The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:54 pm

This thread is called The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies. If you want to discuss that, stay here.

If you want to discuss copypasta, may I respectfully suggest Rory's thread Rhetoric and the art of Collaborative Discussion?

Thank you for your consideration!
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:58 pm

edit: my post crossed with srp's.

You see what I'm up against, 82.(What the entire board is up against.)

Anyway. I see no good reason why any poster should write the incredible post AD just wrote there. None. This is a Discussion Board, is it not?. He refuses to discuss anything with anyone at any time. As srp pointed out: at least 20 posts in a row, just in this thread alone. Any attempt to discuss it just gets ignored completely by AD and then buried in even more copypasta. That is not discussion, that is a propaganda campaign (on umpteen fronts simultaneously).

General Discussion

Data Dump

^^Jeff and justdrew thought that distinction important, and worked hard to make it. Were they wrong? (Not a rhetorical question.)

Goodnight.

PS Please note that someone else keeps jerking my chain in this thread, desperate to provoke a truly childish brawl; but please note also that I refused to respond to those repeated jerks. Not every jerk requires, or even deserves, a response.
Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Fri Mar 09, 2018 10:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby MacCruiskeen » Fri Mar 09, 2018 10:03 pm

streeb » Fri Mar 09, 2018 8:45 pm wrote:
What? Really? :shock: That is one of the creepiest things anyone has ever written on this Discussion Board, and christ knows that's saying something. A complete refusal to communicate with anyone here, except with the mods, in private, and at a time and place of your own choosing? WTF?


Actually Mac is bang on. What is it, now? A decade of evasiveness followed by a declaration of more evasiveness? If AD's copypasta was left to speak for itself, and it is, it speaks very poorly of him/her/them. Gross. Transparent. Absolute rubbish.


Thanks, streeb. Exactly. It's truly incredible stuff.

Goodnight now, really. It's late here.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby SonicG » Fri Mar 09, 2018 10:06 pm

The most AD has opened up about personal beliefs has been to express situationist and pro-situ sympathy, but they (we) were/are generally highly critical of both left and right...
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Cordelia » Sat Mar 10, 2018 10:28 am

MacCruiskeen » Fri Mar 09, 2018 11:02 pm wrote:
Well, Cordelia, I for one, would appreciate it if you would desist (at long last) from this repeated performance of regal superiority.
It is very easy for a bet-hedging spectator to observe a vehement disagreement and act all superior to it, especially from a safe distance and in the plush comfort of the Royal Box. So I would appreciate if you didn't call me childish every time I object to American Dream's warmongering propaganda and his incessant and unparalleled abuse of this board, two matters about which you are careful to express no opinion whatsoever.

Thank you, ma'am.


I confess but isn't this the

Image?


Emphases added, Cordelia. I await your condemnation of that particular "childish brawl" (sic), though I have a strong suspicion I'll have to wait forever.


You're right; but I didn't know I'd been assigned that task.

Upon reflection, childish is disparaging to children; amend to adultish.

(Sorry, :backtotopic: ?)
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 12, 2018 3:49 pm

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby 0_0 » Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:12 pm



And off course, on the previous page of this very thread
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 12, 2018 4:13 pm

The link is updated and the previous posting of the article here- as linked to in my last post- is incomplete and thus requires an active link for full review.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Mar 20, 2018 12:51 pm

Fact-checking the SPLC on Max Blumenthal, Part 1


The most important anti-imperialist hub on Sputnik... is hosted by Brian Becker... The leader of the Party for Socialism and Liberation [PSL], Becker regularly hosts Fellows of the American University in Moscow on his Sputnik podcast, “Loud & Clear.

“Loud & Clear”’s [trans-national far-right figure, Edward] Lozansky-affiliated guests include far-right PR man Jim Jatras, Mark Sleboda of the Dugin-founded Center for Conservative Studies, the Ron Paul Institute’s Daniel McAdams and Alexander Mercouris of the syncretic conspiracist site, The Duran.

