Toon: Very Fine People on Both Sides

Former White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly has written a book of his experiences in the Donald Schickelgruber Trump White House. According to an excerpt in the New Yorker Trump expressed to Kelly his admiration of "German generals" and wished that American generals were more like them.

"Do you mean Bismarck's generals?" Kelly told the Atlantic he'd asked Trump. He added, "I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, 'Do you mean the Kaiser's generals? Surely you can't mean Hitler's generals?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals.'"

Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last sixteen months of Trump's presidency, is quoted in Bob Woodward's latest book as calling Trump "fascist to the core." Two of Trump's Secretaries of Defense, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark Esper, and one of his National Security Advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, swell the chorus that Trump must never again be Commander In Chief of the U.S. military.

The White House and cabinet officials letting it be known that Trump is a fascist wannabe dictator who holds up Adolph Hitler as a role model only confirm what we've seen from the outside. Anyone who has been paying the slightest scrap of attention these past eight years knows that he worships the ground Vlad the Defenestrator Putin walks on, wants to be BFFs with Kim Jong Il, and adores what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungarian democracy.

Once upon a time, being exposed by that much military brass as Adolph Hitler's biggest fan would have been enough to send Trump slinking off in ignominy to Mar-a-Lagoon and thence to Argentina. But apparently, half the population of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina (and overwhelming majorities elsewhere in Dixie and the great plains) just don't care. 

For reasons that defy rational analysis, they enthusiastically plan to vote for an actual, literal, bona fide Nazi sympathizer for President of the United States.

Anything to get transgender folks out of the nation's rest rooms and defend the nation's aryan purity of essence. To Trump basest base, nothing else matters.

My cartoon today updates one by the great Australian-British editorial cartoonist, David Low. "Rendez-vous 1939" depicted Hitler and Joseph Stalin greeting each other: "The scum of the earth, I believe?" "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?" At their feet lay Poland, slain under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact partitioning the country that had separated them.

President Putin's policy since assuming power at the turn of the millennium has been to reconquer the nations that declared their independence from Moscow in 1989-1991. Trump will pull the rug out from under the government of Ukraine, which has been trying to fend off Russian aggression since 2008. Just as he pulled the rug out from under the government of Afghanistan.

If Trump is returned to the White House, no country in Eastern Europe will be safe from Russian lebensraum. No country anywhere else will be able to trust in United States assurances of friendship. There will be a new Axis of Evil, and we will be a junior member of it.

Dammit, this matters.

Q Toon: Tuckerview with a Vladimir

Useful idiot Tucker Carlson went to Russia to fawn over the clean subway and the Aldi-style shopping carts, and to interview President for Life Vladimir Putin last week. 

In the days after the interview was posted on X, an Egyptian journalist asked Carlson why he hadn't asked Putin about the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, unjustly imprisoned in a Siberian concentration camp, or about the murder of dissident journalists, politicians, business leaders, and Putin's own military generals. Tucker whinged, “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.”

Then Navalny turned up dead at the age of 47, three years into his 19-year prison sentence.

Even the National Review and Wall Street Journal were embarrassed for Tucker Carlson. 

By the way, I added the name of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to this cartoon at the last minute while inking it, and I should have fact-checked first. I have since learned that toward the end of the interview, Carlson did in fact ask Putin to release Gershkovich "as a sign of your decency." Putin, after complaining of a lack of "decency" from the West, suggested the possibility of trading Gershkovitz for some unspecified "reciprocal steps." 

My bad. I won't argue if editors choose to omit Gershkovich from the cartoon (or to replace him with ballerina Ksenia Karelina, arrested for treason after Tucker left Russia).

On the other hand, I think it's important to keep all these names in the public mind. Editors who leave mention of Gershkovich in the cartoon can just pretend that later, Tucker noticed that he had a couple minutes left for his interview and decided to risk bringing the Gershkovich case up as long as his getaway car was warming up outside anyway.

Getting back to the part that makes this cartoon relevant to the worldwide LGBTQ+ community, Russian courts have begun convicting citizens arrested under new laws criminalizing so-called "extremist" LGBTQ activity.

Russian courts have issued the first known extremism convictions arising from the 2023 Supreme Court ruling designating the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, Human Rights Watch said today. The Supreme Court ruling, which was handed down on November 30 but became public only in mid-January 2024, indicates that many more convictions may follow.

