Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, leftists

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Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, leftists

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:07 am

I wouldn't be getting embroiled in a big thing about this story but I do think it is appropriate to share it:

Monday, February 02, 2015
Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, U.S. leftists

For decades, some far right opponents of the U.S. empire have been trying to make common cause with leftists. They got another opportunity in December 2014 at an international conference in Moscow on the “Right of Peoples to Self-Determination and Building a Multi-Polar World.” The conference was organized by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR). Participants included U.S. leftists from the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and the International Action Center (IAC) -- both of which are closely associated with the Workers World Party -- alongside Russian and Italian fascists and U.S. white nationalists from the neo-Confederate group League of the South. It’s worth looking at this convergence in some detail as it speaks to an important pitfall confronting leftists involved in anti-imperialist coalitions.

UNAC and IAC articles about the Multi-Polar World conference portrayed it as a progressive event against war, racist violence, and repression. The IAC reported, “Major themes of the discussion were the US-backed war against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and economic war against Russia, Venezuela and Iran, and the ongoing uprising against racism and police brutality in the United States.” Neither IAC nor UNAC mentioned that a number of far right groups were represented. UNAC did note that attendees included Israel Shamir, “a leading anti-Zionist writer from Israel,” but didn’t mention that Shamir is also a notorious antisemite.

The conference declaration was in keeping with the UNAC/IAC portrayal. It called for an international “united front against discrimination, violation of human rights, religious and racial intolerance” and condemned the “predatory foreign policy of the US and its NATO allies.” The declaration also denounced the oppression of people of color in the U.S. and demanded the release of U.S. political prisoners such as Palestinian activist Rasmia Oda, Leonard Peltier, and Mumia Abu Jamal. The declaration urged “the consolidation of the progressive part of mankind” and promised that “we will make every effort to build a multi-polar world!”

Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the phrase “multi-polar world” is a major theme in the work of Aleksandr Dugin, Russia’s leading fascist theoretician, as in his 2012 book, The Theory of a Multi-Polar World. Dugin is leader of the Eurasia Party and the international Eurasianist movement; he envisions a renewed Eurasian “empire” based on authoritarianism, patriarchy, and traditional religion, in which Russians will play a “messianic” role. Dugin disavows biological racism but has called for “the rebirth of the primordial Aryan conscience.”

It’s unclear to me how close the relationship is between the Anti-Globalization Movement and Dugin, but members of the Duginist Eurasian Youth Union took part in the AGMR’s December 2014 conference and have worked with AGMR at other events.

Like Dugin, the AGMR envisions a broad alliance of political forces against U.S. imperialism, ranging from grassroots social movements to Communist Party states to right-wing dictators. The lynchpin of this alliance is Russia. The AGMR website features a list of seven “Faces of Antiglobalization,” almost all of whom are or were friendly with Putin’s government: Belorussian president Alexander Lukashenko, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s ex-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Venezuela’s deceased left populist president Hugo Chavez, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. The one outlier on the list -- and only non-state figure -- is Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, whose 1994 uprising was a pivotal event in the global justice movement’s development.

The overall position statement on the AGMR website opposes “the emerging unipolar world” – i.e., the international dominance of the United States and its allies – and “supports the full sovereignty of nation-states including the sovereignty of Russia as an independent player on the political, economic and cultural world stage.”

The AGMR position statement seems carefully designed to appeal to both leftists and rightists. For the leftish side, it criticizes “the global dominance of transnational corporations and supranational trade and financial institutions.” For the other end of the spectrum, it warns against “the attempts to impose a ‘new world order’” and the threat of “a single mega-totalitarian world state,” both of which are standard targets of right-wing conspiracy theories. AGMR also “aims to promote all aspects of the national security and traditional moral values.” (According to Interfax news service, the AGMR joined with several rightist groups in 2013 to plan a public protest against same-sex marriage outside the French embassy.)

The AGMR position statement also includes a lot of language about tolerance and self-determination, for example, “respect for other peoples and their sovereignty, value systems and lifestyles.” Such phrases appeal to both leftists and liberals, but are also favored by the neofascists of the European New Right (ENR), who have replaced traditional fascist talk of national or racial supremacy with slick appeals to “ethno-pluralism” and “biocultural diversity.” Aleksandr Dugin is the ENR’s leading representative in Russia.

On one of its web pages, AGMR also gives a hat tip to the Lyndon LaRouche network as some of the “like-minded people” from around the world who took part in conferences that laid the groundwork for the AGMR’s founding. The LaRouchites promote a quirky crypto-fascist ideology and in recent years have become increasingly aligned with the Russian government on geostrategic issues, for example echoing a pro-Russian line on the civil wars in Syria and Ukraine.

