Alexandr Dugin's absurd mysticism
criticalresist.substack.com
Or why sounding deep does not make you wise
  • davel [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for your service. I find having to point out the obvious vacuity of mystical grifters like Alexandr Dugin and Deepak Chopra demoralizing.

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    Dugin portrays himself and his "new" ideology (really just banal conservatism, there is nothing original about it) as the antithesis to western liberalism. But in fact he and the liberals are very much alike, in that they are both rooted in idealism and sharing a rejection of materialism and scientific analysis.

    He is neither the profound, world-changing thinker he and his fans like to think he is, nor is he the scary boogieman, the epitome of all that is evil, or the "Rasputin behind the tsar's throne" as the West likes to portray him. And if it wasn't for Ukraine's terrorist attack on him he would still remain an insignificant and obscure figure in Russia to this day.

    In short he is not worth our time. The things he gets right about geopolitics - and yes he does say some correct things that liberals refuse to acknowledge, it's part of why he has the appeal that he does, to a certain niche audience - are extremely obvious and have been pointed out many times before by other more serious people without having to appeal to "eschatology" or other such magical thinking.

    • Fishroot [none/use name]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Dugin portrays himself and his "new" ideology (really just banal conservatism, there is nothing original about it) as the antithesis to western liberalism. But in fact he and the liberals are very much alike

      This is what WangHui, Zizek's Archenemy, said about Dugin too

        • Fishroot [none/use name]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Zizek had written about Wanghui this year on how dangerous Wanghui's ideas are for the stability of the western democracies. As far as i know WangHui never responded

          • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
            ·
            11 months ago

            "Dangerous for the stability of western democracies" huh? That sounds like a good thing to me. If Zizek was actually a Marxist why would he want to preserve the stability of bourgeois states? He's giving away his real allegiances with comments like that.

              • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
                ·
                11 months ago

                So he's a socdem then. And a euro-chauvinist too judging by the way he dismisses asian leftists. It is a fact that in Europe and the US capital is in control while in China it is not. He can call it a "pan-asian leftist argument" all he wants, but it's still true.

                Also i'm not even sure that he is right about Europe having more socio-economic rights than China. I doubt he knows enough about how things work in China and how much things have improved over the past decades to be able to make that kind of judgement.

                There are plenty of social guarantees and labor rights in China, sounds to me like he's just ignorant.

                • Fishroot [none/use name]
                  ·
                  11 months ago

                  Zizek never tried to understand asian leftism because it is not ''real socialism'', he wrote the foreword for an edition of Mao's on practice and on contradiction which he argues that there is no real Maoists in the world except Alain Badiou (which is hilarious because Wanghui, Mobo Gao and some other people in the New left have similar views in regards to some good thing happening with the cultural revolution). He also describes modern day china as Confucianism which is also pretty funny because the early Chinese communists did try to sinofy Marxism-Leninism so this is not really that new of a concept. Zizek's appeal to eurocommies is just that his audience is as uninform as himself, so he sounds smart when he says something ''new''.

                  He was always a socdem, there is a interview of him saying that climate change can only be solve with his ''communism'' which he never defined it clearly except saying that there needs to be bare minimum welfare for citizen survival with a degree of authoritarianism. I don't see how this is new, he just described every right wing european political parties that throws a bone to their countries' pensioners

    • Kaplya
      ·
      1 year ago

      Of course he’s a liberal lol. In fact, only Western liberals take him seriously.

      Here, watch a clip of Dugin sharing the same round table with Anthony Blinken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA5a8naNhC8

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    With people like this and with Jordan Peterson, it's important to reframe what they are saying to see if it actually holds water. I like to imagine it is coming out of a full of shit mate at the pub, who always being a dumbass, if it still sounds reasonable coming out of someone like that, it's probably ok. If it sounds like every other bullshit "nah, mate, this one trick will fix your whole life, honest this time, I swear!" then it is probably bullshit.