Wild Vladimir Putin ‘body double’ truth exposed

Amid reports of a heart attack and emergency resuscitation, Russian President Vladmir Putin was said to be using a body double.

OPINION

Of all the many rules of politics — of which in truth there are zero — none is more effective than the Lyndon Johnson Hogf*cker Theory.

For those unfamiliar with this august political doctrine, it is an apocryphal tale relating to the early days of the great man’s career.

As the legend has it, the barnstorming Texan was running for Congress against a popular farmer and things were looking dire.

Surrounded by a despondent campaign team lamenting their impending unemployment and racking their brains about how they could possibly turn things around, Johnson had an idea.

“My opponent has hogs on his farm, doesn’t he?” he said, in quotes that I have entirely made up.

“Yes,” his staffers wearily agreed.

“Well I want you to go out and start a rumour that he f*cks his hogs.”

Aghast, the team suddenly leapt to attention: “But boss! We can’t possibly prove that!”

At which point I like to imagine Lyndon laconically reclining into his chair as he uttered the immortal words.

“I don’t want you to prove it,” he said. “I just want to hear him deny it.”

This is a lesson that once learned cannot be unlearned and once seen cannot be unseen. Once aware you can find it in almost every political campaign both foul and fair. And now it has come to the foulest of campaigns, namely the shameless Russian invasion of Ukraine.

For a brief exciting moment this week it was reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin had suffered a heart attack and his public appearances were in fact those of body doubles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was rumoured to be using a body double after a heart attack. Picture: Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP

The reports were entirely unverified and came from an outlet with a clear — and wholly understandable — anti-Putin agenda.

And thus they were re-reported by other more mainstream media organisations with a heavy dose of salt, all of whom rightly noted that these were mere unsubstantiated claims.

But the money shot came from the Kremlin itself.

Obviously unfamiliar with the workings of a free press, not to mention democracy generally, a Kremlin spokesman gallantly stepped forward to put an end to such silly misinformation once and for all.

The first two pars of the report in our nation’s most read newspaper captured it beautifully:

“Russian President Vladimir Putin is healthy and does not use body doubles for public appearances, a Kremlin spokesman has said, following claims the Russian President suffered a heart attack last weekend.

“Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that ‘everything is fine’ with Putin, 71, after the Russian Telegram channel alleged he had to be resuscitated by doctors.”

As every human being on the planet knows, “everything is fine” is not a phrase that is ever uttered if everything is, in fact, fine.

This doesn’t mean that Putin has indeed had a heart attack or that there are body doubles running around in his place.

It just means that there is a seed of doubt, and when you are trying to depose a despot then that doubt is the difference between countless millions living in fear of an oppressor’s unassailable and undying power and a tiny little light bulb that says maybe the old b*gger is on the way out.

A Kremlin spokesman stepped forward to put an end to misinformation that Vladimir Putin was using a body double. Picture: Grigory SYSOYEV / POOL / AFP

And so a bit of good old fashioned campaign journalism has become mission-critical wartime propaganda — or maybe vice versa. Chances are the war will go on as long as Putin is still alive and so the best solution is taking him out, either for real or in the public imagination.

This is not just silly stuff. In the age of the all-powerful Henry VIII, the Defender of the Faith and its ultimate betrayer, it was considered high treason not only to plot against the king but to even contemplate the prospect of his death.

In other words, benign speculation about what might happen upon a beloved ruler’s inevitable demise was enough to warrant a beheading because to even contemplate such a thing was so dangerous. The mere thought of the fall was as powerful as the fall itself.

That is what these guys are doing to Putin. It is not the assertion that he has been knocked out that matters the most but the raising of the possibility that he could be. After all the supposedly all-powerful leader has already been subjected to one abortive coup attempt. How many oligarchs and cronies will now be scratching their chins to contemplate another if they think the despot is weakening?

And the proof of this, in keeping with the Hogf*cker Theory, is in the response.

How often does a public official of a major world power have to be shuffled out to insist that their head of state is actually alive and functioning and not using a another human to physically fake his own existence?

How often does a government have to tell its people that “everything is fine”? In other words a government forced to assert to its own citizens that it is still functioning, that it is still the government. Just imagine any stable regime having to say that.

Thus the very denial that Putin is incapacitated could be enough to incapacitate him and then everything might just be fine after all.

ends