Putin has gathered an impressive array of far-right European leaders in support of his evil cause.
On May 31, a secret meeting took place in Vienna in the Palais Liechtenstein to organize a fascist fifth column in support of the Kremlin’s ambitions to dominate Europe.
The chairman and financier of the meeting was Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, the multibillionaire owner of the Moscow-based Marshall Capital. Malofeev, who has direct access to the Russian dictator, is known as “Putin’s Soros” for his role in financing movements and initiatives supporting the Russian fascist cause. These include most notably the current Kremlin effort to destroy Ukraine. In fact, both Igor Girkin (self-styled “Strelkov”), the former GRU colonel who is the military commander of the Kremlin-backed guerrilla forces in eastern Ukraine, and Aleksandr Borodai, the Muscovite businessman who is serving as prime minister of the Putin puppet “Donetsk People’s Republic,” are former employees of Malofeev. (Girkin/Strelkov served for many years as Malofeev’s security chief.)
Malofeev was the producer and director of the event, but the star of the show was Aleksandr Dugin, the prime author of the “Eurasianist” totalitarian doctrine, which is serving its intended purpose as the ideological basis for the Putin regime’s transformation of Russia into an expansionist fascist state, as well as for its creation of a Moscow-controlled fascist international for the purpose of subverting other countries on behalf of the new empire.
Gathered to receive tutelage from Dugin and instructions from Malofeev in preparation for their potential supporting roles as the Pétains and Quislings of the Eurasian Reich was an impressive array of leaders of nominally “conservative” but actually radical national-socialist European parties. These included some deputies of the French National Front, namely Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (granddaughter of the party’s founder and niece of its current president, Marine Le Pen) and Aymeric Chauprade, the very anti-American National Front foreign-policy chief. Prince Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, leader of the Catholic-monarchist Carlist movement, came from Spain, and Serge de Pahlen, director of the Geneva financial company Edifin and husband of the Fiat heiress Countess Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, came from Switzerland. Participants from Austria included Heinz-Christian Strache, the chairman of the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), his deputy, John Gudenus, and the Vienna FPÖ politician Johann Herzog. Volen Siderov, the chairman and founder of the far-right Ataka (Attack) party, came from Bulgaria, and other pro-Russia ultraright extremists came from Hungary, Croatia, Georgia, and Russia.
In speeches at the meeting observed by a German-Swiss reporter who infiltrated the event, many of the attendees hailed Putin as Europe’s “redeemer” from Americanism, liberalism, secularism, and homosexuality. But it was quite clear that the real agenda of the group had nothing to do with fighting sexual depravity (which is quite as prevalent in Putin’s Russia as anywhere else – or, rather, significantly more so, as the country is one of the world’s leaders in human trafficking for the purposes of sexual slavery, according to a just-released State Department report), but rather centered on supporting Russian foreign policy. In fact, many of the parties represented at the meeting had sent representatives to Crimea in March to help Putin by validating his rigged plebiscite in support of annexation following the Russian invasion — a move with little traceability to the prostitution-profiteering regime’s putative struggle against sexual deviancy.
The Putinites are following an old Soviet strategy. The Soviet Union used the exploitation of workers under capitalism as an agitational issue to subvert Western democracies even as it practiced slave labor at home. In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.
The meeting endorsed Dugin’s call for the creation of a new “Holy Alliance,” named after the Russian-dominated geopolitical arrangement created to suppress democratic aspirations in Europe following the entry of Tsarist troops into Paris 200 years ago. One might wonder whether this bit of nostalgia did not evoke some demurral from the supposedly patriotic representatives of the French National Front. But since Chauprade gave a speech to the Russian Duma last year in which he extolled the Putin regime as “the hope of the world against the new [liberal] totalitarianism,” perhaps one should not be too surprised that he did not challenge Dugin’s terminology. The stylish 24-year-old Mademoiselle Maréchal-Le Pen, apparently present to offer herself for a future starring role in The Fuehrer Wore Prada, did, however, warn the group of mostly older men that they must not forget the youth while they were designing the new Reich.
Europe certainly needs a genuine conservative movement to combat the creeping bureaucratic collectivism that is stifling the human potential of the Continent. But the participants in the Duginite alliance represent no such thing. Indeed, in an interview with the French bi-monthly magazine L’Homme nouveau on November 27, 2013, Chauprade made this point abundantly clear by giving this description of the “ideological bipolarity” that separates the world today: “on one side are those who believe that the individual is the supreme value, on the other are those who think that transcendence or the common good are superior to the human person.” He stated that his “commitment is clearly in the second camp.” Thus, far from being conservative defenders of the fundamental Western values of individual freedom and dignity, the Duginites, in classic national-socialist style, seek to invoke the tribal instinct for the purpose of empowering the most radical and destructive forms of collectivism imaginable.
According to a reporter for the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, “. . . the participants were committed to absolute secrecy. A private security service controlled the entrances to the baroque palace. Even the participants were not allowed to take pictures. As FPÖ leader Strache at the conference table snapped a photo with his cell phone, he was immediately reprimanded by Conference Chairman Malofeev.”
Since the meeting was, in point of fact, a planning session for treason, such precautions are entirely understandable.
The next meeting of the fascist international is scheduled to take place in January in Moscow.
— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Energy of Lakewood, Colo., and the author of Energy Victory. The paperback edition of his latest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, was recently published by Encounter Books.