The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:44 am




In the field of conspiracy theories Prof. Dugin is something like an authority. Not only has he written a book about them—covering Martian invasions, underground temples, and even a caste of ruling reptiles—, but he has also distinguished himself, if not as an inventor, at least as a successful propagandist of one such theory, certainly the most presumptuous of them all.

That theory is presumptuous not only in the reach of its alleged explanatory power, which encompasses nothing less than all human history, but also in the politico-military effects that it aspires to unleash: the alliance of Russia with China and the Islamic countries, as well as with part of Western Europe, in a total war against the United States and Israel, followed by the establishment of a worldwide dictatorship.

Prof. Dugin is not a dreamer, a macabre poet creating imaginary hecatombs in a dark dungeon infested with rats. He is the mentor of the Putin government and the brains behind Russian foreign policy. His ideas have long ceased to be mere speculations. One of their material incarnations is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which gathers together Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan and intends to be the center of a restructuring of military power in the world.[1] Another one is the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, which has been the apple of the eye of Russian diplomacy for years.[2]

The “war of the continents” theory was created by the English geographer Halford J. Mackinder at the turn of the twentieth century,[3] under the impact of one of the most interesting episodes of that time: England’s struggle against Germany and Russia for dominion of Central Asia. The “Great Game,” as Rudyard Kipling called it, was an entangled story which involved, besides military personnel and diplomats, a whole cast of spies, bribed politicians, thieves, smugglers, tribe chieftains, secret sects, visionary mystics, sorcerers, corrupt maharajahs, seductive courtesans, and an army of men of science: geographers, linguists, botanists, zoologists, and ethnologists.[4] At the time, what the London government feared the most was that an alliance between Russia and Germany would sink its claws into that area which was so much coveted by its natural wealth and strategic position and thereby put the security of the British Empire at risk. The conflict dragged on for decades, with an advantage now for one side now for the other, ultimately flowing into World War I.


Image
Halford J. Mackinder

In Mackinder’s theory, the following features are visible:

1) He does not propose any general theory of history, except for a methodological rule, quite obvious, by the way, according to which “the actual balance of political power at any given time is, of course, the product, on the one hand, of geographical conditions, both economic and strategic, and, on the other hand, of the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.”[5]

2) The generalizations he puts forward are quite prudent and limited to a determined length of time, accessible to historic verification: the period that begins with the first barbarian invasions and culminates in the epoch of the “Great Game”.

3) He does not create any plan for world domination; on the contrary, he insists on the balance among the relative forces of the several powers—the “balance of power”. Describing Russia’s growth potential, he does not, in any moment, suggest it should be obstructed or frustrated, but only that measures should be taken in order to avoid that the incomparable land-power of the Russian Empire might be also transfigured into a dominant sea-power, for if that came to pass, “the world empire would then be at hand.”

Prudent, rational, and balanced at each of its steps, Mackinder’s exposition has become a model of that which could have become a “geopolitics” with a just claim to being a scientific study.

Yet, his successors would transform it into something very different.

Mackinder, of course, described the situation from the point of view of a “sea-power”. His theory, however, was enthusiastically adopted by the adversary power, but with an inverted sign, and soon it became one of the foundations of the new science, or pseudoscience, of “geopolitics”. Its name was coined by Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén (1864-1922), a disciple of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who was a friend of Darwin and Haeckel and who created the racial concept of the state. One of the first to reform Mackinder’s theory according to a “land” perspective, however, was German general Karl Haushofer, who, according to several sources, was a disciple of the Armenian thaumaturge Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and also founded the secret society Vril, which held a belief in a civilization of superior men which existed in the center of the Earth. According to the testimony of the respected physicist Willy Ley, who fled Germany in 1933, Vril, which was founded on the eve of the Nazi’s rise to power, proclaimed to have secret knowledge that would enable the improvement of the German race to the point of making it identical with the underground men. The name of the organization was inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race (1871), where the word “vril” meant a subtle energy, distantly analogous to the Chi of the Chinese traditional cosmology and the Hara of the Japanese, and capable of conferring extraordinary powers on those who managed to awaken it through ascetical practices.

When Adolf Hitler was in jail with his collaborator Rudolf Hess, Haushofer, who had been Hess’ professor, visited both of them several times and conveyed to them, if not the teaching of Vril, at least the rudiments of his own geopolitical doctrine, whose influence became quite visible in Mein Kampf.

The origins of this doctrine go back to Haushofer’s sojourn in Japan, where he was able to verify how effective the local government’s international plans were in comparison with the resounding failure of Kaiser William II’s imperialist projects.

At the time, the government of Prime Minister Prince Katsura kept the population in a permanent state of alert by warning it, through vast propaganda campaigns, against the imminent risk the Japanese economy’s destruction should the following two closely linked problems not be vigorously attacked:

1. Surrounded by countries with a much larger population, Japan would soon be out of the game if the number of Japanese did not rise by 40 million, reaching the figure of 100 million.

2. It was impossible to squeeze 100 million people into the exiguous Japanese territory.

The obvious conclusion, soon accepted by all the population, was that the country needed to enlarge its territory through a bold policy of conquest.

Redoing the calculations, Haushofer noted that if the first premise was a reasonable conjecture, the second one was a patent lie: the density of Japan’s population was smaller than that of Germany, and the Japanese territory could house another 40 million people without any inconvenience. The policy proposed by the Katsura government did not stem from any objective need, but from a choice, an act of will. Japan did not need foreign territories: it just really, really wanted to become an imperialistic power.

However, rather than being a disappointment to Haushofer, this policy was received by him with enthusiasm, and gave him the idea of adopting it as a model for German policy-making: if the Japanese government obtained the enthusiastic adherence of its population to its imperialistic projects through a system of lies and half-truths based on demographic data well-arranged for this end, why could the German government not do the same?[6]

Yet, lying to the people should not imply that the government would fool itself. A serious study of political and economic geography, well coordinated with an objective strategic consideration of the possibilities of imperialistic expansion, should lay the groundwork for the unification of the national will through the impact of an intense campaign of propaganda.

It was to this synthesis of geography, strategy, deceit and propaganda that he gave the name of “geopolitics”. However, those three elements have not always remained distinct and rationally coordinated throughout his works and the intense pedagogical action that Haushofer came to exert upon German intellectuals, politicians, and military men .

Image
Karl Haushofer (left) with Rudolf Hess.

The theory of the “war of the continents” was also adopted by Russian nationalists, such as the renowned linguist Nicolay Trubetskoy, and many changes and additions have been made to it over the decades until it has been given its current form by the hands of Prof. Aleksander Dugin.

