South Africans have provided some truly ridiculous hot takes on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In many cases, I had to double-check whether they were intended as satire or not.
One of the prime idiots on Twitter is former president Jacob Zuma’s daughter and chief bullshit artist, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla — she of the Capitalise The Start Of Every Word To Illustrate The Ponderous And Plodding Nature Of What Passes For Thinking In My Head tweets.
But even by Zuma-Sambudla’s dismal standards, her pro-Vladimir Putin tweets are crazy. An early tweet shows a picture of the Russian president with the words: "My Leader … I STAND WITH RUSSIA!!!" Then, a pic of Putin being saluted by Russian soldiers, captioned: "We See You And We Salute You Leadership. Amandla!!!"
There are several in the same vein. One shows Zuma and Putin clinking wine glasses, smiling evilly (excuse the editorialising), with Dudu gushing, "We Love You Both LOUDLY And UNAPOLOGETICALLY SO… I’ll Drink To That!!!"
Indeed you will, Ms Zuma-Sambudla, indeed you will.
The Queen of Capitalisation doesn’t seem to realise that a neutral observer will construe that she’s baldly admitting Zuma is in the pocket of Russia, bought and paid for. She apparently really does think SA is a province of Russia.
Responding to a news story revealing that Russian forces had captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, she crows: "Halala Putin!!! We Are Led." She has taken to saying goodnight to Putin ("You Are In Our Midnight Prayers Mr President") and wishing him a cheery good morning ("Good Morning Mr President In You We Trust.")
That last tweet is accompanied by a close-up of a smiling Putin wearing mirrored sunglasses. Reflected in the lenses is a mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.
As it is, Putin has ordered his nuclear forces to be put on "high alert", which must really excite the counterfeit Ivanka no end.
The idea that people are dying in their hundreds doesn’t seem to occur to Zuma-Sambudla. It’s possibly a family trait — her father didn’t seem to mind that he was condemning millions of people to increasing poverty by selling SA to any and all bidders. If he’d held out for the highest bidder, I might have a fraction more respect for him.
For the Queen of Capitalisation, it’s all just a way to keep the good ol’ family business rolling. That would be the business of living off ill-gotten gains, and of evading any accountability whatsoever.
Though Zuma-Sambudla might have the most pleasing oeuvre of buffoonery, she has some stiff competitors. As you’d expect, it’s the usual knee-jerk nonsense from both the RET (Russian Economic Transformation) remoras and their right-wing doppelgängers in the alt.white playpen. In each case, they’ve thought only about how to use a bloody war to advance their own parochial interests, rather than show any empathy with the people dying. In some cases, it’s almost laughably obvious.
The notorious "Man’s NOT Barry Roux" Twitter account (1.4-million followers and counting), tweeted: "Dear Vladimir Putin. I hope this letter finds u in good health. On Behalf of SA I would like to distance ourselves from [international relations & co-operation minister] Naledi Pandor’s statement on Russia & Ukraine conflict. Naledi is from Zimbabwe. Her real surname is Pumba, not Pandor. #worldwar3. Sincerely Your Boy."
It’s ridiculous, but also chilling. Here is the thread binding together despots — actual and aspirational — and the hate speech that results in the killing of people defined as "not us". And it is a global thread, as studies of the negative effects of American right-wing and QAnon mis/disinformation on the SA information landscape have shown.
The SACP, a bunch of intellectual midges who Karl Marx would sneer at, has chosen to parrot the Russian misinformation word for word, just in English.
For them, Ukraine is the occupying power of a Russian country, and what Russia is doing is liberation.
It’s instructive watching the SABC’s Peter Ndoro trying to patiently explain to the SACP that, uh, Russia is the country doing the invading. No, says the SACP’s Alex Mashilo, dressed in a fetching red EFF-like shirt, blinged up with a gold hammer and sickle badge, it’s not an invasion, it’s a military operation.
As you’d expect, the sudden love for Russia by the alt.white is exemplified by those masters of unethical marketing, the American conservatives. Tucker Carlson, the main stench in the Fox News burrow, provided a list of issues that our local alt.white losers will, I’m sure, leap at, when he rhetorically asked: "Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?"
The implication being that Putin is not our enemy, the woke mob is.
Extremists on the Left and Right alike are using a deadly war to advance their own interests
— What it means:
From politicians and criminal-adjacent propagandists, you expect this crassness. But it’s a little more distressing when it comes from journalists.
A recent TimesLive story carried the following blurb: "Forget Russia and Ukraine, Hollywood actor Tom Cruise has invaded the hearts of Hoedspruit locals with his stay in the area while filming Mission: Impossible 8."
I don’t really want to lambast the author of this nonsense. The only reason you can’t find dozens of examples online of stupid things I’ve written over the years is that I had editors who scratched them out, and told me I was forgetting about the real world while trying to concoct pretty sentences. (Yes, before you point it out, you’ll definitely find some examples — but believe me, there could have been a whole lot more.)
The idea that the invasion of Ukraine, the killing of people and the destruction of a country is a fun metaphor for how a teeny Scientologist is making the people of Hoedspruit happy by waving to them is, of course, a spectacularly bad take. (TimesLive has since altered the story.) And yet the tie-in between the world of entertainment and realpolitik is not as tenuous as you might think.
By now, you’ll have read the stories about Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as a comedian. His last role was in a satirical TV show called Servant of the People, in which he played a high school teacher who becomes the Ukrainian president after his rant about corruption goes viral. That show apparently helped energise a real-life presidential campaign, which ended in him being elected president of Ukraine a month after the show’s finale.
You might even have watched the clip doing the rounds on social media that shows him competing in, and apparently winning, a 2006 Ukrainian version of Dancing with the Stars.
As with the invasion of Hoedspruit, the impulse is to humanise the adversaries, to make comprehensible the weight of the hard news. But if we do that, we risk softening the edges of nuance, and then we’re back to that age-old weapon of those who seek to divide us: reducing complexity to good vs evil, to us vs them.
Behind all the pro-Russia simpering is a very simple driver. The populists and politicians yearn to be living in a dictatorship that they control.
EFF leader Julius Malema, responding to the announcement that the EU has banned Russian propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik, plaintively wrote: "That time you are not allowed to ban eNCA, but they are allowed to do the same thing without so-called Sanef [the SA National Editors Forum] crying about media freedom. SIES!"
Poor guy. How he longs to be Putin.
By the time you read this, Zelensky and his family might be dead. Hundreds certainly will be, both Ukrainian and Russian. That’s the stark reality.
The way in which the narrow-minded egoists of the various factions of the Left and Right are shamelessly using the Russian invasion of Ukraine to push their narcissistic agendas is disgusting. They’re showing their true colours, which are those of the avaricious chameleon, changing as they see potential profit.
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