In addition to the Duginists from the Eurasian Youth Union, the December 2014 Multi-Polar World conference also included representatives of the right-wing Rodina Party (which in 2005 was barred from participating in Moscow Duma elections for inciting racial hatred against immigrants) and the Italian neofascist group Millennium, which has had a close relationship with Dugin’s organization for several years. In December 2013, AGMR head Alexander Ionov spoke at a Millennium-sponsored far right conference in Milan.

The Multi-Polar World conference also drew representatives from Novorossiya, or New Russia, the entity in eastern Ukraine that, with Russian backing, has declared its independence from Kiev. The UNAC/IAC folks portray the Ukrainian conflict as aggression by neonazis and U.S. imperialists against the people of eastern Ukraine – utterly ignoring the Russian far rightists who are heavily involved in the eastern separatist movement, as well as the Russian government’s own expansionist aims in the region.


Continues at: http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/ ... s-neo.html





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Re: Moscow conference

Postby The Consul » Wed Feb 04, 2015 1:40 pm

What the heck is the League of the South doing there?

http://dixienet.org/index.php
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Re: Moscow conference

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 04, 2015 2:08 pm

Inside the American Id: Chilling With the South’s New Secessionists

Adam Weinstein 3/21/14

http://gawker.com/inside-the-american-i ... 1547070777

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The leader of this vanguard, part Lenin and part Robert E. Lee, is Hill—the League's only president since he created the group in 1994. Once a promising professor of history at a historically black college in Tuscaloosa, the Alabama native left his tenured position in 1999 to dedicate himself full-time to the South's restoration as an independent nation. (He also happened to leave academia just as his university planned to consider faculty members' behavior outside the classroom in their tenure reviews.)

The creation of the League was a logical outgrowth of Hill's scholarship: He'd studied at the University of Alabama under two famous Southern historians with the appropriately Southern names Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald. Building on McWhiney's magnum opus, Cracker Culture, Hill advanced what is known as the Celtic thesis: the notion that Southern culture is distinct based on its people's heritage as Celtic herdsmen who "realized that the true foundation of independence was that every man be armed."

That culture is agrarian, martial, Protestant, easily excitable, and steadfastly loyal to "kith and kin." It yields brave Christian warriors, but not necessarily prudent ones—an explanation for their honorable military bloodlettings from William Wallace in 1305 to the Wilderness in 1864.

The Celtic thesis doesn't account for the genteel English-style aristocracy of Virginia or the French-infused Catholicism of Louisiana. But let's don't quibble about the details. If monolithic Southern culture didn't exist, Hill would have to invent it. "There always have to be certain cultural traits that are preserved more or less intact for a people to survive as an identifiable people over the centuries," he told me. "We think that our faith, our allegiance to family and our allegiance to each other as a people is the fundamental element of that."

The way I met Hill was this: I started talking to Snuffy Smith with the Liberian flag, and three minutes later, Hill came urgently striding over like a recess teacher on the playground. "Media?" he asked. "Talk to me. Talk to me."

He looked like your high school linebackers coach and sounded like your college professor, the one who's an easy A if you can affect his voice on the term paper. The appearance and sound are not a put-on. He is fastidious about his health—"I still run sprints." When an underling offered him a cold Gatorade on the sun-dried steps of the Capitol, he accepted it with thanks but never opened it. "I only drink water. Water and moonshine. No sugar. Well, moonshine sugar."


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Dr. Michael Hill: League of the South founder, historian, Skynyrd fan.

Hill is, predictably, a purist about many things. He hates Grammy-winning music ("It's not a natural thing. It's just staged. This is not real music. This is not music that grows up from the people"). But he loves the Allman Brothers and Charlie Daniels and "the Skynyrd guys."

He stands proud and talks humble. But he talks, a lot. It is a wind concerto played entirely on dog whistles—unintelligible to most listeners, but a mellifluous, taut tune to a very small audience of aficionados.

"It alarms me that America — and the South in particular, my home — is going to be a place that I wouldn't recognize if I were to come back in 100 or 200 years, and I fear for my progeny," he told me. The last word hung in the damp panhandle air, rusty and antique.

"I've actually heard several Hispanic leaders say, 'Hey, when we get in control, you're gonna pay.' Listen, I'm enough of a fighter that that's a challenge," he said. "I'll take it. I don't want my children and grandchildren to have to fight as a minority in what used to be their country, the country that their ancestors founded and built. And I think that's a legitimate position for anybody to take without being called ugly names about it."

As suspect as that talk may sound, Hill insists his group is not neo-Confederate: "We're not so blind as to think that we can turn back the clock and have things the way that it was 100, 150 years ago, and we don't want to do that. We're men and women who live in the age that we've been placed, and we're not romantic dreamers of some idyllic past or something like that."

Hill's Facebook page suggests otherwise. In late January, for example, he posted a note celebrating the birthdays of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. "[L]et us emulate them and continue the honorable cause that motivated these two noble Southern men—the survival, well being, and independence of the Southern people," he wrote.

The following day was MLK Day, so Hill added another thought. "Note: If you wish to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. please go elsewhere. He is not one of us," he wrote of the Atlanta-born Southern preacher.

