One is the trauma of 1991, which is haunting us all now. The whole country has not become entangled in conspiracy theories, although the society is indeed prone to them. Let’s look at these two things separately, the president and the country. How has modern Russia become a country whose president is channeling out conspiracy theories? How has Russia become a conspiracy theorist of a country? What do we know for sure? We know that back in the 1990s Dugin was loitering at the Military Academy of the Russian General Staff, lecturing on geopolitics and probably speaking a lot about the “new world order.” We can hypothesize that whatever he was saying sank into the brains of some Russian officers, who then decided to use it at some point. We can only speculate about who influenced whom, who read whose article, who was commissioned to write a research paper, and so forth. Let me first say that, as scholars, we cannot draw a direct line between Dugin’s ideas and what the official party line is. How did this make its way from Dugin into Vladimir Putin’s speeches? All these things were put in the same box, anything Western became a manifestation of the “new world order.” When anti-Western attitudes became a mainstream phenomenon in Russia, the “new world order” began absorbing all things “Western” one could only think of: LGBT agenda, feminism, GMO food, WTO accession. Year after year, this idea has been steaming in Dugin’s and his comrades’ writings. Back then he did debate the “new world order”, which had destroyed the foundations of the Soviet Union: the Atlantic world won, this Atlantic world is the new world order, and it will soon annihilate all of Eurasia. In the early 1990s, Alexander Dugin was publishing his Elements magazine, and when the Yugoslav war broke out he published a lot on how the Americans were destroying all independent forces around the world and planning to gut Yugoslavia, our Serbian Orthodox brethren, and so forth. It all started with the fall of the Soviet Union and the institutionalization of anti-Western sentiments. How exactly did these ideas take hold in Russia? In essence, the “new world order” theory was squeezed dry of its US filling, stuffed with all today’s anti-Western sentiments and served to Russian officers and soldiers going to the frontlines in Ukraine. In a weird way, the idea of opposing the US government in the US was transplanted onto Russian soil. In Russia, in the 1990s and 2000s, the “new world order” conspiracy theory has gained a distinctly anti-Western and anti-US flavor. They saw all reforms and novelties as pursued by the devilish hand of the Kabbalah, the superrich, politicians, or people like George Soros. Later the theory was picked up by the far-right, not necessarily religious but radical opponents of the US federal government. Initially it was promoted by radical Protestant fundamentalists (so the whole business of Russian ideologues promoting American Protestants’ ideas sounds absurd from the very beginning). Generally speaking, the “new world order” conspiracy theory first emerged in the US in the 1970s. Unless it’s fake, it is an interesting element of what Russia has on its ideological agenda today. Ilya Yablokov: I was quite surprised to see such a document. One of its maxims states the following: “Russia and the Russian Army are the last bastion against the ‘satanic new world order.’” Where does this come from and what does it really mean? Holod: Christo Grozev, head of Bellingcat, published photographed pages from some kind of “Russian Soldier's Code of Honor”. Holod spoke to Ilya Yablokov, lecturer at the University of Sheffield, in the hope to find out where these constructs in Russian political rhetoric had come from. In his appeals to the nation, President Putin provided a number of explanations why the war against Ukraine was necessary, referring to neo-Nazis who had allegedly seized power in Ukraine and the need to oppose the West and NATO.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |