Putin's Rasputin: Further Encounters with Fascism and the Occult

Hot on the heels of our posts about A) fascism and the occult and B) Putin as Czar, along comes a WaPo editorial discussing Russia's pretensions to an imperial lineage, the "3rd Rome" etc. and the right-wing occultist stoking those ideas.

Just as we wrote: ultra-nationalism, fascism and the occult.  Bloop!  Meep!  Tailor-made for my memespiracy....The far-right mystical writer who helped shape Putin’s view of Russia.  He may be full of pooh, but the pooh flows, and Poot listens, apparently.

We shouldn't over-emphasize the occult aspects of Hitler or Putin's ideology, but shouldn't ignore them, either.  The "why" is self-evident:  we need to understand Putin both in terms of rational realpolitik and, well, his nuttier concerns.

Putin's Rasputin's a dude named Dugin (say that 3x, fast), and "back in the day" he mixed with Satanists and punk-rockers before becoming a reactionary who embraced the Nazis to a certain degree.  He helped to found a Party called the National Bolshevik Party (aka the "Nazbols").  Their flag is a hammer and sickle, but the color scheme is pure Nazi.   The allusion is clear.

 

Glory be!  Mother Russia.  Strange how Dugin's time with occult circles and Satanists meshes so neatly with my last post about fascism, the occult, and Satanism.  Somehow, despite a call to the religious values of times past by these jackals, they are not only willing to countenance occultists among their ranks, but Satanists.  Strange bedfellows indeed!

Just by random chance I just won a French history magazine in a pub quiz and it's all about Russia, including the idea that Russia considers itself a "third Rome" after Byzantium.  This is not a new idea.  The Duke of Muscovy married the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and so the Russians adopted the double-headed eagle of the divided empire, their Cyrillic alphabet is based not on Latin but Greek letters, and they adopted Eastern Orthodoxy, not Roman Catholicism.  "Czar" means "Caesar," after all.  Moscow has long seen itself as the new center of the Roman Empire, the true inheritor of the Byzantines.

Dugin is a Russian Steve Bannon, a once-fringe thinker elevated to the center of power; someone scorned in the past but whose words now echo in Poot's speeches, and have a real effect.  This is not abstraction.  This is how mystical thinking ends up meaning 1000's of civilian casualties in an ill-conceived invasion to rebuild Novorossiya, the "New Russia."  The annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine.  All of it explained by Putin using Dugin's language and mystical vision of a Russia reborn.

Occultists, fascists, Satanists.  And the enemies are, chiefly, the USA and Britain.  

Stay tuned.  Commies cum Nazi-loving, nationalist mystics.  It is worth studying Marinetti and D'Annunzio because the SAME THING IS HAPPENING TODAY (shouting).

Merde, Goddam, and fuck.  Here's a Nazi emblem turned "Soviet" and "Czarist".  It seems at once completely incoherent yet somehow, a "logical" conclusion of what has come before....

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