The mystical politics of Aleksandr Dugin, the mercurial philosopher and geopolitical strategist hovering behind Vladimir Putin, is front and center this week. Last week, we covered the phenomenon of Western conspiritualists folding the Russian invasion of Ukraine into their fact-free claims about what's really going on. It turns out that once you're all-in on the cabal, the Great Reset, mole children, and vaccine genocide, whatever happens in the world means you were right all along. Conspiritualists are claiming that, just like Donald Trump, Putin is really a light worker fighting to save the children and destroy Anthony Fauci's secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine while heralding the true Great Awakening. But an entirely different prophecy, one promising a Soviet spiritual rebirth, appears to be inspiring Vladimir Putin's actions—as well as Russia's disruptive interference in American politics. Julian unpacks the perennialist religious movement, Traditionalism, and how it speaks to fascist political actors around the world, including Steve Bannon. This is especially relevant in light of tragic events in Europe, a stark reminder of those of us who remember the Cold War. This time, Dugin and Putin dream of a new Russian Empire.Show NotesAleksandr Dugin Ukraine Invasion Press ConferenceMoscow Patriarch Stokes Religious Tensions with Ukraine RemarksDugin, Putin & The 2016 ElectionThe Rise of Traditionalism by Benjamin TeitelbaumSteve Bannon’s Ideological SoulmateDugin Fired from University Post for Inciting GenocideThe London Dinner that Brought Europe’s Far-Right TogetherBannon Cites Julius EvolaInside The Strange Origins of Bannon’s Nationalist FantasiaDugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics ReviewedDugin’s Eurasianism & The Am
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion, then I have a podcast that I know you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Mega's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Mega is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find Mega on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bocas del Toro, Panama.
A secluded seaside hideaway.
Scott Makeda has no idea that his tropical haven is about to become his personal hell.
A serial killer pretending to be a therapist.
Holbert rents a room and that's where he set up his business as a fake shrink.
Accusations of a gringo mafia.
Gun running, drugs.
A slaughtered family.
And then he goes back and he plants another bullet.
A killer on tape.
Hey man, I'm guilty.
Everybody knows I'm a monster.
The law of the jungle is simple.
Survive.
I'm your host, Candace DeLong, from Treefort Media and Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.
This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.
Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes drop weekly.
Comedy fans, listen up.
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
And they bring the same acerbic, yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm, or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Hello, Conspirituality listeners.
I'm Julian Walker, and I want to remind you that you can keep up with us individually on Twitter and collectively on Facebook, but we're most active on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod.
Lord.
If you appreciate what we do, you can also find us at Patreon.com backslash Conspirituality to support our work for just $5 a month and gain access to all our weekly Monday bonus episodes.
While Derek and Matthew work on our forthcoming book, I've immersed myself this week in understanding the mystical politics of Alexander Dugin.
He's the mercurial philosopher and geopolitical strategist hovering behind Vladimir Putin as the invasion of Ukraine has the world transfixed in horror and anxiety.
Last week, we covered the phenomenon of Western conspiritualists folding the Russian invasion of Ukraine into their fact-free claims about what is really going on.
It turns out that once you're all in on the cabal, the Great Reset, mole children, and vaccine genocide, whatever happens in the world means you were right all along.
Even if you have to really squint to see that, just like Donald Trump, Putin is actually a lightworker fighting to save the children and destroy Anthony Fauci's secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine while heralding the real Great Awakening.
But there is actually a wholly different prophecy and yearning for spiritual rebirth that may be inspiring Vladimir Putin's actions, as well as Russia's disruptive interference in American politics.
And we talked about this a little bit with Benjamin Teitelbaum, you may remember, when he was on the show with us back in December.
Today, I'll be unpacking the perennialist religious movement of Traditionalism, with a capital T, and how Traditionalism speaks to fascist political actors around the world, including Steve Bannon.
And in light of current events in Europe, those of us old enough are finding that we're harkening back to the Cold War.
Like many Gen Xers and Boomers, I have a very personal link to those years.
Just three months after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Nelson Mandela was released from his 27 years in a South African prison.
He went, overnight, from being a banned person, which in South Africa at that time meant photos, writing, and recordings of his voice were all illegal, he was literally culturally invisible, to being interviewed on state-run TV, pictured on the cover of every newspaper or magazine, and touring the country to speak to full soccer stadiums.
I was in Johannesburg at that time, not yet 20, And already had my plane tickets booked to escape the still active Apartheid military draft and find my way to LA via London with that British passport I had tucked up my sleeve.
The beginning of the end of Apartheid was a welcome surprise because at that time the fear was that there might actually be a reactionary revolution from the well-armed neo-Nazi right who were trying to hold on to power for white people.
Like many post-colonial states in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, South Africa was a kind of proxy theatre for the Cold War and its central realpolitik paradox.
The Russians were usually on the side of the oppressed, leaving the Americans then to often prop up dictatorial regimes.
So in our case, the US and Israel helped arm the apartheid military, while the Soviets and the Cubans were arming and training the revolutionaries.
But the unimaginable brutality of authoritarian state communism under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro still told a very different story to the idealistic promise of uniting the workers of the world to free them from the chains of capitalism.
