Steve in Santa Fe recommended this article by David Von Drehle, Meet Alexander Dugin, the man known as Putin's Brain. I realize that many of you can't broach the paywall at the Wa Po but if you can find the article, it is illuminating and the playbook is exposed.
Free the world from the yoke of the liberal unrooted cosmopolitans and individualists and re establish the Great Eurasian empire. Hmmm, where have we heard that one before?
A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past — infused with mysticism and obedient to authority — to explain a failed present. The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”
Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians. Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia” — his term for the future Russian empire — low.
Fascism never dies, it just goes to sleep for a little while.
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