Lest he be misunderstood, Hill posted this the next day:

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Postings like this suggest League supporters also miss apartheid and segregation.

Lately, Hill and the League have been focused on events far from Dixie. The group recently endorsed Russia's annexation of Crimea as a victory for the Crimeans' self-determination. That's consistent with the League's secessionist bent; good Celts that they are, they've also supported Scottish independence.

"The 19th century was the century of consolidated nation states and empires. The 20th century started to see those things undermined by historical events," Hill said. "The 21st century, I'm convinced, is going to be the century of seeing all of these conglomerates, these monstrosities, these dinosaurs, whatever you wanna call them, just break apart into natural polities that have some kind of cultural and organic sense about them."

But the League's love of the Russian bear goes deeper still. "I have more in common with Vladimir Putin than I do with Barack Obama," Hill wrote last month. "One defends a nation—the Rus; the other lords over an anti-White multicultural empire. One upholds an ancient Christian tradition; the other deplores the Christian faith. One acts like a man; the other like a preening capon."

There's that manhood thing again. But: really? Can a thinking American man truly feel more kinship with a calculating ex-KGB spook than any American president? Yep, Hill said. "Sure, Putin puts on a lot of this stuff, takes his shirt off, rides a horse, but at the same time, you know, you can juxtapose it with Obama sittin' on a stupid-looking bicycle with a goofy-looking bike helmet on his head. And it doesn't look good for Obama. Putin looks like a man, you know. Russia likes this machoness—well, there's some of us Americans like it, too."

The League's coziness with unsavory elements doesn't end at the Black Sea. A quick search of its Facebook members turns up an alarming number of "likes" for white supremacist hobbyhorses like Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, Christian Identity, and the "Fourteen Words" ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children"). It seems a glaring oversight for a polite-sounding group seeking mainstream legitimacy—a group that took pains not to display the Confederate battle flag at the Florida rally, opting instead for the less-notorious and prettier Bonny Blue.

When I asked Hill if Klanners and neo-Nazis have a place at the League's table, he took some time with his answers. He'd prefer they cut any ties with "dishonorable" organizations before applying for membership, he said. But nothing's written in stone: "If you want to believe this, if you want to believe that, that's fine. I'm not going to be an Inquisitor, there's not going to be an Inquisition here."

Hill "can tell a bad egg pretty quick," he said, and he takes pains to send them on their way. But, he said, "if it's just somebody who has ideas that I don't particularly agree with but they agree with me on the Southern nationalist part of this, I can work with them." The important thing, he said, is "to have an organization that is honorable for people to join."

This emphasis on honorableness has a dark primordial heritage of its own. In the groundbreaking 1980s study Honor and Violence in the Old South, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown argued that Southerners' famous genteelness always carried a paradoxical tendency to "unjustified violence, unpredictability, and anarchy." Honor must be defended at all costs. And when honor is defined by blood, by sex, by race, by tribe, the honorable man finds endless provocations.

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Publicly, the League renounces violence. On Facebook, its founder suggests otherwise.

Which raises the question: Just where does all this lead? The League doesn't seem to have a plan to translate its slogans and rallies into revolutionary action or all the bloody tumult a real secessionist movement would entail. "I've studied a lot of nationalist movements in the past," Hill said, "and sometimes it's one coalescing event, like the Easter uprising in Ireland in 1916."

By noon, it was clear this would not be such an event. The street traffic thickened, but the rally crowd wilted somewhat under the sparse cover of the statehouse mall. Snuffy Smith pulled out a can of dip. "I tried to quit a couple of times," he told a colleague. "About three days is all I can do." There was talk of decamping to an Olive Garden for lunch. A Capitol police officer told the group to take down two of its flags from the storied building, a "Don't Tread on Me" and an Alamo banner. The flags were removed quickly, without a fuss. "Well, you know, freedom is kind of a messy thing," Hill told me as we parted.

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The League flies many flags, including this replica of the one flown over the Alamo.

I spent some more time at the front of the demonstration's picket line, where one participant—an enthusiastic local, decked out in Florida State University fan regalia—was trying to chat up one of the out-of-towners. "You ever want to be interviewed on Stormfront or anything?" the local man asked, referring to the white supremacist discussion board that's linked to neo-Nazis and the Klan. His listener declined.

"Just want to let you know the offer is there," the local said.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 04, 2015 5:39 pm

Also in the mix: the Workers' World Party


A brief look at the doctrinaire sect's history: WWP is the brainchild of Sam Marcy, intellectual guru at the party's helm until his death in 1998. In 1956, Marcy led the faction in the Socialist Workers Party that supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, attacking the popular uprising and general strike there as "counter-revolutionary." In 1959, the Marcy clique broke from the Trotskyist SWP to found the more Stalinist WWP. The new group wasted little time in cheering on the brutal Chinese repression of the indigenous culture in Tibet that year (which sent the Dalai Lama and 80,000 refugees fleeing into exile).