Dugin gives Mackinder a non-negligible credit for having “understood the precise objective laws of the political, geographic and economic history of mankind,”[7] an honor which had previously been bestowed upon Montesquieu, Hegel, Giambattista Vico, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer (in partnership with Charles Darwin) and Karl Marx, although each one of them discovered “objective laws” which were quite different from those of the others.

The Mackinder-Dugin Theory certainly enjoys the merit of simplicity: everything in history is reduced to contest for power between world powers that dominate the seas and those that rule over great extensions of land. Cultures, laws, institutions, costumes, values, symbols, and even religions are all born out of that contest. As simple as that. It is indeed the case of asking: “Why hasn’t anyone told me about that before?”

I cannot swear that Mackinder, a simple geographer and strategist with no greater philosophical ambitions, would approve of the transfiguration of the “war of the continents” into that metaphysical duel of titans depicted by Aleksander Dugin. Clarifying this issue would require a time investment which I cannot make now. In any case, I use the expression “Mackinder-Dugin theory” in order to distinguish it from Mackinder’s original theory. Also the Duginian theory could not have gone very far in its generalizing impulse had it started from Mackinder’s ideas alone. In order to formulate it, Dugin had to dig for other sources, especially the teachings of Helena Petrovna Blavatski (1831-1891)[8] and Alice Bailey (1880-1949).

For Dugin, the conflict is not just about a struggle among states. It takes on the proportions of a war between two worldviews, two systems of opposed and irreconcilable values which preserve their respective identities through the ages and go on as if reincarnating, since the remotest times, in successive historical agents—states and nations—, which are not always aware of being moved, as Chinese shadows on a wall, by these invisible and omnipotent super-agents: “Atlantism” and “Eurasianism”:

In the ancient history the ‘maritime’ powers who became the historical symbol of the ‘maritime civilization’ as a whole were Phoenicia and Carthage. The overland empire opposing Carthage was Rome. The Punic war is the purest image of the opposition of ‘maritime civilization’ and ‘overland civilizations’. In the Modern Age and in the recent history the ‘insular’ and ‘maritime’ pole became England, ‘Mistress of the seas’, and later the giant island-continent America. England, as well as the ancient Phoenicia, mostly employed sea trade and the colonization of the coastal areas as its basic instrument for domination. The Phoenician-Anglo-Saxon geopolitical type generated a special ‘mercantile-capitalist-market’ pattern of civilization founded first of all on economic and material interests and the principles of economic liberalism Therefore, despite all possible historical variations, the most general kind of ‘maritime’ civilization is always linked to the ‘primacy of economics above politics”.

As against the Phoenician pattern, Rome represented a sample of warlike-authoritarian structure based on administrative control and civil religiosity, on the primacy of ‘politics above economics’. Rome is the example of a non-maritime, overland, purely continental type of colonization, with its deep penetration into the continent and assimilation of the submitted peoples, automatically ‘Romanized’ after the conquest. In Modern History incarnations of the ‘overland’ power were the Russian Empire and also Central European imperial Austro-Hungary and Germany. ‘Russia – Germany – Austro-Hungary’ are the essential symbols of ‘geopolitical land’ during Modern History.
”[9]

Dugin insists on the essential and millennial unity and continuity of the conflict, as well as of the two adversaries considered separately:

So generalizing the ideas of Mackinder, it is possible to say that there is an historical ‘conspiracy of the Atlantists’, pursuing through the centuries the same geopolitical purposes oriented to the interest of the ‘maritime civilization’ of neo-Phoenician kind.”[10]

The theory clearly fits into the Kantian tradition of aprioristic determiners, which set boundaries to the field of human perceptions and actions, from above the horizon of individual consciousness, and secretly guide the course of events:

Therefore, we are dealing with a ‘secret conspiracy’ of the most ancient kind, whose meaning and intrinsic metaphysical cause frequently remain completely obscure to its basic participants and even to its leading characters.”[11]

Mackinder’s ideas, limited as they were to the British outlook, could not reach such a level of generality prior to being complemented by their opposite—“oriental” and “terrestrial”—version. Dugin informs us that this fusion took place during the “frequent meetings of Russian Eurasianists with Karl Haushofer in Prague,” and he also tells us that around 1920 the overall Eurasian strategy, which stressed the need for a geopolitical alliance between Russia, Germany, and Japan, was ready—that very alliance which the cleverness of the British policy had been successful in frustrating since the middle of the preceding century.

In formulating this new strategy, continues Dugin, the Eurasianists and Haushofer “for the first time (…) expressed what stood behind the whole European political history of the last millennium, having traced the path of the ‘Roman imperial idea,’ which from Ancient Rome through Byzantium had passed to Russia, and through the Medieval Holy Empire of the German nations to Austria-Hungary and Germany.”[12]

The millenary opposition between the two blocks was not only geopolitical, but ideological and cultural:

Against ‘Atlantism’ personifying the primacy of individualism, ‘economic liberalism’ and ‘democracy of a Protestant kind’, stands ‘Eurasianism’, necessarily presupposing authoritarianism, hierarchy and the establishment of ‘communitarian’, national-state principles over the simply human, individualistic and economic concerns.[13]

The struggle between the two blocks crosses the millennia by means of two networks of mysterious agents who invisibly direct the course of events. On the Atlantist side,

We can define . . . the “Atlantic ideology”, the ideology of “New Carthage”- the one that is common to all “influential agents”, to all secret and occultist organizations, to all lodges and semi-closed clubs which served and serve the Anglo-Saxon idea in the 20th century, penetrating the network of all continental “Eurasian” powers. And naturally, in the first place this immediately concerns English and American reconnaissance services (especially the CIA), which are not simply the “sentinels of capitalism” or “Americanism”, but the sentinels of “Atlantism” . . . working not only in the interests of each separate country, but in the interest of a special geopolitical and, in the end, metaphysical doctrine representing an extremely multi-planed, miscellaneous and wide, but nevertheless essentially uniform worldview.[14]

On the Eurasian side,

All those who restlessly worked for the Eurasian union, those who hindered for centuries the propagation on the continent of individualist, egalitarian and liberal-democratic concepts (reproducing as a whole the typical Phoenician spirit of the ‘primacy of economics above politics’), those who aspired to unite the great Eurasian peoples in the atmosphere of the East, instead of in an atmosphere of the West – be it the East of Genghis Khan, the East of Russia or East of Germany – all of them were ‘Eurasian agents’, bearers of the special geopolitical doctrine, ‘the soldiers of the continent’, ‘the soldiers of Land’. The Eurasian secret society, the Order of the Eurasianists, does not start at all with the authors of the manifest ‘Exodus to the East’ or with Haushofer’s ‘Geopolitical Journal’. This was, briefly speaking, only the revelation, the outcome of a definite knowledge which existed since the beginning of time, together with its relative secret societies and network of ‘influential agents.”[15]