The Supreme Court ruling also declared the rainbow flag a forbidden symbol of the “LGBT movement.” Displaying the flag is the basis for administrative penalties in at least three cases that courts have tried in recent weeks. In late January, a court in Nizhny Novgorod sentenced a woman to five days detention for wearing rainbow-colored earrings after an individual accosted her and her friend in a cafe. Also in late January, a judge in Volgograd region handed down a fine over a rainbow flag published on a social media page. In early February, a court in Saratov fined a woman for posting a rainbow flag on social media.

A police investigation of supposedly extremist LGBTQ propaganda at a "My Little Pony" fan convention in Moscow forced organizers to shut down their event this week. Police apparently were unable to find any My Little Ponies with rainbow manes, or whatever was allegedly perverting the morals of impressionable little Russians.

Russia's LGBTQ+ community is, of course, not the only target of the Putin regime's eradication campaign against whomever it slaps an "extremist" label on.

Since a court banned three organizations affiliated with political opposition leader Aleksey Navalny as “extremist” in 2021, Navalny and five of his supporters have been sentenced to prison on a range of extremism charges for legitimate activism, while dozens more have received fines and short-term jail sentences. Six members of Vesna, a democratic youth movement, have been in pretrial custody since June 2023 on various spurious charges, including extremism. Hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been jailed since the organization was banned as “extremist” in 2017.

And now, of course, the ballerina who raised funds for a charity aiding bombed-out citizens of Ukraine.

But at least Putin makes the trains run on time. And so clean besides!

Q Toon: Esprit de Corps

Sergei Markov, a surviving former adviser to Vladimir Putin and now a talking head on Russian state TV, told viewers last month that Ukraine is using something called "neuro-linguistic" programming to unify its army "through gay sex."

"They have an artificial political science fascism created by American and British political technologists. They will turn them into zombies, into cult members. I think they will force some to become homosexuals," Markov said.

"Military theorists and historians know which army in Greece was the strongest, remember? The Spartans! They were united by a homosexual brotherhood. They were all homos. These were the politics of their leadership. I think they are planning the same for Ukraine's Armed Forces."

Granted, Russian state TV is about as responsible in its fact-checking as Faux News or Noisemax in this country.

It is nevertheless alarming that the Kremlin has uncovered the West's neuro-linguistic conversion therapy program to create semper fabulous super-soldiers. Moscow may have no choice but to instigate a Brokeback Mountain military mind control program of its own.

It's either that, or dipping their soldiers in the River Styx by the ankle.

Q Toon: Mistakes Were Made

A Russian judge denied WNBA star Brittney Griner's appeal of her drug trafficking conviction last week. Arriving in the country to play on a Russian women's basketball team, Griner was arrested at a Moscow area airport in January with a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, something she claimed to have had for medical purposes and had forgotten to leave at home.

Days after her arrest, Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, incurring the condemnation of the Biden administration and the U.S.'s principal allies. Instead of expelling Griner from the country, Russia held her in jail for months until her trial, which ended with a guilty verdict and a sentence of nine years at a labor camp. 

Since then, America has tried quiet diplomacy to get Griner free. We offered to trade a Russian arms merchant for her and another jailed American. We sent Bill Richardson. We even sent Dennis Rodman.

I mean, c'mon, man!

One thing we absolutely should not be sending any more are WNBA players to beef up Russian basketball teams.

It's difficult to imagine anyone desperate enough to go, anyway.

Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.

Time to Update That Ukrainian Stamp

 

Q Toon: The Kirilling Fields

Vladimir Putin may have a hard time finding support for his brutal invasion of Ukraine elsewhere, but he has the full-throated support of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

And guess what: it's all about The Gayskis.

Giving his sermon on "Forgiveness Sunday," the last Sunday before the start of Lent, Patriarch Kirill said the war is about “which side of God humanity will be on” in the divide between supporters of gay pride events — or the Western governments that allow them — and their opponents in Russian-backed eastern Ukraine.