Vying with SWP and other parties for top dog position on the radical left, WWP always maintained a front group to suck in neophytes. During the Vietnam era this was Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF). In the Reagan-Bush era it was People's Anti-War Mobilization (PAM)--which would be the operative group in the National Coalition in 1990.

With glasnost, WWP supported the Kremlin hard-liners who resisted Gorbachev's reforms and disarmament moves. Insisting that China remained a "workers state," WWP supported Deng Xiaoping in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, again attacking the protesting students and workers as "counter-revolutionaries." In 1991, WWP supported the KGB coup against Gorbachev.

Yet WWP also wooed the Democratic party, supporting Jesse Jackson's presidential bid in 1984. In New York, WWP made alliances with the left wing of the Democrats to establish a foothold in key trade unions.

WWP cadre Gavriella Gemma became a secretary in Clark's New York law office in 1977. In his New Republic piece, Judis suggests that Clark fell under her spell and was won over to the WWP. When David McReynolds of the War Resisters League met with Clark in 1990 to warn him that WWP was "using him," Clark refused to listen, constantly referring to what "Gavriella said."

With Clark as the figurehead and PAM/WWP at the helm, the National Coalition provoked a split in the movement against Operation Desert Storm through its refusal to condemn Saddam Hussein or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The other established anti-war groups (War Resisters League, CISPES, SANE/Freeze, National Organization for Women, etc.) formed the rival National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which condemned both Bush and Saddam. Soft-peddling their pro-Saddam line, WWP's National Coalition won endorsements from celebrities like Spike Lee and Casey Kasem, sucking in numbers even after the split. The two groups held separate marches on Washington in January 1991, allowing the media to portray a divided movement.

WWP went to extreme lengths to maintain control of the National Coalition. At an April 1991 protest in New York City, WWP thugs attacked a Lower East Side squatter contingent and ejected them from the rally for refusing to take down their unapproved homemade banners. WWPers then called in the police and had the squatters arrested (SHADOW April/May 1991).

In November 1990, Clark flew to Baghdad to meet with Saddam, who allowed him to return with a few hostages. In February, with the bombs falling, Clark was in Basra, Iraq's southern port, witnessing the destruction. But his consistent failure to complain about Saddam's regime made it clear he was there at its invitation.

With Clark's name-recognition and homespun, avuncular image, WWP had the opportunity to form a new front group to win over naive liberals. This was the International Action Center (IAC), which remains the top vehicle for Clark's ego and WWP's play for hegemony over the fragmented remnants of the left.

IAC/WWP's politics went from bad to worse as Yugoslavia descended into chaos. It soon became obvious that Clark's legal work now closely followed the WWP line. In 1992, Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was served with federal subpoenas when he touched down in New York for UN meetings. The National Organization for Women and the Center for Constitutional Rights, acting on behalf of Bosnian refugee women, were charging him with ordering mass rape and war crimes. Clark, of course, immediately came forward to represent Karadzic. Clark also made junkets to Serb-occupied Bosnia to schmooze with Karadzic (as did various Russian neo-fascists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky).

International Action Center leaflets engaged in blatant historical revisionism over Serb war crimes, portraying them as lies perpetrated by an imperialist conspiracy.

"What about all those reports of 'Serbian atrocities'?" asked an IAC leaflet in 1993, and then answered its own question: "Before the bombs can be dropped the lies must be told." It then went on to cite fabricated atrocities which the Kuwaiti regime's paid PR hacks had attributed to the Iraqi occupation forces, without offering a shred of evidence that the reports of Serb rape camps and "ethnic cleansing" were similarly fabricated. Note the subtly evil propaganda. Opposing NATO bombing is one thing. Calling the reports of mass rape and ethnic cleansing "lies" is quite another. This "anti-war" propaganda is on the same repugnant level as right-wing Holocaust Revisionism.

IAC/WWP embraces what is now called in Europe the "Red-Brown Alliance"--the notion of a left-fascist alliance against the West. This alliance is most advanced in Russia where neo-Stalinists and neo-Czarists have joined to oppose Yeltsin (seen as a stooge of the West). In an echo of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, former communists and anarchists in Russia now work with figures like Zhirinovsky, who have themselves sought alliances with German neo-Nazis. Like Clark and WWP, these Russian extremists have avidly rooted for the Serb armies throughout the wars in former Yugoslavia.

The "Red-Brown Alliance" was seen on the streets of New York during the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, when Clark led rallies which brought WWP communists together with right-wing nationalists and Orthodox priests from the Serb immigrant community. Serbian flags were proudly waved at these New York rallies, while meetings at IAC's 14th Street offices degenerated into mass chants of "Serbia! Serbia! Serbia!" This at a time when Serbian police and paramilitaries were forcing 800,000 Albanian refugees to flee their homes in Kosovo at gunpoint. Again, WRL and other anti-war groups broke away to form their own coalition that rejected both NATO's bombing and Serbian aggression against the Kosovo Albanians. But this time it was only IAC/WWP which held a national rally in DC.

