It’s as if the Weimar Republic has come back with a vengeance, and we all know what happened next.
The post-Weimar Walpurgisnacht called Eurovision has just befouled Copenhagen and outdone its predecessor a hundred-fold, but then the EU isn’t yet reeling from a military defeat.
If Weimar was naughty, Copenhagen was wicked. If Weimar was decadent, Copenhagen was degenerate. If Weimar presaged totalitarianism, Copenhagen showed it in all its glory.
For totalitarianism doesn’t have to include concentration camps to be what it is. Its defining feature is producing the same crude stencil to which everyone must be cut. Reason, morality, good taste all have to be sacrificed at the altar of naked, stupefying, ugly power. And power can be projected by propaganda and art as effectively as by firing squads.
If you have any other explanation for the popularity of this obscene spectacle, I’d like to hear it. But it had better be good: the outburst of pan-European enthusiasm for this perversion on wheels is well-nigh incomprehensible.
Before even my time every self-respecting county fair featured freak shows, offering for the bumpkins’ delectation such thrills as Siamese twins (who afterwards happily went their separate ways), men with breasts and women with beards.
One of those hermaphroditic apparitions has just won the Eurovision contest, and how sane people didn’t all throw up at the disgusting sight is another phenomenon that requires a good explanation.
To say that the apparition had not an ounce of musical ability, never mind talent, would be redundant. The appeal of pop music of any kind not only doesn’t rely on such outdated attributes but actively discourages them.
This isn’t music – it’s the pagan victory dance of vanquishing savages, and its appeal isn’t artistic but ritualistic. Real art brings out the best in people; this blend of a Nuremberg rally and an orgy brings out the worst.
And right round the corner from these spiritual totalitarians lurks the muscle-bound totalitarian ready to pounce, his fangs bared. The resurgent Russia, and specifically its Leader so beloved of Peter Hitchens, is watching on with his cold, expressionless eyes.
He knows a bit of German history, and he knows what happens to a Europe softened up by Weimar decadence. It’s Putin’s mission to make sure it does happen, and Eurovision can serve Putin’s purposes famously.
If you think this is far-fetched, here’s a clip from the show aired on Russia’s equivalent of BBC1, Rossia 1 TV, on 7 May, the day after the Russian act had made it to the Eurovision finals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoc1DySBqu8&feature=youtu.be
The act was the Tolmachyov girls, sequined, slit-skirted 17-year-old twins whose musical accomplishments wouldn’t get them a job in a brothel, although some other talents they appear to possess might.
My commiserations to those of you who can’t understand the language of the show, but the pictures speak louder than the words.
The principal shills, by the way, included celebrated poets, actors, artists and even the leader of one of Russia’s main parliamentary parties Mr, né Comrade, Zhirinovsky.
The MC, a young man clad in an electric-blue suit, kicked off the proceedings by punching the air and screaming hysterically, “It’s happened!!! The sun rose over Copenhagen!!!! We’re in the finals!!!!! The light is shining on all our souls!!!!!! We’re all crying because we’re all one big family!!!!!!! We’re all happy to have been born in this great, wonderful country!!!!!!!!”
Before I run out of exclamation marks, the others, all waving Russian flags, put in their penny’s worth, reaching the kind of heights seldom seen this side of a lunatic asylum.
“Our strong, powerful, dynamic country has shown she can bring America to her knees!!!” – this contribution was delivered in broken Russian by a well-trained Cameroonian married to a Russian woman who looked as if she had successfully passed the vetting at the brothel I mentioned earlier.
The African then explained to the Russian audience that even they don’t understand the God-like beauty and power of their native land. The others must have taken exception to that putdown and tried to prove that they did unxderstand their country perfectly well:
“And it’s not just our girls who’ve made the finls!!! It’s also singers from the Ukraine and Armenia!!!! These too are our lands!!!!!” (Or rather soon will be, I have to add for the sake of geopolitical accuracy.)
“This is our Victory Day! As important and smelling of gunpowder as the other one!”
Then, in reference to the Kursk origin of the slit-skirts, “The Battle of Kursk happened 70 years ago!!! So it’s only fitting that these two Kursk maidens have again cemented the motherland together!!!!”
“Our girls have shown the beauty and innocence of Russian womanhood to the West! They’re going to infect the West with their innocence and pristine purity!!!”
In addition to innocence and pristine purity the twins look as if they might also infect the West with other things I shan’t mention for fear of sounding slanderously malicious. But that’s not the point anyway.
The point, ladies and gentlemen, is that I don’t recall chauvinistic spectacles pitched at the same level of fervour even in my Soviet childhood. That was Orwell; this is a schizophrenic rant.
Aren’t you glad that these madmen are armed with an up-to-date nuclear arsenal? That they’re led by a proud scion of history’s most murderous organisation? That he’s commissioning such emetic displays to whip up the whole nation to martial enthusiasm?
I’m not. But I respectfully doff my hat to Peter Hitchens who must be detecting in this obscenity something that escapes me. A truly perceptive man, our ex-Trotskyist.