The decision of outgoing US President Barack Obama to expel 35 Russian diplomats, allegedly involved in hacking attacks that tried to influence the results of the presidential election won by Donald Trump, has once again cooled the already cold relations between the US and Russia, reports the Croatian Jutarnji list.
Analyzing the moves of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Western media have been focusing on the controversial Russian intellectual Alexander Dugin, whom some call "Putin's Rasputin" and others "Putin's brain".
With his long beard, philosopher, sociologist and historian Aleksandar Dugin (54) reminds us of the controversial mystic Grigory Rasputin.
But many analysts in the West believe that Dugin's influence on Putin is similar to what Rasputin had on the Russian imperial family of the Romanovs, Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.
But the Internet forum "Big Think" goes a step further and claims that Dugin is "the most dangerous philosopher in the world", writes Jutarnji list.
Imperialism
Alexander Dugin is an extreme Russian nationalist and advocate of Russian imperialism. As a staunch traditionalist, he is a fierce critic of the liberalism symbolized by America.
"Liberalism is the greatest evil... The American empire should be destroyed," Dugin stated several times.
But Dugin is equally fierce in his condemnation of communism, and although he criticizes fascism, he shows sympathy for the Nazi sense of hierarchy and their romance of death, writes Jutarnji list.
"We need a new party. God's party, the Russian analogue of Hezbollah," emphasizes Dugin, who has attracted the attention of the Western media with his anti-science and anti-technology views. Thus, he is in favor of banning chemistry and physics, and he is also an opponent of the Internet and biotechnology.
Aleksandar Geljevič Dugin was born in 1962 in Moscow. His father, as I claim, probably worked for the Soviet military intelligence service, and his mother was a doctor. When he was three years old, his parents divorced. Dugin's memories of his childhood are not good, he says that he hated both his family and Soviet society.
"I hated the world I was born into," Dugin told the New Yorker.
As a teenager, he joined a circle of eccentric Moscow intellectuals who equally despised Soviet communism as well as Western capitalism and showed a penchant for mysticism and esotericism.
In the early 1980s, Dugin attended the Moscow Aviation Institute, but was expelled for his anti-Soviet and right-wing views. After being expelled from the institute, he worked for some time as a street cleaner and gave instructions in English and French. By the way, in addition to the mentioned two, he speaks another seven languages fluently, including German, Spanish and Portuguese.
In the early 1980s, Dugin married Evgenia Debryanskaya, who gave birth to a son in 1985. However, Dugin never mentions his first wife, probably because Debryanskaya is one of the most prominent Russian activists for the rights of the LGBT community, while he considers the Russian antigay laws "quite correct".
"Liberalism insists on freedom and liberation from any form of collective identity. This is the very essence of liberalism. Liberals freed the human being from national and religious identity. The last remaining form of collective identity is gender. So now the time has come for gender to be abolished and become something arbitrary and optional," said Dugin in an interview last year.
Since 1987, Aleksandar Dugin has been married to the conservative philosopher Natalija Melentieva, with whom he has a daughter.
The West is wrong
During Gorbachev's perestroika (1986 - 1991), Dugin was in the West for the first time, specifically in Berlin and Paris, where he met Alain de Benoist, the leader of the European New Right. Although he points out that he is a great admirer of European culture, Dugin was disappointed during his first visit to the West and found it "worse than the Soviet Union".
In the period from 1990 to 2000, Dugin published a number of works and books, among which was "The Basics of Geopolitics" from 1997, which aroused great interest among political and military structures in Russia.
Dugin then became an adviser to Gennady Seleznyov, the President of the Duma (the Russian parliament). When Vladimir Putin became the Russian president in 2000, Dugin became his big supporter.
"Putin is everything... Putin is absolute... Putin is irreplaceable," enthusiastically said Dugin, who received his doctorate in sociology at Rostov University in 2004 and became a professor at Lomonosov University in Moscow in 2008 and head of the Center for Conservative studies.
Dugin founded the International Eurasian Movement in 2001. It is an organization that encourages the unification of the former Soviet territory into a unique cultural and civilizational entity.
"Eurasia is the territory of the old Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. We can also call it Great Russia," explained Dugin, who in his works also dealt with South Slavic peoples, in one conversation.
Thus, in his article Geopolitics of the Yugoslav conflict from 1997, he assessed that Croats belong to the "Catholic sector of Germanic Central Europe", establishing that their geopolitical destiny is "attachment to that bloc". As for the Serbs, he points out that they were with the Russians in all critical historical moments, writes Jutarnji list.
"Serbs are actually us. They feel like us. Serbs are our self," he said last year during the visit of Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic to Moscow.
During the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014, he advocated the annexation of Ukrainian territory that was previously part of the Russian Empire, and even called for genocide in Ukraine, writes Jutarnji list.
He welcomed Donald Trump's victory in America with enthusiasm.
"Although he is tough and rude, Donald Trump speaks his mind, he is rude, emotional and obviously sincere. The fact that he is a billionaire means nothing. He is different. He is an extremely successful ordinary American," said Dugin.
"For us, his victory is joy, it's happiness. You have to understand that we consider Trump the American Putin," Dugin recently told the Wall Street Journal.
Philosophers, astrologers and fathers had an extraordinary influence on the formation of leading figures in world politics
Ronald Reagan sought advice from astrologers
One of the most popular American presidents, Ronald Reagan, trusted astrologers. This was confirmed by the White House on May 3, 1988. He shared this passion with his wife, Nancy, and one of his favorite "star shooters" was their friend from California, Carol Reiter.
George Bush Jr. asked everyone to read Skaranski
Anatoly Borisovich Scharansky was born in the city of Stalino in the USSR in 1948, and later moved to Israel. His book, in which he advocates the thesis that democracy needs to be imposed by force, strongly influenced Bush, who formulated his policy in this way and launched an attack on Iraq.
Robert Kennedy fell in love with Alinsky
Robert Kennedy, former US Secretary of Justice and brother of US President John Kennedy, quickly joined the followers of Saul Alinsky, who is considered the founder of modern community organizing. In 1970, the respected Time newspaper wrote that "Alinsky profoundly changed American democracy with his ideas."
Angela Merkel remained faithful to her father's ideas
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has never hidden that in numerous political decisions, and this was especially evident in opening the door to immigrants, she relies on the ideas instilled in her by her father, the Protestant theologian Horst Kasner, born as Horst Kazmierczak in Berlin in 1926.
Hillary Clinton has a high regard for Margaret Sanger
The former Democratic candidate in the US presidential elections will always cite her mother first, followed by Margaret Sanger (1879 - 1966), as a person who strongly influenced her. Sanger strongly advocated for the right to birth control and managed to open the first clinic where women could get the help they needed.
Obama followed the ideas of John Rawls
The still current US president Barack Obama was influenced by Harvard professor John Rawls, who is the author of the famous book "Theory of Justice". It is justice that is the key principle according to which a society of individuals with equal freedoms should be organized.
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