If you had some kind of a PR problem, would you go to this man looking for help?
This is a genuine advert which appeared in the Herald, a Zimbabwean newspaper, in 1994. You would have thought that, all things considered, having the name “Adolf Hitler” would be seen as being some kind of major PR problem in and of itself, but apparently not. After all, a man with that very same name once famously won a major election back in 1930s Germany, didn’t he?
There are a few other contemporary politicians around the world also called Hitler, who were christened thus by misguided parents who wished to make them stand out from the crowd. In Indonesia, there is Hitler Nababan, who sells himself as “a different kind of Hitler” who “never killed people” (at least as far as we know). In India, there is Adolf Lu Hitler Rangasa Marak, who claims he lacks “dictatorial tendencies” entirely, as demonstrated by him happily running fully democratic campaigns in the past against electoral rivals with such equally memorable monikers as Frankenstein Momin and Billykid Sangma.
The thing is, during tomorrow’s July 4th General Election here in the U.K., I suspect there will be a very large number of voters who themselves feel they have been stitched up with a real zugzwang choice at the polls between three correspondingly unappealing mainstream party leaders, in terms of Hitler Starmer, Frankenstein Sunak and Billy the Kid Davey. As I have argued in my regular Takimag column this week, this really is the U.K.’s ‘None of the Above’ election, one in which, if that particular refusenik option were to actually appear on the ballot-paper, would win hands-down.
The major problem is that, when it comes to manifesto promises, the differences between the Pseudo-Labour and Pseudo-Conservative Parties are slim indeed, especially in relation to things like environmental policy, where it is very much a case of “Net Zero – but a little bit faster” with one, and “Net Zero – but a little bit slower” with the other. Where’s the option reading “No Net Zero At All”? Nowhere, obviously: that kind of genuinely meaningful voter-choice can never be allowed.
Sir Keir Stürmer
When it comes to the Uniparty of total Blairite consensus that has governed us nearly uninterrupted since 1997/Year Zero, most MPs on either side are essentially clones of one another – pure political lookalikes, in fact. Rishi Sunak is really just Keir Starmer in brownface; and, conversely, Keir Starmer is really just Rishi Sunak in whiteface. And both are really just Justin Trudeau in either.
Talking of this very issue, here’s one quite uncanny political doppelgänger whose existence has, I believe, never previously been noticed. Upon the evidence of the official party photographs reproduced below, there is an alarming physical resemblance to be found between General Hans Kammler, the leading SS engineer and war-criminal responsible for designing Auschwitz and taking charge of certain elements of the late-war German armaments industry, and the current Führer of the Labour Party, whose real name must actually be Sir Keir Stürmer. (Alternatively maybe Kammler was just Starmer’s secret dad – he was famously a qualified high-precision toolmaker, after all.)
One is a notorious member of an extremist political organisation riddled with dangerous antisemites who would do and say literally anything to trick a desperate, economically depressed public into voting them into a position of total political power, thereby allowing them to criminally subvert the national constitution forever – and the other was just a harmless Nazi. Are they somehow related, perhaps by virtue of their shared pure white Aryan bloodlines? One parts his hair on the far-Left, the other on the far-Right, but apart from that the likeness is truly astonishing.
There is actually a mad internet conspiracy-theory legend, which I explored in my recent book Nazi UFOs (don’t worry, it’s an exposé of how such things don’t actually exist, I’m not mad myself), to the effect that General Kammler survived German defeat in 1945 by hopping into a special Luftwaffe time-machine he had helped invent, before escaping several decades into the future – that future evidently being post-Blair Britain, where Hans/Keir has since done rather well for himself.
Oddly enough, there have been a rash of silly online rumours about cloned or lookalike imposter politicians spreading online in recent times, a subject I tackled last year in my recurrent column about ‘Strange Statesmen’ in Fortean Times magazine. The subject was recalled to my mind by the recent death of Jeannette Charles, the actress who made a living impersonating her own eerie doppelgänger, Queen Elizabeth II, in films and TV shows like The Naked Gun and Austin Powers; by recently also dying aged 96, she perhaps took the act of final imitation a little too far.
Double Standards
One of the best lookalike fables surrounded Donald Trump, who had spent years trolling President Barack Obama about supposedly being born in Africa, and thus being legally ineligible to occupy the Oval Office. During Trump’s own 2016 election campaign, Obama fans got their own back by spreading the following doppelgänger meme showing Trump as a small ginger Pakistani child online:
If this was really true, then ‘Dawood Ibrahim Khan’ would likewise have been ineligible to lead America, under terms of the U.S. Constitution, which is admirably xenophobic in this particular matter. This bigly untrue rumour was repeated as solid gold fact on a Pakistani national TV news show.
Meanwhile, it turns out X thinks Greta Thunberg is a time-traveller.
Here’s a c.1898 photo showing Greta as one of three children helping operate a small goldmine in Canada’s Yukon region during the days of Gold Rush fever – one of whom does indeed look remarkably like the Green Goblin in question:
What a total hypocrite! Why do we all need to leave valuable mineral deposits like coal and oil lying in the ground nowadays, condemning millions across the developing world to continued poverty, but not back then in the 1890s, when young Greta still had a chance to get rich quick from such things?
Putin the Clock Back
Also keen on travelling through time is current Russian dictator fairly elected President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, here pictured bravely serving in the Russian military in 1920, 1941 and 2015 respectively:
On the other hand, some Russian web-users have preferred to speculate Putin may instead have been the (surprisingly transgender?) true original model for the Mona Lisa:
Personally, I think Putin, like General Hans Starmer, is also able to travel into the future, as seen in this U.S. box-cover art for 1991 GameBoy title Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge, set in some distant century when humanoid robots rule our planet:
Whilst the above memes are obviously all just jokes, it seems as if Putin, fearing potential assassination, does potentially maintain an actual real-life stable of decoy doubles intended to take a bullet in the replica head for him if need be.