The program also provides a platform to a variety of explicitly far-right guests, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, antisemite Alberto Garcia Watson, alt-right figure Cassandra Fairbanks and militia movement leader Larry Pratt. [Note: the same point about Becker was made in the "Ravings of a Radical Vagabond" post I've linked to before, which covered in exhaustive detail some of the territory Reid Ross dips into here - go to the section entitled "The Strange Case Of Sputnik Radio". This blogpost also exhaustively details Becker's far right links. -B.]

Aside from marginal guests, Loud & Clear can bring on some heavy hitters. During his two appearances on “Loud & Clear” in late 2017, bestselling author Max Blumenthal called the red-brown radio show “the finest public affairs programming” and declared, “I am increasingly turning to RT America for sanity.”


More at: http://brockley.blogspot.com/2018/03/fa ... nthal.html
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 23, 2018 7:35 pm

This dude is a real creep!

Image

The Far-Right Book Every Russian General Reads

Alexander Dugin is a far-right Russian theorist who might be dismissed as a crackpot if his ideas for a fascist empire weren’t required reading for Russia’s military high command.

ALAN GILBERT
02.26.18 5:13 AM ET


In his native Russia, he is a prominent author and activist famous for promoting fascism at home and advocating for a vast Eurasian empire—a dark mirror of American “Globalism.”

Outside of Russia, very few people have heard of Alexander Dugin, the 56-year-old political philosopher and analyst whose views are so extreme that he has been denied entry into the United States—not too surprising, perhaps, since in this country he is worshipped by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke, and others on the violent far right.

Fascist or not, Dugin’s theories are influential, at least in Russia. In 1999, he became special adviser to then-Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev. More important, his seminal work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, in which he promotes the idea of a vast Eurasian empire that looks east, not west, is required reading at the General Staff Academy for every Russian military officer above the rank of colonel.

But in the West, Dugin’s book is dismissed as the work of a crank, when it is acknowledged at all. Only a 2004 article from John Dunlop of the Hoover Institution underlined this book’s influence. Dunlop rightly argues that the brand of fascism promoted by Dugin enabled “nationalist” strategists to reassert, with some precision, Russia’s enlarged boundaries. Yet Dunlop, too, dismisses Foundations as “insane and repellent,” as does a July 2016 article in Foreign Policy by Charles Clover. Arrogantly but also complacently, neither author mentions, let alone takes seriously, Russia’s subversion of U.S. democracy.

The most noteworthy thing about Dugin’s book, though, especially given that it roughly blueprints both Russia’s recent aggression toward its neighbors and its destabilization campaign in this country, is that until very recently The Foundations of Geopolitics was never translated into English, not even in a version sponsored by the CIA.

In 2017, a bollixed translation was published, but the translation was apparently done by a computer, without even a named author. This, too, is, unsurprising: During the Cold War, Marx and Lenin were translated by people commissioned by Russians, but few American scholars or intelligence people had any incentive to read them. In regard to intellectual work by “enemies,” ignorance is often bliss.

Foundations engages with obscure strains in 20th-century fascism, relying heavily, for example, on theorist Julius Evola, who advised Mussolini and the SS and promoted extreme misogyny as well as racism for use by the Russian elite. All sex for Evola is rape and a woman outside the home “a monkey.” He and Dugin both sneer that modern men—not to mention gays, lesbians, and transsexuals—are “feminized.” In the Evola-Dugin playbook, sexual and racist anxieties lie at the root of today’s Russian fascism. And with but slight qualification, one can see Rob Porter, Steve Bannon (an Evola fan), Roy Moore, and Donald Trump as decadent facsimiles.

Nevertheless, it seems foolish not to read Foundations carefully, but to do that we need a decent translation. To that end, I encouraged Grant Fellows, a student of Russian history and politics and my research assistant, to do a translation. His versions of important passages appears below.

Dugin’s words prefigure the testimony before Congress of the National Intelligence and CIA directors as recently as February 13: “We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic spokespeople, and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States,” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats told Congress. And going forward, CIA director Mike Pompeo added, “We have seen Russian activities and intentions to have an impact on the next election cycle.”