Dugin leaves no room for doubt that all or practically all wars in history are nothing more than chapters of that sole and endless war between Atlantists and Eurasianists, and that such war constitutes therefore the ultimate explanation of all human glories and miseries:

Order of Eurasia against Order of Atlantic (Atlantides). Eternal Rome against Eternal Cartage. Occult Punic war invisibly continuing during millennia. Planetary conspiracy of Land against the Sea, Earth against Water, Authoritarianism and Idea against Democracy and Matter. Does not the endless paradoxes, contradictions, omissions and vagaries of our history become more clear, more logical and more reasonable, if we to look at them from the perspective of an occult geopolitical dualism? [16]

What is more: geopolitical dualism not only offers a causal explanation for so many evils and sufferings, but also their definitive moral justification:

Will not in this case the countless victims, by which mankind in our century pays the bill for unclear political projects, receive a deep metaphysical justification?”[17]

The excerpts quoted thus far suffice to uncover an eminent feature of Prof. Dugin’s style, one which, for being purely graphic, is not obscured by translation: I refer to his alternating use of certain expressions which are now written with attenuating quotation marks and now without them, denoting his free transition, or better said, confusion between literal and figurative meaning.

So, for example, the term Eurasian Order sometimes appears as a figure of speech meant to amass into a hypothetical unit “all those who restlessly worked for the Eurasian union” (sic), even though they had no idea that they had been serving some secret organization; and sometimes it designates the organization itself as a concrete historical entity with a date of foundation, hierarchies, rules, oaths, initiation rites, etc.

This introduces into the mind of the reader a twofold confusion. On one hand, it mixes into an indistinct paste both historical research and “conspiracy theory”. On the other, it violates Georg Jellinek’s classic warning, already mentioned in my second message to the debate with Prof. Dugin, that historical processes cannot be explained according to the same criteria when they arise from planned and controlled action and when they result from a purely accidental convergence of actions of several separate and unconnected agents. In the first case, the rational nexus precedes the action; in the second it is projected upon the action, ex post facto, by the imagination of the historian. The degree of certainty in both cases is rather different.[18]

This twofold confusion enables Prof. Dugin to concoct pseudo-historical conceptions which are infected to their marrow with the three typical features of the revolutionary mentality—the inversion of time, the inversion between subject and object, and the inversion of moral responsibility—, which rigorously reduces the scientific value of his speculations to nothing, while at the same time strengthening the force of their appeal to the imagination of the militant masses, over which the confusion itself exerts the fascination of a Sorelian myth.

In order to see this with utmost clarity, one must begin by realizing that “a great war of the continents” has never happened in history. If there were some wars of “sea-powers” against “land-powers,” there also were just as many wars of sea-powers among themselves, and the same being true for the land-powers, and precisely the latter two groups of wars are among the most notable and devastating of all time. The Napoleonic wars and the invasion of Russia by Adolf Hitler are examples that speak for themselves.

Never, at any point in history, do we find a general alliance of “Eurasianists” against a confederation of “Atlantists”. At most, there were localized conflicts between the two blocks, punctuated with equally significant conflicts within each block (supposing, ad argumentandum, that they are blocks). The “great war of the continents” is not a chapter of history: it is a future goal, a plan conceived by Prof. Dugin and his predecessors to be carried out in the subsequent decades, creating a conflict between Russia, China, and the Islamic countries on one side, and America and her allies on the other.

It is by taking this future ideal as a premise for the interpretation of the past that Prof. Dugin performs the magic trick of making a typical and demential “conspiracy theory” look like a respectable historical hypothesis.

To this end, he has to dissolve all borders between well-characterized ideological groups—Nazis and communists, for example—and reassign their members one by one, by forcedly enlisting them in the secret troops of “Atlantism” or “Eurasianism,” often attributing to them unconscious intentions which do not have anything to do with their avowed goals and with the visible course of their actions.

For example: since Germany and Russia are defined beforehand as “land powers,” being therefore natural allies against “Atlantism,” the mortal struggle between the two during World War II has to be attributed to the action of “infiltrated British agents” who manipulated Hitler and Stalin—the poor devils, so naïve!—and induced them into a fratricidal conflict instead of joining them as brothers in the fight against the common enemy.[19] What happened in the first half of the twentieth century is thus explained according to what Prof. Dugin thinks would have been better for the attainment of his plans for the twenty-first century.

Among the British agents in the German High Command, he singles out Admiral Canaris, “betrayer of the Reich,”[20] as being one of those most responsible for turning Germany against Russia instead of uniting them against England. For decades, Hitler had promised to “crush Bolshevism,” making this one of the avowed goals of the Nazi regime. Once in power, he unleashed ferocious persecution against the communists, while at the same time he prepared an attack against the USSR well in advance. But to Prof. Dugin all this does not mean anything. It was all the fault of some “British agent”.

Likewise, World War I—when Russia sided with “Atlantist powers” against its “natural allies,” Germany and Austria-Hungary—resulted from the action of Atlantists infiltrated among Slavophile patriots, who convinced the Tsar that Russian racial identity was more strategically decisive than the territorial unity among different ethnicities (a hypothesis that Dugin imagines would have led to an alliance with Germany).

An identical maneuver would have been carried out by Atlantist agents in the Germany of the 1930s, who deceived the poor Nazis into believing in the identity of “Blood and Soil” when they should have noticed that it was necessary to choose between either one or the other.

Thus, the greatest events of the real history of the twentieth century were nothing more than illusions. The true history is Prof. Dugin’s ideal narrative, which those events have maliciously concealed.

For the hypothesis of a “war of the continents” to enjoy some historical viability it would be necessary to prove, at least, that the wars among land and sea powers were more frequent or had more portentous consequences than other wars, above all the ones fought among land powers or among sea powers themselves. But it will be hard to find in Russian history wars which were vaster and more full of consequence than the invasions of Russia by France and Germany— two land-powers, according to Haushofer and Dugin—or than the war between Russia and Japan, also a land-power according to the same authors.

If the mere existence of a “war of the continents” is a hypothesis that goes up in smoke, even more chimerical would be to try to prove the existence of permanent conspiracies behind those wars, not to mention the existence, over the millennia, of secret organizations—an “Atlantist Order” against a “Eurasian Order”—devoted to their waging. Prof. Dugin sidesteps any confrontation with this question by his alternating use of words written with quotation marks or without them, by sometimes denoting a mere figure of speech and sometimes a presumption of the concrete existence of the organizations in question. In this way he is free to reason as if such organizations really existed, drawing from this the most daring conclusions, as well as to escape from trouble. when pressed against the wall with a demand for concrete evidence, by alleging that the names of the organizations were just figures of speech used to designate the spontaneous and unpremeditated convergence of the actions of “all those who restlessly worked for” the Atlantist or the Eurasian cause, even if they had imagined they had been doing something entirely different (fighting for mere national interests, money, or the propagation of faith, for example). At this point, the confusion between the anticipated unity of a plan and the retroactive unity of a historical account is more than evident.