For eight years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in the [Russian-controlled breakaway region of] Donbas. What exists in the Donbas is a rejection, a principled rejection of the so-called values that are now being offered by those who lay claim to global domination. Today, there is a certain test for loyalty to that power, a certain pass into that “happy” world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of illusory freedom. Do you know what that test is? It’s very simple but also horrific: it’s a gay parade. The demand to hold a gay parade is in fact a test for loyalty to that powerful world, and we know that if people or countries resist this demand, they are excluded from that world and treated as alien.

It wasn't just a one-off thing; Kirill kept coming back to harp on gay pride: “Pride parades are designed to demonstrate that sin is one variation of human behavior. That's why in order to join the club of those countries, you have to have a gay pride parade,” he fulminated, as if gay pride parades were somehow the defining feature of Ukrainian culture and politics. (Hardly.)

If you're wondering why anybody should care what Patriarch Kirill says (well, you wouldn't be alone in that), he is the head of the entire Russian Orthodox Church — officially, "Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church." That doesn't make him the pope of all Eastern Orthodoxy (the "Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople" is the guy deemed the first among equals), but it does include the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. 

At least, it did until Forgiveness Sunday; his sermon understandably angered nearly every cleric and congregation in Ukraine. There has been ample objection from the patriarchs of Orthodoxy's other nationalities as well to Kirill's support of Putin's war.

Kirill has been closely allied with Vladimir Putin throughout his patriarchate, and, like Putin, is a former KGB agent. When he's not obsessed with crushing gay pride, he has accused Ukraine of trying to "exterminate" Russians in Donbas.

Why else should we care?

Not long ago, many Americans took comfort in the apparent progress society seemed to be making toward justice and equality. This was the 21st Century! Sliding back into repression and prejudice might take place in places like Russia, but It Couldn't Happen Here!

Then the November, 2016 election returns came in.

Kirill has his mirror image here in the U.S. in such men of the cloth as Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, and their choir of Trump apologists. They, along with Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and other American oligarchs, have brought right-wing extremism into the mainstream to the point where their storm troopers have actually assaulted the seat of government in order to overthrow the elected government of the United States. (You may have heard of it.)

We took a step back from the brink in 2020, but the forces of repression are definitely not giving up.

So, if fighting for progress, justice, civilization, reason, democracy and, yes, gay pride means sticking up for Ukraine, it's an easy call. Слава Україні!

Case In Point

Quod erat demonstratum.

Toon: As If There Had Been Any Doubt

The Corrupt Trump Administration hit the fan yesterday.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced his resignation. Mikes Pence and Pompeo scuttled off to Turkey to ratify Erdoǧan's ethnic cleansing of Kurdish Syria. Trump dealt himself a G-7 summit at his own $800-a-day Florida golf resort. And Acting White House Chief of Staff Slash Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney stood before the Washington press corps and admitted that the administration had demanded that the Ukrainian government dish up some dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden before it would release aid authorized by Congress.

"We do that all the time in foreign policy.... I have news for everybody. Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy.... That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. Foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration."

In arguing that there was no difference between Obama administration concern that aid to Ukraine not fatten the pocketbooks of Ukrainian officials and letting the Trump reelection campaign's opposition research squad run foreign policy, Mulvaney was admitting the quid pro quo that the Corrupt Trump Administration had up to then denied.

AWHCoSSOoM&BD Mulvaney has since been desperate to let us know that he didn't mean what he said, which hardly comes as a surprise. It's very difficult for the apparatchiks to keep their lies straight when the guy at the top can't get his lies straight, either.

Russia's October Revolution

Samizdatback Saturday returns yet again to the year 1917 and one of the pivotal events of the 20th Century. (Have you realized that the beginning and end of Daylight Savings Time this year line up neatly with the centennials of Russia's February and October revolutions?)

"Set 'Em Up Again!" by Ted Brown in Chicago Daily News, November 10, 1917

News that the Bolshevik forces of Nikolai Lenin (commonly spelled in the U.S. at the time with an extra "e" at the end) were overthrowing Alexander Kerensky's coalition government was greeted abroad with amusement by those who fancied it a momentary development and alarm from those who foresaw it as a lasting one. To the world socialist movement, it was a welcome step on the road to global revolution.

"Was die Sozialisten Wollen" by John Lenz in Vorbote, Chicago, November 14, 1917

But as a Dr. Frank Billings assured his fellow Americans after returning from a Red Cross mission to Russia in August and September, "Those who know Russia believe that socialism cannot last. Why? Because the seat of socialism is confined to a narrow part of the country, of which Petrograd is the center. That is the seat of all of the anarchy."

