Putin uses Dugin in new propaganda spin
By Thomas Assheuer
July 19, 2022
Translated from the German
Among the many impotent attempts to grasp the incomprehensible of the Ukraine war is the guesswork about who is providing Vladimir Putin with the ideological stuff. Who is he listening to? What does he read when he reads? As is well known, he likes to quote the philosopher Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954) at length, because the temporary admirer of Hitler and Mussolini colors the history of Russia exactly to Putin's taste: as a centuries-long sacrifice in a geographically vulnerable location, beset by enemies, but gifted with a rough landscape that makes the body tough and the soul tender.If you follow Ilyin, the enemy always comes from the conquering West, and then the peace-loving Mother Russia unfortunately has to send her very young sons into battle. But the nice custom of "going to your death," he wrote in his book The Nature and Uniqueness of Russian Culture, first published in 1944, makes it easy for them to die. "They leave earthly life in a sacrificial spirit."
The Russian President has given another speech these days, but this time Ilyin seems to have served his time as a cue-giver. Certainly, at first Putin talked as he did in his war speech of February 21 - he spoke to the leadership of the State Duma like a disappointed lover who had always offered the West a friendly hand and was rewarded with arrogance, aggression and the eastward expansion of NATO. Now Russia has to do what an empire has to do. It pre-emptively collects its provinces before the sacred Russian soil falls into the hands of that enemy who had no intention of being a friend.
You know that, it's the usual thing, but after that it gets interesting. Going far beyond the usual hints, Putin presents his new spin and explains why he is putting his "special operation" at the service of the oppressed people. Russia, so the message goes, not only secures its own sphere of influence, but also serves the good of mankind. It resolutely defies the imperialism of the "collective West", its quest for absolute world domination and its attempt to use its "fifth columns" to harm Russia. For example, in Ukraine in 2014, when he "organized an unconstitutional armed coup." The fact that Trump's former national security adviser, John Bolton, recently admitted to having planned coups in other countries is, of course, grist to Putin's propaganda mill.
As I said, these sentences do not sound like Ivan Ilyin, they rather sound like the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, the star of the European right. In fact, Putin borrows key phrases from his new book, The Great Awakening Against the Great Reset, published last year, reeking heavily of copy-and-paste. Original sound Dugin: In the past "complete freedom of opinion and thought prevailed" in the West, he "was pragmatic, individualistic and libertarian". But now, in Liberalism 2.0, "freedom is no longer free" and "has turned into something totalitarian". This means that "globalism is entering its totalitarian phase". The West "wants control of public consciousness on a global scale, at the core of which is the so-called cancel culture."
And now Putin: "The West, which once upheld principles of democracy such as freedom of speech, pluralism and respect for the opinion of others, is now degenerating into the exact opposite - into totalitarianism (...). This model is pushed - the model of the totalitarian Liberalism, including the notorious cancel culture, the ubiquitous prohibitions - all over the world, or at least they try."