By reason of its own confusion, the “Eurasian” idea hangs in the air like a chiaroscuro cloud, fascinating the audience with the power of a poetic-rhetorical discourse adorned with false scientific glitter.


http://debateolavodugin.blogspot.com/20 ... usion.html
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 1:42 pm

Russians and the American right started plotting in 1995. We have the notes from the first meeting.

New documents obtained by ThinkProgress show how Russian and American fundamentalists first began their collaboration.

Image


The right to bear witness

While Carlson was laying the groundwork for WCF with his Russian partners, G. Kline Preston IV was watching the post-Soviet region struggle through the morass of state collapse and bandit capitalism.

Traveling through the Soviet Union, and then Russia and Ukraine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Nashville native even took part in the wheel-deal atmosphere. “I imported [Ukrainian] vodka to get through law school,” he told ThinkProgress, noting that his first visit to the region came while he was getting his law degree.

“They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

But Preston wasn’t interested in business. Rather, he was focused on the legal aspects of building a new state in Russia: helping formulate tax code, defining copyrights, explaining benefits and breaks. Building up personal ties throughout the country, he says he helped refine concepts of things like copyright for Russian lawmakers.

That’s what got him initially interested in the region. What kept Preston’s interest — and would eventually pave the way to him introducing Russian officials to the NRA — was God. Specifically, the explosion of religiosity in post-Soviet Russia, and Putin’s apparent role in expediting the return of Christianity.

The thing that attracted Preston to Putin was the “rebuilding and building anew of churches in Russia,” he told ThinkProgress. “Since he came into power, there have either been renovated, refurbished, or built anew almost 10,000 churches across the country.”

After all, Preston added, Putin himself was “God-sent,” appointed by the “divine.”

Preston spent the 1990s and 2000s traveling throughout Russia when he could — larger cities like Moscow, smaller enclaves like Vladimir — to see these new churches, which to him represented a country returning to its religious roots. He talked with his Russian partners, and spoke multiple times in the Russian Duma. “Rather than go out to a bar on K Street, like you might do in [Washington] or something, we went to church, man,” he recalled.

During this time, Preston kept up with his work in Tennessee — including helping lead multiple re-election campaigns for Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) — but he felt an increasing pull, as he said, to Putin’s “morality.”


Dreaming of the apocalypse

Preston, at some point into the Putin era, eventually found a new goal, beyond simply building bridges between American and Russian Christians. “That idea of that role — I’m going to call it a mission — it hit me in the head,” he said. “I’m not too bright, but it hit me in the head.”

He decided he would write a book explaining Russia’s godliness, so Americans could see Putin the way he did — and could, like him, praise things like the Russian obliteration of Chechnya, annexation of Crimea, and invasion of Ukraine.

“My interest in the United States and Russia having a close relationship is so that my sons don’t have their lives wasted for some bullshit conflict.”

At some point in the late 2000s, Preston’s willingness to excuse the atrocities of Putin’s regime — he was the only American election observer to claim that the recent Russian election was free and fair — allowed him to gain more and more friends among Kremlin higher-ups. Though he sat “about 100 feet from Putin” during the Sochi Olympics, where he was being “hosted by the Russian [Duma],” Preston said he has yet to meet the Russian leader.

But he did meet, and befriend, a man named Alexander Torshin.

In his official capacity, Torshin works as a central bank official in Russia. In his unofficial capacity, though, Torshin has been accused of being one of the main figures involved in Russian money laundering across Europe, with numerous alleged ties to Russian mafiosi to boot. As Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda recently revealed, a notorious Russian money launderer referred to Torshin as “godfather” on wiretaps — recordings that have now been passed to the FBI.

Torshin narrowly escaped arrest in Spain in 2013. Grinda said last month at an event in Washington, D.C. that Torshin “had conversations that led us to believe he was laundering money.” Added Grinda, “I wanted Torshin to be arrested.”

In April, Torshin was sanctioned by the White House for engaging in “malign activities.”


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 23, 2018 9:12 am

Right as your book was coming out, another far-right darling, a Canadian woman named Lauren Southern, sat down with Dugin for an “interview.” She said she was just there to “talk,” but she and her partner — Brittany Pettibone, who is a Pizzagate truther — basically offered Dugin a platform to spout his fascism. What did you make of the interview?

[Southern] is a kind of rock star of the alt-right, or however you want to characterize her. Young people look at Spencer, and they might find him a little scary, and people are doing Heil Hitler salutes, whereas she comes across as relatable, or innocent, or whatever… So why interview Dugin? Why is that an attractive person to interview?

And she’s saying, “Oh, well, he’s been slandered by you liberals, and in fact he’s a decent guy, and he’s not a fascist, and he’s very emphatic about not being racist, and real Nazis don’t like him because he’s not racist enough for their liking.” Well, that’s all just a PR job.

This is a very dangerous person who is a racist, who is a deep anti-Semite. And it requires minimal effort — you don’t have to do years of digging to see how much hatred there is in this man, and how much lunacy. And the idea that “oh, well, he’s been unfairly represented by the fake news liberal media, and just hear him out and you’ll see that he has some interesting ideas” — that’s just bullshit. It’s very directly politically motivated bullshit.

I think you have to have your eyes open… With [Southern’s] telegenic looks and her smile and her relating to teeny-boppers — it’s scary how many people are subscribers to her on YouTube. She’s presenting one of the most dangerous people on the planet as, “Oh, well, let’s hear what he has to say.” How stupid and naïve can you be?


University of Toronto political science professor Ronald Beiner, interviewed by Casey Michel
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 26, 2018 8:52 pm

Belarus tries to follow in Moscow’s steps and team up with the European far right

Image
Vladimir Zhirinovsky (left) meets Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (right) in Baghdad, 29 December 1999.

