Thread by @UncolaMD

If you’ve been keeping up with Ukraine, you might be familiar with this guy, Russian author and philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. Called 'Putin's Brain', many have called him a fascist, tho he and is followers repeatedly deny this.

So what’s his deal? Is Dugin a fascist? 🧵

Some history first; In 1980, Dugin was part of the Yuzhinsky Circle, a group of irreverent hipsters who were into satanism, witchcraft and, funnily enough, esoteric Nazism. Dugin especially loved the Nazi part. Reportedly, everyone from his early years ends up bringing it up.

Dugin also joined up with the Pamyat Society/National Patriotic Front "Memory" in 1988, a group described as a far-right, nationalist, antisemitic & pro-Tsarist. Members of Pamyat later split off to form Russian National Unity party.

Both groups used swastikas, oddly enough.

In 1993, Dugin convinced his friend Eduard Limonov to cofound the National Bolshevik Party, where he edited the group’s newspaper. Like the name suggests, the nazbol ideology is a mix of economic socialism with heavy Russian nationalism. Notice the flag.

This sudden tilt to communism was probably helped by his friendship with Gennady Zyuganov, cofounder and current General Secretary of the CPRF. Dugin is believed to have had some influence on the CPRF’s programme and nationalist tendency, tho this has never been confirmed.

Dugin would end up leaving the NBP in ’97, claiming the party was moving too far left, still working towards his idea of a conservative revolution. Ironically enough, the remaining members would label Dugin and the members who followed him as a fascist. Their words, not mine.

Fmr. Russia MP Ilya Ponomarev said the NBP were never a serious movement but “a postmodernist aesthetic project of intellectual provocateurs” which used “a bizarre mixture of totalitarian and fascist symbols, geopolitical dogma, leftist ideas, and national-patriotic demagoguery.”

After this, Dugin went on to write a few books. One of these, “The Foundations of Geopolitics”, a guidebook on how Russia could oust America as top dog, is a favourite of the Russian military, with many calling it a blueprint for Russia’s current foreign policy plan.

Above all else, Dugin is a philosopher, and a big fan of thinkers like Evola and Heidegger. Here he is on BBC Newsnight in 2016 presenting his ‘special Russian truth’ theory, a postmodern interpretation of truth being relative, or more specifically, absolute truth doesn’t exist.

Dugin’s fans love to point out how he’s gone on record to denounce fascism and rejects the label. Here he is saying this in an interview with white supremacist antisemite Jean-François Gariépy. Case closed, right?

Thing is, he has no problem with Fascism when Russia does it.

In his 1997 essay “Fascism - Borderless and Red”, Dugin claims Germany’s fascism was totally different to any potential Russian variation of fascism, which would be fine, as it’s “a combination of natural national conservatism with a passionate desire for true changes.”

As in 2009’s “The 4th Political Theory”, Dugin rejects stock ethnic nationalism for his theory of 'ethnos', attributing specific cultural values to specific regional groups. It’s using this system that he sets up Russia as the good guy against American modernity.

Dugin and his lot believe liberalism and modernity are inherently ‘Atlanticist’ ideas that are eroding the Russian way of life. His solution? Unite all of Eurasia under a conservative, nationalistic and illiberal regime with Russia at its head. That'll solve everything.

In a move typical of most fascist thinkers, Dugin’s definition of ‘modernity’ is vague, including feminism, LGBT rights, environmentalism, atheism and biology. All of these, he says, are being imposed on Russia by the west, as exemplified in the West’s support of Ukraine.

On Ukraine, Dugin holds a contradictory view; while claiming he wants Ukraine and Russia to form a new state altogether, finally uniting a common people, he’s simultaneously claiming they need to be “killed, killed, killed” since 2014, when Russia first invaded Crimea.

Dugin believes personal liberty is it should be universal only between cultures (or Ethnos), and since some of those cultures are illiberal, they should be allowed to enforce their absolutist, collectivist, or otherwise illiberal traditions within their borders.

This is where his fans, which include Russian nationalists, ‘patriotic socialists’ and the like, get their definitions of fascism; they insist far-right, authoritarian nationalism isn’t fascist, but gay liberal environmentalists from the west are. They think they've cracked it.

Dugin’s beliefs tick every box for what defines a fascist, from Umberto Eco to Lawrence Britt. His ultranationalism isn’t ethnic, but palingenetic, wanting to “recapture the glorious past from a liberal and cosmopolitan present.”

More importantly, Dugin’s beliefs require the all of Eurasia to be a cultural monolith with no room for deviation. This ignores reality (a skill of his) and is just cultural essentialism as an excuse to expand Russia's power and indulge in endless American whataboutism.

inb4 "you don't understand his ideas"

You don’t need to read Hegel and Deluze to be able to tell if a ultranationalist conservative who wants Russia to stretch from Dublin to Vladivostok is a fascist or not. No amount of pretentious postmodernism can change objective reality.

Some resources if you wanna do your own reading;
• stephenhicks.org/wp-content/upl…
• archive.org/details/TheFou…
• areomagazine.com/2022/04/05/ale…
• "Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism" by Charles Clover
• neweasterneurope.eu/2022/11/09/wha…
• commonwealmagazine.org/just-call-it-f…

Also; I am by no means attempting to justify American imperialism, or supporting American-style, pro-capitalist liberalism. Disliking Dugin's wonky beliefs doesn't mean I support the US putting its fingers in other countries affairs. If you think that, you have soup for brains.

I could've spent more time in this thread going into detail about what the specifics of fascism and less bringing up Dugin's old obsession with nazis, I don't deny that. But this is a Twitter thread. We're not in a Greek agora doing sophistry.