In South Africa in the 80s, those of us with anti-apartheid views who were not persuaded by communist revolutionary rhetoric felt more common cause with Soviet dissidents and the Polish solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa.
In a society with over 80% of the population denied the vote, what we really longed for was American-style democracy.
The end of the 30-year-long Cold War not only reduced the ever-present anxiety of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but it also seemed to signal that capitalist liberal democracy and the gradual, hard-fought march toward equality and human rights had emerged as the dominant political and moral perspective on the planet.
As I record this on March 15th, the now almost three-week-long invasion of Ukraine is resurrecting a world defined geopolitically and economically by Cold War demarcations.
But this isn't about communism anymore.
It is conflict.
And Russia says, no, you are not boss.
You are not anymore boss.
That's very serious.
If we insist on multipolarity and if behind us there is nuclear weapon and the iron will to defend, for example, in the little case of Assad, defend Assad.
It's principally not because we have so much interest there.
That is the question of who rules the world.
That is the problem.
That is possible war.
Only war could decide really who is the boss.
Do you think that's really a possibility?
United States doesn't want to start a war.
You should recognize, United States should recognize openly for all humanity, all mankind, that United States is not anymore a unique master.
So let's recognize that there will be no war.
But we understand our position is that we are going to fight.
Up to the end, in order to show to everybody that the United States is not any more unique master.
We are entering the multipolar world.
And the situation in Syria, Ukraine and anywhere else, that's only the case to prove that.
That's Alexander Dugin speaking to BBC Newsnight in 2016 about the proxy wars he sees Russia engaging in so as to signal to the US that a shift in global power is underway.
Let's just flag this term he used, multi-polarity, for now.
We'll come back to it later.
It's important.
I'm recording this on March 11th, 2022.
to Horrifying reports and scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have the world on tenterhooks, while expert analysis and opinion are punctuated by saber-rattling hot takes and conspiracy-mongering from Fox News' Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, as well as the laundry list of conspiritualists that we reported on this past Thursday.
On Sunday, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Krill delivered a sermon before the start of Orthodox Lent that repeated unfounded claims that Ukraine was exterminating Russian loyalists, while not mentioning any of the devastation visited on the civilian population by Russia during the now two-week-long invasion.
According to ABC News, Krill described the conflict as part of the struggle against sin and against pressure from liberal foreigners to hold gay parades as the price of admission to their ranks.
We have entered a struggle, said Krill, that has not physical but metaphysical significance.
He then continued that the Russian loyalists in Ukraine were suffering for their fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power.
So what?
You might say.
These are fairly typical fundamentalist or conservative religious attitudes.
Anti-gay.
Framing world events as carrying divine significance or punishment.
Hello, Jerry Falwell.
We've got one of those right here, or we used to.
Sure.
But notice something.
Patriarch Krill didn't actually critique the government of Ukraine, and he's not referring to them as holding world power and imposing degenerate values.
He also isn't saying that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is on the wrong side of this supposed metaphysical struggle, despite schisms between those sects of the Church.
He's talking about something else.
And really, I hear Krill echoing Alexander Dugin.
And who knows if there's a straight line between the two men, but there's an ideology here that frames the current conflict in a larger context, both geopolitically and spiritually.
Those Krill refers to who claim world power and want to impose their quote-unquote so-called values that include gay parades are clearly the liberal democracies of the West, as led by the United States.
Of course, Vladimir Putin is actively seeking to expand into Ukraine, a project already begun in 2014.
Following on from 2008's war with Georgia and the brutal takeover of Chechnya in 2000.
But although, as we will discuss in a bit, Ukraine has symbolic significance as the birthplace of Russia, this latest invasion really also marks the beginning of a new period of amplified tension between Russia and the United States.
Without Ukraine, Russia cannot become once more the empire.
With Ukraine inside of Russian zone of control, it will become empire once more.
That is a kind of law, nothing personal.
15 days ago, Putin made his move.
Eight days later, influential philosopher and prolific Russian author Alexander Dugin spoke to journalists, as shown in a video posted to a YouTube channel with just a couple hundred followers.
That's who you were listening to at the top.
Dugan has been referred to as Putin's brain, and though he's been profiled before, a lot of good reporting has been done on him, I think he stands on the cusp right now of becoming more broadly recognized, more of a household name in the West, and understood as an incredible danger to global stability, peace, and democracy.
Here's another moment from that 26-minute press conference in which he refers to former U.S.
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1998 book, The Great Chessboard, written in large part as a warning to America against what, as it turns out, Dugin has been hatching since he published The Foundations of Geopolitics at around the same time.
These two books tackle very similar topics, but Dugin is laying out the plan for Russian dominance, and Brzezinski, who was a Polish anti-Soviet advocate of human rights, is making the case for American dominance.
To be part of this chessboard game, my mission is to help Mr. Brzezinski to move the figures on the chessboard.
There is no other option.
No Macron.
Nobody.
No Trump.
No Schultz.
Please, move.
The figures, as I told you, it's your mission.
And Putin, appearing from the table on the other side, has said, can I take part in the game?
That is why we have attacked Ukraine.
We just reappeared on the global scale as An active player playing against this great game.
As the subject, a sovereign player.
Now you'll notice that Dugin frames this as he and Brzezinski being joined by Putin.
