Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Understanding Putin more, via Dugin - Aleksandr Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics

Dunlop, John B.

John B. Dunlop is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His current research focuses on the conflict in Chechnya, Russian politics since 1985, Russia and the successor states of the former Soviet Union, Russian nationalism, and the politics of religion in Russia.
[...]
The author of this six-hundred-page program for the eventual rule of ethnic Russians over the lands extending "from Dublin to Vladisvostok," Aleksandr Gel'evich Dugin, was born in 1962, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Russian military officers. 3 His father is said to have held the rank of colonel, and, according to one source, he served in Soviet military intelligence, in the GRU. 4 By all accounts, Dugin was a bright and precocious youth with a talent for learning foreign languages. (He is said to have mastered at least nine of them.) While still a teenager, he joined a secretive group of Moscow intellectuals interested in mysticism, paganism, and fascism. Both the "masters" of this group and their "disciples" engaged, inter alia, in translating the works of foreign writers who shared their interests. As one of his contributions, Dugin completed a translation of a book by the Italian pagan- fascist philosopher Julius Evola.

Dugin is reported to have been detained by the KGB for participating in this study group, and forbidden literature was subsequently discovered at his apartment.
[...]
In 1989, taking advantage of increased opportunities to visit the West, Dugin spent most of the year traveling to Western European countries. While there, he strengthened ties with leading figures of the European New Right, such as Frenchman Alain de Benoist and Belgian Jean-Francois Thiriart. These contacts led to Dugin's "belated reconciliation" with the USSR, just as that state was approaching its final demise. It appears that, largely as a result of these contacts with the European Nouvelle Droite, Dugin became a fascist theorist. On the subject of Dugin's indubitable fascist orientation, Stephen

Shenfield has written: "Crucial to Dugin's politics is the classical concept of the 'conservative revolution' that overturns the post-Enlightenment world and installs a new order in which the heroic values of the almost forgotten 'Tradition' are renewed. It is this concept that identifies Dugin unequivocally as a fascist." 6

By the beginning of the 1990s, as the Soviet Union was approaching its collapse, Dugin...
[...]
Some time in late 1999, Dugin founded "The Center for Geopolitical Expertise" in Moscow. In an article in Zavtra, he speculated that this new center might shortly become "an analytical instrument of the Eurasian Platform for, simultaneously, the Presidential Administration, the Government of the Russian Federation, the Council of Federation, and the State Duma." 26 In late March of 2000, in a second Zavtra article, Dugin envisioned a new role for the Russian secret police (which until recently had been

headed by the newly elected Russian president, Vladimir Putin). Whereas in his 1993 book, Konspiralogiya, Dugin had criticized the secret police for perceived "Atlanticist," that is, pro-American and pro-British sympathies, he now toasted the KGB (the initials he preferred to FSB) as "a new caste, a new social stratum" called upon both to hold the line against "American hegemony" and to "recreate a mighty Eurasian sovereign state" which would include all of the CIS republics. 27

---
[ Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), free association of sovereign states that was formed in 1991 by Russia and 11 other republics that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had its origins on December 8, 1991, when the elected leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Belorussia) signed an agreement forming a new association to replace the crumbling Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). The three Slavic republics were subsequently joined by the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, by the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and by Moldova. (The remaining former Soviet republics—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—declined to join the new organization.) The CIS formally came into being on December 21, 1991, and began operations the following month, with the city of Minsk in Belarus designated as its administrative centre.
[...]
In August 2008, following an escalation of hostilities between Russia and Georgia over the separatist region of South Ossetia, Georgia announced its intention to withdraw from the CIS. The withdrawal was finalized in August 2009. A similar proxy war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014 after Russia’s illegal annexation of the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea. By 2018 at least 10,000 people had been killed in clashes between Ukrainian armed forces and Russian-backed paramilitary units in the Donets Basin. In May of that year, Ukrainian Pres. Petro Poroshenko officially withdrew Ukraine’s membership from the CIS.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Commonwealth-of-Independent-States ]
---
[...]
Several Russian journalists have underscored that Dugin-style "Eurasianism" meets a number of political needs in Russia. A belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual over those of the state, journalist Evgenii Ikhlov wrote, would result in the control of civil society over the state. In Russia, by contrast, Ikhlov continued:

[O]ur new chief stratum are incapable of ruling under such a democracy....

[As Trump - 'too weak to be a leader, so acts like a king' - and his mob.
Ezra Klein - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175783533]

[T]hey stand in need of an attractive foundation for another, non-democratic model. Here Eurasianism extraordinarily fits the bill. It offers the following: an authoritarian-charismatic (autocratic) model; selfless and ascetical serving of the regime as the highest form of valor (the messianic great power syndrome); the agreement of ethnic and religious minorities to play a subordinate role; and imperial xenophobia.
41

"What induces the regime to seek a new ideology in Eurasianism?" journalist Dmitrii Radyshevskii, asked. He answered...
[...]
The Geopolitics of Dugin's 1997 Book

Dugin's militant views on geopolitics, as expressed in his 1997 "textbook," presumably will strike Western readers as both crude and mad, representing a slight improvement over the ravings of Duma deputy speaker Vladimir Zhirinovskii. Although Dugin's ideas and prescriptions are indeed extreme, dangerous, and repellent, it should be emphasized that they are very much in the tradition of the writings of interwar fascists and adherents of the European Nouvelle Droite. Historically speaking, fascist thought more than once has resulted in explosive expansionism. It should be noted that Dugin does not focus primarily on military means as a way of achieving Russian dominance over Eurasia; rather, he advocates a fairly sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian special services, supported by a tough, hard-headed use of Russia's gas, oil, and natural resource riches to pressure and bully other countries into bending to Russia's will. Dugin apparently does not fear war in the least, but he would prefer to achieve his geopolitical goals without resorting to it.

