Like the typewritten pornographic novels that circulated from hand to hand with grave secrecy among the adolescents in my town, the adults passed among them in the barbershops, with no less eagerness, a brochure whose cover featured a bearded Jew whose On the back shone, with Luciferian gleams, a Star of David.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This pamphlet, of poor but convincing inventions, exposed the plot of a conspiracy woven by the Jews to subjugate the world. No one, neither in a place as far from the centers of power as Masatepe, nor in any other place on earth, would escape those slimy tentacles; And if even the tycoon Henry Ford, who had paid out of his abundant pocket for the printing of entire editions of the brochure in the United States, believed in this fable concocted with childish skill, how could he not convince a cabinetmaker from my town, or a breeder of fighting cocks of those that congregated in the gathering of the barber shops.
Hitler also believed, or pretended to believe, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which served as an ideological pretext for the extermination of millions of Jews. When I came across that brochure, which still does not lose its validity today, I am talking about the fifties of the last century. At that time the horror of the Nazi concentration camps was already more than known, even in small towns like mine, but the eagerness of ordinary people to be part of the serious secrets that the protocols revealed was much stronger.
Simple and literate, we are all children of myth, and it is always tempting to think in terms of a fable; In that swampy terrain, conspiracy and prophecy are at ease to explain the daily occurrences of the world, from natural catastrophes to wars; no wonder the Prophecies of Nostradamus revive each beginning of the year to reveal the ever-threatening contingencies of the future.
And the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which justified the pogroms in tsarist Russia, and the Nazi gas chambers, not only do not lose their validity today, in the middle of the twenty-first century, but also engender postmodern descent.
All the fables invented by the militants of the QAnon sect of the far right in the United States, belong to the same lineage fed in childishness that leads millions to believe that under our feet there is a world of underground chambers that can be reached through the sewers, where famous figures, who hide evil behind their glamor, hold covens to manipulate our lives at will; when in reality the manipulators are the ones who make those legends that belong to the best of the worlds of comics drawn in pictures.
We are at the height of the era of alternate realities. The world is not the one we think we see, but the one that those who steal votes and steal children, sworn enemies of the Trump creed, treacherously teach us. And that other world that we do not see, but from which evil geniuses control our minds, responds to the mechanisms that are natural to cheap fiction. And it is governed by secret keys, as in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
Not that I want to blame Dan Brown for QAnon’s existence, but the credibility of a dedicated reader of his is the same. On one occasion, when that novel was in full swing, I was standing in the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris in front of Delacroix’s painting, Jacob Fighting the Angel, when the voice of the guide surrounded by a group of tourists took me away from my contemplation: they had traveled there, from Ohio or from North Dakota, with the sole purpose of seeing the place where Silas, the albino of Opus Dei, searches for the key to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
QAnon fanatics look for hidden clues in everything, even detergent ads on television screens. Sinister keys, threads of the conspiracy of which they feel victims, directed by Hollywood stars, and whose head is the greatest villain, George Soros, Grand Master of the Deep State, worse than Lex Luthor, Superman’s arch-enemy.
It is a comic cartoon, but with consequences. One of the QAnonianos shot into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington in 2016, before the scared eyes of the poor owner of the premises. The aggressor had been convinced by his confreres that a network of satanic rites dedicated to pedophilia was running from there, according to what the sect discovered in the text of emails that contained coded messages. At the head of that diabolical network was none other than Hilary Clinton, then a candidate for the presidency for the Democratic party.
QAnon members, who communicate through networks, must take a solemn oath as “digital soldiers”. Listed in FBI records as potential terrorists, their leaders were visible in the assault on the Capitol in Washington this January. And these ringleaders, as in the comics that are truly respected, answer to an incognito Supreme Chief who is inside the White House itself, next to Trump, and who leaves traces through the networks to be found by the soldiers of the cause of racial purity.
That the QAnon belong to a comic strip can be seen by their outfits, such as the Yellowstone Wolf, with its Viking horns, spear at the ready and wrapped in a bison skin, and that now in prison he is demanding organic food.
And of course the QAnon believe in flying saucers, and aliens, of course developed intergalactic civilizations are ruled by white supremacists. It would be more.
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