The Murder of Darya Dugin
What makes this murder different?
By Joshua Tartakovsky
8.22.2022
The Russian philosopher’s daughter, Darya Dugina, was murdered in cold blood in the outskirts of Moscow.
The pundits – Russophile ones included: Andrew Korybko for instance – rushed to blame those who associated the father, Alexander Dugin with Russian president Putin. Such a fallacious argument can only imply that if Dugin had an influence on Putin, such a murder is justified and excused. The ones who are responsible for her murder are actually others. It is not merely the Ukrainian intelligence agencies who were possibly responsible, perhaps aided by their American, British and German friends. It is not the think-tank in Washington and NATO publications (all publications in NATO-member countries are for all purposes NATO publications, serving as propaganda outlet for NATO’s wars and demonizing the Global South that is not part of the western alliance). What else can one expect from these people? No. The ones who are truly responsible for her murder are the soft left, the so-called progressives, the self-proclaimed socialists, those who claimed Dugin is a fascist though he proposed multipolarity and anti-imperialism, those who claimed Russia is engaging in an imperialist conquest of Ukraine, those who denounce Putin as Hitler though Russia was a victim of Nazism and Putin’s family survived the siege on Saint Petersburg. Yes, I mean such publications as Jacobin and CounterPunch as such people as Eric Draitser. They bear the responsibility for the blood spilled.
As for Dugin, he now joined the club of Stalin, Mao, and Sayed Hassan, all of which lost their kids in a battle. Of course, Darya Dugina is a combatant of a new kind for nowadays everywhere is a battlefield. She was also a young woman.
Her womanhood and civil status made no difference for the New York Times. In today’s headline, we read:
“Russia Claims Ukraine Killed Daughter of Prominent War Supporter.”
Notice the language, please: “Killed” not murdered. “Russia claims” but Russia is not to be believed about anything because everything Russia says is Russian propaganda. “Prominent war supporter” with the “prominent” serving to emphasize his senior role in being pro-war. It was no small fish. “War supporter” so the murder loses some of its rancor.
A host of CounterPunch radio, Eric Draitser, “Dugin’s assasination.” One would think he was referring to US killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan.
Draitser claims that Dugin is a fascist. He is no different from the mainstream US media, such as The Atlantic citing Timothy Snyder, that claimed the same.
Dugin’s theory is a little complex since he relies a lot on Heidegger, and the latter chose to write in an opaque language, as some German philosophers tend to do. For the reader who has little time to read everything under the sun, here is a quick summary:
We are currently under the dominion of western liberalism, the dominant ideology of western hegemony and by which the superpower imposes its influence on every culture around the globe. Liberalism, fascism and communism are all outdated theories, products of the enlightenment, and instead what we must do is search for a new ideology and doctrine, applicable for the particular conditions, civilizational roots, histories, religions and cultures of each country and culture. While we may disagree on what needs to replace liberalism, we cannot wait until we find a new ideology and must rebel against it so as to break the western domination of our lives and minds. To that end, anyone who opposes the western imperialist hegemony is an ally, and we must be united in a fourth political theory, that is, the rejection of the west and a burning desire for independence.
Does the above make Dugin a fascist?
Only products of western cultures who have not realized that other cultures and societies exist and are equally legitimate, tend to view anyone who contradicts their world and refuses to accept their hegemony (Gramsci) as a fascist.
This is not to say that one must be comfortable with every ideology under the sun. It is to say that the greatest threat to the survival of the planet and to human existence outside of serfdom to western capitalism is western imperialism, that nowadays threatens Russia, China and Iran with war, and looted Africa, Asia and South America.
Simply put, Dugin made an argument any beginning anthropologist will understand. Let’s live in a world of multiple cultures without a single one dominating the other. The world is interesting because it is diverse. People think differently.
As China says, it does not seek regime change or to influence countries’ internal affairs. This is within the sovereign right of a given country.
Dugin also has an element in his thinking on Eurasia, and borrowing from Oxford geopolitical thinker Harold Mackinder, how the Europe-Asia landscape is a single mass that whoever controls it controls the space. He also claims that sea power (USA+ the rest of the 4 eyes) and land power (Eurasia) are in competition. Polish-American thinker, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński, member of the Carter administration, had similar ideas of the connection between landmass and geopolitics. Dugin and Brzeziński met in person and exchanged ideas.
Jay Tharappel wrote the following letter, via his Facebook account, to Marxists-Leninists who oppose Dugin. It is illuminating and therefor quoted in full:
Aleksandr Dugin is hated in the West because he’s an ideologue who represents a state, Russia, that wants to push Anglo-American or ‘Atlanticist’ political, economic, and military influence out of the Eurasian continent. It’s that simple.
He’s not hated because of your nerdy critique based on an endless string of obscure Marxoid jargon. If this is not obvious to you, no amount of studying Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao will save you from being little more than a sock puppet for Western aggression against Russia.
Pretty much the entire third-world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, would benefit from Anglo-American power retreating from its position of global domination, and so would the working-class in the English-speaking West!
The hegemony of the US dollar has deindustrialised the US, and those industries will only return if the US focusses on its internal development by disciplining its capitalist and financial elites the way China does.
Dugin is worth reading. Be mature, engage with his work, and identify specifically what you disagree with instead of soying out and calling him a “fascist”, which is a word too many people use merely as a synonym for “bad”.
Sadly, the popularisation of Marxism-Leninism over the past decade has introduced into its ranks people who in the past would have become some kind of anarcho-trotskyite shitlib. Now those same kinds of people think Stalin is cool.
You may not like Dugin, or Russia. But a daughter of an intellectual was murdered in a bomb blast in a capital city. This act of terrorism can never be justified.
According to Pakistani journalist Tayyab Baloch, two days or so after the murder, Dugin wrote the following status to the public audience:
In a free world, intellectuals would be free to express thoughts that question and challenge western imperialism without cheapening their blood in the process.
The murder of Darya Dugina exposes the fact that for liberal and progressive publications in the west, the killing of a Russian woman who questioned the legitimacy of NATO supremacy and happened to be a daughter of a controversial philosopher is legitimate.
Darya was “killed,” in an explosion that Russia “blamed” Ukraine for and she was pro-war.
Being pro-war is a characteristic shared by nearly all congress and senate members and liberal publications in the US, from the New York Times to the Washington Post.
The murder of Dugina shows that Russians have been dehumanized long ago, that any theory they may come up with unless in conformity with western liberalism is “totalitarian” or “fascist,” and that only western journalists can be pro-war. This is beside the fact that Russia is engaged in a war against the expansion of NATO on its very borders, an expansion carried out in violation of an explicit promise made to the Soviets by the American establishment led by James Baker.
The murder of Dugina is a new chapter in attempts to impose western hegemony on the rest of the world and in the seeds of rebellion that we are witnessing, seeds that may not germinate to evolve into an actual plant.