"Enthroned?" by John H. Cassel in New York Evening World,  November, 1917

"The Prussian Eagle Swallows the Russian Leaders" by Robt. Satterfield in Cleveland News, November, 1917

Nearer to the situation, cartoonist L. Barski sounded the alarm in the Polish satirical magazine Mucha, at the time published in Moscow due to German occupation of Warsaw. "Wolność" is Polish for "freedom."

"The Child and the Matches" by L. Barski in Mucha, Moscow, by November 25, 1917

"With His Head in the Clouds" by William Hanny in St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press, November 26, 1917

Of more immediate concern to the Entente powers was the Bolsheviks' need to consolidate their power, from which continued participation in the Great War was a great distraction. The restraints on Russia's feet in the Italian cartoon below refer to Leninists, Maximalists (a violent socialist faction), and Tsarists; the German helmet of the fellow in the rear reads "Lenin & Co." The cartoonist clearly had no clue what Lenin looked like.

"Russia Might Be Victorious, But--" by Giove "Tony" Toppi in Il 420, Florence, Italy, before November 18, 1917

Working from Moscow, Polish cartoonist L. Barski knew very well what Lenin looked like, and produced this scathing cartoon of him:

"All Russia Is At Your Knees" by L. Barski in Mucha, Moscow, November, 1917

In case you're wondering how a cartoon this critical of Vladimir Lenin could be published in Moscow, that is where the Kerensky government had retreated when the Bolsheviks took over St. Petersburg. Mucha continued publication essentially uninterrupted until World War II, although its conservative politics were presumably unwelcome once the Bolsheviks gained control of Moscow on November 12 (October 31 Old Style).

How Mucha survived, I do not know (even its Polish Wikipedia page is very cursory and makes no mention of its exile to Moscow), and I know even less about the cartoonist L. Barski. Internet sources I've found do not list him as a contributor to the magazine, and one hopes for his sake that "L. Barski" was an alias.

Kerensky still appears in charge in this Russian cartoon, occasioned by Ukrainians' attempt to take advantage of Russia's revolution to declare their independence.

"Delirious with Freedom" in Novy Satirikon, St. Petersburg/Petrograd, before November 11, 1917

The Ukrainian assembly had declared autonomy in June. By the time the country declared its independence in November, it had become a Soviet Socialist People's Republic.

"Russland" by Thomas Th. Heine in Simplicissimus, Munich, Novembeer 13, 1917

The view from Germany was that Russia would remain beholden to American moneyed interests, and indeed the U.S. had pledged considerable funds to support the Kerensky government. The signature on the next of these German cartoons is difficult to make out through the benday dots; my best guess is that it reads "W. Geróm." Whereas American cartoonists had forsaken the character of "Brother Jonathan" in favor of "Uncle Sam" a generation earlier, the name was apparently still in use in Berlin.

"Ein Sklave Ist Sie" by W. Geróm (?) in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, before November 18, 1917 

As we've noted before, all sides of the Great War promoted the propaganda that the other side of the conflict was bound to succumb to starvation. As Dr. Billings reported,

"The food question and the question of destitution is one, perhaps, that is borne out somewhat by fact. In our investigation of the food supply, we found that the grain crop of 1917, together with the surplus of other years, is quite sufficient to sustain the people until another crop shall have been grown. There were more cattle in Russia today, more sheep and more swine, than there were in 1914. There is food enough in Russia, but the fault lies in its distribution." 

It was true that Russia's railways were not up to the task of getting food from the peasant farms to the rapidly growing urban centers even before the war began. The war only exacerbated the problem; the railroads were no better at getting food (or any other supplies) to the troops, leading many soldiers to desert, defect, or mutiny.

"Der Hunger in Russland" by Wilhelm Schulz in Simplicissimus, Munich, November 27, 1917

Sympathetic to German interests, the Swiss satirical magazine Nebelspalter was encouraged by the Russian people's war-weariness. Surely enough, the Bolshevik government would sign a separate peace with the Central Powers in March.

"In the Cafe of Nations" in Nebelspalter, Zurich, before November 11, 1917

Q Toon: Anyone for Tennis?