The chief aim of Foundations is to revive Evola’s fascist idea of traditionalism, which calls for the eradication of any trace of modern, polyethnic, egalitarian, feminist, and democratic cultures—“American globalism”—in favor of a vast, Eurasian, authoritarian empire of racially pure regimes in which women are confined to the home and breeding. That empire would unite regimes across Europe and extend to the United States and Latin America.

Beginning in the late 19th century, geopolitics has been the study—in the United States, Germany, and now Russia—of how to forge vast empires. In 1997, during an imperial low in 1997 for then collapsed Russia, Dugin first urged the creation of “Eurasian” influence. He thought of this largely as a matter of covert operations and information wars rather than, as in Crimea, naked Russian aggression. Urging murderous conquest of Donetsk, however, Dugin egged on the invaders to “kill, kill, and kill!” Such bloodthirstiness was enough to put Dugin temporarily out of favor even with Putin.

Dugin and Putin are not always on the same page. For instance, Putin has tried twice to join NATO to cooperate in Europe and has thus not always been set on fascist expansion. Nonetheless, in revenge for a disintegrated Russian sphere of influence, Dugin speaks for a wide elite audience, often including Putin, about breaking the power of “soulless,” “cosmopolitan” American “Globalism.”

Twenty years ago, Dugin wrote presciently about creating a Trump-like presidency: “At the global level, for the construction of a planetary New Empire the chief ‘scapegoat’ will namely be the USA—the undermining of whose power which (up to the complete destruction of its geopolitical constructs) will be realized systematically and uncompromisingly by the participants of the New Empire. The Eurasian Project presupposes in this its relationship of Eurasian expansion in South and Central America to remove its output from under the control of the North (here, the Hispanic factor could be used as a traditional alternative to the Anglo-Saxon) and also to provoke every kind of destabilization and separatism within the borders of the USA (it might be possible to lean on the political forces of the African-American racists). The ancient Roman formula of ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ will become the absolute motto of the Eurasian Empire, because it itself will absorb the essence of all geopolitical planetary strategy awakening to its continental mission.” (Chapter 4 “The Re-division of the World,” p. 248)

“Dugin’s 'Foundations' prefigures the 2016 covert information or signals assault to destabilize the U.S. electoral process.”

Like many in Russia’s military elite, Dugin advocates a “White” Russian Orthodox empire against Chechen rebels and other Muslims. He also aims to sow division in the United States, offering as a depraved “White” racist, an ugly projection: “lean on the political forces of the African American racists,” by which he presumably means Black Lives Matter, which is in fact a nonviolent movement protesting police murders of innocents.

Stirring racist violence among his followers is the most profound form of “destabilization,” though Dugin’s advocacy of sowing “chaos and disruption” also applies to Trump’s threat in November 2016 to denounce a “rigged” election, as well as Trump’s obsequious embrace of Putin in Vietnam in November 2017, excoriating “hack leaders” of the CIA and FBI.

In Foundations, Dugin also reveres the preachments of obscure English geopolitician Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), who argued that Russia is the heartland of the world. Dugin adds that in Russia’s “relations from the Heartland position, it is clearly necessary to oppose actively the USA’s Atlanticist geopolitics at every level, in all regions of the Earth, striving to unleash maximum demoralization, deception, and in the final account, the defeat of the enemy.” (Chapter 5 “The West’s Threat,” pp. 366-67)

Last October’s news about Russian operations on Facebook reaching 126 million viewers and organizing rallies in Utah and Texas and employing sometimes unwitting, paid American agents during the 2016 presidential election are all illustrations of Dugin’s 1997 tactic.

