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      in World Politics

      Sex Abuse Is the Moral Downfall of the Catholic Church

      by

      My mother passed away a few years ago. She spent the last years of her life in a home for the elderly in a small town in Bavaria, where she and my father had spent most of their lives. In their younger days, both my parents were devout Catholics, initially taking at face value what the church taught. Later on, confronted with the daily hypocrisy and outright nastiness inherent in the institution, they gradually distanced themselves from the Catholic Church, disillusioned, disenchanted, if not worse. But that is a different story.

      I myself spent eight years in a Catholic boarding school, initially with great enthusiasm, in later years increasingly disenchanted, seeking to get out. My parents would not hear of it, for good reasons which had nothing to do with the Catholic Church. I stuck it out until I was old enough to transfer to a different school.

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      A few months before my mother passed away, during one of my last visits with her, she suddenly, out of the blue, asked me a question that initially stunned me: “Why were you so eager to leave the boarding school?” Her eyes were insistent, her voice sounded almost desperate, looking for an answer that would alleviate her concerns and anxieties. At the time, I did not understand. Only a few weeks later, when I recalled the incident, it dawned on me: My mother was afraid that I had experienced sexual abuse, that my asking for being allowed to leave the place was a plea for help, and that, by refusing to take me out, my parents had been accomplices in abetting abuse.

      I had the opportunity to alleviate my mother’s fears. I never experienced sexual abuse nor am I aware of any of my fellow students ever having been subjected to it. Yet this episode showed me to what degree the criminal behavior of legions of members of the Catholic clergy was causing mental anguish among ordinary believers like my mother.

      Facing the Facts

      Over the past few decades, the Catholic Church has been forced to face the facts in the wake of investigations that revealed the full extent of the depravity and corruption endemic to some of its institutions. In the process, once-eminent icons such as Pope Benedict’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, once the all-powerful director of the famous Regensburg Domspatzen (boys’ choir), have fallen hard. In some cases, even members of the Catholic Church’s gotha were convicted of crimes and sent to jail by worldly courts unimpressed by the status of the accused.

      And yet, the McCarrick report recently released by the Vatican suggests that previous scandals have done little to bring about a fundamental change in the way parts of the Catholic hierarchy have been dealing with the question of sexual abuse that has fatally undermined the Catholic Church’s claim to represent a moral authority.

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      For those unfamiliar with the case, until his forced resignation in 2018, Theodore McCarrick was the cardinal of the Archdiocese of Washington, which encompasses the District of Columbia and surrounding areas in Maryland. This is of particular significance given that Maryland has an extensive history of Catholic settlement in the United States, dating back all the way to the 17th century. McCarrick was appointed cardinal of Washington by Pope Paul II, despite allegations that McCarrick had engaged in questionable behavior involving young aspiring priests — he slept in the same bed as seminarians.

      Paul II did not believe the allegations. They reminded him of allegations at priests in his native Poland, promoted by the “communists” to discredit Poland’s Catholic Church. It was only under Paul’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, that the allegations were taken seriously. But by then, it was too late.

      By now it is established — and the report makes it quite clear — that Cardinal McCarrick has a long track record of sexually-inspired coercion, largely ignored and hushed up by the Catholic hierarchy, including the entourage of Paul II. As a result, as The New York Times recently put it, Paul’s image has been severely tarnished, his canonization (the elevation to the status of a saint) put in question. Pope Francis, under whose aegis the report was assembled, has made it entirely clear that he “Intends to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse.”

      I, for my part, believe in his sincerity. The reality is, however, that he is confronted with a hierarchical structure which, in the past, has gone out of its way to dismiss, downplay and cover up reports of abuses, if only to uphold the authority of the church.

      Absurd Theater

      A recent prominent case is the absurd theater provoked by the Catholic Church of Cologne. Its cardinal, Rainer Maria Woelkli, had commissioned a law firm from Munich to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by priests in the archdiocese. The Cologne prosecutor’s office recently brought charges against one of them. He is accused of sexual abuse of his underage nieces in the 1990s.

      Once the expertise was delivered to the Cologne archdiocese, it was kept under lock and key by the cardinal’s office, which charged that it was methodologically faulty and therefore useless. The real reason, critics suggest, is that the report implicates one of Woelkli’s closest aids, today archbishop of Hamburg, put in charge to make sure that the affair would be covered up.