In the video he looks to be very pleased with himself as he sort of mimes Putin almost like a child rising up to peer at the chessboard and asking if he too can play.
There's another moment where he gives the appearance and maybe you can hear it in his tone and the self-satisfied pause and his usual uninterrupted speech.
He gives the appearance of revealing a secret that he's quite proud of, a little twinkle in his eye as he smiles and even makes a little gestural flourish after he implies that he had a role in bringing Putin to power.
You can go and have a look at that if you're curious by following the link in the show notes.
But beyond that...
Notice, too, more ominously, his reference to the period he has been prophesying as beginning now, in terms of the sea power versus the land power.
Put in the context, that was beginning of the secret rise of Mr. Putin to power.
And now, 20 years, Putin tried to accomplish reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the land power and heartland and Eurasia in a peaceful way.
Nobody cared.
Nobody cared.
Finally, there is only one explanation of what is going on in Maidan, in Ukraine, in the post-Soviet space in general.
The C-Power took the momentum of the fall of the Soviet Union, and now we're approaching to our President's discourse, but in the context.
In that situation, Putin, when he came to power, started to reverse the fall of the Soviet Union, clearly.
For him, it was the geopolitical catastrophe.
Geopolitical, that is the key word.
Geopolitical catastrophe, not ideological.
Neither national, nor ideological, nor racial or religious.
Geopolitical catastrophe.
And this catastrophe consisted in the brute or rude fact Imposing the control of the sea power on the territories around Russia that logically belong to the land power.
There is no neutrality in geopolitics.
So they, what we liberated, they took for themselves.
Who they?
Not the West.
Seapower.
I deduced from this application that there will be the big war between continents.
The great war of continents.
So, confrontation between seapower and landpower.
Land power represented by Russia, by Heartland.
You see power represented by modern globalist, post-modern liberal West.
So more on that perhaps odd-seeming reference later.
There's another reference here that discloses his emphasis on a historical context for Russia's importance in terms of the debate between Huntington and Fukuyama.
For too long, we tried to do impossible things to the part of the global civilization.
We are not the part of the global civilization.
We are civilization by ourselves.
Huntington was absolutely right.
Fukuyama, with whom I have very interesting discussions, by the way, was absolutely wrong.
There are civilizations with a great S in the end, and one of them is Russia.
And we had no other possibility to prove that Huntington was right without attacking Ukraine.
It's sad to say, but it's probably us who start this conflictual situation in order to be heard.
And after that, all dialogue on the premise of the existence of a global civilization is broken apart.
So, now we are isolated island.
Russia is island.
It is not the part of the world, is big island.
Big isolated island.
So, and here we come to the geopolitical understanding, geopolitical science.
I started to develop geopolitics 30 years ago, when Russia only started.
To feel herself the part of the global civilization, global west.
And everybody was optimistic becoming the part of this humanity.
Civil rights theory, human rights theory, this global world.
We entered in this process.
We accepted the Western identity, we have abandoned Soviet identity, we have forgotten Tsarist pre-Soviet identity, and we try to be like everybody else.
So the shorthand here is that Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the culmination of the 20th century struggle between ideologies as having now been resolved with capitalist liberal democracy as the clear winner.
There was another contemporary political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, who warned of an inevitable future clash of civilizations coming out of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamism in the Middle East.
In the year of our Lord, 988, Vladimir I, the pagan prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kyiv, the pagan prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kyiv, accepted the Orthodox Christian faith and was baptized in the Crimean city of Cersonesus.
This established the Kievan Rus, a medieval state regarded as the joint ancestral homeland of both Russia In Ukraine, by the way, Vladimir Putin identifies very strongly with this historic Vladimir from a thousand years ago.
But Ukraine has been a contested territory for hundreds of years.
Invasions by Poland, Lithuania, and Mongolia carved the country into pieces with gradually differing cultures and languages.
Then, in the 1790s, the Russian Empire reasserted control and for the next 120 years systematically persecuted expressions of Ukrainian culture and suppressed the language.
Ukraine had a brief respite after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but by the 1930s they were again under the control of Russia, now as the USSR.
And roughly 3-5 million Ukrainians died under the famine created by Stalin's application of Trofim Lysenko's disastrous pseudoscience methods of farming.
If you're interested in that, I talk more about Lysenkoism in a bonus episode from August of 2021.
Ukraine finally gained independent statehood with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Putin continues to refer to the country using the term Novorossiya, or New Russia, and that term goes back to the Tsarist Empire.
Now it's here that I want to make a point, which is that contrary to an impression I had previously formed, and that I still hear other people repeating from time to time, Putin is not truly trying to reconfigure the USSR.
Rather, he's hearkening back further in time to the Russian Empire.
And that's where Alexander Dugin really becomes relevant.
There is more going on here besides an expansionist lust for power and patriotic glory.
Dugin is a great admirer of a Frenchman born in 1886 named René Guenon.
He was a perennialist who explored esoteric Christianity, various schools of Hindu thought, Taoism, and eventually immersed himself in Sufism and moved to the Egyptian city of Cairo.
He was an extremely prolific author, but out of his 20 or more books, five have stood out as very influential in the field of metaphysics and occultism.
If you've spent any time in New Age, Yoga, or Spiritualist circles, you've come into contact with beliefs that Guénon popularized for a Western audience.
