Like the typewritten pornographic novels that circulated with great secrecy from hand to hand among the adolescents in my town, the adults walked between them in the barber shops, with no less eagerness, a brochure with a cover with a bearded Jew whose a star of David shone with Luciferian rays.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This pamphlet, featuring poor but compelling inventions, exposed the plot of a conspiracy woven by the Jews to subdue 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 lavish pocket to print entire editions of the brochure in the United States, believed in this fable made up with childish skill, how could he not convince a cabinetmaker from my town? or a breeder of fighting cocks from those who gathered at the barbershop meeting.
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 is still valid today, I am talking about the 1950s. At the time, the horror of the Nazi concentration camps was well known, even in small towns like mine, but the eagerness of common people to be a part of the grave secrets the protocols revealed was much stronger.
We are simple and literate, we are all children of the myth, and it is always tempting to think in terms of a fable; in that swampy terrain, conspiracies and prophecies are at ease to explain everyday events in the world, from natural disasters to wars; no wonder that Nostradamus’ prophecies breathe new life into each beginning of the year to reveal the ever-looming unforeseen events of the future.
And the protocols of the elders of Zion, justifying the pogroms in Tsarist Russia, and the Nazi gas chambers not only lose their validity today, in the mid-twenty-first century, but also bring about a postmodern lineage.
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 with childishness that leads millions to believe that there is a world of underground chambers under our feet that can be reached through the sewers, where famous figures, hiding evil behind their glamor, hold covens to manipulate our lives at will; when in reality the manipulators are the ones who make legends that are among the best in the world of pictorial comics.
We are at the height of the age of alternative realities. The world is not what we think we see, but the one that those who steal votes and steal children, sworn enemies of the Trump creed, teach us treacherous. And that other world that we don’t see, but from which evil geniuses rule our minds, responds to the mechanisms that are natural to cheap fiction. And it is controlled 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. Once, while that novel was in full swing, I was standing in front of Delacroix’s painting, Jacob Fighting the Angel, in the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris, 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 North Dakota, for the sole purpose of seeing the place where Silas, the albino of Opus Dei, is looking for the key to the abode of the Holy Grail.
QAnon fanatics are looking for hidden clues everywhere, even ads for detergents on television screens. Sinister keys, threads of the conspiracy they feel victimized, led by Hollywood stars, whose head is the greatest villain, George Soros, Grand Master of the Deep State, worse than Lex Luthor, Superman’s nemesis.
It’s a comic strip, but with consequences. One of the QAnonianos shot the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington in 2016, in front of the scared eyes of the property’s poor owner. The aggressor was convinced by his confreres that a network of satanic rites dedicated to pedophilia ran from there, according to what the cult discovered in the text of emails containing encrypted messages. At the head of that diabolical network was none other than Hilary Clinton, then a candidate for president of the Democratic party.
QAnon members, communicating via networks, are required to take solemn oaths as “digital soldiers.” Their leaders, listed in the FBI records as potential terrorists, were visible during the attack on the Capitol in Washington in January. And these leaders, as in the comics that are truly respected, correspond to an incognito Supreme Chief who is in the White House itself, next to Trump, leaving traces through the networks found by the soldiers of the cause of purity.
That the QAnon belong to a comic is evident in their outfits, such as the Yellowstone Wolf, with his Viking horns, spear at the ready and wrapped in a buffalo skin, and that he now demands organic food in prison.
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.