      The result has been a perfect example of mutual recriminations and mud-slinging. Those opposed to the way the diocese has handled the affair allege that Woelkli is more interested in protecting the perpetrators than the victims of abuse. In the meantime, church authorities have gone out of their way to censure and silence critics. A few days ago, they turned off the webpage of the archdiocese’s Catholic University Community, in charge of looking after the wellbeing of Catholic students at various universities in the region. The reason was, according to a Cologne newspaper, the community’s continued criticism of the “backward and evasive” attitude of Church officials with regard to controversial issues, including sexual morals.

      In the meantime, the recent start of an official investigation by the Vatican has put additional pressure on Cardinal Woekli. The investigation concerns a priest active in three dioceses in the greater Cologne area. Tried and convicted of sexual abuse of children and dependents, the priest had been sent to jail in the early 1970s. After his release a short time later, church officials reinstalled him. In the late 1980s, he was once again convicted of sexual abuse. And, once again, he was allowed to continue his active service. It was not until 2019 that he was retired, most likely as a result of the expertise commissioned by the archdiocese.

      In sharp contrast to the Cologne church authorities, the Diocese of Aachen, whose cathedral was the site of the coronation of German kings between 936 AD and 1531, recently announced it would no longer privilege the perpetrators of abuse — an independent report established numerous cases of abuse by priests in the diocese — over the rights of their victims. Unlike hushing up abuse, church authorities in Aachen launched a newspaper campaign asking victims of clerical abuse to contact church offices.

      Not Draining the Swamp

      What all of this suggests is that a significant segment of the Catholic hierarchy has absolutely no interest in “draining the swamp,” to borrow a term from an entirely different source. The reality is that the avalanche of revelations about sexual abuse rampant inside the Catholic Church has not only severely undermined its authority to speak on matters of morals, particularly when it comes to sexual mores, but its authority in general. In late 2019, a mere 14% of the German population said they trusted the Catholic Church; 29% said they trusted the pope. In contrast, 36% expressed trust in Germany’s Protestant Church.

      Embed from Getty Images

      You don’t have to be a prophet to suggest that the most recent revelations about sexual abuse and the way these have dealt with will further tarnish the church’s already dismal image and its moral authority. And for good reasons. The Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality is a joke given the prevalence of homoerotic endeavors within the church itself. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, the priest “doth protest too much, methinks.”

      The Catholic Church’s position on birth control is also risible, given the fact we no longer live in an age where the survival of the tribe depended on replenishing its membership. Those who don’t know what this means might want to read the story of Onan, famous (wrongly so) for being the father of masturbation. Onan’s crime — in the eyes of the Lord — was not that he masturbated, but that he preferred to “spill his seed” outside of the vagina of his late brother’s betrothed rather than fathering an offspring that would be credited to his dead brother.

      Today, we are no longer subject to archaic tribal rationale. Yet the Catholic Church still pretends that we are. Unfortunately enough, President Donald Trump has managed to stuff the US Supreme Court with prominent legal minds stuck in a pre-Middle Age way of thinking. Most of them are Catholics, Amy Coney Barrett the most recent one. In a world where the moral authority of the Catholic Church has been debased to a degree that even in Poland, the home of Pope John Paul II, a mere 10% of young people see the Catholic Church in a positive light, with 47% viewing it negatively, the Catholic Church and its representatives would do well to keep a low profile.

      In reality, the opposite is the case. High-ranking Catholic officials continue to take the moral high ground while pretending that sexual abuse is negligible. As Arthur Serratelli, a retired bishop from New Jersey, put it last year, “Is the terrible crime of child abuse limited only to Catholics? Today’s media would even have people believe that abuse of minors is becoming more frequent within the Church. Patently false. But, too often facts do not matter when a villain is needed.”

      Serratelli should know. During his time as an active bishop, the New Jersey dioceses were a hotbed of sexual abuse by priests. In 2019, New Jersey’s bishops listed some 200 priests “found credibly accused of sexually abusing a child.” To be sure, sexual abuse of minors is hardly limited to the Catholic Church. Quite the contrary. But given its claim to be the ultimate yardstick of moral authority, it should be held to the highest standards. The notion that the Catholic Church is not any worse than any other institution, as Serratelli implies in his defense of his own institution, does not cut it.