But what does the LDPB have to do with the European far right today, especially the FPÖ, AfD and National Rally? All the three parties are known for their pro-Kremlin positions; in particular, they oppose the EU sanctions imposed on Putin’s Russia for the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine, as well as justifying Moscow’s foreign policies in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Belarus is also sanctioned by the US and EU for its authoritarian practices; while many sanctions were lifted after 2015, some sanctions still remain in place. It is difficult to deny that, in the Belarusian authoritarian system, the LDPB can only operate with the permission from the Belarusian Presidential Administration, so it is most likely that the Presidential Administration gave the green light to the LDPB’s initiative. As the FPÖ and other far-right parties have been known for their criticism of the international sanctions against Hussein’s Iraq and, these days, against Putin’s Russia, Lukashenka’s regime may also benefit from the European far right calling for the lifting of the remaining sanctions against Belarus. If the “Congress of Patriotic Parties in Europe” indeed takes place, it will be interesting to see what narratives the European far right will promote afterwards.


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Elvis » Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:07 pm

^^^^ Reminds us that things could be a lot worse—Russia could be led by Zhirinovsky. That could still happen. :shock:
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:55 pm

Zhirnovsky and Putin both have spooky backgrounds.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 27, 2018 12:32 pm

Detangling Putin’s web in the West

Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir. By: Anton Shekhovtsov. Publisher: Routledge, London and New York, 2018.

A review article by Matthew Kott

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Shekhovtsov opens the book with a historical overview, tracing some of the very early roots of national Bolshevism – a totalitarian ideology combining elements of the far left and the far right, which saw the leading role of Soviet Russia and its successor states as having a Eurasian manifest destiny. Most readers today associate national Bolshevism with the party founded by Dugin and Eduard Limonov in the 1990s before they had a falling out and which spread to various parts of the post-Soviet space before being banned for extremism (even in Russia). As Shekhovtsov rightly points out, this ideological thread owes a great deal to interwar German radicals such as Ernst Niekisch. In this narrative, there is a tradition of non-Russian political activists from Paul Elzbacher to Jean Thiriart who turned to Eurasian pro-Bolshevism as a way of combating the perceived degradation of European nations under the negative influences of Jews, Americans and other forces of globalisation.

Even if this thread was always a minority position within the universe of the far right (where the perception of the Judaeo-Bolshevik threat was more dominant by far), Shekhovtsov argues that it was to this tradition that the young Dugin was exposed while travelling abroad in the dying days of the USSR, before importing it back to his homeland. This account, however, leaves out important aspects of the Russian side of the history of national Bolshevism, with its roots in the defeated White movement in the Russian Civil War. Emigre thinkers like Nikolai Trubetskoi and the Eurasianist circles based in Sofia, Prague, Berlin and Harbin (here again, we encounter the difficulties of defining the “West”) formulated ideas combining elements of Bolshevism and ultra-nationalism that inspired movements like the Mladorossi and the Smenovekhovsty. Scholars of the Russian far right like Walter Laqueur established these Russian networks of Eurasianist, national Bolshevik groupings that had connections both to the Soviet Union and to various far right milieus abroad during the 1920s and 30s as sources of inspiration for post-Soviet national Bolshevism. That Shekhovtsov leaves these actors out of his story is somewhat puzzling as discussing them could actually strengthen his narrative of the long-standing entangled history of Russia and the international far right.

New frontier
When dealing with the Yeltsin years, Shekhovtsov looks at two developments. Firstly, there is the rediscovery (or, in Shekhovtsov’s terms, “opening”) of Russia for the far right in Europe and North America. Having emerged from 70 years of communism and experiencing the throes of a brutal process of privatisation and outright stripping of public assets, this country and society was a new frontier for projecting fantasies of the far right imagination about national revival and radical social reordering. In this chapter, Shekhovtsov focuses mainly on actors not directly related to the Russian government. Dugin and his networks figure prominently here, as does the omnipresent political entrepreneur, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The latter’s rise to deputy chair of the Russian State Duma coincided with Putin’s first presidency. During this time, Shekhovtsov describes how Zhirinovsky, now holding an official state office, cultivated networks with unsavoury groups, first via support for Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, which brought him into contact with European far rightists friendly to Baghdad such as France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. Later, Zhirinovsky would arrange several World Congresses of Patriotic Parties hosted by the Russian parliament. The first of these, in early 2003, was the most successful, including delegates from the Front Nationale and other notable European far right parties; the fourth meeting, held in 2010, however, was completely marginalised, ignored by both Russian and non-Russian political players alike.

One key reason for this, according to Shekhovtsov, was the shifting priorities of the increasingly consolidated Putin regime. In the mid-2000s, the Kremlin had little interest in creating friction with governments in the West by cultivating far right discontents. After relations soured following the “coloured revolutions” and the war in Georgia, however, Russia again sought to activate networks of influence that could affect other countries’ policies, for instance to create public opinion against imposing sanctions on Russia, as was common for the USSR to do during the Cold War. By this time, however, actors from other countries had eclipsed Zhirinovsky’s initiatives, so Russia needed to find new channels and contacts.

Identifying Russian influence
Shekhovtsov identifies three main ways the Putin regime sought to regain some impact on public discourse by using its access to far right parties and activists. Firstly, Russia funded the creation of alternative electoral monitoring organisations based around far right personalities with pro-Russian sympathies. These ostensibly independent and impartial observers were invited to witness the performances of electoral authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia and declare them free and transparent, thus offering a counter-narrative to the critiques and condemnations of both important international observers and from domestic civil society NGOs. With their deceptively legitimate-sounding names, the purpose of these organisations was to contaminate international reporting with misinformation, while providing useful material for Russian state propaganda to domestic audiences.

The second tactic identified by Shekhovtsov was the use of western far right activists as expert commentators in the media, particularly on the Kremlin-owned and operated news channel RT (formerly Russia Today). As RT’s mission evolved from presenting a positive picture of Russia to the world to presenting the US-led West as hostile and hypocritical, the editorial office sought voices representing an alternative to the line presented in mainstream international media. In doing so, all manner of marginal and questionable “experts” were given prominent air time on RT, including commentators from the far right. Often little known in their own countries, these “experts” sometimes enjoyed some name recognition in Russia due to their previous participation in the aforementioned electoral observation organisations.

The third avenue pursued by Russia to exert influence using the far right in other countries, Shekhovtsov explains, is by the creation of various front organisations that seek to nudge public opinion in a pro-Russia direction while also acting as legitimising vehicles for far right parties. These groups can organise conferences on improving relations with Russia; protest against policies unfavourable to Russia; champion the Russian position in public debate; and exploit tragedies such as the war in Donbas to present pro-Kremlin narratives under the guise of charitable actions. The cases of how the FPÖ in Austria and the Front Nationale in France has been able to make use of such front organisations is perhaps some of the most unsettling reading in this book.


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 29, 2018 5:22 pm

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Putin Family Values

Jun 26, 2018 ROBERT SKIDELSKY


For Putin, the turning point came with the “color revolutions” of 2004 and 2008 in Ukraine and Georgia, respectively. Unexplained by Shekhovstov is how “authoritarian kleptocracy” established itself and why it remains popular with most Russians.