In October 1999, Clark met with Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, and said everything the dictator wanted to hear. Milosevic, by then facing war crimes charges before the UN tribunal, called his guest "brave, objective, and moral."

The case against Radovan Karadzic languished since the UN launched war crimes charges against him, forcing him into hiding in Serbia. Clark, meanwhile, represented a Rwandan Hutu militiaman fighting his extradition from the US back to Rwanda to face genocide charges. The WWP line simultaneously (and predictably) tilted to the genocidal Hutu militias as the UN wrote up war crime charges against their leaders for ordering the slaughter of half a million Tutsi civilians in 1994.



Excerpted from:

THE MYSTERIOUS RAMSEY CLARK:

STALINIST DUPE OR RULING-CLASS SPOOK?


By Manny Goldstein

http://extra.shadowpress.org/sin001/clark.htm
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby slimmouse » Wed Feb 04, 2015 5:55 pm

The "Red-Brown Alliance" was seen on the streets of New York during the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, when Clark led rallies which brought WWP communists together with right-wing nationalists and Orthodox priests from the Serb immigrant community. Serbian flags were proudly waved at these New York rallies, while meetings at IAC's 14th Street offices degenerated into mass chants of "Serbia! Serbia! Serbia!" This at a time when Serbian police and paramilitaries were forcing 800,000 Albanian refugees to flee their homes in Kosovo at gunpoint. Again, WRL and other anti-war groups broke away to form their own coalition that rejected both NATO's bombing and Serbian aggression against the Kosovo Albanians. But this time it was only IAC/WWP which held a national rally in DC.


WTF? The left, the radical right, the Omnipotent - Gnostic peoples front.

It seems like they all get pissed on here.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby Joao » Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:03 am

[On second thought, I decline to participate in this thread.]
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:42 pm

Brown Is the New Black
Saturday, 29 March 2014
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus | Op-Ed


http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22760 ... -new-black

The influence that the far right has right now on the interim government in Kiev is indeed worrisome. But they remain a minority and, judging by public opinion polling, will continue to be so after the next elections. Nevertheless, the Russian government has branded the entire post-Yanukovych ruling elite “fascist” and therefore illegitimate, and many overseas supporters of Russia’s actions in Crimea have followed suit.

What hasn’t received much attention, however, is the influence of the far right in Russia itself. It makes Ukrainian fascism look like child’s play.

Presidential elections in Russia, I once predicted, “may usher in an autocrat by democratic means, a la Germany in the 1930s.” Such an autocrat “could turn Russia into Chile on a grand scale, a Chile that not only clamped down on internal dissent but stamped out opposition in its neighboring countries as well.”

I published those sentences in the now-defunct Covert Action Quarterly in 1996, long before Vladimir Putin arrived on the political scene. I’d just returned from a trip to Moscow. At the time, Boris Yeltsin and his coterie of cronies were giving liberalism a bad name, fascism was making a comeback after many decades of hibernation, and several political strongmen were contending for the honor of ruling Russia with an “iron fist.” Military general Alexander Lebed, who had openly professed his admiration for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was one such candidate. He placed third in the 1996 presidential elections, eventually took over a governorship, and died in a helicopter crash in 2002.

But Lebed was in many ways just a moderate nationalist. A much more authentic avatar of Russian fascism was Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Openly anti-Semitic, deeply misogynistic, and thoroughly racist, Zhirinovsky has often been dismissed as simply a clown. But he has proven to be an enduring politician since he first emerged in the early 1990s talking about retaking Alaska, reviving the southern surge to the Persian Gulf, and redistributing free vodka and underwear. His Liberal Democratic Party—don’t let the title fool you—is currently the fourth largest in the Russian Duma, with nearly 15 percent of the seats.

Clown prince of politics or not, Zhirinovsky is currently the deputy speaker of the Duma. His party’s brand is “Greater Russia”—the revival of the once-mighty Russian empire—and this has become a much more popular vision than it was in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise. His approach to Ukraine is rather close to how Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic once viewed Bosnia. In a recent letter, Zhirinovsky proposed that Poland, Hungary, and Romania retake sections of Ukraine that had once been their territory, presumably as part of a land grab that would have Russia take over eastern Ukraine.

Zhirinovsky’s views, if not Zhirinovsky himself, attract wide support. Racism runs deep in Russian society. Racially motivated attacks and killings have been widespread, only 24 percent of the population (in 2011) rejects the slogan “Russia for Russians” as fascist, and an estimated 50,000 skinheads are active in Russia today. President Putin has condemned the use of racism in the media and politics, and the Russian Federation has more vigorously prosecuted neo-Nazi groups and racist crimes, as the most recent Council of Europe report notes. But the level of xenophobia in the country makes non-Slavs often feel unwelcome and under threat, to put it mildly.