      Luckily for the Serratellis and Woelklis of this world, Jesus is no longer around. As he once said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). Those concerned are advised to study Houdini. His tricks might come in handy.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Cult of Kek: An Archaic Belief System for an Alt-Right “New Age”

      by

      Pepe the Frog, the green character in Matt Furie’s “Boy’s Club” cartoons, is familiar on the internet. The alt-right started to use it to symbolize their battle against political correctness as well as the principles of liberty, equality and justice — the founding values of liberal democracy. The alt-right aims to restore traditional hierarchical society and a racial state. Pepe the Frog landed a role in this task, mainly because of the alt-right’s desire to use memes to spread their message far and wide. From its humble beginning as a cartoon character, Pepe the Frog made a meteoric rise when the alt-right renamed it Kek, establishing the Cult of Kek.

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      The Cult of Kek appears to offer different things to different people based on what they seek. For those who enjoy creating or following memes, the Cult of Kek is satire. For others, it offers a religion, a deity, even a prayer to advance “meme magic.” However, at the heart of it, the Cult of Kek is neither satire nor religion but an arcane belief system firmly grounded in ancient Egyptian mythology.     

      Who Is Kek? 

      The ideology behind the Cult of Kek is explained in a series of eight books published under the pseudonym “Saint Obamas Momjeans” in 2016-17. The satirical pseudonym helps to keep the books from inviting serious analysis. Dan Prisk identifies this as “an ironic and irrelevant mode of communication” that seems to have the best of both worlds: the advantage of using “ironic humour” to attract attention and the ability to “hide true politics while openly promoting them.” “Nothing is as it seems” is the best adage to explain the Cult of Kek; even its “prayer” asks to “twist reality around the memes we make.”

      The term “meme magic” seems to have multiple meanings. First, meme magic is a reference to the accessibility and appeal of memes, which can attract followers and create thought movements. Second, the Cult of Kek wants memes to have perceived magical qualities, a pretext to attract followers and enthusiasts. As a 2015 essay published on Daily Stormer explains, “The trve power of skillful memes is to meme the karmic nation into reality, the process of meme magick. By spreading and repeating the meme mantra, it is possible to generate the karma needed for the rebirth of the nation.” But who is Kek, and in what context did the alt-right come to appropriate it?

      Embed from Getty Images

      “The One True Bible of Kek” is the primary source of the cult. This text introduces Kek as a figure who opposed the creation in favor of primordial chaos said to be a myth in the religion of ancient Egypt. Was there a Kek in ancient Egypt? Evidence can be traced back to the Egyptian Old Kingdom during 2575-2134 BC, where primordial Ogdoad was worshipped in Hermopolis on the banks of the Nile. Ogdoad was eight (male and female) personifications of nature, such as water, air, infinity and darkness. Among them, Kek and Keket represented primordial darkness. Kek is the male form with a frog head. The Papirus of Ani, dating back to 1450 BC, which forms a part of the Book of the Dead, mentions four of Ogdoad as humans, having heads of frogs and the other four of serpents.

      E.A. Wallis Budge, citing M. Maspero, links these ancient deities to the later forms of famous Egyptian gods: Kek and Keket as the early forms of Osiris and Isis. Such evidence indicates that the mythology of Kek dates back to the Old Kingdom period in Egypt. But what does the current iteration of Kek offer? What is the message behind the Cult of Kek?

      The Magic of Memes

      Kek is mainly associated with meme magic, which refers to the transferring of “idea viruses” online in order to change the subconscious. Memes are visually and textually appealing thought elements. They can spread like viruses, creating trends or habit-forming thought movements. For example, radical-right memes launch assaults against liberal democracy, and the Cult of Kek and its meme magic are part of this radical-right mobilization.

      Meme magic is believed to have started in 4chan and 8chan imageboards around 2015. It is created by an anonymous swarm, the so-called ANONs or anonymous members of the imageboards, producing one-line messages. The first book of the Kek series, “The Divine Word of Kek,” explains how to create and transfer memes. The book recommends further readings, such as Tom Montalk, William Walker Atkinson and Franz Bardon.

