Russia’s Hybrid War against the West has Been Ongoing for 200 Years, Lea and Borukh Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 11 – In a new article on “The Origins of Russian Fascism,” Aaron Lea and Baruch Taskin trace the ways that extreme right members of the first Russian emigration and early Soviet practices played an important role in Hitler’s Nazism and how both the ideas and the actions of the latter returned to Russia and reenforced governing patterns there.

            That history, the two Israeli analysts say, shows “Putinism is not an exception to Russian history but its norm” and that what the current Kremlin leader is doing reflects the longstanding Russian belief in existence of a threat requiring an authoritarian leader, a repressive state at home, and aggression abroad, a belief it sent to Germany a century ago (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=6AA3F9BB0CB91&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

            What is on view in Moscow now is not some innovation on Putin’s part or of a conspiracy.  Conspiracies, after all, “don’t live for centuries,” Lea and Taskin say. Instead, “it is a structural continuity,” with the same diagnosis and prescription passing from one generation to the next, changing the packaging but preserving the contents.”

            And that explains, the two argue, why “the Kremlin isn’t just exporting ideology: it is funding the European far right, turning ‘the liberal order’ into a target for coordinated attacks via think tanks and bot farms,” the latest Russian industry “created to paralyze the will of the West” and something the Nazis did as well, following earlier versions of this Russian model.

            In this latest Russian campaign, they write, “the main export product is not money or content: it is an idea: the liberal order as a conspiracy, national sovereignty is a sacred value and a strong leader as the only answer to chaos” – exactly the ideas Russian emigres brought to Germany in the 1920s and that continue in Russia today.

            In short, Lea and Taskin, once again, Russia’s “hybrid war with the world is in full swing,” just as has been the case for 200 years. And Europe, which has seen all this before but has forgotten the lessons of that reality, “is just beginning to label it state terrorism,” thinking that this is something new rather than the well-forgotten old it in fact is.