Bloomberg: There's Nothing Exceptional About Any Country

For every commentator declaring the end of a given national exceptionalism, others pop up reasserting it. This seems to be an iron law of history: Every nation at one point or another claims to be superior to others or endowed with a special mission. Exceptionalism, ironically, is universal. [...]

Of the many exceptionalisms around today, one in particular resembles the 19th-century German variety. Russia has long seen itself as a “Third Rome,” following the empires of the Caesars and the Orthodox Byzantines, whose role “Holy Rus” tried to take over. Like the Germans of yore, Russians are sure their culture and soul is deeper than the West’s. As expressed in the thought of scholars such as Aleksandr Dugin, this exceptionalism implies a manifest destiny to rule over an anti-Western “Eurasia.” Putin is said to subscribe to much of this worldview. [...]

The problem is that exceptionalism leads to bad things. The first is hypocrisy. How, for instance, could the U.S. or U.K. ever have claimed to be morally superior when the first English ship carrying African slaves to America arrived in 1619, a year before that other English ship, the Mayflower, brought the Pilgrims to their city upon a hill? And what would either country say if the anti-racism riots of recent weeks — late blowback for that earlier legacy — had taken place in, say, China or Iran? Exceptionalism requires editing a country’s past, and indeed lying.

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UnHerd: The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right (published on 21 April) reads a bit like Dan Brown’s pol sci doctoral thesis — standby flights to Washington, 3am Skype calls with Kremlin advisors, mittel European intrigue in Budapest, racists in ashrams, a Black Hand of high-end political operators, all united by their faith in a shadowy paleo-religion.[...]

The simplest way into Traditionalism is to think of it as the fourth quadrant on a political compass where the other three are fascism, liberalism and communism. Traditionalism rejects all three rivals on the same grounds — that they are modernist, they’re competing for the chance to modernise the world; and they’re materialist: communism and liberalism are both obsessed with money, fascism with bodies. [...]

Most influential of all is Aleksandr Dugin, a long-time foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin. Though his relationship to the Kremlin has often been informal, it was Dugin’s ‘tanks to Tblisi’ sloganeering that persuaded Putin to seize South Ossetia in 2008, and his dreams of a greater Russia that undergirded both the taking of Crimea in 2014 and the continuing attempts to hack bits off eastern Ukraine. Dugin even wrote a book on Traditionalism: The Fourth Political Theory. [...]

The question of whether Traditionalism is a religious ideal with political dimensions or a political one with religious ones is never quite resolved. At its heart, it takes a sort of gnostic, Unitarian ideal of faith. It hardly matters which faith — but older, more ancestral creeds are prefered, which is why so many Scandinavian neo-Nazis embrace Wodin and Thor, and why Hinduism is considered an acceptable choice for the modish skinhead intellectual. It’s ancient, it’s pantheistic, it’s bafflingly non-linear. Which is why in 2009, two of America’s alt right founding fathers, John B Morgan and Daniel Friberg, ended up living at a Hare Krishna temple near Chennai. [...]

But Bannon is also far more pragmatic than either Dugin or de Carvalho. He seems to draw upon his intellectual tools like a bag of golfing irons. He tells Teitelbaum that “Traditionalism is a total rejection of racism in that it is a brotherhood of the spirit”. What he seems to be, at base, is anti-liberal. Be it in trade, migration, or even education.

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Al Jazeera: The death of the Russian far right

Today, most of the leaders of the ultranationalist groups that used to organise the march are either in jail or in self-imposed exile. Their supporters consider them to be politically persecuted and complain about increasing state repression. [...]

"Controlled nationalism is about using nationalists in some [political] games. In some cases, [the authorities] would support nationalists in order to keep the regime alive, to fight the threat of a colour revolution," says Anton Shekhovstov, visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria. [...]

That same year, the Russian authorities decided to finally do away with the November 7 official holiday celebrating the October Revolution. They moved the allocated day off to November 4 - the day Moscow was liberated from the Poles in 1612, an official holiday in tsarist Russia until 1917. [...]

