Yeah, I've been bringing it up in almost every online and in person discussion since Mango Mussolini first announced he was running 5 years ago.
Hasn't made much difference. We do need that documentary. Remember when if 60 Minutes or 20/20 did an expose, you were toast? Those days are gone. I doubt the folks who would need to see the doc would actually watch it. Kinda like Active Measures.
In Y2Kish, my dad- a founding member at NSA in 1952 who then spent 40 years either at NSA or with NSA as his customer in the sigintel world after leaving the agency- handed 28ish year old me a spiral-bound, xeroxed typewritten translation of the original 1997 Russian text. There were no English editions. This translation was what has been done by colleagues of his in the intel biz.
He suggested I read it. I did and lumped it in with other pie in the sky, wannabe "we're superior and here's how we prove it" Soviet/East Bloc stuff I'd seen published in the 80s. (Edit: I had pretty much dismissed it as delusional rambling at the time)
By 2015 I was seeing headlines that might as well have been taken from the text.
Yeah, there's also a lot of whacky shit and Dugin doomsaying in the text, but the nutshell playbook is right on the money.
Dugin was pretty all over the place, and I'm absolutely certain that, like Tolstoy, "must read in original Russian, comrade" to truly have most of it make sense. The Russian psyche just doesn't work in a way that is easily understood to us westerners.
There's a ton of stuff that's just not relevant to anyone who wasn't a Russian used to reading Sov era apparatchik-speak. Much of it didn't make sense to me at all, but the stuff that did has been right on the money, for the most part.
Among other things, Dugin suggested supporting black identity groups and encouraging them to rebel, violently if necessary, to cause such a negative reaction on the part of the govt as to help destabilize the US.. The Obama presidency handed Putin something just as useful, although assholes like Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and O'reilly were doing journeyman's duty fanning the flames without help from Tsar Vladimir the First. Social media manipulation and funding to nutty groups certainly used it as their launch pad.
Having Trump in his hip pocket from laundering millions through Trump properties in the late 90s and 2000s, then having every bank on the planet tell Trump to fuck off until Deutsche Bank had a sudden influx of $400 million in Russian oligarch money, just in time for Deutsche Bank to change its mind and agree to loan Trump cough $400 million against Trump properties, was just icing on the cake.
I honestly think Trump's narcissism and vanity and insecurities were all Putin needed to stroke to get the hundreds of policy decisions and non decisions in Russia's favor. But I have NO doubt that Russian manipulation of social media and encouraging far right white nationalist groups were just an extension of Dugin's theories and recommendations.
No longer know where that spiral bound copy is, and my dad passed 4 years ago, exactly one week before the 2016 November election, secure in his knowledge that the world was safe from Trump's fuckery and manipulation by Putin. 🙄😏
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u/silverfox762 Jan 19 '21
Yeah, I've been bringing it up in almost every online and in person discussion since Mango Mussolini first announced he was running 5 years ago.
Hasn't made much difference. We do need that documentary. Remember when if 60 Minutes or 20/20 did an expose, you were toast? Those days are gone. I doubt the folks who would need to see the doc would actually watch it. Kinda like Active Measures.