Why does Putin have superfans among the US right wing?
Say what you like about Vladimir Putin; he may be slaughtering innocent Ukrainians, but, on the plus side, he has never once called the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson a racist. Last Tuesday, Carlson, who is reportedly paid $10m (£7.5m) a year for his piercing insights and analysis, told Americans that they had been brainwashed into thinking Putin was a baddie. Think critically, Carlson instructed his depressingly large audience. Ask yourself this, he posited: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? … Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions – and the answer to all of them is no.” To be clear: these are inane questions and the answer to all of them is: “Turn off Fox News before the rest of your brain turns to mush.”
Carlson, it should be said, has significantly toned down the pro-Putin rhetoric in the past few days. What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that Carlson is far from the only person on the US right to have a soft spot for old Vlad. While Donald Trump has called the Russian attack on Ukraine “appalling”, he has also called Putin’s actions “genius”, “savvy” and “smart”.
While I haven’t called up every white nationalist group in the US and Europe for comment, it is fair to say the Russian premier has a fervent fanbase among the far right in the west. Why is this? They love what he has done with Russia. They love the way he has dismantled women’s rights. They love his attacks on gay and transgender people. They love his dismissal of western liberalism. Their values align perfectly.
There is also a whiff of antisemitism
in the right’s support for Putin. On Sunday, for example, Wendy Rogers, a Republican state senator in Arizona, tweeted about the Ukrainian president: “[Volodymyr] Zelensky is a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons.” “Globalist” and “Soros” are well-established dog whistles, of course. (Zelenskiy is Jewish.)
Rogers’ comments on Zelenskiy came shortly after she attended a white nationalist convention in Florida, where she praised Nick Fuentes, its Holocaust-revisionist organiser, and proposed hanging “traitors” from “a newly built set of gallows”. A very normal thing for a politician to say! Fuentes, meanwhile, urged the crowd to applaud Russia and had them chanting: “Putin! Putin!”
It is not just the racism, homophobia and misogyny that the right love about Putin: it is also his muscle. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January found that 62% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents reckon Putin is a “stronger leader” than Joe Biden; that number rises to 71% among those who name Fox News as their primary source of cable news. Putin’s bare-chested photoshoots have done their job, eh?
While I have absolutely nothing good to say about Putin (or his biceps), we should condemn him without lapsing into simplistic narratives of good versus evil. The right may be full of unthinking Putin fanboys, but there are also a number of liberals who seem to think that Putin is uniquely bad. They are quick to rationalise invasions and occupations when a western country or a western ally is the aggressor. Many liberals care deeply about Ukrainians, as we all should, but aren’t quite so bothered about Yemenis, Syrians or Palestinians. The west should condemn Putin – but it could also do with thinking more deeply about its own actions.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
be absorbed into the culture of the City and another to be regarded as an international model of its kind.” For some, this is a battle still to be won.
The idea for the Barbican was driven by the need to save the Corporation of London from oblivion after the second world war had devastated the residential population of the Square Mile. By 1951, Cripplegate had a population of just 48 – a century earlier, it had been home to 14,000. Without residents and voters, the City faced losing its centuries-old powers and being absorbed into the wider London County Council.
Imagined as a “city within a city”, the Barbican was concocted to lure well-heeled middle-class professionals into the centre, providing a utopian community for 4,000 residents, with unparalleled cultural facilities on tap, along with schools, a church, shops and pubs, all arranged around an artificial lake. The raw concrete look of the estate has led many to believe it was originally built as social housing, but it was nothing of the sort. The flats were designed to be high density and high value, to help pay for the vast cultural podium on which they stood. The arts centre – which trebled in size during the design process – would be buried, so as not to obstruct the view from the luxury apartments.
An essay in the book by Elain Harwood, postwar specialist at Historic England, unpicks the evolution of the scheme, by the young architecture firm Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. “We strongly dislike the Garden City tradition,” the architects declared, “with its low density, monotony and waste of good country, road, kerbs, borders and paths in endless strips everywhere.” Instead, they wanted to make a “truly urban” place, inspired by their visit to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. Harwood notes how they also drew on historical references, from the stark medieval towers of San Gimignano in Italy to the repeated barrel-arched roofs of the churches on the Greek island of Mykonos. The brick used at the lowest levels was a nod to the warehouse basements that had stood there until hit by Luftwaffe bombs.