The success of the far right, however, has not been simply to elevate Zhirinovsky in the Duma or to swell the crowds of neo-Nazis who march in Moscow and other major cities. Rather, the far right has been able to shape the very mainstream of Russian policy.

In many ways, Vladimir Putin is the autocrat that I imagined back in the 1990s would come to power. Russia remains a democratic state, but it is an “illiberal democracy” (as John Gray would say) or a “democracy with Russian characteristics” (as the Chinese might say). Putin’s party United Russia dominates parliament, and the president has systematically removed any potential challengers to his authority. For instance, he deployed his “iron fist” to rein in the oligarchs by arresting the country’s richest businessman and supporter of the political opposition, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and shipping him out to Siberia for 10 years. Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor who alleged large-scale state theft of money, died in prison. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who led huge demonstrations against Putin, was also thrown in jail. Although released after a few months, his probation bars him from running for political office for as many as 10 years. Even members of the flamboyant but rather innocuous punk band Pussy Riot were sent to the labor camps.

Putin tolerates very little dissent. He restricts the dissemination of information through state control of television and radio (and his government has targeted the remaining independent radio station, Ekho Moskvy, and TV station, Dozhd). Russia currently ranks 148th in the press freedom index from Reporters Without Borders, below Afghanistan and the Central African Republic. The state has also blocked opposition Internet sites, using a new law from December that allows the Russian equivalent of the attorney general to crack down on anything deemed “extreme.” The ministry of justice has used the law on “foreign agents” that went into effect last March to rein in the activities of thousands of NGOs throughout the country. Meanwhile, Putin has created a veritable cult of personality through youth organizations like Nashi (since disbanded) that glorified his policies and behaved like a gang of thugs against presidential opponents.

This, of course, is just run-of-the-mill authoritarianism, not fascism. But in other ways, the Putin government is pushing Russian policy even further rightward. This turn is most evident in foreign policy where Putin has put the protection of Russians in the “near abroad” at the center of his concerns. The seizure of Crimea—after a military intervention and a jury-rigged referendum—is only the latest in a series of efforts to expand the Russian sphere of influence that has included the 2008 war with Georgia, the support extended to breakaway regions like Transnistria in Moldova, and the funding of Russian nationalists in other neighboring countries like Latvia. The Crimean adventure, however, reveals the true nature of Putinism. He has cut Ukraine down to size in the same way he went after Khodorkovsky. Any person, institution, or country that dares to challenge his authority should expect to feel his wrath.

Still, this expansionist Russian foreign policy might seem like nothing more than ordinary imperialism. In the larger context of the revival of Eurasianism, however, it begins to assume a different character.

Eurasianism began in the Russian émigré community of the 1920s as a spiritual alternative to both Bolshevism and liberalism. A messianic vision that looked more into the future than back into the 19th century, it focused on Russia’s Asian roots (mostly imagined) and the country’s role in bridging two continents and many cultures. The Eurasianist philosophy drew on Slavophilism, but differed in important respects such as a statist predisposition and a streak of cultural avant-gardism. As such, Eurasianism offered a third path between communism and capitalism, Slavophilism and Westernism, Europeanism and Asianism.

In the 1990s, Eurasianism made a comeback in the work of analysts such as Yeltsin adviser Sergei Stankevich. This revival stressed historic destiny over pure rationalism and the interests of Russians over abstract liberal reforms. Eurasianism assumed a concrete form in the proposals of Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbaev for a “Eurasian” union that would anchor a stronger Commonwealth of Independent States. In striking a balance between Russian national interests and cooperation with the West, a Gaullist approach emerged that could be termed “moderate” Eurasianism.

But Eurasianism also has its more intolerant side. In 1995, for instance, the Russian Duma conferred its first “Milestone” award on late anthropologist and noted Eurasian scholar Lev Gumilev. Among other things, Gumilev was convinced both of Russia’s superiority to the West and the necessity of preserving the genetic stock of ethnic Russians. In the popular writings of Aleksandr Prokhanov, meanwhile, Eurasianism assumes the form of an Asiatic despotism shot through with European fascism. Eurasianism, in other words, can also be a facade for Russian racism and a vehicle for Russia’s colonial aspirations.

Putin has instituted a Eurasianism from above, with his updated version of Nazarbaev’s proposal—the Eurasian Union that currently counts Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as members. Ultimately, Putin wants to reconstruct an entity of the size and heft of the Soviet Union that can balance and bridge China to the east and Europe to the west. Ukraine is key piece of this jigsaw puzzle.

But there is also the Eurasianism from below. Far right movements in Europe have thrown in their lot with Russian fascist groups and with Putin’s government as well. Russian fascist political scientist Aleksandr Dugin has pushed hard for the most intolerant and racist version of Eurasianism, and he has attracted the support of Hungary’s Jobbik. Marine Le Pen, of the National Front in France, has also visited Moscow and sat down with more establishment figures, like Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who has long been a key member of the Russian far right.

