Dugin the puppet-master? | Traditionalists

https://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2017/08/dugin-puppet-master.html

 

Monday, August 28, 2017

Dugin the puppet-master?

Sometimes it seems that the Western media really loves Alexander Dugin. First we had Dugin as “Putin’s brain” (as if Putin didn’t have a brain!) and now we have Putin as Dugin’s puppet–honestly, and in the Huffington Post, too!

“Okay, so a weird mystical guru is using Vladimir Putin as a puppet to implement his spiritual goal to destroy the West and end the world, in order to bring about the spiritual transformation of society. What can I do about it?”

asks James Carli in “Aleksandr Dugin: The Russian Mystic Behind America’s Weird Far-Right,” before suggesting organizing against the Right and re-reading Rousseau.

Carli recognizes elsewhere in the article that “experts are divided about the extent of Dugin’s influence,” but even so he goes on to suggest that Dugin is manipulating Putin. Why is it, one has to ask, that there is this desire to explain the whole of Russian foreign policy in terms of the ideas of one thinker? Is it perhaps to avoid more difficult discussions?