Steve Bannon Is a Traitor

Steve Bannon has spoken highly, in public speeches, of the 'Eurasianist' ideologist Aleksandr Dugin. In the spirit of 'know thine enemy', a principle I wish more of us were willing to adopt, I've been reading Dugin, and translating parts of his work, for the past few years. His basic argument is that political power may be classified as either thalassocratic, which is to say sea-based, or tellurocratic, land-based. Anglo-American power, as consolidated in NATO, is the world's great thalassocracy, while the Russian Empire, whether Soviet or not, is the world's great tellurocracy. Germany and France, Dugin says, have elements of both, and can be swung either way. You might see where this is leading: Russia's historical destiny is to draw Germany and France into its own orbit by drawing out their own innate tellurocratic character.

I've also been reading Stormfront, V-Dare, and similar propaganda sites since long before Trumpism was on the radar, and I started noticing some years ago a clear surge in Russophilia, which was in part based on enthusiasm for Putin's new assertions of machismo, but also on a lot of arcane discussion among white-supremacists of the need to move beyond the now-outdated 'Nordicist' theory that made Germanic peoples into the paradigm of whiteness, while holding Slavs to be somehow second-tier whites. A friend of mine has alerted me that many usernames on white-nationalist message boards now make reference to the Yamnaya Culture, a Bronze Age settlement that, among other things, seems to root Indo-European civilization in the Pontic Steppe of Southern Russia: the appropriation here, one might speculate, is something like the adoption of the Cro-Magnon, with its supposedly robust skull, as a sort of mascot for 20th-century French racialists who wanted all Europeans to be descended from such a fine specimen of man.

A clear shift occurred in white supremacist ideology, which corresponded, presumably, to the rise of post-Soviet Russia in the first decade of the present century as a powerful illiberal nation, and to the simultaneous post-war accommodation of all of Germany, reunited in the early 1990s, within the Atlantic order. And now we have the alt-right ideologue Richard Spencer declaring that Russia is "the most powerful white power there is." And we have Steve Bannon, presumably, communicating similar thoughts to Donald Trump.

The American left is still complaining that any expression of concern about Russia's role in this election is just pro-Hillary 'red-baiting’. I have seen no shortage of memes in the left-wing social media showing, for example, a tinfoil hat photoshopped onto Paul Krugman's head for his supposedly outlandish belief that Russia has actively intervened in the 2016 US presidential elections. These low-information critics seem not to be decided on whether they think it is not true that Russia has intervened, or whether they think it is true, but are glad, thus trading on a crucial ambiguity we know very well from the Holocaust deniers.

Suppose for the sake of argument that they do think Russia intervened, and are glad of it. Is there anything left-wing about this stance? Dugin does regret that the Bolsheviks did not manage to trigger a comparable revolution in Germany circa 1918, not because Dugin has any sympathy for Leninism, but because he doesn’t think what imperial leaders say or think about their empires matters at all. In fact however the perplexing question of Russia's new role in American politics is closely connected with the domestic issue of the resurgence of white nationalism. The best hope for the growth of the tellurocracy to its maximum extent, which would involve Western Europe falling into the orbit of Russia by force or by persuasion (at this very moment, Bannon is publicly offering help to the campaigns of the National Front in France, a party that has recently also taken a generous loan from Russia), is to reduce the US to a white nationalist vassal state, happy to gaze admiringly and passively from afar at "the most powerful white power there is." These are the ideas that are currently filtering, though of course indirectly and in garbled form, into the lizard brain of the president-elect of our country.

This is perhaps a useful talking point when you are calling your local representatives to pressure them to somehow pressure Trump to scrap Bannon. Whatever you think of this notion, it presumably still means something to elected officials: Steve Bannon is a traitor.