Dugin’s Book of Lamentations

Part 3.

What is happening in Russia now is an extraordinary phenomenon: the spectre of evil fascism has incarnated without being recognition by the majority of those living there.

Modern-day fascism is flaunting itself, in our collective faces. Putin did not rely on modern technological advancements, entrepreneurship, freedom and the liberal genius of individuals. Instead, the leader of the biggest country in the world chose war and threatened the world with nuclear weapons. This barbaric threat seems as disproportionately crazy as it is insulting to an entire generation of young people who are inventing new technologies, concerned with threats to the environment, and, in general, believe in the future of humanity. The “old” Russian government, like an ancient red-eyed vampire, has risen to foment hatred and conflict, inciting the resulting bloody massacre so as to alter the trajectory of history in its favor.

In my two previous articles, I looked closely at the ideas of well-known ideological philosopher Alexander Dugin. His concepts could have escaped public attention if not for the many similarities between Putin’s rhetoric and Dugin’s ideology.

Continuation

Ex-KGB Lieutenant-colonel, Putin, the grey dragon, eventually ripped off the liberal noose inherited from President Yeltsin. He saddled the government like a helpless donkey and crushed the very rudiments of healthy thought in an entire people. With finesse, he chewed off Crimea, after doing much the same with a number of post-Soviet territories: Moldova, Chechnya, Georgia etc, then turned to the public flogging of Greenpeace and Navalny activists. Under Putin’s silent guidance, activists and vocal opponents were publicly poisoned, and singers from the Pussy Riot band imprisoned. And that was only a tiny part of a more global plan, one that no one could be suspicious of.

Many progressive minds in Russia were busy living in the new, post-soviet world, but occasionally noticed a weird tendency of moving backward ideologically. They were almost in the promised land when the shimmering neon lights of Moscow luxury and pride suddenly turned into fading will-o’-the-wisps in a swamp of totalitarianism. Its triumph was reinforced by homophobic legislation and the single-minded cultivation of foul propaganda strangling what remained of liberal and independent journalism.

Dugin refuses to answer any direct questions as to whether he is consulting or seeing Putin. However, there is enough evidence for those who remark on how closely the vision and actions of Putin reflect those promoted by Dugin. Dugin himself uses Putin’s deflection techniques and prefers to operate in the shadows. Most likely, the ideologue of Eurosianism has ongoing indirect contact with the President. From Dugin’s emails, published by a hacker 7 years ago, one can see the web of people connected to Dugin and Putin, including Putin’s spiritual confessor, Father Tikhon.

Dugin sees himself as a big-caliber philosopher, underappreciated and misunderstood but still thirsting to convince the rest of the world of his infallible doctrine.

In his most popular work “The Basics of Geopolitics”, Alexander Dugin, the dark priest of Putin’s regime, laments the fact that geopolitics is still not recognized as a science. Dugin believes that just as Marxism once presumed to revise the classical economy, geopolitics can nurture ambitions aimed at revising the history of international relations. Of course, the “science of sciences” should only allow the humanities and natural sciences to be involved when they do not contradict the principles of the geopolitical method.

In one of his interviews Mister Dugin mentioned the Book of Lamentations, wherein sadness and sorrow overwhelm the prophet. He compares his state of mind and heart to Jeremiah’s lamentations. He knows that his ideas will inevitably lead to the killing of people and he accepts it, alluding to that part of the Bible. It is sad for him, but necessary, drawing comparisons to God himself, who allows people to suffer for a greater good that only divine understanding can justify.

When asked how to explain to a Mariupol mother (city almost fully destroyed by Russians in Ukraine) that the death of her child was necessary, Dugin says, “We’ll explain it all later. When we liberate Ukraine. Right now our plan is to win.”

Dugin’s philosophy, graphomaniacally embodied in more than 30 heavy tomes, is challenging bordering on impenetrable. Although he prefers to present his conclusions under the umbrella of geopolitics, they really should qualify as the winner in the category: Alternative History Genre.

For the most part his books and publications are unoriginal, weirdly blended and untested ideas, with a fanatic’s claim to a true vision of the one and only path toward redivision of the world. And throughout this esoteric bacchanalia of thoughts, one can glimpse a mysterious, monstrous enemy, who bodes an imminent and inevitable threat to Russia’s mission.