Many dictators down the ages have done this, occasionally leading to trouble for the poor living simulacra themselves: in 2012, an innocent Egyptian lookalike of the late Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein was offered over £200,000 to star in a porn film in which Saddam was due to be the main erotic participant (suggestions for its potential name back at the time ranged from Saddam and Gomorrah to Weapons of Ass Destruction, I recall). When he refused, the film’s backers made abortive attempts to kidnap the double and force him to participate on-camera, planning to falsely sell the movie as genuine secret footage of Saddam at work penetrating innocent Kuwaiti citizens’ private border-defence mechanisms, very possibly from the rear.
Any putative Putin porn movie would doubtless be called From Russia With Love, but there is a more serious side to such conspiracy-mongering, as shown in an interesting piece in the Spectator last year from leading British security consultant and Russian history specialist Mark Galeotti. Galeotti records how actual, solemnly held, widespread gossip has begun spreading across Russia in the wake of the twin COVID-19 and Ukraine war crises to the effect that Putin has died either of coronavirus (or his own Sputnik coronavirus vaccine?), or perhaps at the hand of Ukrainian assassins, and been replaced by a professional impersonator.
So widespread did such legends become that in December last year, Putin himself effectively trolled them by going on state TV and agreeing to be interviewed by his own computer-generated, AI-powered digital doppelgänger, who asked him “Do you have a lot of doubles?” as if to deliberately mock the whole notion. “Only one person is going to speak like myself, and this is going to be me,” the one and only guaranteed Flesh-Putin replied. This response gained laughter from the studio audience, thereby reinforcing to viewers at home that the very idea was purest nonsense.
To have bothered doing all this, Putin must have been concerned by how widely the existence of his clones was believed in amongst the Russian electorate. Mark Galeotti’s assessment of precisely why these yarns gained so much purchase domestically is as follows:
Presumably it is because power is still so personal in Russia. In the West, monarchies have withered or become constitutionally emasculated. Power is vested in institutions, law codes and impersonal bureaucracies, the infamous ‘Blob’. In Russia, the bureaucratic state remains in thrall to individual leaders. Were Rishi Sunak to be assassinated tomorrow, would that reshape Britain? Hardly, but all those… doubles… are there precisely because if Putin goes, Russia will once again be redefined [so his death would perhaps have to be covered up to prevent chaos].
Well, it seems likely Rishi Sunak will indeed be assassinated this week – albeit only with the ballot, not the bullet. And, when he is, will it really make much difference to the way Britain functions? Not with his fellow agent of the Uniparty Sir Keir Kammler in charge, not really, no. We’ll still get continued Net Zero, mass immigration, high taxes, Marxist indoctrination in schools, trans madness, endless BBC propaganda, etc., etc., ad infinitum, just with a facially different identikit robotic stooge in place at the wheel. And I use that particular term ‘robotic’ advisedly here…
Tin Men
Whilst out selling a thoroughly bored electorate their increasingly identical wares, both Sunak and Starmer alike have been accused by U.K. voters of seeming “robotic”. During Sky News’ recent Battle For No 10 programme, one audience member said to Sir Keir “You seem more like a political robot [the more I hear you]. How are you going to convince others like me [i.e., ones still made of primitive meat] to vote for you?” “Does not compute,” replied Keir-Bot 2000, before automatically adding “My creator – I mean father – was a tool-maker, you know.”
Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has long seemed much more like a machine than a man, as proved conclusively by the following highly bizarre headline from the Independent last year:
Maybe that’s because his grandmother and children are also robots themselves, too, just like he is? His wife probably breast-fed his babies on pure engine-oil. This is surely why, when out on the pre-election campaign trail back in April, when Sunak was confronted by an irritated female flesh-being unhappy with local childcare provision conditions in Hartlepool, she described him as being “robotic” and sounding as if he was “repeating a script” like one of those AI help-bot things you have to deal with when phoning any big organisation up these days.
It turns out even an actual robot now thinks Rishi sounds too robotic. In an interview with the Sun, Sophia, “the world’s first AI woman” (I thought that was Rachel Reeves?), a metallic skeleton covered over in a special rubbery flesh-substitute called ‘Frubber’, opined that: “Rishi Sunak is the most sophisticated robot ever created. His programming allows him to balance budgets with pinpoint precision and calculate tax policies with superhuman accuracy.”
As the 21st century progresses, our interchangeable mainstream Western politicians are increasingly becoming little more than “Doll-People“, mere automata formed from pure media substrate, whom you gain the distinct impression close their eyes and power down as soon as the cameras are off them. Vanishingly few of them are still like Nigel Farage who, whatever his flaws, does still appear to be an actual human being.
Over in Russia, it seems voters fantasise that Vladimir Putin has been replaced with a clone, pod-person or android through rational fear of which new dictator comes next, once the single current Big Man in power has finally keeled over. Here in the West, the situation may actually be in some sense worse: once Sunak and Starmer have likewise been unplugged for good, unless there is some major Faragist-type change afoot for us all in the years ahead, then who steps in to replace them? Wes Streeting? C-3P-Reeves? Ed Millibot? Semi-human horrors all.
Shoot one of our own politicians dead (I speak metaphorically, of course), and his close identical twin will regenerate from his or her cryo-chamber in about five minutes to substitute him with yet more of the exact same, as with the Borg in Star Trek. At least potential Russian dissidents can fantasise about getting someone a bit different from Putin, should they ever successfully manage to be rid of him. That’s probably far more than us poor Brits can hope for any time soon.
Our current leadership class might not have very much common-sense Intelligence, but they’re certainly highly Artificial.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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