Posted on 03/03/2014 12:13:24 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
As the Putin regime invades Ukraine, it has become apparent that a new force for evil has emerged in Moscow. It is essential that Americans become aware of the nature of the threat.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate. Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as “Eurasianism.”
The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.
Born in 1962, Dugin was admitted to the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979, but then was expelled because of his involvement with mystic neo-Nazi groups. He then spent the Eighties hanging around monarchist and ultra-right-wing circles, before joining for a while Gennady Ziuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF, a neo-Stalinist group partially descended from, but not to be confused with, the previously ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU), after which he became a founder and chief ideologue of the Eurasianist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in 1994.
Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.
Dugin ran for the Duma on the NBP ticket in 1995, but got only 1 percent of the vote. So, switching tactics, he abandoned the effort to build his own splinter party and instead adopted the more productive strategy of becoming the idea man for all the bigger parties, including Putin’s United Russia, Ziuganov’s CPRF, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. In this role he has succeeded brilliantly.
The core idea of Dugin’s Eurasianism is that “liberalism” (by which is meant the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world. Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime cosmopolitan power “Atlantis,” which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly, he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome v. Carthage to Russia v. the Anglo Saxon “Atlantic Order,” today. If Russia is to win this fight against the subversive oceanic bearers of such “racist” (because foreign-imposed) ideas as human rights, however, it must unite around itself all the continental powers, including Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Turkey, Iran, and Korea, into a grand Eurasian Union strong enough to defeat the West.
In order to be so united, this Eurasian Union will need a defining ideology, and for this purpose Dugin has developed a new “Fourth Political Theory” combining all the strongest points of Communism, Nazism, Ecologism, and Traditionalism, thereby allowing it to appeal to the adherents of all of these diverse anti-liberal creeds. He would adopt Communism’s opposition to free enterprise. However, he would drop the Marxist commitment to technological progress, a liberal-derived ideal, in favor of Ecologism’s demagogic appeal to stop the advance of industry and modernity. From Traditionalism, he derives a justification for stopping free thought. All the rest is straight out of Nazism, ranging from legal theories justifying unlimited state power and the elimination of individual rights, to the need for populations “rooted” in the soil, to weird gnostic ideas about the secret origin of the Aryan race in the North Pole.
The open devotion to Nazism is Dugin’s thought is remarkable. In his writings he celebrates the Waffen SS, murderers of millions of Russians during the war, as an ideal organization. He also approves of the most extreme crimes of Communism, going so far as to endorse the horrific 1937 purges that killed, among numerous other talented and loyal Soviet citizens, nearly the entire leadership of the Red Army — something that Stalin himself later had second thoughts about.
What Russia needs, says Dugin, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” On the other hand, “Liberalism, is an absolute evil. . . . Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response. . . . The American empire should be destroyed.”
This is the ideology behind the Putin regime’s “Eurasian Union” project. It is to this dark program, which threatens not only the prospects for freedom in Ukraine and Russia, but the peace of the world, that former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych tried to sell “his” country. It is against this program that the courageous protesters in the Maidan took their stand and — with scandalously little help from the West — somehow miraculously prevailed. But now the chips are really down. The Ukrainians are being faced not with riot police, but with Russian divisions, subversion, and economic warfare. The country needs to be stabilized, and defended. The Ukrainians deserve our full support — and not just for reasons of sympathy for those resisting tyranny or respect for the brave. It is in the vital interest of America that freedom triumphs in Ukraine.
Without Ukraine, Dugin’s fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later Russia itself will have to join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe. But with Ukraine underfoot, the Eurasianists’ program can and will proceed, and a new Iron Curtain will fall into place imprisoning a large fraction of humanity in the grip of a monstrous totalitarian power that will become the arsenal of evil around the world for decades to come. That means another Cold War, trillions of dollars wasted on arms, accelerated growth of the national-security state at home, repeated proxy conflicts costing millions of lives abroad, and civilization itself placed at risk should a single misstep in the endless insane great-power game precipitate the locked and loaded confrontation into a thermonuclear exchange.
The 20th century saw three great-power confrontations. Two of them turned into total war. We lucked out on the third. Do we really want to roll those dice again? We will have to, unless the Eurasianist program is stopped.
The stakes in Ukraine could not be higher.
Bull crap.
If we stopped trying to expand our military presence right up to their border things might turn out differently.
We put troops into Georgia. We sign agreements that include defense support with Ukraine.
We are begging Putin to act. And then we act shocked when he does.
We are a nation of gullible fools, lead by even greater fools.
We have no issue there. F’em.
Ping.
We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
How far do you think we should retreat?