“It is generally important,” Dugin wrote, “to introduce geopolitical chaos within the American daily experience by encouraging all manner of separatism, ethnic diversity, social and racial conflict, actively supporting every extremist dissident movement, racist sectarian groups, and destabilizing the political processes within America.” [ch.5, “The West’s Threat,” p. 367]

In Foundations 20 years ago, Dugin spoke of a U.S. “national sovereignty” regime exiting NATO and—as John McCain and George W. Bush underlined last October 17—forfeiting its global power. Dugin avers: “While simultaneously supporting isolationist tendencies in American politics, those circles (often right-wing Republicans) believe the USA should confine itself to its own internal problems. The position Russia has been placed in is supremely favorable.” [p. 367]

Dugin’s Foundations prefigures the 2016 covert information or signals assault to destabilize the U.S. electoral process, a destabilization that, according to James Clapper, former head of National Intelligence, this destabilization succeeded more wildly than Dugin (or Putin) dreamed. “Every geopolitical level of the USA should be involved simultaneously,” Dugin writes, “similar to the anti-Eurasianism of the Atlanticists: ‘sponsoring’ the disintegration of the strategic bloc [Warsaw Pact], governmental unity [USSR], and furthering ethno-territorial problems under the guise of regionalism, which accomplished Russia’s progressive disintegration up to its complete destruction. The Heartland will force the Sea Power to pay in the same coin. This is basic symmetrical logic.” [p. 367]

Dugin’s notion of “symmetrical” payback highlights three vengeful points.

First, Russian intelligence has long understood U.S. actions to destroy the Soviet Union. “Symmetrically,” Dugin argues, a “White” Russia aims to—and in 2016 succeeded in—shattering the American empire. In Dugin’s terms, Russia seeks to be the New Rome in a global “Eurasia.” Consider its work in Brexit in 2015, and the Trump election in which the administration has now sundered NATO.

In 1990 and 1997, under President Boris Yeltsin, Russia applied to join NATO but was rebuffed. At a 1997 NATO summit, President Bill Clinton promised Yeltsin falsely that NATO would not expand up to Russia’s borders. In 2001, Putin asked for entry into NATO, and President Medvedev in 2010 called for a Europe-wide collective security structure. If NATO had included Russia in the post-Cold War era, a functioning democracy might have survived.

Instead, the U.S. expanded NATO and engaged Russia even on its borders in Georgia and Ukraine (I leave aside the merits of independent, democratic movements in these societies.) Consider how John F. Kennedy responded to the USSR putting nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Why would one expect even a capitalist Russia, demeaningly excluded from Europe, to respond differently to a threat of a pro-NATO regime on its border?

Second, in 2014, the Russians recorded Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland on her “secure” phone bad-mouthing NATO and naming the new leader of the Ukraine. That Russian signals intelligence was effective against ordinary U.S. precautions, as Dugin foresaw, could have been gleaned by Hillary Clinton’s operatives (Nuland may have warned about this, to some extent). But Russia, they thought arrogantly and complacently, could never—never—reach the United States.

Were Russia not a “White” power, furthering violent attacks on black and Latin people and on the wellbeing of most ordinary Americans, as well as the ugly empire Dugin projected in 1997 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the U.S., one might see its stand against American aggression as morally justified. Instead, as Dugin’s schooling of Russian officers underlines, Russia seeks to create a rival empire with even more horrific aims.

Third, the United States coined the term information warfare. Intelligence agencies under Obama used it first in 2012 for the “Stuxnet” virus that destroyed Iranian centrifuges at Natanz. Presciently, on February 1, 2012, former CIA head Michael Hayden warned: “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction rather than just slow another computer or hack it to steal data. Somebody crossed the Rubicon.”

In 2014, Obama dissed Putin: “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength but out of weakness.” That neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton grasped the possibility of information warfare being turned against the U.S.—even as Russia tested it under American eyes in the Ukraine in 2014—signals the sort of hubristic overconfidence that Thucydides spoke of regarding the decline of the first democratic imperialism in Athens in the 5th century BCE.

In Dugin’s words, the bizarrely “symmetrical” Russian operation in 2016 did to the American presidency what Nuland and Clinton had threatened against Putin.

At a strategic February 2016 “InfoForum” in Moscow, Andrey Krutskikh, a senior Kremlin adviser, menacingly announced that Russia was planning an information assault on the November election which would be equivalent to the first Soviet nuclear explosion: “You think we are living in 2016. No, we are living in 1948. And do you know why? Because in 1949, the Soviet Union had its first atomic bomb test. And if until that moment, the Soviet Union was trying to reach agreement with [President] Truman to ban nuclear weapons, and the Americans were not taking us seriously, in 1949 everything changed and they started talking to us on an equal footing.

