The latest round of U.S. sanctions against Russia drew little attention when they were announced in mid-March, but, as previously reported for The New American, the list of individuals being sanctioned included one of the more significant ideologists behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin’s alleged advocacy of genocide in Ukraine was one of the reasons for his inclusion among individuals placed on the sanctions list, and links between members of his Eurasian Youth Union and alleged recruitment of fighters for the civil conflict in Ukraine led to the sanctioning of that organization, as well.
Among the ramifications of Dugin’s inclusion on the sanctions list is a prohibition on travel to the United States. However, this prohibition apparently did not extend to the use of communication through the use of modern technology, and thus Dugin was invited to speak on April 29 to students at Texas A&M university in College Station, via a Skype video link.
The invitation prompted a wave of controversy and inquiries by the FBI regarding the content of Dugin’s speech. However, when barely more than a dozen students attended the speech, both the presentation and the controversy surrounding it called to mind Shakespeare’s words in Macbeth: “full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Preparations had been made for the speech to be met with protests from the Ukrainian-American community: Signs were posted that demanded protesters remain silent in the back of the hall, and a police officer was present to ensure than such instructions would be obeyed. However, no protesters appeared, and the handful of attendees scattered throughout a lecture hall with seating for 120 sat through Dugin’s presentation with an air of impassivity. The conclusion of his nearly hour-long lecture was met with silence and not even a round of polite applause. For an ideologist who has built his reputation on controversy, Dugin’s lecture could only be described as a failure.
Part of the failure of Dugin’s lecture may be attributed to a general state of apathy in the American body politic: Americans are apparently far more concerned with crises at home than they are with reports of enemies abroad. The ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine receives only sporadic attention in the Western news media, while in Ukrainian cities such as Donetsk, the conflict was recently described as “constant fighting, every single day.” One factor in the battle has been the concept of “Novorossiya” (i.e., “New Russia”) — a zone where Russian-speakers make up a sizable proportion of the population — which Putin declared last April contained extensive territories in eastern Ukraine that should no longer be considered part of Ukraine. However, there is little sign that Americans are particularly concerned about old or “new” Russia.
Eurasianist ideologist Aleksandr Dugin has long been a figure associated with controversy both within Russia and abroad, and he is arguably the chief ideological advocate for the creation of Novorossiya. Although Dugin has been active in Russian politics since the early days of the anti-semitic Pamyat movement in the late 1980s and the formation of the National Bolshevik Party in the early 1990s, it was the publication in 1997 of his influential book, Foundation of Geopolitics, and his formation of the Eurasian Movement (Evraziia) in 2001 that marked a significant escalation of his influence.
Last August, Dugin (then a professor at Moscow State University) made comments that have been widely understood as a call for genocide against the Ukrainian people: “Ukraine should be cleared of the idiots. Genocide of the cretins is suggested. The evil cretins are closed to the Voice of the Logos, and deadly with all their incredible stupidity. I do not believe that these are Ukrainians. Ukrainians are beautiful Slavic people. This kind of appeared out of manholes as a bastard race.”
In his April 29 talk, Dugin endeavored to cast these comments in a different light, insisting that they should only be understood as a call for the death penalty to be imposed on those Ukrainians engaged in crimes against Russians. However, this assertion does not alter the fact that he called for “Genocide of the cretins.”
Dugin entitled his speech for A&M university, “American Liberalism Must Be Destroyed,” which was an allusion to the title of a book about his writings that was published last year (which was authored by the present writer). Throughout his presentation, Dugin left the central term — “Liberalism” — undefined, but in response to a question asked by one attendee at the conclusion of his speech, Dugin declared that the entire American political spectrum fit under his definition of “Liberalism,” insisting that it was simply a distinction between “liberal Left and liberal Right” and that “American ideology, is regarded from the Left or from the Right, but [is] always West [sic] Liberal. That is why I would see something interesting in American politics only on the margins, for example on the far Left, that challenges Liberalism.” What Dugin left undefined was what means by which he proposed this Liberalism was to be “destroyed.”
In his speech, Dugin expressed his shock at the way in which his views have been represented in the West, insisting that his view are “very pacific because considering that war is a part of human nature we need to avoid the violence” — a surprising moderation from earlier occasions when he declared in his essay, The Hand is Stretching for the Holster, that “aggression – is the founding law of existence” and that the coming conflict between the West and “Eurasia” is a conflict between “Two positions which could not be brought together, two all-encompassing super worldviews, two mutually exclusive projects of the future of mankind. Between them is only enmity, hatred, brutal struggle according to rules and without rules, for extermination, to the last drop of blood. Between them are heaps of corpses, millions of lives, endless centuries of suffering and heroic deeds.”
In the course of his speech, Dugin reaffirmed his support for the creation of Novorossiya out of territories seized from Ukraine, insisting that “Ukraine is not only one country” and a few minutes later declared, “For me, there is no difference between Crimea and Donbas and the eastern Ukraine — Novorossiya”.
Throughout his speech and in response to questions at its conclusion, Dugin expressed his shock at the decision of the U.S. government to place him on the list of sanctioned individuals, insisting that the action must be driven by those “who fear the evolution of Putin’s Russia in the direction that I am representing.” However, this is not the first time that Dugin has been banned from entry to a country: In June 2006, he was formally declared persona non grata by the Ukrainian government and banned from entry for five years, and when Dugin attempted to enter Ukraine in June 2007, the government deported him, “arguing he sought to destabilize the country.”
Dugin expressed his disappointment that his sanctioned status denies him entry and access to financial activity in the United States, because he had planned to take a more active role in the United States: “I think that the spread of my ideas, my texts, my books, my principles and the network that share the interest for [Dugin’s] ‘fourth political theory’ as the new, twenty-first century alternative to Liberalism bothers, really bothers, these guys.… The sanctions make many obstacles on the way to spread more this vision, and they try to scare, to put fear on the people [sic] who share, up to some point, my vision in the West. American sanctions prevent me to travel [sic] to United States, to organize some initiatives on the American soil — for example, founding a publishing house for ‘fourth political theory.’”
