Re: The Far Right's Love of the Kremlin’s Policies
Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 4:02 pm
I didn't know this history and would not be surprised in the slightest if LaRouche and Duke turned out to be conscious agents of deep political power:
More: https://thinkprogress.org/how-russia-wo ... cf6e3b814/
Russian attempts to woo American white supremacists have backfired
A quarter-century after American neo-fascists began looking to Russia for support, the relationship is on its heels.
The first, most prominent neo-fascist to travel to a newly independent Russia appears to be Lyndon LaRouche. A font of anti-Semitic conspiracy, LaRouche found fertile ground in Russia.
In October 1992, LaRouche’s Schiller Institute joined with the Russian State Humanitarian University to organize a conference on “Alternative Approaches to Economic Reform.” As LaRouche’s magazine would later relate, his ideas had “reach[ed] Moscow in time of troubles,” with his teachings, according to one conference participant, “open[ing] for us a new world.” The American fascist even managed at one point to speak in front of the entire Russian parliament.
LaRouche also partnered with Sergei Glazyev, a one-time Minister of External Economic Relations of the Russian Federation who later joined the opposition against President Boris Yeltsin. Glazyev’s patronage, as researcher Anton Shekhovtsov would write, allowed LaRouche to become “an opinion maker and commentator on political and economic issues in Russia — a status that LaRouche could not enjoy in his home country where he has remained a fringe political figure.”Russia presents “an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race,” said David Duke.
LaRouche was soon superseded in Russia by another American white supremacist, however — one who gained newfound prominence decades later during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. It’s unclear how David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader and anti-Semitic white supremacist extraordinaire, first ended up in Russia. Regardless of how he landed there, Duke says that his five years in Russia were some of the most productive in his life.
Duke sold his books in the Russian parliament and attended numerous white supremacist conferences in the country, often as the lone American representative. Toward the turn of the century, Duke began saying that Russia presented “an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race.” He clarified that Moscow — a city he said had “the largest number of [w]hite people of any city in the entire world” — was the “key to white survival.”
Along the way, Duke brought other American neo-fascists to Moscow, including Preston Wiginton, a Texas white supremacist who courted Russian skinheads in his own right.
Duke never managed to build the official ties LaRouche amassed. However, one photo hints at the types of audiences Duke attained while in Russia. In a black suit and maroon tie, Duke stands next to a man with a scraggly beard, a dark blazer, and drooping eyes — a man who would, in years to come, be referred to as “Putin’s Brain,” and who would become one of the primary nodes between Russian circles and American white nationalists.
David Duke (left) and Alexander Dugin (right) pose in an undated photo.
More: https://thinkprogress.org/how-russia-wo ... cf6e3b814/