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On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a long and tumultuous speech, denying the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians. A speech that many Western analysts saw as bizarre and baseless.
In fact, it was weird but not unrelated. After all Putin’s analysis stemmed directly from the works of a fascist prophet of the maximum Russian empire named Alexander Dugin.
Dugin’s intellectual influence over the Russian leader is well known to the narrow-minded students of the post-Soviet era, among whom Dugin, 60, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.”
His work is also known for the “new right” in Europe, where Dugin has been a leading figure for almost 3 decades, as well as for the “alternative right” of America. In fact, the Russian-born ex-wife of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, Nina Kuprianova, has translated some of Dugin’s works into English.
But as the world watches with horror and disgust indiscriminate bombing of Ukraine, a broader understanding of Dugin’s deadly ideas is needed. Russia has used its “manual” for the past 20 years, bringing us to the brink of another world war.
A product of the late, and declining Soviet Union, Dugin belongs to the long and grim list of political theorists who invent a grand and glorious past – filled with mysticism and blind obedience to authority – to explain a failed present.
And the future lies in restoring this past by replacing the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers reached their peak of a century ago, under the European ruins of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Moras, French reactionary nationalist; Charles Kauglin, American radio propagandist; even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf”.
Dugin tells essentially the same story but from the Russian point of view. According to him before modernity destroyed everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one large empire, properly ruled by ethnic Russians.
Sadly, a wide-ranging rival empire of corrupt individualists and money predators, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s fate and sabotaged the Eurasian project, which is its term for the future Russian empire.
In his major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, published in 1997, Dugin describes this project in detail. Russian agents must promote racial, religious, and sectarian divisions within the United States, at a time when they must promote the isolationist factions of the United States. (Doesn’t that sound like something familiar?).
In the UK, efforts should focus on exacerbating historical divisions with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, needs to pull away from Russia by luring in natural resources: oil, gas and food.
NATO will collapse from within. Putin has followed this advice carefully. And he must have felt that things were going well when he saw protesters smashing windows in the corridors of the US Congress, Brexit in Britain, and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas.
Given that the damage to the West is going so well, Putin has moved on to the part of the project where Dugin writes: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions, poses a great danger to all of Eurasia, and without solving the Ukrainian problem “It is pointless to talk about continental politics.”
But what if Putin manages to “solve” Russia’s problem in Ukraine? Dugin envisions a gradual division of Europe into areas of German and Russian influence. Russia will have a lot of weight because of Germany’s needs for its natural resources.
As Britain collapses and Russia seizes its spheres of influence, the Eurasian empire will eventually expand, in Dugin’s own words, “from Dublin to Vladisvostok.”
Even Putin’s involvement in the conflicts in the Middle East has been influenced by Dugin’s idea of a Moscow-Tehran axis. His allure to the nationalist government in New Delhi, India, is a reflection of Dugin’s insistence that the Eurasian empire should extend to the Indian Ocean.
As important as it is for Western decision-makers to take Dugin’s mystical megalomania seriously, it’s just as urgent for China’s Xi Jinping. Xi and Putin announced a close partnership in February to reduce US influence.
But according to Dugin, China must also fall. Russia’s ambitions in Asia will be aimed at “territorial disintegration, fragmentation and political and administrative division of the Chinese state,” Dugin wrote. According to Dugin, Russia’s natural partner in the Far East is Japan.
In a sense, Dugin’s 600-page book can be summed up in one idea: World War II was won by the wrong alliance. If Hitler had not invaded Russia, Great Britain could have been broken.
The United States would have been left out of the war, isolated and divided, and Japan would have ruled China as Russia’s smallest partner. A fascism from Ireland to the Pacific. An illusion? I hope so. But illusions become important when embraced by tyrants./bota.al
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