The Would-Be Czar's Dark Prophet (Putin's Rasputin)

[Nevilledog]

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/182605


Should Vladimir Putin's barbarous war of Russian expansion move beyond the borders of Ukraine into Moldova, Finland, or even Sweden, then expect to hear the name "Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin" far more frequently. A former philosophy professor at Moscow State University, Dugin has combined his obsessions with occultism and the neo-pagan philosophies of European fascists like Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist to derive his fervently nationalistic ideology of "Eurasianism," promulgated in books with torpid titles such as Foundations of Geopolitics and The Fourth Political Theory.

With his disheveled dress and long beard, Dugin affects the appearance of an Orthodox mystic, bearing a not uncoincidental resemblance to the monk Grigori Rasputin. In the West, a philosopher like Dugin expressing admiration for both Satanism and the Waffen-SS would be dismissed as a crank; proclamations that national greatness are to be found in a "genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism" would rightly not endear you to the public at large. In the Russian Federation, however, Dugin is an adviser to high-ranking members of Vladimir Putin's United Russia party. Even more disturbing, according to Foreign Policy, his 1997 Foundations of Geopolitics has been required reading for students at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation for a generation.

Gestated in anti-communist right-wing activism during the waning days of the Soviet Union, indebted to a specifically anti-liberal and anti-Enlightenment philosophical embrace of authoritarianism, irrationalism, and hyper-nationalism, Dugin dreams of a reborn Orthodox Tsarist state surpassing the borders and spheres of influence as they existed before 1989, of a Novorossiya built not on socialist principles, but fascist ones. In Foundations of Geopolitics, which Dugin describes as a brief for Russian ambitions from "Dublin to Vladivostok," the philosopher claims that "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness," fulminating that Moscow must solve "the Ukrainian problem." If you want to know what the fascists intend to do, it's always wise to pay attention to what they literally say, otherwise you might be caught surprised. In looking for an interpretive key to understanding Putin's unhinged February 22 address on the eve of invasion, which was replete with bizarre historical revisionism, we'd all do well to familiarize ourselves with the contents of Foundations of Geopolitics. Understanding Putin's motivations, his current actions, and his future plans depends on a thorough comprehension of the sort of dangerous ideas advocated by an ideologue like Dugin, a man whom historian Timothy Snyder described in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America as having "revived or remade Nazi ideas for Russian purposes."

With pretensions to being a Russian version of the German existentialist Martin Heidegger and of serving the same political purpose as the Nazi theorist Carl Schmidt, Dugin posits that the global order is split between thalassocracies and tellurocracies, with the former being maritime nations defined by individualism and "rootless cosmopolitanism" and the latter referring to land-empires rooted in a "blood and soil" nationalism. In the current day, Dugin defines the United States, Great Britain, and the NATO alliance more broadly as a fundamentally "Atlantean" thalassocracy, while the continent spanning Russian Federation and her future allies (willing and unwilling) as a "Eurasian" tellurocracy. As a dictum for the Eurasian order as he most properly understands it, he is guided by the principle that the "nation is everything; the individual is nothing." Dugin zestfully prophesizes a coming apocalyptic conflagration between these two orders, with a new Russian Empire arising from those ashes. "In principle, Eurasia and our space, the heartland Russia," writes Dugin, "remain the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution… the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us."

*snip*

[EYESORE 9001]

1. I've heard that Steve Bannon is also an acolyte

Figures.

[Nevilledog]

2. Big time.

[UTUSN]

3. K&R