"Eurasianism" Ideology Mixes the Best Parts of Marxism, Naziism

Well, that's what this guy says Putin's "Eurasian Union" is ultimately about.

I don't know if that's true-- it could be that Putin is just using that term ("Eurasian") and this other character uses it for his weird Soviet Nazi hybrid.

Worth reading, though.

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... 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.

...

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....

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.

Uh, I did not quote one important part of this, because of fair use, and because it was so Crazy Crank I felt embarrassed even having it on the site.

But it goes like this: This guy Dugin claims that there has been a battle since the beginning of time between the evil, cunning agents of Atlantis (yes, that Atlantis), who today make up all the world's maritime and mercantile peoples, and the good land-based farmer folk of the inland parts of the world.

Almost all of the world's conflicts of the past 10,000 years, he thinks, were really proxy wars between the Atlanteans and the Land People.

This is where I started to think, "There's no way Putin believes this."

But then, Hitler is said to embraced lots of crazy Blavatskyan mystical hokum, so there is precedent, I guess.

(Actually I think there's some debate on this, and while this idea that Hitler was "just crazy about the occult" is popular (and is of course the foundation of the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark), I don't know if it's established that Hitler himself was a member of the Thule Society and all that. I mean, he was obviously a lunatic, but I don't know if it's as true as popular culture tells us that he was into runes, Atlantis, and all the other sort of theosophical crap that had been bubbling up since the 1870s.)

posted by Ace at 06:24 PM

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