“I’m warning you: We are at the verge of having ‘something’ in the information arena, which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.”

In November 2016, Dugin crowed aptly about Trump’s victory: “Trump’s ascent puts a decisive end to the unipolar world. Trump has directly rejected U.S. hegemony in both its mild form, which the Council on Foreign Relations insists on, and in its harsh form, as the neocons call for… This means that the unipolar world is liquidated not only under the pressure of other countries, but from within America itself. The peoples and states of the world can finally take a deep breath. The expansion of globalism has been stopped at its very center. The new multipolar world means that the U.S. will henceforth become one of several poles of world order, a powerful and important one, but not the only one, and more importantly one that has no claims to being exceptional.”

Ironically, given Trump’s soft-pedaling of Russian intervention, Putin has subordinated the United States. As Dugin boasts, Trump has already split NATO, the foremost Russian political objective. And, except for revelation of Michael Flynn’s being a paid foreign agent by Acting Attorney-General Sally Yates and pressure from below, the administration intended to do Russia other favors. Further, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell underlined on Christmas Day 2017, the Russians were even then spreading anti-immigrant lies on Facebook: “In a single week this month, Moscow has used these accounts to discredit the FBI after it was revealed that an agent had been demoted for sending anti-Donald Trump texts; to attack ABC News for an erroneous report involving President Trump and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; to critique the Obama administration for allegedly “green lighting” the communication between Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak; and to warn about violence by immigrants after a jury acquitted an undocumented Mexican accused of murdering a San Francisco woman.’

Dugin’s account of geopolitics is also fundamentally dishonest. While Foundations extols Nazi advocates of Lebensraum in the East, he often “forgets” Hitler’s genocidal assault on Russia. And fascinatingly, Dugin‘s Foundations ignores the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued for an ever shifting westward “frontier” wiping out indigenous people. German imperialists, notably Hitler, saw the genocidal American “Wild West” as a model for the “Wild East” of Poland and Russia. Turner worked closely with Friedrich Ratzel, a German geopolitician, who coined the term “Lebensraum”: vast continental “living spaces” to be settled by those who murdered or enslaved indigenous inhabitants. Ratzel’s student Karl Haushofer taught the term to Hitler and agitated widely for conquest of the “Wild East” during the Nazi regime.

But Dugin bizarrely denies Haushofer’s role in invading Russia. Like the violent American Right, Dugin wants to recreate an imaginary Russia not as the defeater of Nazism in World War II—his book does not once name “the Great Patriotic War,” as Russians refer to the conflict—but as a now White Fascist Sun for orbiting racist autocrats.

In The Daily Beast last Dec. 11, I pointed out that initial exit polls used by the American State Department to test the fairness of elections abroad showed Hillary Clinton in the lead in four swing states and also revealed large discrepancies with machine-recorded results. This is, unless disproven by argument, profound evidence of the corruption of the 2016 American election.

In addition, led by Professor Alex Halderman’s testimony on June 23 of last year, 120 computer scientists warned Congress of the ease of manipulation of U.S. election machines which leave no paper trail or on which the paper trail can be turned off, as they were in Ohio in 2016. Easily hackable machines, by domestic enemies or foreign ones, must be replaced by paper ballots to secure upcoming American elections (currently, the U.S. ranks as having the 61st least safeguarded elections among democracies in a Harvard/University of Sydney study).

Yet in addition to using bots targeting likely Republican voters, the Russians tampered with voter registrations and perhaps even the machines to elect Trump. This systematic cyberwarfare is the most successful act of aggression inside the United States ever achieved by a foreign power. Though others executed the tactics, Alexander Dugin was the architect.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-far-r ... eral-reads
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Jerky » Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:48 pm

He's a creep alright.

He's also a ridiculous goof, but still incredibly dangerous, regardless.