Perennialism holds that there is a primordial and universal wisdom which is the source of all world religions.
This metaphysical truth, according to Fritjof Schoen, a fellow perennialist, is an infinite presence that lives within the heart of all intrinsically orthodox religions.
Along with Ananda Kumaraswamy, Schoen and Guénon are considered the principal authors of the school of perennialism known as Traditionalism.
That's with a capital T, Traditionalism.
One aspect of Hinduism that Guénon embraced was the notion of cyclical time passing through gold, silver, bronze, and dark ages or yugas.
Central to the traditionalist perspective, is that the concept of progress is false.
We are in the Dark Age, or the Kali Yuga, and seeming technological progress, as well as supposed socio-political progress in terms of liberal freedoms, secularization, equal rights, cosmopolitanism, even science itself, are all actually evidence of degradation and decline.
The Golden Age, from which we have fallen, was rooted in spiritual truth and ruled over by the Brahmin caste, who within that system are aristocratic priests deserving of religiously ordained worldly power.
Each of the other ages is ruled over by lesser castes, the warriors, the merchants, or the slaves.
In this conception, Western liberal democracy is an expression of the complete loss of historical, spiritual, cultural meaning and values.
It is the prioritizing of slaves over priests, time over eternity, and materialism over spirituality.
An Italian philosopher named Julius Evola also comes out of this school and was influenced by Guannon.
Evola would go on to inspire Mussolini and to maneuver in the inner circles of Nazi Germany.
Evola referred to his own philosophy as magical idealism.
He believed in ghosts and telepathy, antisemitic conspiracy theories, and rigidly traditionalist, misogynist gender roles.
Italy's post-fascist terrorists of the 60s and 70s saw him as their intellectual godfather and named themselves Children of the Sun after an idea in one of his books.
The Greek neo-Nazi party, the Golden Dawn, includes his books on their reading lists, and the far right in Hungary sings his praises.
Evola is, today, also influential amongst the American alt-right intelligentsia, including Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, who have both praised his work in public speeches.
Here is Dugin mentioning some of these connections during an interview.
You'll notice he mentions Trump, Bannon, Guenon, Evola, and traditionalism right off the top.
Emotionally, I'm in favor of Trump or above all, with Bannon, who has read "Ebola" and formulates from time to time something more or less similar to the traditionalism.
So that I like, but we are dealing with a kind of morbid, morbid body.
So American society, it is the same as disease.
There are worse diseases, there are better forms of disease, but we're speaking about disease.
So that explains the tension.
But if we compare on our Eurasian continent, we could see more or less the same with Eastern Europe and Western Europe.
Because Western Europe is in a deep disease, and Eastern Europe that is in disease, but the disease of Eastern Europe is not so deep.
So there are some levels of the perversion, and I think that the United States of America is in a worse situation in general.
But what I can remark or identify, or better, what I would want to identify Maybe that is the sign of the reversal.
Maybe we will witness the big and the great eschatological revival.
I'm not sure I would prefer that.
They are deeper than all of us in the night, but maybe they are closer to the dawn, to the new beginning.
And that, I'm not sure, I would prefer that.
That, for example, Trump is a sign of the new morning that is approaching from other side of the night.
And they are closer to the extreme, farthest point of the decline.
And that is precisely where the great, great change of the polls should start.
So that as well explains why I have some sympathy for Americans.
American struggle against their morbid and poisonous toxic Democrats, liberal Democrats and progressives.
We had a guest host toward the end of last year for episode 82 named Benjamin Teitelbaum.
He's the author of the book War for Eternity, and in one of many conversations he had with Steve Bannon for that book, Bannon referred to Donald Trump as a man in time.
And this is an interesting reference in terms of traditionalism, but it actually goes back to Savitri Devi, who talked about Adolf Hitler as being a man in time as well.
It's the idea that you have Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma as the kind of trinity of deities in Hinduism.
Shiva, who is the destroyer, Vishnu, the preserver, and Brahma, the creator.
And that being a man in time is actually embodying that kind of Shiva energy where you come to bring the great destruction that will result in something new being created.
and And in the way that Steve Bannon was talking about it, the man in time can also be thought of as someone who doesn't really know what their purpose is.
They're living out their purpose in a kind of perfect way, but they don't really know what it is or why they're doing it.
And so in terms of traditionalism, the idea that we are living in the Kali Yuga, in a great dark age where we've lost touch with what is really important and sacred, chaos and destruction can disrupt the Kali Yuga to such an extent that it ignites a new golden age.
Now this is consistent with Bannon having referred to Trump as a blunt instrument and saying the following at CPAC in 2017, a year after the election that brought the blunt instrument to power.
I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it down into three verticals or three buckets.
The first is kind of national security and sovereignty.
The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism.
The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state.
And if you...
If you look at these cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction.
The way the progressive left runs is if they can't get it passed, they're just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency.
That's all going to be deconstructed.
There's a new political order that's being formed out of this, and it's still being formed, but if you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room, whether you're a populist, whether you're a limited government conservative, whether you're a libertarian, whether you're an economic nationalist, we have wide and sometimes divergent opinions, but I think the center core of what we believe, that we're a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a reason for being.
And I think that's what unites us.
So we know that during those early days, Trump was indeed appointing people to head up agencies who were in fact hostile to the goals of those very agencies.