Drawing on the extensive twentieth-century literature on geopolitics--and especially on the interwar German school of Karl Haushofer--Dugin posits a primordial, dualistic conflict between "Atlanticism" (seafaring states and civilizations, such as the United States and Britain) and "Eurasianism" (land- based states and civilizations, such as Eurasia-Russia). 43 As Wayne Allensworth noted, once one penetrates below the surface of Dugin's seemingly rational and scholarly language in Foundations of Geopolitics, one realizes that "Dugin's geopolitics are mystical and occult in nature, the shape of world civilizations and the clashing vectors of historical development being portrayed as shaped by unseen spiritual forces beyond man's comprehension." 44 In Dugin's treatise, as Allensworth underscores, the author has appropriated almost wholesale "the idea" of Belgian geopolitician Jean Thiriart, who "recognized the Russified Soviet Union as the final bastion of civilization in a Europe overrun by rootless American consumerism." Thiriart earlier had advocated the formation of a new "Holy Alliance" of the USSR and Europe aimed at constructing a "Euro-Soviet Empire," which would stretch from Vladivostok to Dublin and would also need to expand to the south, "since it required a port on the Indian Ocean." 45

The Gorbachev Debacle

The Gorbachev years (1985-1991) represent, in Dugin's eyes, one of the most wrenching geopolitical defeats in the millennial history of Russia-Eurasia-USSR. Beginning in 1989, it became clear that "no- one in the Soviet leadership was capable of explaining the logic of traditional [Soviet] foreign policy and, as a result, there took place the lightning-fast destruction of the gigantic Eurasian organism ..." (95). 46 Unexpectedly, the USSR "found itself in almost the same situation as postwar Germany--its world influence reduced to nothing, its territory sharply diminished, its economy and social sphere reduced to ruins" (96).

Dugin contends that the Soviet disaster of 1989-1991, like the earlier German one, resulted from a failure of the country's leaders to heed the counsel of its geopoliticians. Hitler disregarded the advice of Karl Haushofer and other specialists when he decided to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. In similar fashion, a "certain secret department of the GRU" and other voices had been advocating a "Eurasian" course for the USSR, but their advice went unheeded (103).

As Dugin sees it, the "project" that Westernizing Russian reformers attempted to implement during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years by now has been discredited fully: "This project denies such values as

the people, the nation, history, geopolitical interests, social justice, the religious factor, etc. In it, everything is constructed on the principle of maximal economic effectiveness, on the primacy of the individual, on consumerism, and the 'free market'" (179).

Dugin believes the Atlanticists (especially the United States) consciously plotted the downfall of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. "The Heartland therefore is required to pay back Sea Power in the same coin" (367). The goal, as Dugin sees it, is to resuscitate and reinvigorate Eurasia/Russia after the near-fatal geopolitical blows it absorbed from 1989 to 1991.

Dugin emphasizes that the current Russian Federation, which appeared in 1991 from under the rubble of the USSR, is not a full-fledged state, but rather "a transitional formation in the broad and dynamic global geopolitical process" (183). The new states that have come into existence in the space of the former Soviet Union also do not, with the sole exception of Armenia, possess any markings of authentic statehood (187). Instead they represent artificial, ephemeral political constructs.

The ethnic Russian people, in contrast, are seen as "the bearers of a unique civilization." 47 Russians are a messianic people, possessing "universal, pan-human significance" (189). The Russian people, Dugin insists, can serve only as the core ethnos of a vast empire: "[T]he Russian people (i.e. Russia) never made its goal the creation of a mono-ethnic, racially uniform state" (190). Such a distorted view represents "the Atlanticist line masking itself as 'Russian nationalism'" (213).

[Think Zionist Israel, albeit with lower expansionist intent,
but certainly seeing themselves as a messianic people.]

"A repudiation of the empire-building function," Dugin warns sternly, "would signify the end of the Russian people as a historical reality, as a civilizational phenomenon. Such a repudiation would be tantamount to national suicide" (197). Deprived of an empire, Russians will "disappear as a nation" (251). The sole viable course, in Dugin's view, is for Russians to rebound from the debacle of 1989- 1991 by recreating a great "supra-national empire," one in which ethnic Russians would occupy "a privileged position" (251-252). The result of such a rebuilding effort would be "a giant continental state in the administration of which they [Russians] will play the central role" (253). This ethnic model, Dugin notes, is quite similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

In order to facilitate the recreation of a vast Russian-dominated continental empire, Dugin advocates the unleashing of Russian nationalist sentiment, but of a specific type. "This [Russian] nationalism," he writes, "should not employ state but, rather, cultural-ethnic terminology, with a special emphasis on such categories as 'Narodnost" and 'Russian Orthodoxy'" (255). Religious sentiment, Dugin urges, should be placed front and center: "Russians should realize that they are Orthodox in the first place; [ethnic] Russians in the second place; and only in the third place, people" (255). There is a need, Dugin insists, for the "total churchification" of Russians, for the Russian nation to become viewed simply as "the Church" (255-256). Such an emphasis, he believes, should--together with a persistent focus on the glorious past and bright future of the Russian nation--help bring about the "demographic upsurge" so desperately needed by Russians today. Economic incentives by themselves will prove insufficient to promote such an upsurge (256-257). One "radical" slogan, Dugin concludes, must be consistently put forward: "The nation is everything; the individual is nothing" (257). This slogan encapsulates one of Dugin's most cherished beliefs.

https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics

So we have the messianic mob of Russia, of Israel and of the United States.

Different yet united in belief in their right to rule. In their need to rule. For survival.