Dugin and Putin

About the announcement of a great war against the West. About Serbia as an advanced command post of Russian neo-imperialism. On the geopolitics of the Bosnian conflict from the Russian-Serbian point of view

Written by: Nerzuk Ćurak

Six days before Putin’s announcement of mobilization, the leading Russian geopolitician and geophilosopher Alexander Dugin will publish a programmatic text in which he will declare the Russian, unprovoked attack on Ukraine an attack by the USA and the satanic West on Russia. Dugin’s pamphlet, originally published on the multimedia platform of this Russian Huntington, is a call to a war of civilizations which, in his dark insight, can no longer be avoided since the open attack of the West, led by the USA, on Russia, the mother of Eurasian civilization that is the only one resisting, continues further penetration of godless Atlanticist forces into the womb of Mother Russia.

Although the reality is completely opposed to this artificial, imaginary construction of Dugin’s diabolical mind, because in reality it is Russia that is trying to build itself as a new imperialist power whose bombs level the neighboring Ukraine, there are not a few Balkan followers of the Russian geopolitical construction who prefer the fiction of the American army that only she didn’t walk into the Red Square, but what they see with their own eyes: a wounded and massacred Ukraine, whose territory is being raided and ordered by Russian soldiers, taken aback by the strange idea of the attacked people – to defend themselves.

How do Ukrainians get the right to defend themselves when the Russians attack them?! They should be grateful for the Russian attack. So isn’t Russian shit better than American cake? Better for the Russians to capture us than for the Americans to set us free.

The Balkan country where the previous irony is the general, serious attitude of the majority population is Serbia, whose corrupt nationalist elite, dominantly pro-Russian, showed all the splendor of their talent for lying during the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina, which exploded this September in President Vučić’s speech at the General To the UN Assembly, when he dead-coldly asserted that “Serbia has never attacked any sovereign state or endangered the territorial integrity of any sovereign state”. (?!?) Russia and Serbia are really two eyes in the head, firmly connected in defense against the brutal aggression of strong Ukraine and even stronger Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That is why significant financial resources had to be pumped into the production of opinions that will permanently place Serbia in the East, in the Russian interest zone, so no one should be surprised by the strong presence of pro-Russian portals in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which both openly and half-hiddenly favor the ideas of leading Russian minds. above all, Aleksandar Dugin, whose texts are translated from Russian to Serbian in a faster time interval than Aleksandar Vulin, “if you know that way of life” (N. Čanak), spouts dangerous nonsense about, say, the Russian-Serbian world. And he shoots, he continues to shoot.

Serbia in the Eurasian world

Our common Balkan fate is contained in the undeniable conviction of tens of thousands of Serbian citizens (not to mention hundreds of thousands) that everything Russian and everything Serbian is the truth in advance, and everything that comes from the West (except for the hunt) is a priori a lie that only Putin can break politically and militarily and intellectually that Eurasian, Christ-Slavist shaman of the Serbian pro-Russian, extreme nationalist right, Aleksandar Dugin, exalted in the belief that Russia is an autonomous civilization and Moscow the “third Rome”.

His conspiratorial geopolitical and geophilosophical doctrine found dangerous followers in the “Serbian world”, who in a significant number populistly ordain in Cyrillic, and more intellectually seductive in the infosphere, on Russian-Serbian platforms that convince us that Christ is in Moscow and Lucifer is in Washington.

One of the best ways to realize the long-term synergy of Serbian and Russian nationalism is to reject the relevance of ideas and people who propagate the naturalness of the opinion that Serbia should be part of the Eurasian Russian world and pan-Slavic, Christian Orthodox doctrine. In liberal and left wing intellectual circles, it was and is generally dismissed as foolishness. And while stupidity is dismissed as a conspiracy theory of those who are not clear in their heads, history opens up to fools eager for power. Thus, in the heart of liberal democracy, post-fascism appeared, treated as a political fringe, ridiculed until it crashed into history and remained in it, as confirmed by the results of this week’s elections in Italy.

And just as it remains an open question whether anti-fascism will have the knowledge, will, will and possibilities, and above all, organized political and intellectual subjects, to defeat post-fascism as normalized anti-humanism and totalitarianism, it is also worth asking whether it will ever be able to triumph in Russia and Serbia liberal democratic values or it is already too late.

