What do Fikile Mbalula and US far-right ‘journalist’ Tucker Carlson have in common?

14 Feb 2024

Well, it seems that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the United Russia party which backs him believe that both men are thicker than the Witwatersrand gold reef.

A lot of other people happen to share that opinion. But Vladimir Putin is currently putting on a masterclass in playing the politically gullible that is simply breathtaking to behold.

He has successfully courted white nationalists who long for the days of segregation in the US and apartheid in South Africa, while simultaneously reeling in a black liberation movement that made its name fighting racial oppression.

And both sides seem blithely unaware this is happening, though neither Putin nor United Russia are concealing their budding bromances. It’s almost as if Putin has cast a spell on them.

This clown show would be comical – Mbalula and Carlson are both hilarious in unflattering ways – were it not for the geopolitical stakes involved, including the future of both the US and South Africa as functioning democracies.

To wit, Carlson, a former Fox News host, famously had an infamous interview with Putin last week in which the Russian autocrat launched a rambling historical monologue justifying his invasion of Ukraine.

Carlson, of course, is a key player in the US far right and the Maga movement that has transformed the Republican Party – the party of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln – into a racist and misogynistic cult beholden to Donald Trump.

Yaroslav the Wise, the 11th-century Grand Prince of Kyiv, featured in Putin’s monologue. I am not making this up. One can’t imagine the Maga crowds chanting “Yaroslav the Wise!” between chants of “Hang Mike Pence” and “Lock Her Up”, but stranger things have happened.

The wider point here is that Carlson is a love-struck Putin fan-boy and at the same time a relentless scaremonger about the plight of whites in post-apartheid South Africa and the plight of white Americans in the post-Civil War and civil rights eras.

A rant by Carlson in 2018 on Fox News about the dire straits of white South African farmers prompted then president Trump to tweet that he had directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures,” as well as the “killing of farmers.”

Carlson is also a frequent booster of the white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory”, which holds that shadowy (read liberal, Jewish, woke) elites are encouraging immigration from developing (read non-white regions) into white regions (read America/Europe) to “replace them” with obedient voters to live off the dwindling taxes of hard-working (read white) workers.

David Duke, a long-time leader of the Ku Klux Klan, once said that Russia under Putin was “key to white survival”.

The United Russia party itself has forged links with far-right (read white) parties and political leaders outside of Russia, such as Hungary’s Victor Orbán and his Fidesz Party. Oh, and Carlson is also a fanboy of Orbán. Just saying.

Against this seething backdrop of white resentment and nationalism, one would assume that an African liberation/nationalist movement like, say, the ANC or its splinter the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), would not be drawn like moths to the same flame of hate as white nationalists such as Carlson and his ilk.

I mean, this would surely be a far-fetched plot line for a novel or a movie.

Parallel universe

How can you claim to champion African liberation and oppose “neocolonialism” while playing footsie with white supremacists who regard parties like the ANC with contempt for racist reasons, while launching an imperialist invasion yourself? It all gives new meaning to the term parallel universe.

Well, Putin and his party are doing just that.

Lo and behold, a week after Carlson journeyed to Moscow to learn about Yaroslav the Wise, Mbalula will this week lead an ANC delegation to Moscow where several political parties from the Global South will work out a blueprint for a new entity whose raison d’etre will be to confront “neocolonialism”.

This is an initiative of the United Russia party or Putin’s party. Is Mbalula unaware of the fawning praise that has been showered on Putin by the likes of Carlson, and, for that matter, Donald Trump?

Does he not realise he is climbing into bed for a political ménage à trois requiring contortions that would put a Cirque du Soleil performer to shame?

The ANC’s mantra when it comes to Putin’s Russia as some icon of anti-colonialism is that Moscow supported the ANC back in the day. That was during the Cold War, and such a narrative dispatches down the memory hole the backing that the ANC and the wider anti-apartheid movement had from Western governments such as Canada and Sweden, as well as that offered by many Americans and Brits even when the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were hostile to the cause.

It also conveniently forgets that it was the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – you know, the party of a guy called Stalin – that provided the ANC with support.

United Russia by contrast is right-wing and nationalist, and its de facto leader, Putin, is idolised by white supremacists. You know, the same kind of people who supported apartheid.

And they now have the leader of Reagan’s Republican Party – who recently encouraged Russia to attack Nato allies for allegedly not paying their dues – eating out of their hand.

This all matters because regardless of the skin colour of nationalism, it all points to an unsettling rise of authoritarian populism globally that will have chilling political, social and economic consequences.

Jon Stewart, who has returned to host the US satirical current affairs programme, The Daily Show, said this week in a conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor of The Economist, that the Cold War between capitalism and communism seems to have been replaced by a global confrontation between “the woke” and “the unwoke”.

But the ANC in this regard seems to be a square peg being rammed into a round hole lubricated by Stolichnaya vodka. I mean, for all its glaring governance faults, I suppose it likes to put on woke pretences. It raises the suspicion that it’s all about money – you know, the stuff generated by the exploitation of the masses – and that Russia is funding the ANC.

I’m not saying that is the case… merely connecting some dots.

There is also the GazpromBank deal to reboot the Mossel Bay oil refinery – awarded in a suspicious manner – and the push for 2,500MW of nuclear energy, which South Africa can hardly afford.

Surely the ANC delegation going to this anti-neocolonialism shindig in Moscow cannot possibly be that thick. It certainly seems to think South Africans are. DM

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Parallel universe