      Montalk is a German spiritualist interested in metaphysics. His website explains the world as a matrix control system led by the Illuminati. Atkinson is an American author who writes extensively on esoteric subjects and is known to be a theosophist. Bardon is a leading occultist known to be influenced by the likes of Éliphas Lévi and Aleister Crowley. The evidence confirms the initial suggestion that the Cult of Kek is neither satire nor religion but something of an arcane belief system.   

      One book of the Cult of Kek series, “Intermediate Meme Magic,” explains the story of Kek, citing authors such as E.A. Wallis Budge, an eminent British Egyptologist. This shows that the anonymous author used arcane knowledge to find a mascot for memetics. Their battle is said to be against “the degenerate left.” It tells the reader to “tear society apart so that you can rebuild it later without undesirable elements.” Another work, “Shadilay, My Brothers: Esoteric Kekism & You!” affirms that “This is truly the beginning of a new age.”

      Why did the alt-right apply an ancient deity to brand the modern practice of memetics? It may not be an accident, nor that they needed spiritualism to give their craft strong roots. Instead, the Cult of Kek sits precisely where the radical right connects with the broader new-age belief system. For example, Nouvelle Droite (New Right) thinkers such as Guillaume Faye were firm believers in “the Golden Age of a future humanity.”

      It is well known that the Nazis were influenced by messianic and millenarian myths. For example, Savitri Devi, famously referred to as Hitler’s Priestess, entwined the idea of the yuga cycle — the Hindu belief regarding the cyclical evolution of time — to give Germany’s National Socialists a new identity. Devi wanted the Nazis to end the corrupt world, ushering in the traditional and sacred Golden Age.

      It appears that the alt-right follows this tradition, borrowing from early extreme-right thinkers but positions the same beliefs in an entirely novel context — the postindustrial realm of cyberspace and memetics, creatively delivering age-old esoteric ideas to the present.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Strongmen review: a chilling history for one nation no longer under Trump

      by

      This terrific history of strongmen since Mussolini makes it clear that despite a horrific pandemic and massive economic disruption, ordinary democratic Americans have more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than ever before.Comparing the gruesome, granular details of the reigns of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Gaddafi, Pinochet, Mobuto, Berlusconi and Erdoğan to the acts and aspirations of Donald Trump, New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat makes a powerful argument that on the scary road to fascism, America just came perilously close to the point of no return.Almost everything Trump has done has come straight from the authoritarian playbook. Every dictator, for example, has built on the accomplishments of his predecessors.“Just as Hitler watched Mussolini’s actions carefully,” Ben-Ghiat writes, “so did Gaddafi learn from Lt Col Gamal Abdul Nasser’s 1952 overthrow of the monarchy in Egypt.” Then in the 1980s and 90s, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich served as models for Europeans looking for “a more radical form of conservatism”. Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America was echoed a year later by the Front National, with its “contract for France with the French”. Berlusconi’s Contract with Italians followed six years later.In Egypt, Nasser hired “former Nazi propagandists for their expertise in antisemitic messaging”. In Zaire, from 1965, Mobutu Sese Seko’s media handlers reimagined Leni Riefenstahl’s image of Hitler descending from the sky by opening the television news each night with a picture of the dictator’s face, hovering up in the clouds.The parallels between Trump and his role models are endless. Ben-Ghiat writes of “watching Trump retweet neo-Nazi propaganda, call for the imprisonment [of Hillary Clinton] and lead his followers in loyalty oaths at rallies seemed all too familiar”– and how it filled her “with dread”.Before the Putin-Trump bromance there was Putin and Berlusconi, grinning at each other from Zavidovo to Sardinia. The way Trump talked about Mexicans was hardly different from Hitler’s words about the Jews or Berlusconi’s about Africans. The Italian media mogul and prime minister was himself just a pale imitation of Mussolini. In the pre-war period, he was responsible for the deaths of 700,000 Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians.Every authoritarian regime has seen a crucial alliance between big business and the dictator, from Putin and his oligarchs to Hitler and German industrialists and Trump and the Wall Street elite. The German businessman Ernst von Hanfstaengl, Ben-Ghiat writes, introduced a “cleaned-up Hitler to the moneyed social circles that mattered” – just as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman helped legitimize Trump with tens of millions in campaign contributions to him and his Republican allies.Like all his role models, Ben-Ghiat sees in Trump a “drive to control and exploit everyone and everything for personal gain. The men, women and children he governs have value in his eyes only insofar as they … fight his enemies and adulate him publicly. Propaganda lets him monopolize the nation’s attention, and virility comes into play as he poses as the ideal take-charge man.”The US has done so much to promote authoritarianism abroad during the last 100 years, it’s actually surprising it took so long before we had to confront it at home.When Mussolini desperately needed international legitimacy and economic aid in 1926, it was a fascist proselytizer and JP Morgan partner Thomas Lamont who rescued him, brokering a $100m US government loan. Fifty years later, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger told CIA director Richard Helms to make Chile’s “economy scream”, so Gen Augusto Pinochet could overthrow the socialist Salvador Allende. Kissinger and William F Buckley became fervent Pinochet apologists, even as thousands were tortured and disappeared. More

