Tucker Carlson and Alexandr Dugin
So, Tucker Carlson went back to Moscow to interview Alexandr Dugin. It’s a nice look into a sanitized view of the man some have said is close to Vladimir Putin. I realize that Steve Bannon is a fan as well.
Why should we be alarmed? And yes, it’s free speech, so by all means. Maybe Tucker should consider leaving his life of luxury in New York, Florida, and California; he has owned property everywhere. In that sense, he fits with the oligarchs. And being a member of the Swanson family, you could argue he is as close to that as we get to that in this country.
So, let’s look at the interview from the perspective of Russian resistance. Understand they know their audience:
Tucker Carlson interviewed Alexander Dugin 🤮 What’s wrong with him?
In the video, which is aimed primarily at an American conservative audience, Dugin portrays the Western political model as a new totalitarianism, and Putin as a fighter against this system .
What is the interview about?
▪️Introducing Dugin, Carlson says that this public figure in the West is written about as “Putin’s brain,” but in fact he is not his adviser, but only a thinker whose books are banned in the United States “because the ideas are too dangerous.” “We want to talk to him so that you can form your own opinion about his ideas, which are so dangerous that his only daughter was killed,” Carlson explains the purpose of the interview.
▪️Dugin begins the interview with a definition of individualism, which, in his opinion, is “a false idea of human nature, when the individual is cut off from everything around him.” It was this “false” idea, according to Dugin, that was embedded in the Protestant reforms, after which the concept of the individual found itself at the center of the “Anglo-Saxon” worldview.
▪️Liberalism led to the abandonment of the Catholic Church, empires, and nation states in favor of civil society. Then there was a big war between liberalism, communism and fascism, and liberalism won. After the fall of the USSR, only liberalism remained, Dugin believes.
▪️After this, there are only two entities left that individualism can fight — gender and human essence. The last confrontation, which will allow you to choose whether to remain human, has not yet been completed.
▪️Asking the next question, Tucker Carlson said that the model of liberalism described is different from the one he has in his head. Carlson, according to him, grew up with an attitude towards liberalism as an opportunity to make one’s own decisions, to say what one thinks, to protect oneself from the state, including a totalitarian one. And many Americans think so, Carlson said.
▪️In response, Dugin clarified that these are two different understandings of liberalism. “Classical” liberalism was about democracy, which is understood as the rule of the majority. The “new” liberalism is about the power of minorities and “liberation from individuality” (Carlson laughs). In the new reality, people only have the right to be “left-wing liberals,” but do not have the right to be “right-wing liberals,” Dugin believes. He considers such a system a new totalitarianism (Carlson begins to look with his mouth slightly open).
▪️Carlson asks what will happen next. Dugin says that this is described in many American films, in particular “The Matrix”, “Terminator”. Films made in Hollywood are no longer science fiction, but part of a political project, Dugin sums up.
▪️The last question is why Western liberals, who defended the Soviet system and Stalinism for more than 70 years, and then “loved Yeltsin because he was drunk,” became the main enemy of Russia after the change of power in the 2000s?
▪️Dugin connected this with the fact that Putin is a “traditional leader” who began to take the country out of global influence and conflict with the progressive agenda: “If your main task and main goal is to destroy traditional values, the traditional family, the traditional state, the traditional faith and someone with nuclear weapons (this is the last but not the least argument) firmly defends traditional values that are going to be abolished, I think they have some reasons for Russophobia and reasons to hate Putin.”
What Carlson doesn’t say:
▪️He does not mention that the murdered Daria Dugina was not just the daughter of a philosopher, but also a propagandist.
▪️Dugin and Carlson do not discuss the annexation of Crimea, which created a dangerous precedent that showed the possibility of revising international borders.
▪️When discussing the conflict between Russia and the West, neither Dugin nor Carlson ever say that the war in Ukraine is the largest military conflict in Europe since 1945.
▪️They don’t discuss the fact that Putin, defending the “traditional” family, got divorced and now lives in an unregistered marriage. [Agency]
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