Mick Hartley

Interesting to see Putin's favourite thinker pontificating on Islam and Israel. From MEMRI TV:

Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin said that he was disgusted by the Islamic response to Israel’s war against Hamas and Hizbullah. “Where is Islamic solidarity? Where is the Islamic world?”, he asked, saying that only “a small population of brave Houthis” demonstrated the “Islamic warrior spirit.”

Speaking on the Hira podcast, posted on YouTube on February 3, 2025, Dugin said that he was “depressed and disappointed” by the “pitiful reaction from Turkey and other Islamic countries.” He slammed what he called the “huge defeat of the Islamic world before the globalist liberal West and Israel,” and said that mainstream Islam is composed of different opportunistic and corrupt regimes. He further said that while Salafis could kill and torture innocent women and children, when it comes to the fight against Israel or the West, “they are like domestic pets. They are kittens.”

More on Dugin here:

To help decode the Russian leader’s position, it’s instructive to look at the positions espoused by Alexander Dugin, a Russian intellectual who has done much over the years to formulate what appears to now be the Kremlin’s dominant ideology….

The French scholar Marlene Laruelle has described Dugin’s political philosophy as an attempt “to rehabilitate fascism in Russia” by stressing its nationalist orientation while disowning its associations with Nazism and racism. Tellingly, Putin’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine has exemplified this vision.

Fascism embraces a mythic past, where the nation, once great, has experienced humiliation and loss of land, the result of weakness and decadence brought on by liberal democracy. To make up for these losses, real and supposed, fascist leaders encourage violent reassertion of previous greatness, as well as the destruction of liberal democracy in favor of a one-party state or, more typically, a single autocratic ruler who is synonymous with the nation.

In the Russian nationalist version of the mythic past, Ukraine is central. According to this mythology, there are no Ukrainians—just lost Russians living, whether they know it or not, in the heart of historic Russia. Under Putin, Russia has been harshly sexist and homophobic, familiar manifestations of fascist ideology. But Russia’s violent imperial war against a neighboring cosmopolitan democracy that it seeks to absorb is the clearest manifestation yet that its animating ideology is something akin to classical fascism….

Also, on the unlikely Dugin links with Aleister Crowley and, um, Throbbing Gristle.