Part of the reason must be economic. Russian reformers eagerly embraced economic liberalism at the end of the 1980s. This was not the older Keynesian economics of the 1950s and 1960s, but the neoliberalism of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher. The immediate consequence of attempting to implement these doctrines in Russia was economic collapse.

Admittedly, the reformers, headed by Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s first post-communist prime minister, faced dreadful choices, as the post-communist state had almost disintegrated. Nevertheless, their religious faith in privatization, unfettered markets, and monetarism led them to over-hasty asset sales, reckless deregulation, and savage deflation. Out of this economic catastrophe was born the Putin kleptocracy.

By embracing economic neoliberalism so uncompromisingly, Russia’s political liberals lost any chance of inheriting the succession to communism. One could say that the liberals had too little time. In any case, the political damage they inflicted on the liberal cause was too great to be repaired by subsequent economic recovery.

Shekhovstov’s book is particularly interesting for its account of how Putin’s regime and Europe’s right-wing populists have made a common enemy of the global order headed by the United States and abetted by the EU. At the center of the spider’s web imagined by the populists sits a creature called “finance capitalism.” Heedless of frontiers and jobs, it is allied to a liberal elite pushing an agenda of same-sex marriage and other supposed “abominations” on “healthy” populations. Since 2011-2012, Putin, a purely opportunistic technocrat at the outset of his rule, has made such rhetoric his own.

Shekhovstov argues that the rise of populist parties in Europe has for the first time given Putin’s regime powerful Western interlocutors. Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s League party who is now Minister of the Interior in Italy’s coalition government, recalls the cozy atmosphere of his meeting with Putin in 2014: “We talked about the absurd sanctions against Russia introduced by the cowardly EU that defends the interests not of its own citizens, but rather of the economic oligarchs,” and about “important topics ranging from the protection of national autonomy to the fight against illegal immigrants and defense of traditional values.”

Russian and Western values, then, are converging, at least among some in the West. Since the economic collapse of 2008-2009, globalism and its supporting economic rules and norms have been challenged not just by US President Donald Trump, but by populists entering the European mainstream. Those who vote for them all feel “left behind,” not just economically but also culturally. So we see the curious fusion between protectionism and Christian conservatism.

All of this is music to Putin’s ears, for it suggests a West that is no longer implacably opposed to his regime’s practices. No wonder the Kremlin has been courting – and financing – populist parties all over Europe.

The tactical alliance between the Kremlin and the populists pumps up the dream of an ideological union, stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” based not on Western but on “Eurasian” values. That such geopolitical projects are moving from the fringes to the mainstream should give everyone pause.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 03, 2018 7:15 pm

Chapter 4: Far-right election observers in the service of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policies


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Aleksandr Dugin (far left), Aleksandr Prokhanov (second from the left) and Luc Michel (centre) at the “anti-mondialist” congress in Tripoli organised on the initiative of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Tripoli, 1996.


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Activists of Aleksandr Dugin‘s Eurasian Youth Union (left to right: Aleksandr Bovdunov, Leonid Savin and Pavel Zarifullin) as “observers” of the “referendum” in Transnistria. Tiraspol, 15 September 2006.


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The BNP’s leader Nick Griffin as an “observer” of the fraudulent parliamentary elections in Russia, 2011.


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:10 pm

Russia

The international far right flocked to Russia this June, but not necessarily for the World Cup. Far-right YouTube personalities Brittany Pettibone and Lauren Southern traveled to Russia to produce a series of videos. Notably, they met ultranationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin. Both figures said they were impressed with Dugin’s talk about topics like “identity or returning to traditional roots or the Great Replacement—things that if you mention these in America or Canada, it’s like, whoa, suddenly it’s like, too spicy.” Banned from the United Kingdom for their heavy involvement with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim identitarians, the two women have made a career of smuggling far-right anti-immigrant and racist ideas into wider circulation among mainstream audiences.

Rebel Media’s Katie Hopkins also went to Russia and spent a significant amount of time praising Vladimir Putin. Her travel political commentary — including awe at the Russian subway and the Russianness of the Russian people — was roundly mocked. Hopkins is known for her inflammatory racist statements, notably calling migrants “cockroaches” and advocating for the use of gunships to stop them.

Meanwhile, the UK’s Home Office banned 1,200 known football hooligans from going to Russia, fearing clashes. While there have been some clashes between various nations’ hooligan factions — including between some British hooligans — around the World Cup, there have been fewer than expected, especially given anxiety at the lifting of the ban on some Russian hooligans ahead of the tournament. Russia’s soccer federation was fined by FIFA when a fan held up a neo-Nazi banner at a game.


Last month in Europe: June 2018
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 07, 2018 10:41 am

Yoav Litvin

Caitlin Johnstone — a Performing Strut in a WikiLeaks and Consortium News Web

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History
Over the spring and summer of 2017, Johnstone begged progressives to collaborate with the fascist rape-apologist Mike Cernovich and promoted a green-brown alliance between yet another fascist — Robert “child sex slave colonies on Mars” Steele — and former Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.

In one of her several pleads, Johnstone claimed American fascists “are mostly decent people with a solid moral code”.

Yep, you read that correctly.

This careless statement is in obvious contrast to a range of killings, assaults and other forms of bigotry inspired by the rise of American/Trumpian neo-fascism. A recent report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center titled ‘The Alt-Right is Killing People’ summarizes some of this data.

...But Johnstone’s writings are still a danger. This is not because of their obvious sensationalism and shilling for many of the worst elements in society, but because she consistently claims to represent a leftist perspective, which reflects very poorly on true leftists and their agendas.

In fact, she has avoided culpability for- and even denied her shilling for white nationalists, and still frequently signal boosts Mike Cernovich, Cassandra Fairbanks and a host of Trump-stomping neo-fascists.

Consortium News/ Russia Insider
Consortium News, a media outlet that has gained respect mostly due to its founder’s work, the celebrated journalist Robert Parry (RIP), just picked up Johnstone as a regular contributor.

As if on cue, a recent report by author of ‘Against the fascist creep’ Alexander Reid Ross revealed that Consortium News fiscally sponsors Russia Insider, whose editor Charles Bausman published a 5000-word vile, anti-Semitic screed titled ‘It’s time to drop the Jew taboo’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Johnstone has been featured in Russia Insider in the past, and presently.

Nat Parry, the current editor of Consortium News and the son of Robert Parry, has dismissed my questions regarding Consortium News’ long-standing (at least since 2015) associations with Russia Insider and his outlet’s promotion of Johnstone and Gilbert Doctorow, who published a complementary anti-Semitic letter to Bausman’s racist screed.

