ThreeFlangedJavis wrote: ↑
He may be crazy, but there may be a kernel of truth in his craziness essential to know when dealing with Russia.
The problem is that by not challenging Dugin, by presenting him only as the "pariah" without the madness, people like Southern are legitimizing him, allowing him a megaphone for his propaganda.
There's a kernel of truth in all craziness. Hell, even the SocJus has more than a kernel of truth to them. Police shootings in the US exist, they're often hard to justify, and die to a series of reasons they impact black people more than their percentage of the US citizenship. People who use the internet to spread death threats exist. Rapists and sexual harassers exist. And it's normal to be concerned about them, especially as a woman. This doesn't mean that we live in a "rape culture" or that "the police is genociding blacks". But if leave out the pomo deconstruction at its heart the SocJus is based on things that exist and ARE unjust. They simply face them in a counterproductive, or baseless ways at times.
And the SocJus, annoying and counterproductive as it can be, is not advocating for killing journalists and critics, they're not in power, and even if they were they'd be limited by the inherent limits of power of a liberal democracy like the United States.
Still we and a lot of other people HEAVILY criticize the SocJus, we don't just parrot their views.
Dugin has ties to the highest Russian authorities, his speeches are sometimes used by them to justify some of their actions of the Russian regime, he has advocated political murders. He's several magnitudes more dangerous or effective than an Amanda Marcotte or a PZ Myers or an Anita Sarkeesian.
It's one thing to be wanting to study the guy, or to challenge him in a tough interview. It's another to give him a soapbox to an audience which is already sympathetic to some of his ideas. Southern has praised Dugin as someone who "speaks to the spirit of Russia" like Jordan Peterson "speaks to the spirit of the West". That's high praise, considering that her fanbase has a big overlap with Peterson. She's basically selling Dugin's ideas and recommendations to the alt-right, and to "American conservatives" in general.
Now, if she wants to diffuse far-right ideas, that's her right, but people who don't want to, and who are pointing out how far-right she is, aren't "shaming her" or "silencing her", they're simply telling it like it is. Maybe Southern isn't spreading Dugin's neo-fascism intentionally and knowingly, maybe she's genuinely convinced that he's just a victim, a "free speech pariath". But in practice she IS diffusing his ideas to her audience, and listening to his recommendations.
If Dan Arel or Peezus interviewed a well-spoken representative of the People's Republic of North Korea, who explained in calm and collected tones how the US need a peaceful path to a communism to smash the Capitalist Patriarchy, and if said representative had previously written about how those who resist are being "aggressive towards the revolution" need to be put down, or about how the the South Koreans need a genocide of the corrupted capitalists, everyone here would lose their mind, aggressively call for atheist associations to throw out both of them, and for people to spam their propaganda for the North Korean regime everywhere, so that it'd never be forgotten.
But it's a hot blonde doing it, and she's an "anti-SJW", so she gets a pass.
I also get the impression that Dugin is a bit of a dreamer in that he thinks it possible be a "tolerant" Nazi. He regards the racism of the Nazis as a German quirk, so I think it wise to examine his admiration for the SS in a bit more detail. In some sense he may be a little incoherent so drawing inferences may be misleading.
If he really believes this he's not a dreamer, he's a moron.
If you read some of what he's written his intent become more clear: he's opposed to the racism of the Nazis towards the Eastern Slavs because he's a Eastern Slav and promoting an Eastern Slavic identity, but he's not opposed to the idea that the collective ethnic identity has a right to purge traitors and extraneous bodies.