The result was a beguiling cocktail – part bastion, part brutalist hanging gardens of Babylon – and it stood as the ultimate expression of the modern movement’s search for a monument. As the Architects’ Journal put it: “The Barbican, now it is completed, has all the aspects – gigantisms, singleness of purpose – of that bygone age when architects had the confidence (or naivety) to believe that monumentality had a place in architecture – and that part of their job was the imposition of discipline and order on the users of the buildings.”
By the time it was finally finished in the 1980s, such modernist dogma was anathema. Massively delayed and hugely over budget, the Barbican was seen by many as a concrete albatross around the City’s neck. In one heated, high-level debate, a city official argued that the money would have been better spent on prisons. The Aberdeen Press and Journal’s review was typical of the reaction to the opening in 1982: “From the outside, the much-publicised Barbican Centre hardly looks like £152m worth” – a figure that would be almost £600m in today’s money.
Once inside, however, the reviewer was won over. “The overpowering imagination, skill and effort which has gone into the 25-year project becomes apparent immediately. It is engrained in the pine-clad walls, the polished teak flooring, the subtle lighting, the overall design. In fact, the Barbican has been described as ‘a haven of cultural perfection in the midst of the City of London.’”
Christoph Bon, the Swiss architect of the trio, had been adamant that fixtures and fittings in the public areas should be as luxurious as possible. As a result, visitors glide over endgrain wood-block flooring, run their fingers along polished brass handrails and lounge inside the Peruvian walnut cocoon of the theatre – materials all chosen to contrast with the artfully rugged surface of the pick-hammered concrete walls. There were innovations at every turn, like the fact that each row of theatre seating had its very own door – a boon for latecomers trying to sneak to their seats.
And latecomers did not always have themselves to blame. The complexity of incorporating so many venues on so many levels across a 40-acre site has always made the place an infuriating labyrinth for the uninitiated, with successive decades of signage and way-finding strategies deployed in an attempt to ease the maze-like passageways. Even before the arts centre opened, it had garnered a reputation as impossibly difficult to navigate. One official advertising poster even quipped: “If Helen Mirren can find the new Barbican Centre before it opens in March, she will be appearing there in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
While not shying away from the Barbican’s more dysfunctional sides, the book contains some eye-opening recollections from those who have had to endure its back-of-house areas, including actor Fiona Shaw, who arrived when the Royal Shakespeare Company’s tenure here was only two seasons old. “Its early reputation among the RSC actors was as a very luxurious but terrifying building,” she writes, describing how the stage door was “hidden like an afterthought”, and how actors spent their time “lost on the staircases and the inhospitable corridors”, forced to rehearse in underground rooms “like canaries in a mine”.
Some of these enduring idiosyncrasies are part of the reason why the Barbican recently launched a £150m architectural competition, to seek “a new vision for a global icon”. Fans of the place have good reason to be wary. There have been many past attempts to tame the beast, most of which have come a cropper. In the early 1990s, Theo Crosby of Pentagram was charged with creating a new look for the centre, which introduced pastel colours and gilded fibreglass statues in a bizarre whimsical pastiche – derided as “feeble tinkering” by Geoffrey Powell, one of the original trio.
Gillian Darley’s review in the Observer was damning: “Crosby’s peculiar attempts to jolly up the Barbican suggest a damp squib of a student project rather than a scheme drawn up by an international design group.” Another rebranding project in 2000 prompted the Guardian to note: “The world’s most bewildering arts centre is solving the problem of its notorious signs once and for all – by getting rid of most of them.”
But this latest venture rings louder alarm bells still. While admirably aiming to improve the accessibility and sustainability of the complex, the brief also talks of “a huge opportunity to bring currently under-utilised spaces to life … in support of our creative and commercial ambitions”. It sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for turning it into a mall. The shortlist of architects charged with coming up with “bold” and “radical” solutions includes David Adjaye, Bjarke Ingels and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a starry cast known neither for their subtlety nor their sensitive restorations of postwar buildings.
The Barbican may be a great hulking brute, but it is a carefully composed, grade II-listed one. It demands delicate intervention with a lightness of touch – not more shops squeezed into every available cranny.