By the way, just in case you want to contribute to Consortium News or Russia Insider — they share an address in Arlington, VA.

The plot thickens — enter WikiLeaks
There’s a deeper question about Johnstone. If she really is a fascist, why doesn’t she just come out with it? What is she trying to gain by claiming she’s on the left, yet consistently promoting American fascists like Cernovich and Steele, Trump bootlickers like Cassandra Fairbanks, and libertarians like Ron Paul?

Bottom line — what political voice does she channel?

And then it hit me: Johnstone is not shilling for an organized fascist outfit, but serves as a strut in a network that claims to own a truth that transcends politics and is especially averse to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party — WikiLeaks.

A quick analysis of her pieces clearly reflects this notion. Over 35 articles contain ‘WikiLeaks’ in their titles or hashtags, with 18 additional ones centered around WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. The pieces all contain unreserved, and highly favorable endorsements and promotions of Assange and WikiLeaks.

Highlights include titles such as: ‘Julian Assange is a planetary hero’, ‘Julian Assange has balls the size of Antarctica’, ‘Why Julian Assange is the most important person in the world right now’ and a love poem she simply called ‘Julian’.

An analysis of her positions on American politics, Syria, libertarianism, the two-party system, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, whistleblowers, the CIA, NSA, Chelsea Manning, Donald Trump, a collection of conspiracy theories and of course her fetish to team up with white nationalists also indicate that she is toeing the WikiLeaks, i.e. Assange’s, party line.


Benjamin Dixon on Assange and “alt-right”
In fact, the late WikiLeaks party were deregistered in Australia for procedural reasons. Many lost confidence in them at least partly because of their overtures to the xenophobic white nationalist Australia First Party, whose chairman Jim Saleam is a former neo-Nazi.

Julian Assange’s relationship with the anti-Semite Israel Shamir and WikiLeaks’ anti-Semitism and questionable professional practices have also been made public.

Coincidentally, or not, Israel Shamir is a regular contributor to Russia Insider, an outfit that, as stated, is fiscally sponsored by Johnstone’s new writing home — Consortium News, which has consistently published pro-Assange/WikiLeaks articles.


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:11 am

Rohini Hensman Analyzes the new "Second Camp Anti-Imperialism"

by Joey Ayoub July 8, 2018

Rohini Hensman. Indefensible: Democracy, Counterrevolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism. Haymarket Books, 2018. 400 pp.

Rohini Hensman starts off her book with two simple questions: How has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism come to be used in support of anti-democratic counterrevolutions around the world? And what can we do about it?

ImageThe questions came about from her own experience as a Sri Lankan feminist and labour activist living in India. The daughter of “parents who consistently opposed imperialism in every part of the world” as “part of a more general support for democracy and human rights”, she wished to understand how something which is seemingly so ‘pro-human’ (anti-imperialism) could be used to justify that which is inherently ‘anti-human’ (state oppression). She structures her attempt by placing ‘pseudo-anti-imperialists’ into three categories: the first two are the tyrants and imperialists who utilise anti-imperialism to divert attention from their own crimes and the neo-Stalinists who regularly serve as apologists for Russian imperialism. As for the third tendency, it is arguably the most common one as it is capable of adopting the language of progressivism and even solidarity to downplay or support various forms of oppression. This tendency “seem unable to deal with complexity, including the possibility that there may be more than one oppressor in a particular situation”.
But more than that, Hensman argues that this tendency, which has come to dominate large segments of self-defined anti-imperialists, depends on “a West-centrism which makes them oblivious to the fact that people in other parts of the world have agency too, and that they can exercise it both to oppress others and to fight against oppression; an Orientalism which refuses to acknowledge that Third World peoples can desire and fight for democratic rights and freedoms taken for granted in the West; and a complete lack of solidarity with people who do undertake such struggles.” Here she joins those who have attempted to explore this tendency which has grown increasingly confident over the past few years. The Syrian dissident Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, who spent 16 years in prison for belonging to an opposition Communist party, argues that pseudo-anti-imperialists routinely deny Syrians “epistemological agency“. The British-Syrian anarchist Leila Al Shami calls it ‘the anti-imperialism of idiots’.

As mentioned, Hensman’s journey starts with Sri Lanka where following the end of the civil war in 2009, the ruling Rajapaksa regime “claimed to be anti-imperialist when EU nations, Canada and several others in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) asked for an independent investigation into and accountability for the huge civilian death toll, as well as unhindered access of humanitarian agencies to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) detained in military camps.” Rajapaksa used anti-imperialism and got the support of Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and other countries including Russia and China, finally passing a resolution “commending the government for addressing the needs of the IDPs”. By 2014, when the government’s crimes in military-occupied Tamil-majority areas in the north and east as well as its brutal repression of dissent throughout the country was made clear, Evo Morales of Bolivia offered Rajapaksa a Peace and Democracy award. “When Sri Lankans did eventually manage to bring about regime change in 2015, it was no thanks to these pseudo-anti-imperialists”, Hensman continued, referring to the surprise election of Maithripala Sirisena in January of that year.

But the scope of Hensman’s book is more ambitious than that. Divided in three sections – “understanding imperialism”, “case studies” and “looking for alternatives” – it looks at Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iran and Iraq as well as two chapters on Syria. With each case study, Hensman adapts her own analysis of imperialism and global capitalism made in the first section to the particularities of the countries analysed. Her goal is nothing less than to “suggest alternative narratives in each case, providing enough detail to enable genuine anti-imperialists, antiwar activists, socialists and humanitarians from other countries to identify the people with whom they should be expressing solidarity.”

In the last section, Hensman suggests five ways to fight the reactionary tendencies among the pseudo-anti-imperialist Left: (1) pursuing the truth and telling the truth; (2) bringing morality and humanity back into politics; (3) fighting for democracy; (4) bringing internationalism centre stage; and (5) pushing for global institutions to promote human rights and democracy. While four of these suggestions would appear uncontroversial, the argument for internationalism is of particular urgency. This isn’t to downplay the others; they remain necessary components of what is needed to move forward in building a serious internationalism that could ally itself with struggles for freedom and justice all over the world. Rather, bringing internationalism centre stage is a challenge to one of the most authoritarian concepts taken for granted by much of the world’s left today, namely that of economic nationalism. This includes supranational entities such as the European Union which preaches internationalism within the borders of Fortress Europe while militarising them to keep out some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

The Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky, reflecting in 1948 on ‘the particularly devilish theoretical issue, the national question, whose horrifying actualité had just been demonstrated by Hitler’s infamous policy towards Jews and other “Untermenschen” as well as by Stalin’s less well known, and only somewhat less deadly, policies towards non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union’ concluded, among other things, that just as the working class is not de-facto socialist or revolutionary, neither is it de-facto internationalist. In other words, we must “first acquire through arduous effort the internationalist attitude that its general, historical interests demand from it’. I say ‘we’ rather than the original ‘proletariat of every land’ used by Rosdolsky because the latter seems to have less resonance with today’s audience and is likely to be rendered outdated in our era of anthropogenic climate catastrophe and automation.

