympic Games began, and then cracked on with the competition as if nothing had happened.

1978: the World Cup from Hell

Perhaps the most egregious example of sportswashing took place in 1978, when the World Cup was staged in Argentina. At that time, the country was in its second year of the military junta headed by the sinister fascist ghoul Jorge Rafael Videla.

When the World Cup was awarded to Argentina in 1964, FIFA could not have known that it would be ruled by a man who promised a conference of Latin American military commanders in 1975 that ‘As many will as is necessary will die in Argentina to protect the hemisphere from the international communist conspiracy.’

When Videla and his fellow army officers came to power in 1976 they initiated a secret program of mass killing and torture known as ‘The Process of National Reorganization’ in which this principle was put into practice with insane and savage ruthlessness.

As many as 30,000 people were swallowed up by a machinery of annihilation whose modus operandi was defined by the governor of Buenos Aires: ‘ First we kill all the subversives, then we will kill all their collaborators, then…their sympathizers, then…those who remain indifferent, and finally, we will kill the timid.’

The full horror of Argentina’s war on ‘subversion’ was mostly concealed from its population and the outside world. Nevertheless, news did get out., so much so that in the lead-up to the World Cup, international criticism of the regime’s human rights record became so vocal that FIFA considered staging the competition in other country.

Videla was desperate to avoid this outcome, and he was equally desperate not just to hold the tournament, but to ensure that Argentina won it. The regime spared no expense to make this happen, spending a whopping $700 million on the tournament that included hiring the US public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to oversee what became one of the most epic sportswashing exercises ever undertaken.

To counter criticisms from Amnesty International and other organisations of its human rights record, the regime disseminated decals and banners proclaiming ‘Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos’ - ‘We Argentines are human, we Argentines are right.’

This was the message that greeted visitors who arrived at the Ezeiza international airport, which was repeated endlessly in shop windows and cars. Employees at the Ministry of the Interior even had the gall to ‘demonstrate’ in favour of these supposedly violated ‘rights’ in the Plaza de Mayo to counter the women who were demanding to know what had happened to their children and grandchildren.

The regime also adopted a policy of complete radio silence in response to the ‘World Cup offensive’ organised by the exiled leadership of the leftwing Peronist guerrilla group the Montoneros.

In addition to disseminating leaflets, the ‘Montos’ staged nine armed attacks during the World Cup, including RPG-7 attacks on public buildings. These were attempts to disrupt the regime’s aura of normality rather than take casualties, and they received little or no attention in the national or international press.

It was true that the World Cup brought the regime under closer scrutiny, and provided an umbrella of safety that enable journalists to interview human rights activists in Argentina without being killed or disappeared.

But once the football started, few people cared about the desaparecidos or whatever else was taking place off the pitch. As the world knows, Argentina won the tournament, amid accusations of bribery and match-fixing that still persist. Throughout the competition, Videla took a personal interest in the outcome, visiting the Argentinian dressing room to ‘inspire’ and even intimidate the players.

At the group stage, Argentina had to beat Peru in order to avoid elimination, and won 6:0, in what remains one of the most controversial matches in World Cup history. Allegations have persisted that Peru threw the match, either because they were bribed or intimidated.

A 2012 Channel 4 investigation claims that the Peruvian government pressured its players to lose, and that Videla visited their dressing room before the match, accompanied by the equally atrocious Henry Kissinger.

Whatever the truth of these allegations, Argentina went on to make the final. Some great football was played throughout, by Argentina and also by a brilliant ‘Total Football’ Dutch team that continued to dazzle even without the presence of its star player Johan Cruyff.

Millions of spectators watched the final, including the regime’s prisoners, some of whom could hear the cheers from the La Plata stadium from the clandestine centres where they were being tortured.

Incredibly, the basement of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) building in Buenos Aries - where thousands were tortured and killed - was used as a changing area and relaxation centre for footballers, while the upper floors were still being used for interrogations.

In other camps, prisoners waiting for death flights or ‘transfers’ were brought out into corridors to watch Argentina on the television and made to shout ‘goooaaaal’ when they scored.

In one astounding episode, prisoners at the ESMA were taken by their guards on a day trip to hear the cheering crowds acclaiming Argentina’s victory, before being brought back to the centre. Three days after the final Videla delivered a speech to the nation in which he hailed the victory as a ‘lesson’ in ‘civic maturity’:

This unanimous cry of ‘Argentina!’ that rose up from our hearts, this singular flag of sky-blue and white that fluttered in our hands, are signs of a deep reality that exceed the limits of a sporting event. They are the voice and insignia of a Nation that is reunited in the plenitude of its dignity…All the Nation has triumphed. We are one people who today assume the challenge we put to ourselves: that of creativity, of fruitful work, and shared effort.

As Marguerite Feitlowitz put it in her magisterial A Lexicon of Terror, ‘At no other time during the Process was Argentina ever so massively, orgiastically fascist.’ The beautiful game helped make that happen. FIFA helped make it happen. Everyone who watched the tournament - including me - helped make it happen.