Dugin was delighted that Trump won the election and our national psyche has spent years now grappling with the reality and extent of Russian interference in that election.
And with the fact that Russian operatives actively use social media to amplify conflict, spread conspiracies, and perpetuate our Trumpian post-truth climate of mistrusting the media and government institutions, as illustrated by the unhinged and perpetuate our Trumpian post-truth climate of mistrusting the media and government institutions, as illustrated by the unhinged polarization
We also know that Bannon, working for Cambridge Analytica, played a huge role using stolen Facebook data in the surprising outcome of the Brexit referendum, and then utilized those same strategies to great effect in 2016.
In sync with this idea of deconstructing the administrative state and using Trump as a blunt instrument who can be a man in time, getting the UK out of the EU is a victory not only for anti-immigrant sovereign nationalism, but it's also a blow against what many on the right, including conspiracy theorists and including Dugan, refer to as globalism.
For Dugin's project, breaking down strategic alliances whenever possible that transcend traditional national religious identifications, alliances that can stand together to represent liberal democracy, breaking those down is a victory.
Why?
Because Dugin wants the Russian Empire to expand, and weakening alliances that would prevent that expansion is good.
In 1997, Alexander Dugin published a book titled Foundations of Geopolitics.
It has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff for the Russian military and has had a significant influence on elites within that military as well as the police and foreign policy circles.
Dugin also claims that the book has been adopted as a textbook in other Russian educational settings, and the former speaker of the Russian state Duma, to whom Dugin was foreign policy advisor, has publicly urged that the book be included in all school curricula in Russia.
In the book, he lays out a detailed and explicit strategy for establishing the Eurasian Empire, constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy, the rejection of Atlanticism, rejection of strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to let liberal values dominate us.
It takes inspiration from the Eurasian movement in Russia during the 1920s, which was supportive of the Bolshevik revolution, but not of communism.
It rather saw the Soviet Union as a stepping stone to the creation of this new empire.
Now this is where we catch up with two important reference points from the beginning.
You may remember Dugan talking about sea power versus island power, as well as insisting on fighting for something he called multipolarity.
In Eurasianism, the great landlocked island, made up of a union of Asian and Eastern European countries, stands in contrast to Atlanticism, seen as the alliance across the ocean between the US, Canada, and Europe.
Sea power versus island power.
Atlantis versus Eurasia.
But it's more than just geopolitical or economic.
For Dugan, different civilizations are expressions of different spiritual essences or identities, and they each have their own values.
He sees the dominance of liberal democratic values as a totalitarian unipolar imposition.
In fact, in a mind-boggling inversion, he argues that universal human rights represent an aggressive Western construct.
And he even tries to defend this position using postmodern philosophy.
He does it here, in 2016, while referencing some of the concepts we've been defining so far, and using the conflict at that time in Syria as emblematic of Atlantic versus Eurasian power struggles.
For, as he says, who is boss?
You can hear echoes here of Kellyanne Conway's alternative facts and the conspiracist attitude toward the mainstream media, but also, oddly enough, of Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake's New Age pablum.
Everything is relative.
And we need, we in Russia, we could use postmodernity in order to explain to the West that if any truth is relative, so we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept as something that maybe is not your truth.
Even if it's not true?
But if the truth is relative, that doesn't mean that the truth doesn't exist.
That means that absolute truth, one for all, doesn't exist.
Let's take an example.
If you watch Russian television today, you'd think that Russia and America were about to go to war.
Yes, but the same if we are examining, if we are reading American press, we have the same impression.
Not really.
I've just come back from America.
You don't really get that impression.
Do you think this is genuinely the case?
No.
I think that now the situation is in Syria, for example, United States.
Continuing to be unipolar, or continuing to consider itself as unipolar power, it says, no more asset.
And Atlanticist powers of Western Europe repeat after Washington, we don't want any more asset.
But Putin, other civilization says, stop.
Let have Assad.
And after that, there is our nuclear and military power behind Assad.
So, and that is serious.
If you are boss, you could not let the other decide, if you really are boss, decide what to do in your realm of responsibility.
Let's listen some more because the inseverer Gabriel Gatehouse actually does an excellent job trying to make the reasonable case for standards of evidence and analysis in journalism in the face of this kind of relativist ruse.
So may I ask you a personal question?
When you watch the news on Russian television, do you believe what you see?
Absolutely, because... You're an intelligent man.
Surely you can't believe some of the most outlandish things.
No, no, no.
Absolutely.
Postmodernism teaches us to understand our sociology.
I'm a sociologist as well.
And what is total fact?
According to Durkheim, the founder of sociology, Emil Durkheim, affirmed that total fact is the fact that society believes in.
So if enough people believe it, it'll become true?
No, no, the truth is the question of belief.
And postmodernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of believing.
So, we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say, and that is the only way to define the truth.
The truth is a matter of belief.
And that is not only our position.
Because when I see Western media, I ask myself how the people could lie in such way.
They lie about everything in the world.
But, after that, I say to myself, stop.
That is not a lie.
It is their truth.
They are completely convinced that they are true.
I work in the Western media.
I'm a reporter.
I go out on the ground.
I report what I see.
Nobody tells me from on high what the editorial line should be.
