Is Alexander Dugin a Secret Supporter of Queers & Gender Benders?

This is no joke, nor is it trolling.

This is real.

Not only is Alexander Dugin an Islamophile, negro-lover, cannibal apologist and fan of Judaism and Kabbalah, he’s a crypto-queer theorist and advocate of androgyny.

Counterpunch:

So what of sex and gender in the Fourth Political Theory? Dugin dedicates a whole chapter to the subject, outlining first his perception of how gender evolved through the first three political theories, and then how it will unfold in the fourth. In short, under liberalism, gender is occupied with “man” (given that women are not really given any personhood), and not just any man but “the rational, rich, adult White male.” Under communism, gender was considered a bourgeois political construction that needed to be critiqued. Under fascism we see again the urban, white, wealthy man but with added exaltation in the form of Aryan masculinity and women relegated to the home and motherhood.

Given what we know about Dugin’s far-right affiliations, it is tempting to imagine that his presentation of sex and gender in the Fourth Political Theory will take those of the previous three in more extreme directions. But this is not the case. Having given an overview of gender in the previous three political theories, the very first thing Dugin states is, “The Fourth Political Theory represents an aspiration to overcome the gender construction of the three political theories of modernity.” In other words, Dugin signals from the start that he does not wish to perpetuate traditional understandings of gender.

Dugin initially grapples with the attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory, first through the process of negation (in other words, what it is not): “In the face of this construction of ‘man’ as he who possesses reason, wealth, responsibility, city, white skin color, and so on, we revolt. This image of man must die; he doesn’t have a chance to survive, as he is closed inside modernity’s historical deadlock.” So, traditional masculinity is gone. Dugin then looks to positive attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory: to the “pre-logical” world of children, madness, intellectual transgression and, more generally, those who are “non-White/European, insane, nonurban or defined by a constructed landscape … the ecologist or aboriginal.”

It is in his discussion of the gendered subject of the Fourth Political Theory that Dugin starts to sound eerily like a queer theorist as he suggests it should be in a state of “between.” Dugin opts for the model of “Dasein,” referring to Heidegger’s understanding of existential being, which “can somehow be sexualized, but that sex which it has cannot be either male or female. It may make sense to speak about it in terms of the androgyne.” Even then Dugin does not want us to get stuck in the rut of thinking the androgyne is a combination of a binary sex or gender: “Should we say that the Fourth Political Theory may be addressed to the androgynous being, and its gender is the androgyne? Perhaps, but only if it is possible not to project onto the androgynous the obviously split models of sex as halves of a whole.” He wants us to think of the androgyne “not as a result of a combination of the man and the woman,” rather “primordial, untouched unity.”

Dugin’s presentation of sex and gender in the Fourth Political Theory bears a resemblance to a queer theory PhD dissertation from the late 1990s. So how do we get from someone who states “By going beyond the limits of gender which we know, we get to the domain of uncertainty, androgyny, and sex as practised by the angels” to someone who frames gay marriage as a sign of the end times? There are various possible explanations.

First, when writing The Fourth Political Theory Dugin strategically opted for language that could be interpreted in various ways, thus reeling in a potentially diverse readership. Second, Dugin’s worldview has genuinely become more extreme over the years. Third, Dugin has learned lessons from the alt-right and chosen to distil his message into clickbaity rage, even if it is not necessarily representative of his views.

And then there is a fourth explanation that is worth considering (with tongue firmly planted in cheek). Could it be that Dugin has been an undercover queer theorist all along and is playing a long game, positioning himself as an intellectual heavyweight on the far right in order to subvert it from within? If you think that is far-fetched, consider the following, as chronicled in Masha Gessen’s recent book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Dugin’s first wife was Evgeniya Debryanskaya, who he taught English by reading the suspiciously queer The Picture of Dorian Gray. They eventually broke up, after which Evgeniya Debryanskaya went on to become a prominent feminist and LGBT activist in Russia. This part is not in Gessen’s book: shortly before they parted ways, the young couple made a pact: “Sasha, darling. I will fight openly for the rights of women and gay people. Your task is far more difficult. You must pretend to be an ultra-nationalist until the time is right. Then we will reveal to them the joy of androgyny and sex as practised by the angels.” Stranger things have happened.