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:49 pm

Agreed on both points.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Jerky » Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:01 pm

Actually, Dugin is a very apt figure for study here at Rig Int, considering his admitted fandom of Aleister Crowley, his interest in certain mystical forms of Islam, and his pseudo-syncretistic, almost Hegelian ideas about taking "the best" (ie the worst) from Bolshevism and Nazism and making something "new" (not really that new) out of it (his so called "Fourth Position").

Here's an interesting CounterPunch article.

Dugin’s Occult Fascism and the Hijacking of Left Anti-Imperialism and Muslim Anti-Salafism


In his September 2015 CounterPunch piece, “A New Chapter in the Fascist Internationale,” Alexander Reid Ross highlighted the state of the Fascist Internationale in recent times, underscoring the role of Russian fascist and Fourth Position theorist Alexander Dugin and his networks in it. What is however not widely appreciated about the current state of activities by these Duginist networks, especially in social media, is their active recruitment efforts among the Left as well as among disparate groups of anti-Salafist Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims, particularly among supporters of the Resistance Axis. Rather than a legitimate alliance, this turn of events is arguably an attempt to muddy waters by certain behind the scenes power brokers that could potentially fracture (or otherwise neutralize) a united front against Empire from the grassroots and eventually redirect it to more sinister ends. Here a heretofore undiscussed facet of this development will be broached (a guiding feature informing the subtext of Duginism’s ‘beyond left and right’ ideological catchall); and, that is, the Duginist appropriation of a primarily western occultist framework (and specifically the worldview of Chaos magic) and its transformation by the Duginists into a strategy for political action in the service of the Fascist Internationale.

Whither Dugin’s Traditionalism?

Many discussions around Alexander Dugin in print have outlined his vast, often contradictory, influences, background and ideological trajectory. For example, Dugin’s ‘Traditionalism’ or ‘neo-Traditionalism’ – i.e. his adherence to the ideas of French Sufi Muslim convert René Guénon (d. 1951) and the Italian Julius Evola (d. 1974) – has been detailed by Mark Sedgwick and others (see, for instance, Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World, 2004: chapter 12). However, at least in more recent years, Dugin’s Traditionalism appears to be overstated, since his fanatical (almost messianic) Heideggerianism – face to face with the dismissive, often overtly hostile, views held by many eminent figures of the Traditionalist school towards Martin Heidegger – has seemingly placed him outside of the proverbial neo-Traditionalist pale. Comments made in an early chapter of his 2014 book, ‘Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning’ (2014: 18), where Heidegger has been elevated by Dugin to the status of a culminating eschatological figure on par with the prophet of Islam, only reinforces such negatively held views about Dugin’s ‘anti-Traditionalism’ among some contemporary neo-Traditionalists.

As such Alexander Dugin’s purported Traditionalism, which used to serve at one point as his biographical headliner, is no longer a reliable feature which can be taken uncritically and at face value. If he once was, as of now at least, Dugin is no longer a neo-Traditionalist in any meaningful sense, which makes the use and appropriation of the term by North American white nationalist acolytes of Dugin, such as Matthew Heimbach, hold even less validity. Therefore, to continue discussing Dugin’s current ideas and stances in light of Guénonian-Evolian Traditionalism can in fact be misleading because he has in recent times moved in the opposite direction and into what some neo-Traditionalists would probably characterize as ‘counter-initiatic currents’ and the ‘Counter-Tradition’.

Chaos Magic as the True Duginist weltanschauung

The misanthropic ideas of British occultist and satanist Aleister Crowley (d. 1947) do however inform both the Duginist world view and its contemporary praxis. Indeed it is within the worldview of Chaos magic specifically (which is a spawn of Crowley’s Thelemic philosophy) where much of the paradoxes and seeming contradictions of the Duginist weltanschauung – and especially in its Fourth Positionist catchall of ‘beyond right or left’ – must be sought, since this is (whether explicitly articulated or not) the actual animating locus of the Duginist far-right praxis, beginning with its choice of symbology, i.e. his Eurasian flag of eight white or yellow thunderbolts (or arrows) shaped in a radial pattern and set behind a black background. This symbol by itself is alternatively referred to in Chaos magic as the ‘wheel of chaos’, ‘the symbol of chaos’, ‘arms of chaos’, ‘the arrows of chaos’, ‘the chaos star’, ‘the chaos cross’, ‘the chaosphere’ or ‘the symbol of eight’. Somewhat reminiscent of the Thule Society and then Hitler’s own appropriation of the swastika from the writings of Theosophical Society founder H.P. Blavatsky (d. 1891), Dugin derives his design from the popularizations of it made by western Chaos magicians during the 1970s-1980s who themselves appropriated it from the work of British science fiction and fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock.