Decades of underestimation of neo-fascist and post-fascist ideas both in the West and in the East allowed extreme right-wing actors to build their poisonous, regressive, chauvinistic, xenophobic arguments without the spotlight, waiting for a favorable moment to go down in history. Now they are here, they even made incredible, euphemistic disguises in order to appeal to the people, so that the plebs would accept their lines of argument (both in the anti-immigrant Rome and in the “third Rome”), such as e.g. the Duginov-Putin lexicon of death in which the people who defend their freedom are called, no less than Nazis.

That lexicon of death resonates very well in Serbia, the best in the whole world. Where the Chetniks were declared anti-fascists and given a pension, the one who fights against Russia’s ultimate embrace, what else but a Nazi. It is very demanding to be a neighbor of both Russia and Serbia.

The previous lines refer to the current geopolitical framework. My intention is to contextualize the “hidden history” of the penetration of Russian Eurasian and militant Christ-Slavist ideas into Serbia. Today, we are concerned with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which is revealed not only as Moscow’s illegal intrusion into an internationally recognized state, but also as an attempt to politically materialize the ideas of Alexander Dugin and his predecessors about the Russian world and about Russian civilization, which extends both geographically and spiritually through cartography on which more no traces of the freaky West. Unfortunately, in the geopolitical and geospiritual imagination of Dugin and his Serbian epigones, Serbia is a part of that world, a protruding wedge of aggressive Russia, a new Russian limes and, without ignorance, attention must be paid to that. This vision is not from yesterday, it has been brewing since the beginning of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Where, therefore, is the place of Russian geopolitics in post-Dayton BiH and Serbia, seen through the eyes of A. Dugin and the protagonists of his school of thought?

Basics of Dugin’s science

Exactly twenty years ago, I published the book Geopolitics as destiny. Dugin, with his original and dangerous opinion of the global world space, was still unknown in the Balkans at that time, except in Serbia, where he had just begun to establish himself among the militant entrepreneurs of the new era of Russian-Serbian friendship, who did not hide their enthusiasm for the new guru of the all-encompassing awakening of the Russian-Orthodox world. who in the extensive, two-volume textbook Fundamentals of Geopolitics (1997) considers the geopolitical future of Russia as a leading supra-imperial Eurasian power.

In the book, I paid due attention to this person, convinced that the age is coming when extremist ideas (such as Dugin’s) will feed the political center and become part of the mainstream, which is happening to a large extent, both in Russia and in the “Serbian world”. Before us, Dugin’s ideas are coming to life, the aim of which is to transform the Balkans in a way that de-Westernizes the post-Yugoslav territory. I would never again underestimate the destructive influence of militant cryptologists, conspirators, and mystics, no matter how much various reasonable actors try to downplay their influence.

Already in 1992, Dugin published the first version of the text Geopolitics of the Yugoslav conflict with the intention of affirming Russian Balkan geopolitics. It assesses the geopolitical capacities of Serbia, Croatia, Slavs, Bosniaks and Macedonians. The tendency that emerges from Dugin’s analysis of the Yugoslav conflict is imperial Orthodox-Slavic Russism, with an undisguised ambition to instrumentalize the Balkans for the purpose of Russian geopolitical phantasmagoria. Here is my scholarly note (with Dugin’s quotes) from twenty years ago:

By composing “three European powers”, i.e. three geopolitical areas in Europe (the West, Central Europe, Eurasia-Russia) and one peripheral European (Islam, from the Maghreb to Pakistan and the Philippines), Dugin constructs a geopolitical pandemonium in which the nations of the former Yugoslavia are local units of geopolitical relations between the mentioned areas. Without going deeply into Dugin’s unsustainable projections, it is enough to indicate that in his simplified picture the Croats represent the area of Central Europe (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy), the Serbs – Orthodox Russia, i.e. the Eurasian Russian area, as well as the Macedonians, who are part of that area through the unrealized construct of Orthodox Yugoslavia (Serbo-Bulgarian base), and Bosniaks and Albanians, as “remnants of the Ottoman Empire”, through Turkey represent an Islamic, peripheral European area which, Dugin believes, will significantly in the twenty-first century (“as it was in the Middle century”) to influence European geopolitics.

It is noticeable that Dugin does not see a representative of the western area in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, which is “primarily formed by France and Portugal, and in the broadest sense, Great Britain and transatlantic, non-European America belong to it”. According to Dugin, although there may be internal contradictions between the continental West (France), the insular West (Great Britain) and the overseas West (USA), the West acts towards other geopolitical entities “most often as a single geopolitical force”, which creates disorder in the territory of the former Yugoslavia periodically displacing Serbs, Macedonians, Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians from their native areas, bringing unrest into the alleged, objective geopolitical given. Trampling the borders between sovereign states, in the best tradition of German wartime geopolitics, Dugin opposes the principle of immutability of borders to the principle of civilizational circles, that is, “spiritual geography” that has no problem with international law.