So Dugin actually wants to do away with whiteness and manliness, and have everyone act like wild children. He wants us all to transcend sex differences and embrace androgyny.

Let’s quote that again:

Dugin initially grapples with the attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory, first through the process of negation (in other words, what it is not): “In the face of this construction of ‘man’ as he who possesses reason, wealth, responsibility, city, white skin color, and so on, we revolt. This image of man must die; he doesn’t have a chance to survive, as he is closed inside modernity’s historical deadlock.” So, traditional masculinity is gone. Dugin then looks to positive attributes of gender in the Fourth Political Theory: to the “pre-logical” world of children, madness, intellectual transgression and, more generally, those who are “non-White/European, insane, nonurban or defined by a constructed landscape … the ecologist or aboriginal.”

The white male must die, and in its place an androgynous aboriginal dindu with a child-like mind.

And this:

This part is not in Gessen’s book: shortly before they parted ways, the young couple [Dugin and ex-wife] made a pact: “Sasha, darling. I will fight openly for the rights of women and gay people. Your task is far more difficult. You must pretend to be an ultra-nationalist until the time is right. Then we will reveal to them the joy of androgyny and sex as practised by the angels.” Stranger things have happened.

According to this article, Dugin and his dykish ex-wife made a pact to promote opposing philosophies, pro-queer liberalism and anti-queer nationalism, but then to merge them in some kind of satanic end times.

Indeed, chaos is what Dugin most desires.

Cathy Young:

Dugin’s ex, Evgeniya (Genya) Debryanskaya, is a pioneering Russian LGBT activist who also has a long history of activism in the pro-democracy movement. She co-founded Russia’s first gay rights advocacy group, the Association of Sexual Minorities, in 1990; she was also a co-founder of the Russian Libertarian Party and was involved in the Democratic Union, the small party led by Valeria Novodvorskaya (the remarkable Russian pro-freedom activist who died last month, and about whose life and work I wrote here). I met Genya in 1990 on a trip to Moscow, while doing interviews for an article on women in Russian politics. I think we met twice. The second time, she gave me a letter to her American girlfriend to mail in the US, not wanting to entrust it to the Soviet postal service. (She also asked to borrow $50, promising to repay it on her upcoming trip to America. “She’ll never pay it back,” said a Russian friend who knew her. “Consider it your donation to the Russian gay rights movement.” The friend was right.)

I’m not sure exactly when Debryanskaya and Dugin were married, but they have a son born in 1985, named Arthur at birth and christened as Dmitry in the Russian Orthodox Church. (Amusingly, Dugin’s bio on his website gives the date of his son’s birth but makes no mention of the mother’s identity; the only marriage mentioned in the bio is his second marriage, in 1987, to philosophy professor Natalia Melentieva, with whom he has a daughter.)

Debryanskaya later drifted away from politics, though she was arrested at a gay rights protest in Moscow in May 2006. (According to an article in the Russian edition of Newsweek, she and her fellow protesters shared a police van with several counterprotesters from Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union, who were also arrested; when one of the “Eurasian” boys began to grumble about having to “ride together with these stinking fags,” Genya rendered him speechless him by mentioning that Dugin was her former husband.)

All of this meshes well with standard Marxist-Leninist Kremlin KGB practice of coopting all sides of political ideology to harness it towards the ultimate ends of Marxism-Leninism: global communistic rule.

The Atlantic:

One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: In 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then-President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost election by persuading the nation that he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.

In the 21st century, the techniques of the political technologists have become centralized and systematized, coordinated out of the office of the presidential administration, where Surkov would sit behind a desk with phones bearing the names of all the “independent” party leaders, calling and directing them at any moment, day or night. The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd. One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn attacked the modern-art exhibitions. The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

And there it is. This is the Leninist principle of controlling opposition by taking it over and leading it.

This is what Dugin does by seeping into all sides of discourse, lending some credence to all of them while truly adhering only to chaos, destruction and satanic earthly rule.

It is clear that he stands with the brown man, the moslem, the negroid, the jew and the chink, and secretly with the queers, all mobilized into a Satanic Eurasianist Army against the white man.

This kind of bizarre fusing of diametrically opposed philosophies and ideologies can only really happen in Russia, where vodka rules life.