It should be noted here that both the number eight as well as the color black play a pivotal role in all neo-Nazi/far-right symbology, not to mention that the ‘wheel of chaos’ itself maintains striking similarities to the well known ‘sun wheel’ symbol used by the SS and many contemporary neo-Nazis (likewise the symbol of the old Spanish Falangists). In his own defence, Dugin would probably assert that the number eight also holds important correspondences within esoteric Christianity as well where it refers to Christ. However, his obvious (or dubious, rather) choice of the ‘wheel of chaos’ over the cross would tend to refute that claim. In addition, as a self-proclaimed Russian nationalist, it is not clear exactly why Alexander Dugin would choose his chief symbol from sources located within the tradition of British occultism rather than from those of his native Russia or, for that matter, from the Eastern Orthodox Christianity that he claims to adhere to. This point alone, we believe, further reinforces the allegations regarding Dugin’s anti-traditionalism, while simultaneously locating him in a very different universe altogether than the one he claims to be speaking for.

Be that as it may, such behaviour in itself would be quite consistent with Chaos magic’s basic dictum regarding the malleability of all beliefs and their pliability as tools in the hands of the Chaos magician. Here it is the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ in-itself that becomes the prime motivation of the black magus turned political activist. Emerging from this, the next significant formula of Chaos magic is that of a continual paradigm shift or the constant arbitrary changing of beliefs, where holding contradictory positions simultaneously becomes the vehicle for self-realization and understanding of the coincidentia oppositorum underlying all phenomena. As a spiritual practice there are numerous correlations and comparisons that can be made with this specific idea among many traditions around the globe (i.e. Taoist, Sufi, Tantric, Zen, Hermeticism, etc.), and in and of itself it is neutral. Except that with Dugin and his acolytes the issue is not linked specifically to any spiritual practice and its realization per se but rather it is purely about political praxis and the will to power in its crudest form. In other words, for Dugin the alchemical laboratory and its ars operativa resides not in the self but rather in the greater world and the theatre of politics where the black magus acts to immanentize the eschaton and where this eschaton represents the inversion of all values.

The Philosopher’s Stone for Dugin is thus power over the world for its own sake and not over the self. This, including other features of his thinking, is what informs the paradigmatic ‘beyond left and right’ catchall latched on to by the Duginists. It is also what makes Duginism particularly dangerous as an ideology and a movement. In other words, in this worldview where Chaos magic acts as the ideological primum mobile, occultist principles are made to serve a fundamentally fascist political program. Some would also call this a form of Satanism and yet another manifestation of the very modernity and ‘materialist West’ that Alexander Dugin has otherwise railed against. Arguably, and whatever else Dugin says to criticize and distance himself from it, Hitlerian National Socialism attempted precisely the very same thing – animated also, as it was, by almost identical underlying ideological concerns and motivations.

That said, René Guénon alleged about Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society that during the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were essentially acting in the capacity of a colonialist trojan horse put up by the imperial British secret services in order to infiltrate and disrupt the traditional religious sub-cultures of the sub-continent (see his, Theosophy: The History of a Pseudo-Religion, 2004). Given Dugin’s networks in Iran, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world, not to mention Eastern Europe, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that similar patterns and inducements may be motivating and underlying the Duginists’ recruitment agenda whereby Dugin himself can be seen as the new Blavatsky with his networks the successor to the Theosophical Society-cum-British imperial trojan horse. Certainly their attempt to further break down the already fractured left/right spectrum in Europe in order to recruit for the far-right appears to speak to it directly given that their unambiguous racist and reactionary rhetoric on the immigration/refugee crisis, on the face of things, otherwise defies the alliances they have made inside the Islamic world among Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and other sectors of the Resistance Axis.

