RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oh no, how will the women of Afghanistan cope without lectures about Marcel Duchamp’s urinal? They’ll have to find a way. For it’s been revealed that Turquoise Mountain, a batty British charity that has lectured Afghan women about the wonders of conceptual art, has had its USAID funding slashed. I hope you’re happy now, Donald Trump and Elon Musk – no more will the tyrannised women of Afghanistan enjoy the sweet relief of a plummy Brit telling them about the time Duchamp put a porcelain piss station in an art gallery.

This is the heartbreaking news that the NGO founded by King Charles and run by Rory Stewart’s wife, Shoshana, has had its USAID handout of a million dollars slashed. It was Rory who broke the story. Looking even soppier than normal in his weekly conflab with Alastair Campbell on their surreally successful podcast, The Rest Is Politics, he said USAID funding for Turquoise Mountain ‘just stopped’. It had a contract with USAID, and it ‘had another million dollars to go’, and yet mad, bad Trump pulled the plug, Rory almost sobbed.

And what urgent work does Turquoise Mountain do? It promotes craft-making in Afghanistan. You can buy its ‘hand-knotted rugs’ made by ‘talented weavers’ – a must-have for every virtuous home in the West’s turbo-smug boroughs. It does some good stuff, like restoring historic buildings, and it does some insane stuff, like the aforementioned Duchamp discourse. In a remarkable scene in Adam Curtis’s 2015 documentary, Bitter Lake, a woman from Turquoise Mountain was shown extolling the virtues of Duchamp’s inverted urinal to a roomful of incredulous Afghan women. It was super rad when Duchamp ‘put this toilet in an art gallery’, she said, as the women shook their veiled heads in disbelief.

Now, just like that, the US will no longer fund such valiant crusades to enlighten the most brutalised women on Earth about Dadaist stunts from a century ago. Rory seems agog that his wife’s charity ‘had $1million halted’. That sound you can hear is the world’s smallest violin playing for this Eton-educated son of a spook who seems to think the US taxpayer should stump up for his other half’s overseas do-gooding. The entitlement is depthless. Imagine if some factory worker in Ohio happened upon this foppish Brit who once boasted about making ‘Championship footballer money’ from his podcast and who now wrings his manicured hands over USAID’s cuts to his wife’s charity. He’d be within his rights to wonder why his earnings were being raided to fund this crap. Hell, he’d be within his rights to feel all 1776 and go looking for a musket.

The optics are awful. Stewart reportedly makes £70,000 a month from his podcast wanging on about Brexit and Trump and other things that give his class of wets and bores sleepless nights. We don’t know how much his wife makes with Turquoise Mountain, but it won’t be peanuts. And yet the taxed earnings of the workers of America part funded his wife’s NGO antics. Make it make sense! No doubt, Stewart, Campbell and their listeners will fret that Trump is leaving poor Afghans in the lurch. So let’s remind them that Campbell was Tony Blair’s right-hand man when he laid waste to Afghanistan and then Iraq – something Trump and Musk have never done. I bet there are Afghan women who’d far rather have back the sons killed in that infernal war than another fucking powerpoint on Duchamp.

Some of the overseas stuff that was funded by USAID was insane. America’s taxpayers helped to pay for a transgender opera in Colombia. They forked out $70,000 for a ‘DEI musical’ in Ireland. They gave more than a million to the advancement of DEI in Serbia’s ‘business communities’. Then there was the trans comic book in Peru, the LGBT activism in Guatemala, the promotion of electric vehicles in Vietnam. As the White House website says, for decades ‘massive sums of money’ were pumped into ‘the ridiculous… pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats’. The sobs of Stewart will be drowned out by the cries of glee from America’s workers who now know their taxes won’t be used to spread woke around the world.

For that’s what USAID’s funding frenzy really represented. It wasn’t just dumb and wasteful. It wasn’t just proof that America’s overclass who controlled the purse strings were morally a million miles away from the working men and women who filled the purse. It was also a kind of soft imperialism, the foisting of the eccentric ideologies of a self-righteous new empire on to the benighted nations of the Earth. Where the old colonialists brought the Bible and common law, the new ones brought genderfluidity and correct-think. They proselytised across borders for their new religion of DEI with as much fervour and cash as their forebears did for Christianity.

This neo-colonialism is crumbling now. The raid of USAID is liberating foreigners from America’s ideologies, and liberating America’s workers from having to fund the globalisation of their ruling class’s faddish beliefs. As to the women of Afghanistan, they have more to think about than Dadaism. Like the fact that the misogynist tyrants of the Taliban are expelling them from virtually the entirety of public life and even restricting their right to speak in public places. They need our solidarity, not lessons from a rich podcaster’s wife on how to make a mat.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy