Mick Hartley

Some interesting background on Alexander Dugin, Putin’s favourit philiosopher, from Marc Weitzmann at Tablet Magazine:

:With his long beard, resonant voice, outgoing personality, and bellicose, mystical rhetoric, Dugin is regarded by his global fan base and by his enemies alike as a kind of geopolitical genius, the most prominent representative of contemporary Russian political thought, and, most of all, the inspiration behind Russia’s foreign policy—Putin’s personal Rasputin. Like most things in the 21st century, the reality is far more childish, more ridiculous, and, because of that, more frightening.

The puerile grandiosity of his book titles, with their aura of esotericism and science fiction—The Fourth Political Theory, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Last War of the World-Island—is in line with their content, which is a jumble of nihilistic fantasies, fascist dreams, totalitarian plans, and ridiculous predictions. In a piece written in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Dugin announced that Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia were about to rally to the side of the Palestinians, who will launch an uprising in East Jerusalem that will lead to the sealing-off of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to World War III, during which Russia will “at last” side with the Muslims against the Israelis, the West, and the forces of LGBTQ.

At their even less incoherent, the so-called neo-Eurasian or fourth-political theories that he presents as original are, in fact, largely copied and pasted from more coherent anti-modern, anti-Enlightenment Western theorists and philosophers. The result is a vision of history that can only be called gnostic and that can be summarized in a simple paragraph:

The present geopolitical situation is the latest episode of an ancestral cosmic war. Two types of societies clash: The evil ones, which he calls “thalassocratic,” are essentially treacherous because they’re governed by the mischievous, untrustworthy “Atlanticists” and are engineered by commerce, exchanges, individualism, and egalitarianism. The good ones, the “tellurocratic” societies, are rooted in soil, knighthood, religion, and vertical hierarchy. The thalassocratists (the United States, Western Europe, protestants, atheists, Israel, and the Jews) are liberal children of darkness. The tellurocratists (the Russians, the Orthodox and the Catholics, and Muslims, especially Shiites) are children of light. At stake is the human soul. Should the Russians (or the Iranians) lose, there is no reason that the world should continue: In a recent interview, Dugin declared that Moscow would provide nuclear weapons to anyone dedicated to fighting “the West.”

Apparently Paris in the post-war decades wasn’t just the birthplace of third-worldism, with such leftist luminaries as Frantz Fanon, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh mingling in the cafes. There was also a lively right-wing scene, with post-Nazi philosophy interacting with Islamist theorising. And Alexander Dugin was there.

A very murky world.