Russia, the European refugee crisis and far-right Duginist geopolitics in action

Now, the instrumental role of NATO in the collapse of the Libyan state in 2011; the Syrian war that is now going into its fifth year; ISIS; Ukraine, and, above all, the European refugee crisis appears to have provided the Duginists a rare opportunity to exploit existing splits arising among cross-sections of the western antiwar Left as well as among activists in the Muslim community itself in order to recruit among these groups. This is especially in evidence in the recent talking points adopted by a number of otherwise progressive and left-leaning pundits who regularly appear on RT (Russia Today) and elsewhere in the alternative media where their usually consistent antiwar stance with regard to Syria specifically (and western imperialism generally) has, in paradoxical fashion, given way instead to a melange of reactionary narratives over the European refugee crisis. In short, we have a situation where certain progressives (and even some Muslims) have adopted the contemporary white supremacist kulturkampf rhetoric of fascists and fellow travellers that largely victimizes Mid East/North African immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe, and where rightwing hysteria over a perceived threat to ‘European culture’ and ‘its way of life’ is uncritically repeated, to varying degrees, parrot fashion.

Whereas some blame Russian state policy directly for such recent developments, the point of view of the present author is that such a turn of events ultimately benefits the agendas of Empire itself rather than Russia specifically such that these Duginists may in fact be sheepdogging for long-term Anglo-American Atlanticist policy initiatives rather than specifically Russian ones. Be that as it may, rumours abound that the Russian state has been a generous donor (and in a few cases has even outright financed for protracted periods) fascist/far-right groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and the Golden Dawn in Greece. Since 2014 in Germany, for instance, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) and PEGIDA are alleged to have received substantial financial support from Moscow as a means of destabilizing Merkel and the German center who were key actors in the sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Similarly is held regarding Le Pen’s Front National in France. Certainly much of the anti-immigration/anti-refugee jingoism published regularly on the pages of RT (Russia Today) as of that time would on the face of things tend to support the allegations.

However, even with that, it is not clear exactly how such policies would strategically benefit Putin’s Russia in the long term either, since these very same forces that Russia ostensibly supports at the moment could quite easily be marshalled at any given point in the future by its Anglo-American geopolitical rival and used against Russia itself, as the case of Ukraine amply demonstrates. Certainly it can be argued that Russia and the Anglo-American Atlanticists are using competing far-right proxies against each other’s interests on the continent as a form of asymmetrical warfare, with Germany as one of the key battlegrounds and the refugee issue as the linchpin. But then this would tend to indicate some kind of split in the Fascist Internationale while also explaining one reason for the aggressive recruitment efforts presently undertaken by the Duginists (especially among Muslims and disenchanted Leftists without a home) on social media and elsewhere. Nevertheless in Greece, for instance, it was not with the Golden Dawn but with Syriza that Dugin personally invested the most time, and Syriza’s role during 2015 in further fracturing consensus among the Anglo-European Left has undeniably been a critical one.

Much more can be said, but whatever rhetoric the Duginists spin among assorted activist communities to draw them in, on its own merits Duginism is neither authentically anti-imperialist nor does it genuinely hold any leftwing values. Nor, for that matter, is it Traditionalism either. Rather, on all fronts Duginism actually represents a carefully smokescreened form of fascist white separatism, which is to say yet another ideological permutation of Euro-American white supremacy that has organized itself into a movement. Dugin’s own skewed definition of Eurasia, where in this scheme Eurasia merely represents the horizontal landmass between Vladivostok and Lisbon (and where all of south-west and south-east Asia are categorically excluded from it), reinforces the fact. As such the seductive dangers represented by Duginism and its networks to any united front against Empire among the anti-imperialist Left and anti-Salafist Muslims cannot be underestimated.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/10 ... -salafism/
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 23, 2018 9:10 pm

Yes- Dugin is like the cold-hearted concrescence of all that is most hurtful and hurting in the human soul. Which typically opens the door to the Lovecraftian dimensions of Evil that Rigorous Intuition has long grappled with.
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