After drawing two cartoons in a row about marriage equality, I needed to find some other topic -- any other topic -- for this week. Believe you me, it was a tough challenge.

My husband is a big tennis fan; I see enough of it when Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens are on that I know the big names in the sport: Rafael Nadal... Roger Federer... Venus, Serena and Brian Williams... Nocnoc Djokovic... Angus Podgorny...

I see that I've been getting some visits here from readers in Ukraine, so perhaps some of you are familiar with Sergiy Stakhovsky; but here in the states, I doubt there are many who know of the 30-ranked tennis player who beat Roger Federer in the second round of the Wimbledon Championships two years ago. Even fewer of you caught this story:

Professional tennis player Sergiy Stakhovsky has made some inflammatory comments about women's tennis and the lack of gay men on the men's tour. He told xsport.ua, which 9news in Australia translated:
"You see, on the ATP, we have a normal atmosphere," he said. "If there was anything, we'd know about it, because it's a very closed circle. In the backbone of the top 100 there are definitely no gays."
"On the WTA Tour, almost every other player is a lesbian. Can you imagine — half of them. So I for sure won't send my daughter to play tennis."

If you haven't clicked through to read the cartoon, stop right here, because I'm about to trample all over the punch line. Seriously. Read the cartoon before reading one more word. Okay, I assume that everyone still reading this paragraph has read the cartoon and had a good chuckle or wry smile or eye roll. I just wanted to apologize to my non-Yankee readers that I had young Miss Stakhovskova aspiring to play "soccer." I know that what she would rather play is called "football." My print clients, however, are all in the U.S. of A., so I had to use the term that we Yankees call The Beautiful Game. If I had written "football," my Yankee readers wouldn't have caught my meaning.

For that matter, my Yankee readers probably also didn't catch that I misspelled "Ukrainian."

And congratulations, by the way, to the World Champion U.S. Women's National Team!

Response to Aggression

Putin has the right to remain silent.

Q Toon: The Plane in Ukraine

Since the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 over eastern Ukraine, apparently by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian separatists, the Russian government and media and their minions have been working hard to supply alternative theories for the tragedy.

One of the more outlandish stories circulating on the Russian side is that MH 370, the Malaysian jet that disappeared somewhere in the Indian Ocean, was actually captured by the United States, and all its passengers and crew killed and drained of their blood, so that the U.S. could secretly have the plane full of corpses and explosives take off from the Netherlands with a crew that parachuted to safety while the plane continued on autopilot to be detonated over Donetsk. (Reported by Julia Ioffe of the New Republic.) This apparently springs from the claims of a separatist leader, Igor Girkin, quoted by the website Russkaya Vesna.

So far, Putin has tried to deflect blame onto the Ukrainian government, not teh gayz. But it's not such a stretch to imagine that he could cast aspersions our way if it suited his purposes. He previously claimed that the protesters who brought down the previous Ukraine regime are "gay nazis," and his government has done much over that past few years to criminalize gays.

✒

On another point in this cartoon, the fog of war made it difficult to nail down a number of what I chose to call "health experts" who died on their way to the HIV/AIDS conference in Austrailia. I hoped that "health experts" was general enough to include medical professionals, activists, and reporters who may only have intended to observe the conference. The initial number I heard reported was 100-- over a third of MH 17's passengers.

Subsequent reports used the vague term "dozens"; after I had sent the cartoon to my editors, I saw a report that said there were six. So I apologize for my part in perpetuating what is almost certainly an example of hyperbole borne of the heat of the moment.

Q Toon: From Moscow With Love

The Daily Beast reports that the Kremlin has retaliated against recent Obama administration sanctions by banning certain Americans from entering Russia. The latest list includes LGBT campaign contribution "bundlers" who have held fund raisers for President Obama:

The names of the specific bundlers remains a secret, but a focus was put on those with ties to the gay and lesbian community; it’s a reflection of the ongoing fight between the Kremlin and the White House over Russia’s laws punishing the promotion of LGBT “propaganda.”

(By the way,there was something just a little bit off about the photo of Putin at the Advocate's repost of the story. It eventually dawned on me that it was a photo of the Putin at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.)

There is no word whether Senator Lindsey Graham is still allowed to travel to Moscow.