Populism & Carnival Culture: Power To The People? God Help Us.

With Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister and the algorithmic populist Five Star Movement led by Comedian Beppo Grillo, Italy did everything before any other modern populists did anything. That’s why Steve Bannon spent so much time over in Rome, studying closely what’s going on in the populist Capitol of the world to implement the recipe on Breitbart and his campaign for Donald Trump, and that’s why the Italian Giuliani da Empoli was the perfect man to shed light on political advisers, IT experts, scientists, pollsters and spin doctors behind the success of populist movements in his outstanding book The Engineers of Chaos (2020). In his book’s thrilling opening pages, da Empoli links populist movements and their raging push for emotional “truths“, their aspired inversion of the Status Quo and strive for humiliation and punishment of the (liberal) elites to the traditional carnival. He links the court jesters in the Middle Ages to the trolls in the Digital Age. It is a captivating elaboration on an idea first proposed by David Brooks of the New York Times, who refers to Trump’s election as the crowning of “a fool king… a fool puppet master“ and an expression of “carnival culture with an ocean of sadism lurking just below the surface“. But you have to understand the carnival first before you can truly understand this thought.

Most people around the globe associate Rio de Janeiro and its gorgeous Samba dancers and colorful street parades with the carnival. But there is a much more interesting carnival with a political dimension to be found in some parts of Europe, especially in the staunchly Catholic cities Rome and Cologne. I’ve never experienced the Roman carnival, but there are 5 days every year where I go into voluntary lockdown, pandemic or not, or simply flee the country, and that is during the Cologne Carnival. Officially labeled „Narrenzeit – Fool’s Season“, or the „5th Season“ as if it was some Satanic inversion, the religious celebration which is rooted in Christianity and the last days of meat (lat.:carne)-eating before fasting until Easter, has little to do with religion anymore but a lot with unhinged excess and a creepy celebration of foolery.

The carnival turns the order as we know it on its head, and what it does sounds so good on paper. It reverses relations between the sexes, between classes and hierarchies, between primitive and cultivated. In Cologne, the Carnival reaches its climax in the last week before Ash Wednesday, with “Weiberfastnacht”, the Thursday when women rule the roost, storm the town hall and cut off all men’s ties as a demonstration of reversed power hierarchies. It’s like the storming of the Capitol, only less violent and with more women and oompah march music- that carnivalesque guy in the Viking costume got the entire thing right, actually.

Albeit by now a big touristic attraction and major source of financial revenue for the city of Cologne, the carnival is not the usual panem et circenses given to the people, but “a celebration that the people give themselves”, as Goethe once stated. It is a festival at which the little people disguise themselves as rulers and rulers as little people- the carnival is indeed the perfect framework for a president who would want to choose the Village People’s “YMCA” as his hymn. Everything is allowed, everything is democratic, everyone is equal, freedom and free speech galore- and it is hell. For five days, Colognians of truly all classes and political camps ritually invoke the illusion of unity, only to wake up to a massive hangover and regrets over having dropped the thin veil of civilization for an extended moment. Because the reality more often than not looks like this: wild hordes of costumed deplorables of all social classes fucking or raping on the streets and making a bed of vomit for themselves on same. The streets are flooded with alcohol corpses. The intoxicated fornication and sexual harassment levels by both men and women rise to an all-time high during the “We, the people” celebrations: an estimated 5-10 of 100 children in Germany are “Kuckuckskinder”, meaning that the unsuspicious men fathering them are not their biological fathers, and most of these children are born 9 months after the Carnival. The anonymity of the internet already existed within the masks of the carnival, masks which encourage unleashed and demented action without the usual shame and fear of consequences.

Other comparisons to populist movements like The Five Star Movement or MAGA can be drawn. The carnival committees officially declare their own Kings and Queens, in Cologne it’s called the “Dreigestirn”. Do I have to mention that they are all-white, always, although the carnival itself is highly diverse: black facing, orientalism, and all other sorts of cultural appropriation and mockery are stubbornly displayed for everybody to see, and nobody is objecting to it. It’s also not hard to recognize the yearning for shadow-presidencies and ‘Alternatives for Germany‘ here, executed under the disguise of humor and foolishness; just like the carnival’s street parades which are highly political and claim to be satire- only they are not funny at all. Of course, the “We, the people” collaborated with the Third Reich back in the day, during those years Cologne had stunning parades were “Heil Hitler” was chanted joyfully with thousands of outstretched right arms. Today, the take on world leaders like Merkel, Putin and others is a rather liberal one by depicting them in diapers or other humiliating positions like Trump anal-raping the Statue of Liberty. It is neither intelligent nor funny, but entirely calibrated on infantile insults and toilet humor, all of which in our times is called ‘satire’, or ‘free speech’ if you are from the USA. It is obnoxious, it is primitive, it is deeply unsettling. But if you object on it because you simply can not laugh about such base and vile humour, you’re being branded as humorless fun killer, “Thousands are laughing and we are on the right side of things, what’s wrong with you?”, or to put it in a more contemporary vocabulary: “You’re a humorless snowflake“.

More about the carnival can be linked to modern populism, like the patriotism that is disguised as nostalgic and romanticized regionalism. The omnipresent carnival chant is “Kölle Alaaf“, dialect for „Köln über Alles- Cologne above all“, which is a softer version of the infamous „Germany, Germany Above All / Above all in the world“ lines from the banned stanzas of the German National Anthem. It is a carnival patriotism that despite all claims of innocence expresses itself in march music exercised by a foolish shadow-army of militants in new, glittery uniforms. Because these uniformed gangs dance and smile more and are more feminine than the regular uniformed types, we are supposed to believe that they are somehow a force of good. But uniform is uniform, and march music always carries the DNA of propaganda, violence, and inbreeding villages.

An anecdote about the current state of affairs: a dream came true this year when the carnival was cancelled for the first time during my lifetime because of the Corona pandemic. In 2020, it was different. The night before the street carnival kick-off, 16 mainly Kurdish and Turkish people were gunned down and 8 killed in a terrorist shooting spree by a Trump-loving far-right extremist in Hanau, a city about two hours from Cologne. In deep shock, and thinking that the celebrations would surely be cancelled after such a gruesome event (and also because the Corona pandemic had swept over Wuhan for already two months and had long reached Germany at that point), I walked out of my house the morning after the terror night to hordes of costumed “Je Suis Charlie” hypocrites and other asshole people, including many friends of mine. They were celebrating, laughing, dancing, and drinking for five days like nothing had happened, putting surreal terror on Turkish and Kurdish people and amplifying our trauma.

Power to the people? Fuck off, won’t you.

by Saliha Enzenauer