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      in World Politics

      The Dazzling Shallowness of Bernard-Henri Levy

      by

      One of the attractions, or oddities, of France is its reverence of those who are regarded as philosophers, or at least philosophical thinkers. In the age of fast information, we also have fast philosophy — soundbite philosophy. Not that this has no value, but this value has to be abstracted from the veneers that accompany not just instant thought but instant thought that seems intellectually attractive: exciting, provocative, perhaps outrageous, but plausible.

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      It is in this category that Bernard-Henri Levy now finds a home. It is the task of the reader to distinguish content from veneer. But since many readers seem no longer to try, Levy has a ready audience for instant diagnosis of serious situations, rendered “philosophical” by the constant dropping of names, recognized as the serious thinkers of the past, and constant references to his own earlier work.

      Sense of Exaggeration

      That earlier work is not inconsiderable. Although always controversial because of his willingness to eviscerate sacred cows, his condemnation of Stalinism was a bold challenge to the European left to make a new start that banished socialism achieved by tyranny. His intellectual histories of French thought, such as in “Adventures on the Freedom Road,” although even then striving for effect, were vibrant and made thought seem integral to the French project of a national self. He wanted that national self to be humane and humanitarian.

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      Levy’s championing of refugees was staunchly within the moral need for a nation to be compassionate. His defense of freedom elsewhere, as in his taking of sides with Ahmad Shah Massoud against the Taliban and his more recent advocacy of the Kurdish Peshmerga in their fight against the Islamic State, were evidence of a cosmopolitanism that he saw first evidenced in the life and adventures of his hero, the writer Andre Malraux. Malraux had fought in China (with the Communists), Spain (with the Republicans) and France (with the Resistance), and wrote great novels and art histories as well as somewhat exaggerated memoirs.

      That sense of exaggeration has always been with Levy. Every adventure has been a photo opportunity, including in Bosnia during the Siege of Sarajevo or wandering the ruins of what had been Muammar Gaddafi’s headquarters in Tripoli. That, of course, comes with kickback. Levy was indeed a frequent visitor to besieged Sarajevo, but those visits tended to be fleeting, leading the entrapped citizens of Sarajevo to nickname him not BHL, as he is widely known in France, but DHL — Deux Heures Levy, in and out (safely on a United Nations plane) within two hours.

      That he then compared himself with Susan Sontag, who stayed in the city for a lengthy period, accepting the same risks as all others without UN protection, was always rich. And his perhaps seminal influence on the French and, through the French, on NATO to intervene in Libya had the unforeseen consequence of war without end in the “liberated” country.

      His latter-day championing of Jewish identity and culture, echoing in some ways Levinas, but without his philosophical gravitas and genuine luminosity, leaves open questions as to Levy’s stance on any Israeli settlement with the Palestinians that they themselves might find just. This is a shame as, in some ways, he might be a reasonable interlocutor between the two peoples making, one would hope, the proviso that human rights must deploy equality of political rights — and, of course, that there is no humanitarian settlement without human rights.

      Gadfly of Thought

      Because he’s rich, given to Dior suits and Charvet shirts, lean enough and with sufficient hair to appear dashing in his late middle age, Levy crafts an image that all the same now seems that of the jet-setting gadfly of the international — and of thought.

