On this edition of Parallax Views, Ramon Glazov, translator of Girgio De Maria's The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works and author of assorted pieces found in such publications as Jacobin and Overland, joins us to discuss the Russian far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin. Dugin has been in the news due to his daughter's death in a fiery car explosion. This episode will not deal so much with that current events incident, but rather the question of Dugin's significance to the regime of Vladimir Putin. In both mainstream and alternative/independent media Dugin has often been described as "Putin's Brain" or "Putin's Rasputin". Ramon believes the evidence for Dugin's significance to Putin and the Russian state has been vastly overstated in a way that has negative consequences. We'll discuss Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics, his "Fourth Political Theory", Dugin and postmodernism, Dugin's anti-China views, Dugin's more bizarre geopolitical proposals that are unlikely to be held by Putin or the Kremlin, elitism vs. populism on the right, the Traditionalist thinker Julius Evola, the modernist poet and rabid antisemite Ezra Pound, French far-right thinker Alain de Benoist, the political uselessness of Evolian occultism, Dugin's removal from the University of Moscow for genocidal comments directed at Ukraine/Ukrainians, the paradox of Dugin's self-professed "ethno-centrism, but not racism" views, Dugin's defensive identity politics, spiritual racism, fascism, Russian punk/counterculture icon Eduard Liminov and National Bolshevism, Dugin's views on Germany, Western journalism on Dugin and cherry-picking what Dugin says, Dugin's pluralist relativism, racist ideas about Russians as inherently relativist in their thinking, Dugin and the Kremlin, isolationism and the paradox of far-right wing "anti-globalism", far-right intellectuals and political opportunism, Dugin/Pound/Evola as political hanger-ons, Steve Bannon Vs. a figure Julius Evola or Alexander Dugin, Ezra Pound's WWII propaganda broadcasts in Mussolini's Italy, Ezra Pound's mental hospital stay, Dugin's strange views on Soviet Union serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, and much, much more!