We exist within the confines of capitalist society and challenging it requires serious work on ourselves as well as with others. The absence of internationalism, as is painstakingly obvious today, is fueling the Far Right and other reactionary forces (including among self-described leftists). If leftists wish to ‘out-nativist’ the rightwing nativists by, for example, suggesting that the UK Labour Party will ‘tackle illegal immigration’, they will only become de-facto partners of xenophobia while making themselves, at best, irrelevant or, at worst, an obstacle to those whose lives are shattered by borders. The same goes with Bernie Sanders focusing so much on US workers losing jobs to workers in Vietnam, China and Latin America – and that is putting aside the failure to acknowledge the much greater role of automation in the inevitable loss of jobs. As the late theorist Moishe Postone put it simply: the right (here, Trump) are much better nationalists than the left (here, Bernie). And internationalism-building also requires all four other components proposed by Hensman. After all, there are fascist anti-imperialists and transnational white supremacists attempting to organise with one another. They praise the ‘white’ Assad regime for crushing dissent, they terrorise refugees from France to Australia and demonise Muslims and/or black people and/or transpeople, all the while obsessing over controlling women’s bodies, regardless of borders. If opposition to this international alt-right isn’t internationalist, how can it succeed?

‘Putting [enter country] first’ erases the working classes who happen to not be within the borders of the state and, in the process, makes Trump/Orban/Modi/Netanyahu’s [and so on] arguments that ‘we aren’t winning anymore’ for them. As Hensman argues: “Capitalism is inherently global, and it has become even more so over the past half-century; unless the opposition to it is equally global, capitalism will always win. Globalising the opposition even to neoliberalism, in the first place, requires organising across national borders, which is facilitated by freedom of movement across those borders. Closing borders, as the far right wants to do, only sabotages the struggle against neoliberalism.” This fundamental notion is too often ignored by those who already have the privilege of freedom of movement. And the same goes for anti-imperialism. An anti-imperialism that is not internationalist cannot be effectively anti-imperialist. Just as anti-capitalism will always fail without internationalism, so will anti-imperialism. Rather than viewing those on the Left who fail to oppose authoritarian regimes across the planet as exceptions to be dismissed, we should be asking why they are so effective in silencing anti-authoritarians in the first place.

Hensman’s work will hopefully help make the case for introspection, one which demands community-building and solidarity regardless of borders. “It is absolutely necessary to rebuild an intellectual and political foundation for criticism and seeking change in the world, but metropolitan anti-imperialism is totally unfit for this job”, Al-Haj Saleh once wrote. “It has absorbed subordinating imperialistic tendencies, and it is fraught with eurocentrism and void of any true democratic content. A better starting point for criticism and change would be to look at actual conflicts and actual relationships between conflicting parties.”

Joey Ayoub is a Lebanese writer who blogs at Hummus For Thought. He is the MENA editor at Global Voices and at IFEX.


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 10, 2018 4:57 pm

Australia takes advice of far-right ‘strong borders’ advocate, kicks her out

After being banned from the U.K., Lauren Southern runs into trouble Down Under.

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LAUREN SOUTHERN, WHO CLAIMS SHE'S NOT A WHITE SUPREMACIST, IS RUNNING OUT OF COUNTRIES TO VISIT.

Australia’s denial is the latest embarrassment for Southern. Not only was she booted from the U.K., but a few weeks ago she and Brittany Pettibone — another conspiracy theorist who once referred to herself as “one of the leading authorities on Pizzagate” — conducted an “interview” with Russian neo-fascist Alexander Dugin.

The hard-hitting questions Southern lobbed at Dugin included queries such as “What are the most important challenges facing the Millennial generation today, particularly in the Western world?” and “How would you suggest that Millennials live their life when they don’t want to be a part of liberalism?”

Southern — who couches much of her rhetoric in barely veiled bigotry, preferring to spew anti-Islam diatribes and moan about the “victim[s] of multiculturalism” — denies that she is a white supremacist. (Like many other far-right voices, she initially made a name for herself on YouTube.) However, she has made a habit of palling around with outspoken white supremacists over the past few months.

Last month, she grinned alongside James Allsup, who marched alongside white supremacist organizations in last year’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has also insisted that white supremacist Richard Spencer is not, in fact, a white supremacist.

Southern had planned on visiting Australia to take part in a speaking tour alongside Stefan Molyneux, another Canadian conspiracy theorist. Like Southern, Molyneux denies he’s a white supremacist. But he has, among other things, claimed that the word “‘racism’ is the new ‘n***er,'” and stated that “freedom has a eugenics component to it inevitably.” Molyneux has also ranked races in the past according to their “sweet spot of criminality.”

He has even conducted his own softball interviews with fascists, such as a 2016 interview with admitted white supremacist Jared Taylor — an interview Molyneux claimed was an “honest conversation about race.” Time Magazine, in a run-down of Molyneux’s views, also noted that the Canadian believes that “violence exists in the world because of the way women treat children.”

As GQ wrote in May, Southern and Molyneux “alternate between linking Black Lives Matters [sic] with crimes by black people unaffiliated with the movement and then hitting on the theme that white people are hated over and over.” (The speaking tour’s organizers described the two as “world leading commentators and justice activists,” and Southern claimed she was bringing “facts” to Australia.)


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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby dada » Tue Jul 10, 2018 10:31 pm

American Dream wrote:"Rather than viewing those on the Left who fail to oppose authoritarian regimes across the planet as exceptions to be dismissed, we should be asking why they are so effective in silencing anti-authoritarians in the first place." - Joey Ayoub


Should we? Alright: why are those on the left who fail to oppose authoritarian regimes so effective in silencing anti-authoritarians in the first place.

The idea is that we should study the fake left? Try and emulate their tactics, or something?

I guess I'm not really sure what he's getting at, here. Anti-authoritarians are silenced because they don't do enough global organizing? Therefore they should concentrate on internationalizing the anti-authoritarian movement.

But there is no anti-authoritarian movement. Is there? Joey kind of slid from anti-imperialism right into anti-authoritarianism. These are two different things, though, surely.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies

Postby Grizzly » Wed Jul 11, 2018 4:43 pm

^^^
Right!?..wait. No, left... wait! wot? ...lol
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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