Far from being above politics, the World Cup bolstered the regime’s political agenda and drowned out the voices of its victims, at least temporarily, because this is what prestige sporting competitions will always do.

A tournament like the World Cup, that appeals to so many people as an all-absorbing distraction and media spectacle, lends itself easily to political amnesia and forgetfulness, and the same thing will almost certainly happen in Qatar.

So why has this particular World Cup been singled out for such criticism? The regime is not the Argentine Junta, and it is not Russia, where the World Cup was staged in 2018 to far less criticism. Is it true, as Qatari officials claim, that their critics are being ‘unfair’? Are these critics guilty of ‘double standards’, as the ridiculous FIFA president Gianni Infantino insisted in a rambling disingenuous speech that seemed to suggest that because everyone was bad, then no one was bad?

Yes and no. To anyone who believes that LGBT rights matter and that sporting competitions should uphold them, then the World Cup should never have been staged in a country that doesn’t believe in them and made no secret about it.

Unlike Argentina, FIFA knew exactly what kind of country it was dealing with when it voted to stage the World Cup in Qatar, and given FIFA’s dreadful record and Qatar’s deep purse, it is difficult to believe that a lot of money didn’t change hands to make this happen.

It’s also difficult to avoid the suspicion that some of the criticisms directed at Qatar are based on the fact that this is the first time the World Cup has been held in a Muslim/Arab country, without any notable footballing presence or tradition.

Criticisms of this ‘artificial’ and ‘unnatural’ context ignore the fact that Qatar may not have much of a football tradition, but the MENA countries certainly do, and have done for a long time. Nor do such critics complain of the absence of such a tradition when Qatar and the UAE or Saudi Arabia buy Premier League and European football clubs, from PSG and Manchester City to Newcastle and Malaga.

These might be self-interested financial investments, but no more so than those that the likes of Roman Abramovich or the Glazer family have made, because the beautiful game is drenched in money and capital. Does it only become ‘corrupted’ or less beautiful, because Arab capital seeks to profit from it?

And as for artificial, is Qatar any less authentic that the other ‘evil neoliberal paradises’ of the Persian Gulf, as the late Mike Davis memorably described Dubai, where airconditioned shopping emporiums, high-rise resorts, mansions, yachting marinas and amusement parks converge to make ‘an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption’ out of a ‘dying planet’s terminal addiction to Arabian oil?’

Consider Qatar’s man-made ‘Banana Island’ - shaped in an Islamic crescent - where guests can pay £3,500 a night to stare out the sea from above-the-water-bungalows just across the water from the war in Yemen, and enjoy ‘wellness’ rooms that include an ‘Antarctica room.’

This is not for the likes of you and me, or for most of the fans who will be watching the World Cup. If Antarctica ever melts, this ‘island paradise’ may go the same way as islands that have been there for much longer, but this is the lifestyle that Qatar enjoys, as a result of the world’s addiction to gas, rather than oil.

And no one should be surprised that the stages that millionaire footballers are now performing on were built by migrant workers, of whom an incredible 6, 500 have died working on World Cup facilities and related infrastructure.

We shouldn’t be shocked by the attempts to attribute these deaths to ‘natural causes’; by the kafala contracts that have turned tens of thousands of Nepalis, Pakistanis, Indians and other workers into disposable serfs; by the security guards who work 100-hour shifts for the equivalent of 35 p an hour on World Cup facilities. Because this is the 21st Century Gilded Age, and these workers are at the bottom of the pyramid that Qatar and the Gulf States are built on, and that our Gilded World is also built on.

So Infantino is right to denounce Europe’s treatment of migrant workers, and point to the borders that kill and trap thousands of them every year, but the FIFA president is not trying to advance the cause of migrants or refugees,but only to ‘sportswash’ Qatar and absolve FIFA of any responsibility for a championship that floats on blood as well as money.

We don’t have to do the same. Because Qatar may not be the Argentine dictatorship, but its human rights record deserves to be criticised. But whether we tune into the global spectacle or not, we should not fall for the phoney egalitarian ‘dream’ that Beckham is helping to sell.

We should know that Qatar is not some anomaly, but part of the world that we deal with whenever we turn on our gas ovens.

And perhaps that’s why this World Cup feels so sour, as we shiver in our cold homes in this dire winter with Russia’s terrorist war raging in Ukraine; as we buy liquefied Qatari gas to compensate for the Russian gas that we don’t have; as we contemplate our failure to address climate change, our energy dependency, gross inequality, and collapsing living standards.

Perhaps Qatar 2022 is simply a reflection of the world we are trapped in and cannot find the will and the courage to change, where footballers might provide fleeting moments of beauty and distraction, but if you look beyond the cheering crowds and empty seats, you can see the ghosts of 6,500 workers who died to make this happen.

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