Mr. Dugin’s official claim to fame is as the acknowledged ideological progenitor of the Eurasian theory. According to his worldview, Russia must enter a multipolar world, as opposed to the unipolar world where the US is the Antichrist incarnate, both theologically and geopolitically. As seen by Dugin: “Today it is obvious that the most “perfect” and “complete” form of historical realization of this sinister character is the liberal West, the ideology and system that won the Cold War with the Soviet Union and established the foundations of planetary dominance everywhere in the form of a “new world order”.

In Dugin’s game of thrones, global history is nothing more than an overt and covert struggle between two secret orders, the “minstrels of Morvan” (the Atlantist-Mondialists) and the “minstrels of Murcia” (the Eurasians).

Even Harry Potter’s magic class would be amazed at how easily the Russian wizard Dugin morphed the freshly minted science of geopolitics into a set of speculations justifying Russia’s political and territorial imperial ambitions. Dugin reanimates the messianic version of totalitarianism with creative inspiration. He is convinced that Eurasianism is an ideology that is different from the Communism of the Soviet Union or the National Socialism of Nazi Germany. Dugin states: “The Eurasian idea is the real backbone of Russian statehood. Not Slavic, not Russian, not nationalism — all this, on the contrary, will only divide and distract…”

He believes that he has taken into account the mistakes of his predecessors, as Lenin did with the results of the French Revolution, or his friend Barkashov with his criticism of Hitler, who underestimated the Slavs. Or Muslim integrists who remembered the mistakes of dictators that acted without God’s blessing. His political theory claims to be on the other side of liberalism, communism, and fascism.

Maturing in his views, Dugin prayerfully turned to the infinite and called upon the Orthodox Church and God himself to take his side in the holy war against the West. Even before he became a sympathizer of staroobryadtsy (religion of Old School Believers), Dugin’s concepts were too vast to pay much attention to “tiny” dissonances — especially now that the battle with Satan is final: now or never.

If the existence of aliens was generally accepted, Dugin could successfully justify a theory of intergalactic geopolitics and pitting a couple of extraterrestrial civilizations against each other. This would encompass a much larger scale theater for murder, war, and death than the mundane earthly theory of fighting dark forces in the form of a dull, liberal, and materialistic West.

That is why liberalism and capitalism, which Dugin hates with every fiber of his being, are so much dearer to people — because of their practical relevance. People appreciate capitalism and accept liberalism because they are constructs focused on their own lives. It’s about them buying houses, cars; creating families, jobs, children; taking stock market courses and cleaning out their backyards. People build their own lives and don’t set their sights on running the universe until they have cleaned out that backyard. Pretty personal. Pretty individualistic. For Dugin, individualism is the root of all evil. He fears that full-fledged individualism will drag humanity to an inhuman state of being, uncontrollable by society and its norms.

Dugin yearns for a special kind of people called “men of long will”. Nietzschean titans — brutal conquerors and merciful liberators, bearers of the Great Idea and the Royal Spirit. His superhumans crush the dull mundane abominations of liberalism and return man to the pedestal of the God-man. He sees these heroes as manifestations of the pulse of Russia itself.

The “builders of the new order” is in itself an inspiring idea. A dream of absolute perfection, where man, as it were, achieves a higher stage of development.

At the same time, it reflects the communist idea of the superhuman and collectivism. Russia has already once summoned up the spectre of communism-socialism into reality. It eventually faded into ongoing banal theft by party representatives, economic collapse, degradation in all spheres of production, etc.

However, Dugin is pretty adept at the incremental correction of his political vision. He stated that the “truly new” (probably referring to his ideas) is born out of eternity. Like a midwife, Dugin himself is present at the birth of Eternity. And Eternity, to the great amazement of the initiated, gives birth only to another totalitarian overhaul. In a horrifically practical turn of events, that achievement of Messianism and Greatness was expressed as a vulgar war against Ukraine, with thousands and thousands of dead innocent people and millions of others drugged by propaganda like cheap hashish.

Dugin is “dreaming history”. He rises above the petty agendas of those who have been defeated in the past, like the geopoliticians and ideologues of fascism. Wary of being grouped with them, he wisely criticizes their failures. It is as if Dugin rises above the clouds of all these notions and ideas with the understanding that only he delivers the one true vision to the world. And in this dream of Dugin’s universe, Russia will play a leading role. He is so enamored by the self-evident truthfulness of his vision that he is ready to sacrifice anything.

Even human lives.