      That sense of the gadfly of thought comes through in his latest (short) book, “The Virus in the Age of Madness,” on the COVID-19 pandemic. It is full of references to (highly excerpted) thought from great philosophers alongside references to his earlier writing. But there is a difference stylistically to his previous work. Levy was once the pioneer of an evocative methodology that married philosophy with fiction that all the same was evocative and sometimes illuminating. That was within the construction of an imaginary conversation between himself, or himself in disguise, and one of the great thinkers.

      The great thinker explains himself, but always within the terms posed by Levy as an interviewer. Of course, this made Levy the commander of explication and interpretation of another’s thought. But the technique drew in the reader and did provoke thought among the audience.

      This time, Levy seems merely to be interviewing himself, inviting himself to make declaratory and pontifical statements to do with his (seemingly erudite) outrage that COVID-19 has rendered all other catastrophes in the world second-rate as face masks and respirators subvert and overwhelm our awareness of hunger, war, (other) pestilence and political repression. This is a fair point but made with a dazzling shallowness that proposes no means of balancing concerns over the pandemic and for other worlds. It gestures toward the sacrifice of medical frontline workers but almost dismisses them toward the end in a frenzy of concern for the “out there.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      The short treatise is a polemic that has a theme but no purpose. It pales beside Susan Sontag’s own short book, “Illness as Metaphor,” which discusses the use of metaphor in the ways we refer to serious illnesses — just as Levy announces his intention to dissect the uses of metaphor but winds up proposing grand vistas of image after image for the sake of effect. And, of course, he does compare himself to Sontag in their quite different Sarajevo involvements. He also progresses the use of Benny Levy, once the controversial aide to the elderly Jean-Paul Sartre, from one side of Bernard-Henri’s interview-as-philosophical-insight technique to the status of good friend. No aggrandizement is spared.

      Levy’s book does not even interrogate the disease itself. One would have expected Levy to interview the coronavirus, but, in fact, he dismisses its personification even in medical discourse without offering any epidemiological or biochemical investigation as to why the virus has been so easy to personify as an almost thinking antagonist. He offers no way forward except, fatalities and medical staff casualties notwithstanding, that we should diminish our concerns over COVID-19 and elevate our consciousness once again to countenance commitment against the great crimes of the world.

      But we never abandoned our commitment against the great crimes. Levy’s evidence that we did so relies only on the plenitude of newspaper headlines about COVID-19, as if that alone were enough to obscure ongoing and heroic struggles. He points out, of course, that he himself never ceased his war on the world’s great crimes.

      But this proposal of singularity ignores the fact that in every case of his activism, he had to cooperate with others and bear witness to the work of others. Levy never took up arms alongside the Peshmerga. He did, however, pose for a lot of photos with them. Perhaps one day he will publish a 1,000-page pictorial history entitled “How I Alone Tried to Save the World,” in hope that the world will forget that he once wrote meaningful books.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      It was hard not to laugh at Rudy Giuliani's hair malfunction – but it's time to stop equating looks with character | Emma Beddington