What utter crap. Putin is not an adherent of Dugin, who is a lunatic.
Putin is defending Russia’s interests and that includes not allowing Crimea to be turned into a NATO base. He saw the EU/US fund a truly Nazi movement in Ukraine which violently overthrew a freely-elected government.
Putin is an Orthodox Christian and was friends with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
This anti-Russian hysteria is stupid and dangerous. They have nukes and we have to live with them. It’s best not to attack a bear in its lair, and that is what we appear to be doing.
Crimea has been Russian (and remains so demographically) since around 1783. The people there do not want to be in the EU/NATO.
We do not need to blow up the whole world so that EU and NATO can have Ukraine.
Interesting that we’re just a couple of weeks short of the 1938 anniversary of Hitler invading Austria and annexing it to Nazi Germany. Much like Putin in the Crimean region of the Ukraine today who claims he is invading to protect ethnic Russians, Hitler claimed he did it to unite German speaking Austria with Germany. At the time, his aggression was met with only weak verbal protests—just like today. And we all know how that turned out. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...
Hyperbole. I'm more concerned about the actual evil that emanates from Mordor on the Potomac.
Germany never owned Austria. Austria-Hungary was a centuries-old empire.
Crimea was owned by Russia since 1783. The current border with Ukraine was redrawn in 1954 by Ukrainian General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, as a “gift”.
You too seem to be defending Russian interests.
Since the ‘truly Nazi’ movement has seized power in Ukraine, what evil things have they done so far? Have they even hinted at discriminatory policies for ethnic Russians yet? Any ethnic purges so far? That is what would be expected from Nazis, wouldn’t you think?
Ukraine is not Putin’s lair, as you seem to think. He would like it to be in his lair, and people like you are helping him with that goal.
And the Crimea you claim to be majority Russian since 1783 was overwhelming composed of minority populations until Stalin purged them and moved in Russia a to take their place.
One has to be there before they retreat.
It is not our responsibility to wage war in areas where the US has no interest. If the EU wants to send in troops, have them call Germany. I think they still have some maps.
I think that is an over-reading of the current situation. I think the Ukes just hated becoming subservient to the Bear, and had themselves a revolution.
Unable to eat them whole, the Bear came and ate their lunch (Crimea).
The Bear is essentially a thief. He creates very little of his own, and lives as a parasite by eating the productivity of others.
I disagree that there is any further grand philosophizing by the Bear. He wants what he wants, and he eats it if he can. He may call his hunger by some name or other, or eat on one tablecloth (flag) or another, but he just wants to eat you.
Either the Bear will continue to eat, or someone will shoot him. It is simple from a great remove. Let’s not get out our magnifying glasses to inspect the dirt under the Bear’s fingernails to ascertain his innermost feelings and motives.
You stated that, if “we stopped trying to expand our military presence right up to their border things might turn out differently.” How far should we pull back?
Crimean “gift”, starvation murder of 5M. Communism gives and takes away.
Putin is invading because NATO (the US and EU) are encroaching on his borders. We would be a little antsy if he did the same thing in, say, Cuba. Oh wait...they did. And we almost went to war over it.
Russia is not a threat to us in Europe. They are the only power that kept us from getting mixed up in Syria.
Perhaps we should mind our own business, not fund the overthrow of legitimate(although corrupt) governments, and then not get all worked up when it goes bad.
Obama sucks. Putin is a bad guy, but he makes Obama look like a fool.
Personally, I think our interests lie about 200 miles around our shores.
I would much rather see the troops along the borders. I don’t want to fight Russians. Killing some drug mules would be OK.
If we had not included NATO provisions in the economic deal the EU presented Ukraine last year, this would not have happened.
While I am an old school isolationist, I am also a realist. I just not see a need to move a NATO structure into the heart of the old USSR. I understand the other Balkan states have been brought under NATA. But Ukraine? That has been under the Russian yoke for a long, long time.
Pushing our noses in there to control the Gas lines from the middle east is just too provacative. This has nothing to do with “freedom” or “liberty.” If the folks in the US were concerned with that, we might want to start throwing firebombs around here. It has to do with gas lines and energy delivery to Europe.
I think Putin wants wealth and power. I think the leaders of the Democrat party want wealth and power. Both sides try to cloak their greed in political terms. If the Democrats want me to care about Ukraine, they are going to have to convince me that they care more about The United States then they do about the Democrat party.
Retreat? What are you talking about?
What do we have to gain by lighting a bag of dog sh*t on Putin’s doorstep? The Soviet Union is gone. Please get over it, because we have far more serious enemies at home.
Godwin’s law.
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