Fascism and Socialism: Still Not Opposites The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism.

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Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping hisBIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like)

I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want the housekeeping staff to find the body in my room. If I didn’t need coffee so badly I would have taken care of that already. But one must prioritize. I think the high altitude here is making my brain itch.

FASCISM, AGAIN

Timothy Snyder has written the best piece I’ve seen on what’s going on in Kiev. It’s worth reading just as a primer. But it’s also interesting in other ways. I had not read a lot about the “Eurasian Union,” a proposed counterweight to the European Union, in much the same way the Legion of Doom is a counterweight to the Justice League. Putin and a band of avowed “National Bolshevik” intellectuals are in effect trying to put the band back together. Snyder writers:

The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

Via: NRO

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