Aleksander Dugan: Rasputin Redux?

Aleksander Dugan

Speculation is percolating about an emerging “new fascist international”—stretching from France (stamping ground of the Le Pens and the National Front), to Spain (whose extremist rightist figure head is Prince Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, leader of the Catholic-monarchist Carlist movement), to Austria (where Heinz-Christian Strache heads the fascist Freedom Party), to Greece (where “Golden Dawn” is headed by Nikolaos Michaloliakos), to Hungary (where Marton Gyongyosi heads the vicious Jobbik Party), to Bulgaria (where Volen Siderov is founder to the far-right Ataka Party), to Vladimir Putin’s expansive-minded Russian Federation.

To the extent that there is a nucleus of fact beneath overblown hype, the question emerges who might provide the ideological glue for such a new alignment?

The cultural and religious gaps among these right-wing forces is such that the probable answer is nobody. Yet Putin’s Russia—the prime mover behind the new far right—is also providing the movement with a primus inter pares.

His name is Aleksandr Dugan who is being pictured, not without some plausibility, as a sort of reincarnated Rasputin, the “Mad Monk” whose unbridled charisma helped lead the Russian Empire presided by the last of the Romanovs over a cliff. His roots are uncovered in several recent books including James D. Heiser’s “‘The American Empire Should be Destroyed’: Aleksander Dugan and the Perils of Immanentized Eschatology” (2014).

Born the son of a KGB colonel-general, Dushkin billed himself as a “journalist” before latching on to the position of head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations of Moscow State University where his academic title is largely a front for his role as preeminent ideologist of Putin’s nomenklatura.

Dugin’s first party affiliation in the 1980s was with Pamyat which sought to revive the virulently anti-Semitic “Black Hundreds” shock troops of Czarist times. Interestingly, however, Dugin has always sought to avoid neat ideological pidgeonholing—flirting with both Russian communist and fascist movements in the 1990s. In addition, he ostensibly distanced himself Pamyat’s virulent anti-Semitism while also championing a “Slavic-Islamic” alliance that is a cornerstone of Putin’s foreign policy. A consistent theme throughout his career is hatred of the U.S.: “the American Empire [that] should be destroyed.”

More broadly, “the West” to Dugin is “the anti-Christ,” whereas Mother Russia—anointed in the sacraments of the Orthodox Church—is the Holy Warrior leading Eurasia’s fight against godless western individualism and materialism. A cheerleader for Putin’s subversion of pro-Western Ukraine, Dugin views this battle as the first skirmish in a new Cold War to roll back Euro-American capitalism.

Dugin’s worldview fuses a revived pan-Slavism (the ideology that helped trigger Europe’s fratricidal explosion in 1914) with more cosmopolitan fascist currents, particularly the so-called Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola. Yet the resonating heart of his doctrine is a racist occultism that is the ultimate giveaway of his fascist intellectual roots. The “deep history” of this ideology—which flourished before World War II but has been resurrected on the European (and American) fringes since—is excavated in the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s fascinating book, “Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity.”

A groundbreaking exploration of the extreme Right’s post-World War II literary underworld, Goodrick-Clarke’s book also explores the better known prewar nexus between the Nazis and the occult. Goodrick-Clarke not only catalogues recent fantastic tales of extraterrestrial Atlanteans who burrowed under Tibet to escape Noah’s Flood, only now to reemerge as potential architects of a Fourth Reich, and of SS “miracle weapons” (including “W-7” flying saucers) based in Antarctica where the Fuhrer and Eva Braun are said to have taken refuge. He analyzes how, in the post-World War II era, myths of Aryan racial superiority found a home in the world of New Age spirituality and environmental consciousness.

The story starts with Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas in Lyons), the self-styled priestess of the new Aryan religion, who spent the prewar and wartime years in India seeking an Nordic-Hindu symbiosis and communing with anti-British ultranationalists who shared her notion of Hitler as “an incarnation of Vishnu.” In 1945, she returned to Europe to become the jailed heroine of the new Neo-Nazi underground. Helping inspire the “esoteric Hitlerism” of Chilean diplomat and writer Miguel Serrano, Devi was a guest in Cairo in 1957 of Goebbel’s former propaganda specialist Johannes von Leers. Her Italian neo-fascist Italian devotee, Claudio Mutti, a supporter of the Italian neo-fascist movement (MSI) responsible for the terrorist campaign culminating in the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing killing 85, lauded Muslims for honoring Hitler as a hâjj (pilgrim) at the same time as Hindu extremists saw him as a positive manifestation of Vishnu. Devi’s widely translated manifesto, “The Lightning and the Sun” (1958), begins with Aryan Man’s reincarnation in “the late-born child of light” in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889. A millennial redeemer, the late-born Hitler is her “Kalki avatar.”

In the 1960s, Devi (who died in 1982) became a pen pal of Britain’s young fascists and met American George Lincoln Rockwell. For her doctrines of Hitler as a divine leader, she was venerated by the next generation of American Neo-Nazi and Christian identity leaders such as Matt Koehl of the National Socialist White People’s Party and Jost Turner. In the 1980s, Turner established in Northern California an “Odinist commune,” Volksberg, ostensibly based on a combination of North mythology and Hindu Tantric yoga promising sexual liberation.

Roughly at the same time that youthful hippie “flower power” had blossomed in the 1960s, Wilhelm Landig’s German trilogy of Thule novels counterbalanced fears of Europe’s racial mongrelization with hope for a resurgent Aryan “Age of Aquarius.” Then in the wake of the Arab and Iranian oil embargoes and the energy crisis, Neo-Nazism took on an environmental friendly hue in D. H. Haarman’s three-volume “Geheime Wonderwaffen” (“Secret Miracle Weapons”) claiming that SS inventors of electromagnetic flying saucers has also achieved an antigravitational power source that would now be an alternative to fossil fuels except for a Jewish conspiracy of banks, oil companies, and car makers. Eventually, Holocaust Denier Ernst Zundel and others used the Internet to market a multimedia mélange of extremist books and music with a New Age flavor featuring time travel, extraterrestrial visitations, and fantasies of Nazi revenge and rebirth.

By the late 1990s, fascists on both sides of the Atlantic were brandishing their “green” credentials. Even Louis Farrakhan’s followers chimed in by claiming that “Zionists” were responsible “for the hole in the ozone layer.”

Believe it or not, such occultist megalomania camouflaged as geopolitics is now being whispered in the ear of Vladimir Putin by Dugin. A “Rasputin Redux” indeed.