ALEXANDER DUGIN AND STEVE BANNONS IDEOLOGICAL TIES TO VLADIMIR PUTINS RUSSIA

[orangecrush]

A former banker turned film producer and right-wing polemicist, Bannon has praised not only Russian President Vladimir Putin but also a brand of Russian mystical conservative nationalism known as Eurasianism, which is the closest the Kremlin has to a state ideology. Eurasianism proclaims that Russia’s destiny is to lead all Slavic and Turkic people in a grand empire to resist corrupt Western values. Its main proponent is Alexander Dugin, a Russian political scientist. Dugin’s philosophy glorifies the Russian empire—while Bannon and the conservative website he formerly led, Breitbart News, revived the “America First” slogan, which Trump later adopted in his campaign.


Despite their nationalism, Bannon and Dugin have something in common: They both believe global elites have conspired against ordinary people. Their enemies: secularism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism. In both Bannon’s and Dugin’s worldview, the true global ideological struggle is not between Russia and the United States but between culturally homogenous groups founded on Judeo-Christian values practicing humane capitalism on one side and, on the other, an international crony-capitalist network of bankers and big business.

Bannon’s fix for the world is to revive the nation-state—precisely what Putin’s Kremlin is promoting as it backs anti–European Union candidates from Hungary to France. “I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing,” Bannon told an audience of Catholic thinkers at the Vatican by video link from the U.S. in 2014. “Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism.”

Dugin agrees. “We are unfairly described as nationalists—but this is not old-fashioned nationalism in the sense of ethnic chauvinism but reflects the idea that we believe in many civilizations that are all equal and have the right to their own identity and decide their own course.”


http://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-donald-trump-jared-kushner-vladimir-putin-russia-fbi-mafia-584962

[DBoon]

1. this needs wider exposure

There is a whole universe of fascist and neo-fascist thinkers influencing right wing political parties.

We remain ignorant of these connections at our peril.

[orangecrush]

2. I'm trying

Really, I am.

Trump, Bannon, and the Alt Right didn't just materialise out of thin air.