On that matrix, he says that the Balkans are Russia’s further foreign country, the gradation of its geopolitical power, the expansion of influence outside the ring of the “closer foreign country”. As such, the Balkans is an important issue for Eurasian Russian geopolitics, from whose crisis Russia can draw serious lessons. Dugin, as the spiritus movens of Russian geopolitics, adds to the Balkans, in addition to all associated imaginative meanings, another imaginative code of a geopolitical nature. He establishes a spatial, ethnic and religious analogy between the former Yugoslavia and Russia.

In Dugin’s interpretation, Russia is Serbia, and Ukraine, as a potentially big Russian problem (the escape of Kiev from the Russian East and “getting closer to the European area economically controlled by Germany”) is Croatia. In that simplified quasi-geopolitical equation, the analogues of Bosniaks and Albanians are the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The way in which Dugin questions the geopolitical potential of Balkan Muslims, especially Bosniaks, deserves our increased attention.

Inadmissible analogies

In the Geopolitics of the Yugoslav conflict, Dugin devotes one part, titled The Truth of Yugoslav Muslims, to Bosniaks and Albanians, attributing them, as we have already stated, as an Islamic, “Ottoman” factor in Europe. As, according to Dugin, Turkey is an obvious instrument of the expansion of Atlanticism into the zone of Russian imperial interest (Eurasia), according to this logic – all the worse for the fact – both Bosniaks and Albanians are politically leaning on Turkey and in the geopolitical arena of Europe and Eurasia their matrix is “worldly, anti-Islamic Turkey”.

Dugin’s “imperialism of the imagination” reached a dangerous point with his “innocent proposal” to Bosniaks and Albanians to turn to Iran “and its consistent policy, because at the present moment only that country in the Islamic world leads a geopolitics that is oriented towards independence, autonomy and continental harmony, acting in accordance with its own logic, independent of the interests of the Atlanticists in this region”. Dugin observes the process of de-Ottomanization and pro-Iranization of the Muslim peoples of the former Yugoslavia in three stages, which “can take place in parallel, each at its own level:

Reorientation of Muslims from Turkey to Iran

Consolidation of the geopolitical alliance of Central Europe with Iran and the Islamic world as a whole

Eurasian geopolitical alliance of East and Central Europe (Mittleuropa).”

Dugin emphasizes his “concern” for Yugoslav Muslims with the position that “the problem of a small Balkan nation cannot be solved geopolitically without the most serious global geopolitical transformations”. In this sense, he brings gifts to the Ballkan Bosniaks from Danai ( “I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts”-Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes), especially to the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks.

From the dark depths of Russian sacral-mythical and imperial geopolitics, in parallel with Russia’s constructive participation in the construction of the Bosnian state (the Yeltsin era, remark: N.Ć.), a radically new, provocative offer arrives, which is an unadulterated attempt to instrumentalize a small Muslim group in Europe for Russian interests: “It is important to point out that the Muslim republics that were part of the USSR represent a zone of competitive geopolitical influence between Turkey and Iran. As in the case of Yugoslav Muslims, this comparison shows that republics oriented towards Iran have more chances to achieve geopolitical harmony with the core, Russian bloc of the Eurasian continent. And vice versa, the geopolitical factor of Turkey, which now plays the role of the executor of the Atlantic policy in this region, is necessarily connected with dramatic and conflict situations.

Without stating any serious reason (apart from principled insights) for which Iran should become a geopolitical measure for Bosnian and other Muslims, Dugin, from the point of view of the scientific valorization of his opinion, missed the geostrategic and geopolitical essence of BiH, producing a geopolitical construct that is essentially anti-Bosnian and anti-American (the main conflict between the former Izetbegović government and the USA was due to the expansion of Iranian influence in Bosnia), which is one of the goals of the geopolitics of the new Russian right, whose shaman is Aleksandar Dugin.

While Russian diplomacy actively participates in the multilateral activities of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina and affirms the Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state (until the moment when in the Peace Implementation Council it continuously starts voting against the decisions of the Council, against the mission of the High Representative and against Bosnia and Herzegovina), two conservative geopolitical conceptions (Eurasianism and Orthodox Pan-Slavism) live their lives in Serbia and the “Serbian areas of Bosnia”, which, to apply Dugin’s analogical system, are a local form of the Russian Orthodox-sacred geopolitics of the East./AntenaM