Éric Zemmour, proud Frenchman, bends his head, burns what he adored and adores what he burned. The candidate for the French presidential election was again obliged, a few days ago, to explain himself publicly on his past glowing descriptions of Vladimir Putin, Russian dictator.
In 2013, the former French columnist wrote that “Putin becomes the last bastion against political correctness, gay communitarianism, multiculturalism […] I would dream of a French Poutine”. He reformulated this wish in 2018, two years after a trip to Russia, four years after the annexation of Crimea.
These praises are obviously reproached to Mr. Zemmour since the very destructive Russian invasion of Ukraine. It cost the presidential candidate on the right of the right a few points in the voting intentions which could prevent him from reaching the second round of the election at the top in a few weeks.
“I recognized in Putin first of all to be a Russian patriot and, secondly, to have straightened his country after the terrible decade of the 1990s, when the Russians lived in misery”, explained the founder of the political party Reconquest to the radio program The Big Mouths from RMC. ” […] Putin, in the 2000s, was a great president. Today, the situation has led him to unspeakable and reprehensible acts. »
Similar troublesome ideological nuggets are unearthed all over the West. Italy’s far-right leader Matteo Salvini’s trip to Poland turned into a fiasco recently when the mayor of Przemysl, home to tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, greeted him with a reminder of his Putinist sympathies. Matteo Salvini backed the Crimean Big Swallow and wore a Vladimir Putin t-shirt while visiting Moscow’s Red Square in 2014.
Donald Trump has also never hidden his sympathies for the Russian president as for other autocrats, from Kim Jong-un to Mohammed bin Salman. The former president of the United States continued to pass the feather duster even after the invasion of Ukraine, which he described as the “act of genius”.
All these flirtations with Russian authoritarianism can be explained by ideological affinities. Vladimir Putin attracts (or openly attracted until the war) because he represents the ferocious criticism of representative democracy, the return of repressed identity and nationalism on ethnic bases, an assumed xenophobia and a refusal of multicultural mixing, the detestation of the diverse regime and, then, of course, order and repressive power.
“Putin’s attack on Ukraine since February 24 and the attack by Donald Trump supporters on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, are certainly different, but they are similar in their disregard for democratic institutions. and their attempts to justify violence by postulating a threat to a dominant racial or ethnic group,” summed up columnist Robert Reich of the Guardian at the beginning of the month.
On the conspiratorial menu
Anti-democratic populism and conspiracy were cited as major sources of danger and threat to Canada and Quebec during the online symposium The strategic orientations of Quebec and Canada organized last Wednesday by the Strategic Analysis Network and the Montreal Institute of International Studies.
“I make a connection between the occupation by the Ottawa convoy and the war in Ukraine,” said Justin Massie, full professor of political science at UQAM. One of the vulnerabilities of Western societies — and Quebec, like Canada, is no longer an exception — concerns subversion operations using false news or other means of dividing the population, The recent occupation of Ottawa and the entire protest movement during the health crisis show that there is a movement with 10 to 15% of the population inclined to favorably receive so-called “alternative” messages. This fertile ground for subversion operations represents a problem which does not yet seem to me to be taken seriously enough. »
The complosphere seems to be changing its obsession by abandoning criticism of sanitary measures (they disappear by themselves) in favor of resolutely pro-Russian positions in the conflict with Ukraine. “We have been able to observe, within the conspiratorial movements, a fraction which seeks to renew its discourse by dealing with Ukraine, added Professor Massie. Western democracies are seen there as dictatorships, and Putin’s Russia as a model of freedom. We find ourselves in an Orwellian world, where the terms seem to mean the exact opposite of common sense. »
Disinformation platforms
Some conspiracy sites become de facto propaganda relays from Moscow presenting the military operation in Ukraine as an attempt to rescue Russian speakers in the country supposedly threatened by a neo-Nazi regime. It is also not impossible for Russian disinformation to serve as an information base for Western conspiracy.
One of the popular theories claims that Ukraine harbors secret American laboratories preparing a new virus or biological weapons. Another, taken up in China, claims that the COVID-19 would have been manufactured by one of these laboratories in Ukraine. Billionaires Bill Gates and George Soros are still embroiled in poisoning. Anti-Semitic sites also find a way to blame the Jews for being responsible for the conflict.
Conspiratorial Quebecer Alexis Trudel-Cossette devoted an entire program to Ukrainian “biolabs”. He also claimed that the great manipulators of the world are in fact seeking to bring about a third world war since their diabolical plan to control the world population through the pandemic has been a failure.
The @vicsurvivaliste Twitter account (“I like poutine and that’s what it’s called”, says his presentation) takes up or composes messages that shoot in all delirious directions. Ukraine is said to be a hub for child trafficking, Ukrainian soldiers have crucified, burned alive and castrated their Russian prisoners, etc.
David Morin, specialist in radical movements, from the University of Sherbrooke, thinks that this movement is the symptom of a crisis of confidence vis-à-vis political and media institutions. “What weighs the most on our societies today is the risk to democracy,” he summed up at the symposium on strategic threats. We find it difficult to recognize the fragility of our societies. Conspiracy is not new, he summed up at the symposium on strategic threats. We talk about it more. He has rightly become an object of concern. […]. In a context of mass disinformation, fueled by foreign powers, this is an issue. We are neighbors of one of the countries most affected by this threat to democracy, and the common border is, to say the least, porous to ideas. »