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      Weren’t the pictures of Rudy Giuliani’s hair malfunction last week wonderful? I was transfixed by footage of him bug-eyed and ranting at a press conference, as dark rivulets of hair dye (or mascara, expert opinion was divided) ran down his sweaty cheeks. The incident spawned a delighted outpouring of comment and mocking tweets. He was a Scooby-Doo villain unmasked; a gargoyle, a comic-book grotesque, and it felt so apt. For critics, it was as if corruption, lies and moral turpitude were finally oozing out of him as a tarry discharge.It is the same satisfaction we feel as we dissect the brittle spun-sugar edifice of Trump’s hair, the harshly theatrical lines of his makeup (“una naranja espantosa”, a scary orange, as a White House housekeeper described it to the Washington Post) or his cack-handed panda-eye concealer habit. It is delicious when the facade cracks, especially in one so obsessed with surface. It feels like poetic justice when a man who built a gold tower, regularly comments on his daughter’s looks and mocked a disabled reporter is caught looking diminished and ridiculous.No amount of expensive vanity, it seems, can cover what is essentially rotten about these men: the ugliness keeps showing through. “If a person has ugly thoughts it begins to show on the face,” Roald Dahl wrote in The Twits. Except, of course, that is nonsense. I don’t believe for a moment that any of us actually thinks there is any correlation between looks and character. So why do we still allow and amplify this lazy trope?Years of cultural conditioning doesn’t help, I suppose. Hollywood has been conflating ugliness and moral failing since cinema began, and Shakespeare was doing it 500 years ago. The messaging is at its most intense in childhood: villains, from Disney to Harry Potter, are fat, disfigured or ugly. David Walliams has been called out for it; Dahl is infamous for it. Reading The Witches to my sons when they were small was an odd experience: they adored the story and Quentin Blake’s enchanting illustrations, but the diagram and explanation of an unmasked witch confused them – because it looked like me. I have alopecia and, like the witches, am bald beneath my wig. Was I planning to turn them into mice?Even in 2020, Anne Hathaway’s Grand High Witch in the new screen version is revealed, beneath her disguise, to be a bald monster with disfigured, claw-like hands. Weary disability campaigners were provoked into action once more on the film’s release, condemning yet another depiction of disability as evil. People with limb differences, from Paralympians to Bake Off’s Briony Williams tweeted pictures of themselves tagged #notawitch and Warner Bros was flustered into one of those weaselly not-quite apologies. The studio declared it was “deeply saddened … our depiction of the fictional characters in The Witches could upset people with disabilities”.Things are slowly changing: the British Film Institute has said it will not support films with facially scarred villains, and the campaigning group RespectAbility is dedicated to analysing shortcomings in Hollywood’s portrayal of disability and trying to shift its portrayals.From a fictional perspective, it is surely more interesting to subvert the “ugliness as evil” trope anyway. One of the best things about the Amazon’s ultra-gory, superheroes-gone-bad series The Boys is how absurdly good-looking the truly repellent baddies are, all chiselled cheekbones and dewy beauty.But this reframing needs to go further than fiction, and that is up to us. Corruption and amorality can also be high-definition glossy and ready for its closeup: think of Ivanka and Jared. The next generation of hard-right demagogues probably won’t look like Trump or Steve Bannon (another whose general aura of dissolution and decay it is terribly hard not to conflate with his repellent politics). Isn’t that actually far scarier?There are many reasons to loathe Trump and Giuliani, but a heavy hand with the retouching wand, a pale expanse of paunch spilling out of a golf shirt, or a turbo-charged bad hair day are not among them. They are rotten to the core; let’s resist the temptation to fixate on the surface. More

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      Can American democracy survive Donald Trump?

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      “I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
      The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
      However, the very fact that we need to ask this question helps answer it – for lying, paranoia and conspiracy are also defining features of the totalitarian societies that American society is being so hotly compared to. As Federico Finchelstein maintained in his recent A Brief History of Fascist Lies: “As facts are presented as ‘fake news’ and ideas originating among those who deny the facts become government policy, we must remember that current talk about ‘post-truth’ has a political and intellectual lineage: the history of fascist lying.” Both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, two of history’s most acute observers of totalitarianism, situated lying squarely at the heart of the totalitarian project. Not just the Hitlerian big lie of propaganda, but a culture of pervasive lying, what Arendt called “lying as a way of life” and “lying on principle”, systematic dishonesty that destroys the collective space of historical-factual reality. Orwell similarly insisted that lying is “integral to totalitarianism”: indeed, for Orwell, totalitarianism probably “demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”. And as Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, both the Nazis and the Soviets created markedly paranoid societies, in which the capillary action of conspiratorial fictions did as much work as ideological infrastructure. More

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      Barack Obama on the moment he won the presidency – exclusive extract

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      More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.Taking the chair beside the bed, I held my grandmother’s hand in mine. Her body had wasted away and her breathing was labored. Every so often, she’d be shaken by a violent, metallic cough that sounded like a grinding of gears. A few times, she murmured softly, although the words, if any, escaped me.What dreams might she be having? I wondered if she’d been able to look back and take stock, or whether she’d consider that too much of an indulgence. I wanted to think that she did look back; that she’d reveled in the memory of a long-ago lover or a perfect, sunlit day in her youth when she’d experienced a bit of good fortune and the world had revealed itself to be big and full of promise.I thought back to a conversation I’d had with her when I was in high school, around the time that her chronic back problems began making it difficult for her to walk for long stretches.“The thing about getting old, Bar,” Toot had told me, “is that you’re the same person inside.” I remember her eyes studying me through her thick bifocals, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “You’re trapped in this doggone contraption that starts falling apart. But it’s still you. You understand?”I did now. More