In August 2011, DPNI was banned by the Russian government (the SS had been banned a year earlier). Nevertheless, the government allowed the Russian march to take place. On November 4, more than 10,000 nationalists, joined by opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny, marched in Lyublino with banners reading "Stop feeding Caucasus". Over the years, the central government has been perceived as being quite generous in its budget allocation to the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus and has been criticised by both nationalists and liberals for it. [...]

The result was a "schism" in the nationalist movement with one camp supporting the annexation of Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the other opposing both and supporting the Ukrainian central government. [...]

Human rights groups have been divided over whether or not to consider the detention and imprisonment of ultranationalists to be political prosecution. Human rights organisation "Memorial" considers that in the case of Belov, there are "signs of political motivation".

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Infinite Coincidence: The ideological psychopaths behind Trump, Putin and Brexit (February 6, 2017)

Figures like Bannon, Surkov and Cummings may have different visions of a perfect society, but they share a commitment to elite rule and an idea of how to aggressively pursue it: by creating chaos, using what Rebecca Solnit (in one of the best assessments I’ve yet encountered of why Trump won) describes as ‘gaslighting’ to destabilise accepted values and undermine trust in established institutions. I found out about Surkov through Adam Curtis (a very skilled propagandist in this own right), who says that Surkov has “turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater…(creating) a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control”*. This interest in disruption is something all ideological psychopaths share. An appropriate analogy might be that shaking a baby vigorously enough a) might somehow make it grow up quicker and b) will stop things getting boring. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that historical precedents to such projects lie in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge. Figures like Bannon, Surkov and Cummings also have literary antecedents. Kane defines Cummings as “a mercurial figure who could easily stalk the pages of the Booker Prize longlist”. After all, part of the thrill and success of the Booker-winning ‘Wolf Hall’ lay in Thomas Cromwell’s machiavellian machinations. Much of what I’ve read about the three ideological psychopaths in question reminds me of a quote from H.G. Wells’ Doctor Moreau:“Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say; this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own.” [...]

There’s also been a lot of talk over the last few months about tricksters: Pied Pipers who lead the masses astray. Ideological psychopaths seem to make use of charismatic leaders, or at least to put themselves at their service. They are often not the figureheads themselves but the powers behind the throne. The Italian populist leader Beppe Grillo keeps himself out of direct political involvement and tries to get someone else to do the dirty work (he’s not very good at choosing). Then there’s the question of which ideology they adhere to. Bannon recently claimed to have once been a Leninist but has very clear fascist and possibly Nazi sympathies. Surkov’s inspiration apparently comes from contemporary art, and both he and Bannon have been associated with the fascist Russian ‘philosopher’ Alexander Dugin, who believes Russia should provoke an all-out world war. As for Cummings, despite his intellectual posturings, he may be stupid enough to be a fan of that ultimate Godhead of failed teenage bullies with megalomaniac pretensions, Ayn ‘Medicare’ Rand. He is an extreme Neoliberal and a reminder that the origins of Neoliberal thought lay partly in nazi belief in the purity and goodness of elite power.

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Independent: After years of capitalism, Russia wants a tsar again

One of the book’s most revelatory moments comes during an interview with a Kremlin official who prefers to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons. “Russia,” he notes, “has a tsarist mentality.… Whether it’s a general secretary or a president, either way it has to be a tsar.” It’s a point of view Alexievich regretfully admits she shares – and the reason, she says, that Russia has failed to embrace democracy.

Not that she demonises Russian President Vladimir Putin; for her, the country’s problem is a collective one. “Putin symbolises the feelings and sentiments of pretty much the majority of Russian citizens,” Alexievich says. “It looks like people in Putin’s immediate circle who are oriented toward an anti-Western, Slavophile rhetoric…and who used to be on the margins of political thought…are moving closer to the president.”

Some, such as the right-wing Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, advocate a return to totalitarian values, and as Secondhand Time unfolds, the spectre of Josef Stalin wafts in and out of the book like Banquo’s ghost. Many members of Russia’s older generation whom Alexievich interviewed yearn for the days when the dictator ruled the Soviet Union with absolute power. One extraordinary conversation with an 87-year-old veteran of World War II leaves Alexievich bewildered (she occasionally inserts her feelings between brackets). 

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