If you add it all together—autocracy, imperialism, and a semi-mystical belief in the divine mission of ethnic Russians—the result looks browner and browner by the minute.





Ukraine: Interview with a Donetsk anarchist

http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27241

What is the social composition of the protesters in the south-east and at Maidan? Who are the leaders and the ordinary people there?

Maidan and the Separatists of the South-East do not differ much from each other. Both the Maidan revolution and the revolution of the Separatist East involve the people of Ukraine: creative intellectuals, employees, entrepreneurs, citizens, the rural population, students, the lumpen proletariat and the former military. This fratricidal war is between the people who must have common interests, but in the course of political manipulation this nation has become a hostage and a puppet to interests of the feuding economic clans, families, in fact, to separate “strong personalities”. Instead of directing their arms against the oligarchs and their empires, the ordinary people of Maidan have led new oligarchs to power, and the common people of the South-East carry out the orders of the family of ousted president Yanukovych and his Moscow Master. All this rhetoric flavored with nationalism and chauvinism, all these tears about some interests of the East or the West are just stage scenery for the struggle for the interests of oligarchic families and State institutions, subject to their will. But these pieces of scenery are bloody. People have always paid in lives for the interests of their masters, both in the First World War and in the Second. Both in the recent local wars of contemporary history and, alas, now in Ukraine. As a result, bloody wounds and anger for decades – that is the very thing that the Ukrainian people will ultimately receive for their sacrifices. The people of Ukraine, who recognize themselves as such or do not realize, are embroiled in these cruel “games of thrones”. People on both sides of the barricades and roadblocks must understand that they have been deceived, that they are fighting with mythology and in reality they are killing themselves, because they are one united body. The workers who have been pitted one against another like fighting dogs, on whom stakes are placed, and who will get nothing but wounds and grief. Because the enemy is on the wrong side of the fun sight. The enemy is in the Kremlin and in the Mariinsky Palace, in the Capitol and in the Bundestag.

Now let's talk about the leaders. The Maidan leaders are the national bourgeoisie and its radical elements. Who are separatists’ leaders? The national bourgeoisie and its radical elements. In the East they scare the people with the Pravyj Sektor (“Right sector”) and call on them to fight fascism - those, who have come from within the Russian fascist parties and movements or share the paradigm of imperial fascism of Russian nation. Supporters of Barkashov, Zhirinovsky, Dugin and Limonov do call to fight fascism, don’t they? This is nonsense. And the saddest aspect of this process is that by fascism the Russian fascists and nationalists, together with those in the masses fooled by them, mean all Ukrainians, the Ukrainian people as such. The Ukrainians are denied their history, language, their own name, the right to exist as such. In Donetsk, according to their logic, you have a choice, to be either a Russian or to be a fascist. If you are Ukrainian, but you have nothing to do with nationalism and, moreover, with fascism, it does not count. If you say, “I am Ukrainian,” for a word in the Ukrainian language you are beaten or killed. It's simple. Such is the logic of imperial Russian “national anti-fascism”. Come to Donetsk and speak Ukrainian, and you will see for yourself. And this phantom has embraced not only a handful of the pro-Russian Right, but the whole population strata. Even the so-called Left in the South-East. Manipulation wins the war. Rape the consciousness of the masses and you can work wonders of absurdity. This happened at Maidan and is now happening in the South-East.


Rabochiy Front is a group that emerged as a result of a split in the Ukrainian Workers Union long before the events at Maidan. These are workers of communist, pro-Soviet views. When the unrest in Donetsk started, this group showed itself initially by protecting a monument to Lenin. Then it participated in the capture of the Donetsk Regional State Administration. In general, the participation of supporters of the Communist Party of Ukraine and all the pro-Soviet groups in the separatist movement has manifested itself massively and actively. Even the Borot’ba party takes an active part in events in the South-East. Many people see Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union. And, in connection with this, in all the pro-Russian-ism they see a kind of restoration of the USSR. It is so ridiculous and illogical that I do not even want to comment on it. But mass psychosis is a complex phenomenon. It has been perfectly described by many, from Le Bon to Reich and Moscovici. There was a time when I did not understand why the Nazis were able to win in Germany so easily. Now I understand. The crowd can be only manipulated, it will swallow everything. Moreover, none of the classical schemes of the world view work in the era of Post-modernism. That’s why one can see a communist and a fascist standing shoulder to shoulder, an imperialist and a supporter of workers' councils, an anarchist and a nationalist. I’m reminded of a vivid illustration of the above, when at the anti-fascist rally devoted to the anniversary of the victory over fascism, on the 9th May in Donetsk, my brother, a supporter of the separatists, was greeted with “antifascist” greeting “Heil Hitler” by his comrade-in-movement, one of those who stormed the Donetsk SBU (Security Service of Ukraine). In response to my sarcastic remark my brother, who came “to protect veterans from Banderovtsy” murmured shyly: “Hrmph…”


Do you think there are any Russian experts in the South-East?