No, no, no.
There is no such thing.
The fact, it's always interpretation.
There is no such thing as a fact.
Wittgenstein has proven that.
There is no fact.
There's only interpretation.
You see because you interpret this or so or so.
Our manner of thinking of any man, of any culture, of any civilization, it deals only with interpretation.
You cannot see nothing without interpretation.
What you see, it's interpretation.
I see you can argue that philosophically, but... It is not causal.
It's practical.
If somebody flies an airplane and drops a bomb on a building in Aleppo... Sorry, sorry.
Somebody's dropped that bomb.
Who has fixed that?
Whose airplane is it?
What is the bomb?
What is the quarter the bomb is falling on?
What are the people?
And there begins our interpretation.
Because it is the war.
It is very difficult to go in and to see and to prove.
For you, any bomb falling is a Russian bomb.
Any killed by Russian bomb should be an innocent civilian and any harm that is done in the Aleppo or in the Syria is absolutely from the beginning.
You have no idea that could be different because you are real normal Western man, Western reporter, Western journalist.
It is your truth to see, to say, to presume, to be completely convinced that Russians are evil.
So that are their bombs that follow... But that's where you're wrong.
I spent many years studying Russian and learning to love Russia and all things Russian.
But nevertheless, that are our bombs that destroy innocent civilians everywhere.
I'm not saying they all are, but sometimes they are, right?
Uh, never!
If I say to you, if I say to you, Western journalists are often biased and mistaken, but they try to tell the truth, whereas Russian TV has gone through the other side... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, It's sometimes biased, sometimes not.
I would say Russian TV is sometimes biased, sometimes not.
If you say we are sometimes not biased, but you are always biased, I would say exactly.
You are sometimes biased, we are sometimes not biased.
So we are always exactly equal.
Absolutely.
And that is multipolarity.
Nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
The truth is relative.
I could accept that.
But only if you accept that.
If you say, our truth is absolute, I would respond immediately.
Our truth is absolute.
I don't believe that, and you don't believe that.
Or maybe you believe.
If you believe that your truth is absolute, you are a normal Western man.
I don't believe anyone's truth is absolute.
Okay, we could agree on that at least.
Now obviously the contradictions in Dugin's statements are everywhere.
He sees universal human rights as an oppressive imposition.
He encourages sovereign nationalism but in service of an expansionist Russia that will break down those borders and take over.
He wants to destroy globalist alliances so as to establish the Eurasian Empire which is a big global alliance.
He claims that all civilizational cultures have unique versions of truth and moral values, and yet has a grand vision that is essentially to create a big authoritarian theocracy.
The multipolar world, he describes, is one in which vast and separate power blocks have to contend with one another in a way that rolls back the clock to pre-enlightenment medieval times.
It's like a map that you find in a Lord of the Rings book or something like that.
He couches this vision in a philosophy called the fourth political theory, which is the title of his other most significant text, Humanity.
Here, beyond the three familiar ideologies of communism, fascism, and liberalism, lies his fourth theory, and it's based in part on Martin Heidegger's idea of Dasein, Which, for Dugan, is a kind of deep, existential, spiritual essence.
It's the being of each individual that is nonetheless deeply infused with civilizational identity, with a particular way of being, a set of values, and the potential for a metaphysical self-realization that has been shaped by geographical and cultural context.
So respecting the differing Dasein and creating a world in which these empires with radically different truths and moral foundations can coexist is what Dugin refers to as multipolarity.
In a way, it sounds kind of progressive, like diversity and inclusion.
But it's not that.
It's the antithesis.
Here's a quote.
Liberalism insists on freedom and liberation from any form of collective identity.
That is the very essence of liberalism.
The liberals have liberated human beings from national identity, religious identity, and so on.
The last kind of collective identity now is gender.
So this is the time to abolish it, to make it arbitrary and optional like everything else.
Let's go back to the foundations of geopolitics.
I'm drawing here from a super brief summary.
The strategy he lays out is complicated and remember this is taught to all Russian military personnel and is widely circulated amongst the intelligentsia in Russia.
So this is the strategy for Europe.
Annex Ukraine.
Offer Germany political dominance over Central and Eastern Europe, in alliance with France.
Cut the UK off from Europe due to their strong ties with Atlanticism.
Take over Finland, Romania, North Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Greece.
Now in the Middle East and Central Asia, rely on the traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization.
Maintain Iran as the key ally and give them Azerbaijan.
Give Armenia a special role due to their being an Aryan people.
Take over Georgia and the countries on the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian Sea.
Destabilize Turkey.
In East and Southeast Asia, take over Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria as a kind of security belt against China.
Offer China help then in expanding South so they can take over Indochina, besides Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia.
Provoke anti-Americanism in Japan.
Now finally, in the United States, As per this book, Dugan has since 1997 advocated fueling separatism and instability.
He advises a strategy of provoking racial political enmity, social and ethnic conflict, support all dissident and extremist movements, and also support isolationist politicians.
I tried to explain why.
It started.
It was put into reality.
Why it happened?
Why?
And not who started it.
So, and what happened?
And what is happening now?
So, it is the fight between land power, very hardly damaged with the end of the Soviet Union, and all these 30 years by pressure of the sea power.
And there came the moment when counter-attack began.
