Ideology and Meaning-Making under Putin
Professor Marlene Laruelle and Professor Glenn Diesen
Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science and Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at The George Washington University. Prof. Laruelle talks about her new book: "Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime" https://www.sup.org/books/politics/ideology-and-meaning-making-under-putin-regime?tab=2
This interview was less than edifying.
Thesis: In the analysis of Russian ideology, there's one obvious factor that was missed. Or maybe it's not so obvious, given a lack of insight in the chattering classes. If Russia cannot formulate a clear ideology of traditionalism for itself, then in 30 years time it will be engulfed by creeping leftism, AKA 'liberalism'. Leftism has a progressive internal dynamic, which is ultimately the killer of any society it infects. Its key agenda is the racist-antiracist paradigm. This is the same evil that's effectively destroyed western society. Now it's gnawing at the fringes of the Russian Federation via its non-Slavic, non-Christian republics, oblasts, and neighbors. In those areas, western influencers (NGO's, media, etc.) promote this paradigm, as a way to undermine Russian Slavs.
Discussion: Russian Slavs are the core element of Russia, the exemplars who make it successful. But the Russian Federation is a compartmentalized, multicultural, multiracial state, which makes it vulnerable to the racist-antiracist agenda. It's also hypersensitive to anything resembling Naziism, which is Russia's Achilles heel. Equality and antiracism, along with tolerance for supposedly victimized minorities, can creep into Russian Slavic society via monumental guilt trips disguised as morality. Leftism destroys society by splitting it into false factions, the guilty and the victims. Racism-antiracism, in its crusade to impose perfect equality on imperfect reality, ensures there's no way to reconcile the two.
A charge of RACISM! sets up false binary choices, both of which lead to destruction. If you don't choose total racial and cultural integration, then you're personally destroyed as a Nazi. If you choose antiracism (which presupposes racism), then your culture, traditions, families, neighborhoods, and society are destroyed by diversity, multiculturalism, and mass immigration of incompatible ethnic groups. The woke left will relentlessly shove this two-pronged agenda into your life, and make you feel guilty every step of the way. They'll insist it's supreme morality, and you are immoral slime to even question it, let alone oppose it. They'll incrementalize this agenda on your laws and your psyche, until one day you wake up and wonder how your successful culture and forthright people were flushed down the civilizational toilet.
Even if Russia wins militarily against the West, it can lose culturally. The west will keep insinuating its values about equality and racism into non-Slavic oblasts and republics. In 50 years Russian culture will become just as degraded as the west, because equality and antiracism, along with celebration of pre-victimized minorities like homos and trans, will overtake Russian society. Any Christian society such as Slavic Russia can be preyed upon by heretical interpretation of the Biblical injunction 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. It's easily weaponized against naive Christians to induce guilt for a revisionist history of their society, along with traditional thinking reframed as hate crimes.
Conclusion: Westerners are too stupid to have understood any of this. For the last 60 years they stood idly by, while leftist ideology consumed their societies. The masses of midwits are groomed to believe that racial equality is a moral virtue to be rewarded, that hate speech is a moral vice to be punished, and that woke leftists are their moral authority. The masses are oblivious to the iron law that beliefs have consequences, and that each rotten trend infecting society is the result of their rotten beliefs. When presented with the issues raised here, they're conditioned to react with kneejerk savagery, including mindless memes, buzzwords, and epithets (RACIST! NAZI! FASCIST!) seared into their psyches. They rationalize their complacency and obliviousness. They've bought into their own destruction, and don't even know it. That's why western society is finished, and THAT'S what Russia has to look forward to if it doesn't wake the hell up.
Her Book is amazing