I do not think so, I can confirm so. And a lot of them - there are training bases in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, where groups of 400-500 local people and visiting volunteers from Russia undergo training under the guidance of military instructors. There are experts, for example, in the “Vostok” (“East”) battalion, several dozen Russian military professionals. There is Girkin and his group in Slovyansk, there is Bezler in Gorlovka and many others. Of course, the majority of people who are fighting under the flags of the separatists are the locals, ordinary hard workers or veterans of the army or security agencies, Afghan War veterans, former cops and experts from the Special Forces. But a significant and authoritative core of militants, apart from volunteers from Russia, such as the Don Cossacks and the core group of various nationalist Russian organizations, are Russian saboteurs, military specialists, who organize the process. The supply of ammunition, special equipment, weapons and financing comes from Russia via the Duma’s powerful lobby. People close to Putin advise functionaries from the Donetsk People's Republic, people such as Glazjev, for example, and such odious figures as Zhirinovsky, Dugin and Barkashov. Moreover, the current head of the government of the so-called "People's Republic" in Donetsk is a famous Moscow political strategist, Boroday, appointed by the Kremlin administration; he is also giving orders to separatist “Vostok” battalion whose recruiting stations openly recruit volunteers/mercenaries throughout Russia. This is intervention to a large extent which relies on the local protest movement and the local political elite. All these elements are present.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:59 pm

I wondered how long it would take for the CopyPasta to start... and slipping in posting from a deeply Soros-connected entity around this subject. Without that connection being mentioned...

I am getting that feeling of deja-vu all over again. Perhaps this should be in the Time-slip thread?

Searcher08 » Sat Nov 15, 2014 3:43 pm wrote:Why should we listen to this person?

I wonder how long it will take me to find a direct link between him and Soros ?

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus. This is part of the Institute for Policy Studies, which spawned the European based Transnational Institute. Funded by the Samuel Rubin Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Feffer

“Obviously, being a pundit is only half of the story here in Washington,” Feffer told POLITICO. “The other side, of course, is being inside the belly of the beast, so to speak, being inside politics.” Feffer isn’t a stranger to this world, either; he’s a think-tank man, currently a fellow at the Open Society Foundations and a North Korea expert at the Institute for Policy Studies.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/07/the-pundit-john-feffer-94049.html#ixzz3J9Toxwok

American Dream posting more articles from Soros Fellows, but leaving that information out.

The first rule of the globalist think-tank / academic anti-fascism writers is:
1 Never EVER EVER E V E R mention the USA or Israel as moving towards fascism.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 1:58 pm

That's what you call: missing the point.

Deliberately, I'd imagine.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Feb 05, 2015 2:35 pm

American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 5:58 pm wrote:That's what you call: missing the point.

Deliberately, I'd imagine.


No, that is NOT what I call missing the point. It is called being absolutely ON point to your posting with attribution, Sorosian globalist "thinktank" pieces served up in an innocuous 'this might be worth reading' sauce.

Ironically, I noticed that you have avoided actually *doing* any of the practical actions suggested in the 'Thread Improving' thread.

Deliberately, I'd imagine.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 2:43 pm

The first rule of the globalist think-tank / academic anti-fascism writers is:
1 Never EVER EVER E V E R mention the USA or Israel as moving towards fascism.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 2:55 pm

The "Red-Brown Alliance" approach tries to erase the differences between the more right-wing influenced anti-"NWO"/"Globalists" orientation and the more left-wing influenced approaches to anti-Imperialism and anti-Globalization efforts but I don't buy it personally.

There's really not enough common ground and I see a bunch of really nasty "deal breaker" type differences in principles and world view.
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby coffin_dodger » Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:34 pm

Wheee!...another thread basically about fascists (that actually had 'fascists' slipped into the thread title 24hrs after first posting)

BUMPITY BUMP, BUMP, BUMP!
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:42 pm

American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 6:55 pm wrote:The "Red-Brown Alliance" approach tries to erase the differences between the more right-wing influenced anti-"NWO"/"Globalists" orientation and the more left-wing influenced approaches to anti-Imperialism and anti-Globalization efforts but I don't buy it personally.

There's really not enough common ground and I see a bunch of really nasty "deal breaker" type differences in principles and world view.


Yet still you post data from Soros Fellows without mentioning that very relevant and pertinent fact.
Why?
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Re: Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, left

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 05, 2015 5:47 pm

As to "fascists" I'm not sure if I would use that word here but I would certainly say "far right".

As to Soros, I confess- I smoked the dope that came from Dennis Peron- and he got some of the money to collect signatures for California's medical marijuana initiative from a Soros-related entity. So therfore I must be one of... THEM!



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