The direct words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, with whom I met in 2005 in Washington.
And these words were written in his book, The Grand Chessboard.
Without Ukraine, Russia cannot become once more the empire.
With Ukraine inside of Russian zone of control, it will become empire once more.
I should, in order to be part of this chessboard game, my mission is to help Mr. Brzezinski to move the figures on the chessboard.
There is no other option.
Please, move!
The figures, as I told you, it's your mission.
And Putin, appearing from the table on the other side, has said, can I take part in the game?
That is why we have attacked Ukraine. - It's now March 13th.
And I say that because I don't know what's going to happen between recording this and you listening in the world as it is right now.
And also because this was intended originally as a Monday bonus episode, but it's ballooned out into this full-fledged episode for Thursday, partially because it's so topical.
And listening back to the summarized strategy of planned maneuvers laid out in Dugan's book, it might be easy to dismiss him as a grandiose madman.
Certainly the fifteen minutes, or probably more than that, of excerpts from speeches and interviews to which I have subjected you, dear listener, He paints a very narcissistic, idiosyncratic, fanciful, and of course, chilling portrait of a man who spends a lot of time internally involved in his own fantasies of defiant power.
He's been playing a game of geopolitical chess out in his head against Jimmy Carter's now-dead National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for the last 25 years.
The backdrop of which is a late 20th century political science argument between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington.
In a way, the cheerful press conference he held just days after the invasion of Ukraine began was like his moment to deliver the Oscar speech that an aspiring actor has practiced in the mirror since they were a child.
He, to me, seems to believe he has won the game.
Defeated Brzezinski and Fukuyama, showed himself and Huntington to be correct.
He spat venom into the eye of the West and announced the beginning of the great Eurasian Empire.
And like a benevolent philosopher king, he has permitted his poisonous little prince Putin to move the pieces as instructed.
If we are to believe his posturing pronouncements, this is just the first move in a well-planned strategy of the new attacking style of Russian chess.
It's also a religious reassertion of spirit over materialism and eternity over time.
From the West, we watch now as the carnage unfolds and millions flee Ukraine.
As economic sanctions are applied, fault lines emerge between those countries willing to condemn Putin and close off trade, versus those who seize the opportunity to create an anti-Western alliance.
And already China and India look like potential partners for Russia.
U.S.
representatives are apparently in Venezuela, seeking to persuade them out of an ongoing alliance with Putin.
Meanwhile, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, who are all fellow members with Russia of the CTSO, or Collective Security Treaty Organization, will likely stay loyal to him.
And closer to home for us, Cuba.
has only been deepening their ties with Russia in recent months.
Cuba's just 90 miles south of Florida.
Miami is a three and a half hour flight from Venezuela.
It's all quite terrifying.
There's a very real possibility that we're not only bearing witness to an unjust war, but living through a global historic moment, a pivotal turning point after which nothing is ever the same.
Maybe that's just the Dugan app I feel is installed in my psyche right now after reading and listening to him and to experts on him so much for the last four months, but especially over the last couple weeks.
He may well be the ascendant evil villain of our time.
In a way, I have felt like I'm taking notes on a deeply malevolent figure just starting to reveal his significance before he becomes a blood-stained household name as events unfold.
I'm not saying I think Dugan can flawlessly execute the plan laid out in Foundations of Geopolitics or that Putin Can successfully go on an invasion rampage through multiple countries over the coming months or years.
But I am saying that it looks to me like both men are committed to causing a great deal of trouble in the name of profoundly retrograde imperial ambitions and anti-humanist religious glory.
As everything I've shared with you so far shows, Ukraine is very likely just step one in terms of what they're trying to do.
But let's go back a bit.
Dugin's strategy for destabilizing the United States was about polarization, supporting extremism and separatism, and promoting isolationism.
American isolationism is good for Russia for the same reasons that Brexit and a faltering NATO have been good for Russia, but again, alliances with authoritarians and rogue states can become a kind of isolationism with friends.
We've already mentioned Steve Bannon and his ties to Dugan via traditionalisms René Guénon and Julius Evola.
I'm not saying that Bannon is in cahoots with Dugan to destroy America.
In fact, Bannon has reportedly urged Dugan to be less anti-American.
Good luck there, Steve.
Rather, I'm saying that Dugan has seen Bannon as useful for his purposes.
Bannon admires Dugan, but has his own agenda for driving America farther to the right in alliance with fascist leaders around the world, who just so happen to have Putin on their dance card too.
Bannon held a dinner in 2018 in London under the banner of his organization called The Movement for right-wing populist politicians from around the world.
At that dinner, Belgian, French, Swedish, English, and even American figures of the far right Gathered to hear Bannon's pitch for how coordinated efforts could unite their parties in a shared mission and strategy.
Whilst in Europe, at that time, Bannon also was able to meet with Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban, as well as Alice Weidel of Germany's radical right-wing party.
Part of his vision for the movement is creating a coordinated conservative bloc within the EU that exerts greater control and influence.
He also spent time at an 800-year-old Roman Catholic monastery in Italy, where he had, until recently losing a court battle in 2021, planned to establish an academy to train young right-wing activists.
We've also talked before about how Bannon's involvement in Cambridge Analytica's illegal Facebook data activities may have played a significant role in Brexit happening, as well as in turning two-time Obama voters toward supporting Trump in 2016 by flipping over 200 Rust Belt counties that Bannon reportedly focused on from blue to red.
And that comes from Benjamin Teitelbaum's book again.
But in all the complexities and the fog of the culture war, it's easy to lose track of this additional fact.
Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election was massive.
This interference included reaching millions of social media users over a four-year period, planning and supporting events online and offline, and spreading fabricated news articles and disinformation sourced directly from Russian government-controlled media.
We know that Russian hackers infiltrated Democratic Party information systems and then strategically timed leaks to disrupt the Clinton campaign and boost Trump.
The FBI Director James Comey was eventually fired by Trump in part because he refused to stop investigating Russian interference.
Robert Mueller's special counsel report concluded that Russian interference was, and I quote, sweeping and systematic.
Mueller had everything but the smoking gun to show the Trump campaign's knowledge and participation.
But those contentious political interpretations aside, even if Trump was oblivious, and I think he wasn't, Russia was very actively involved in this massive political upset that has polarized and destabilized America so much in the last six years.
Now here's what really blows my mind.
Right-wing reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, and indeed the conspiritualists that we cover here on the pod can all get drawn into this idea that Neo-Marxism is this big threat.
You know, the supposed creeping communism of critical race theory in schools or the postmodern gender politics coming to pervert your innocent children.
How all of this is turning our institutions into Maoist hotbeds of illiberal dogma and viciously intolerant cancel culture.
How quarantine measures are un-American and the vaccines are really a way to depopulate the earth or surveil us all so that the liberal Davos elite can disempower and enslave freedom-loving patriots.
And of course, how Trump was really sent to save us from the lizard alien pedophiles.
And then had his election stolen by the deep state.
None of this is the real enemy.
These are culture war phantoms and fever dream vampires.
Sure, discourse on the activist left has become toxic in some ways.
And it perhaps plays its own role in perpetuating the rancor.
You know, Obama, I think, was right when he said that it is sometimes like a circular firing squad and prone to the narcissism of small differences amongst fellows who are actually allies.
And yes, some aspects of the opportunistic anti-racism industry and the enthusiastic diversity measures can be heavy-handed and overly ideological.
But it isn't the communists who are coming for you, and it's certainly not the lizard people cabal.
It's the fascists.
Russia and several of their other allies changed from red to brown, while Americans were manically jumping through flaming hoops in social media's dingy basement circus, starving for meaning, hungry for the tantalizing MSG of deep-fried misinformation, unquenchably thirsty hungry for the tantalizing MSG of deep-fried misinformation, unquenchably thirsty at the intoxicating firehose where spiritualized ancient conspiracy theories mingle deliciously with dystopian sci-fi nightmares, and looking for someone to blame for the nihilistic despair present as the prosperity and looking for someone to blame for
MLM entrepreneurial aspirations faded to reveal the stark reality of living under rapacious capitalism without a social safety net.
On the right, and amongst conspiracists who inevitably trend right, the rhetoric of anti-globalism, individual and national sovereignty, and disdain for elites and experts in favor of an emotional populism is also rampant.
Now all of the above may or may not be driven by Russian efforts to inflame polarization in the US.
Either way, it certainly works in their favor.
And anti-media, post-truth, weaponized relativism, and conspiracy disinformation is all very much in their well-oiled wheelhouse.
This fact is evidenced by how many conspiritualists are now circulating Russian propaganda about the situation in Ukraine on social media, while wrapped up in a Gadsden flag.
But look, we're still in a liberal democracy, and as imperfect as it is, As much as it needs to be improved, people on both the left and the right often seem to have lost track of the crucial factors that have kept liberal democracies unique in our world over the last hundred years.
A free press, secure elections with peaceful transition of power, branches of government that exert checks and balances, shared commitments to facts and evidence, reason and science, even when these contradict our opinions.
Separation of church and state and a willingness to be a vessel for the will of the people to evolve and heal and admit mistakes and to strive to protect the most vulnerable and marginalized among us from exploitation, violence, and oppression.
Make no mistake, Putin and Dugin and their allies stand for the opposite of what this rare and precious flame genuinely seeks to illuminate in the heart of humanity.
Even with all the awful history of the West that has led us here, the many problems of capitalism and the vexing imperfections of our social fabric, Their vision is of an ascendant, theocratic, authoritarian empire that, in the name of empty vanity and glory, throws off any moral obligations of human dignity, freedom, equality, and compassion.
It is sometimes only when it is most in danger that we realize how much we actually have to lose.
So look, I don't have any answers.
I'm going to walk the dog with my wife and our toddler to the nearby park where we can meet another family and our dogs and four-year-old daughters can play for a while and where we grown-ups can forget for a while, absorbed in the simple goodness of time and experience that are fleeting, precious, and not guaranteed.
Before I go, I want to leave you with this because I love poetry.
This is Mary Oliver.
She asks, Oh, do you have time to linger for just the little while out of your busy and very important day for the gold finches that have gathered in a field of thistles for a musical battle to see who can sing the highest note or the lowest or the most expressive of mirth or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks drink the air as they strive melodiously not for your sake, and not for mine, and not for the sake of winning, but for sheer delight and gratitude.
Believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.
I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant when he wrote, you must change your life.
