OPINION: Making The World Safe For Autocracy

Seven Months of stalling in the House of Representatives on the US aid package to Ukraine allowed Russia to make significant military gains that sent thousands of Ukrainians fleeing.

According to two Republicans, Rep. Ken Buck and Senator Mitt Romney, fierce resistance against the aid, by what has been dubbed the ‘Putin-wing,’ was instigated by former Fox news anchor Tucker Carlson, who now hosts his own show on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

“Carlson got this started and a lot of activists have picked up on it,” Buck told the American news website The Daily Beast back in September. Romney agreed: “As soon as Tucker Carlson said it, and Donald Trump parroted it, then the Trump-like individuals jumped on board.”

Presumably as a reward for obstructing Ukraine aid, Carlson reaped an interview in February with Putin, who turned it into a “history lesson” that was meticulously debunked as mythical thinking justifying genocide by eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder. 

On April 30 Carlson also released an interview with the Russian far right ideologue and ultranationalist cheerleader for the war on Ukraine Aleksandr Dugin, whose daughter Daria, as was mentioned in the show host’s introduction, was killed in 2023 by a car bomb which US intelligence attributed to Kyiv. The war however was not brought up at all, nor was Dugin questioned about the fact that he had promoted killing as many Ukrainians as possible. Russia's blatant violations of international law were not discussed. 

Instead, Dugin was asked to explain why Western countries are in a state of turmoil and even on a “self-destructive” track. Of course, Dugin had thought long and hard about it. All problems had started with individualism, which led to the liberation from any form of collective identity, whether church, empire or state. Whereafter liberalism reached its terminal station with the liberation of gender identity, i.e. the liberation of being human. “For now in the West one can choose the sex one wants which means being human is optional, one can choose to be human or not to be human,” Dugin argued 

“This is clearly happening, and horrifying,” Carlson responded, agreeing with a dehumanizing portrayal of transgender people as a threat to humanity, though transgenders make up less than 1 percent of the world's population and are no less human than anyone else on the planet

Dugin went even further by actually claiming that freedom of choice has effectively ceased to exist in the West. Classical liberalism had morphed into wokeism, the prescription to be modern, the duty to be left-liberal. Thus, liberalism had become totalitarian: “Either you’re progressive or we'll cancel you.”

However the world will be saved from the realization of this horrifying global progressive agenda, which seeks to destroy everything traditional, by Putin who has set himself up as a defender of traditional values, hence Western Russophobia, Dugin concluded.

The Neo-Eurasianist ideologue who dreams of a Russian-led Great- Eurasian empire stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon, appeared ignorant of the fact that transgenders are not a modern and exclusively Western phenomenon.

Take one of the principal deities of Hinduism, Vishnu, the protector of the universe, who is depicted as gender-fluid.  Already centuries before Christ, the Veda as well as Hindu law recognized three genders from childhood on. Hijira as they are also called rose to important positions in the royal courts and religious institutions of the Islamic world too.

It was in fact the British colonial administration in India that criminalized transgender people and denied them their civil rights. In 2014, India’s Supreme Court granted transsexual and transgender people the right to self-identify their gender. That ruling came five years after Indian election authorities granted what they called an independent identity to intersex and transsexuals in the country’s voter lists. Until then, they were referred to as male or female in the voter rolls.

Thus, the rulings of the legal institutions of the world’s largest democracy also correspond to one of the most famous and fundamental texts of humanism, De Hominis Dignitate (on the Dignity of Man, 1486), by Pico della Mirandola in which he reasoned that man is the only creature to whom God has given the freedom to model himself. 

To package the illegal imperialist war against Ukraine as a global fight for the defense of traditional family values against gender-neutral bathrooms is of course a travesty. The staggering number of war crimes in the form of bombings of civilian targets – including hospitals, schools, museums, and energy infrastructure – summary executions, torture, rapes, abductions and deportations of Ukrainian children, speak volumes and plunges countless families, both Ukrainian and Russian into deep mourning.

Though an advocate of imperialist and genocidal conquest, Dugin was given ample opportunity to present himself to the American viewer as an ally in the right-wing cultural war against liberalism which aims to make the world safe for democracy.

“If they did not have press freedom, we would have to invent it for them,” legendary KGB- General Ivan Ivanovich Agayants said, way back in the 1960s, after a long career in propaganda and dezinformatsiya. And yet he would not have dared to dream of a tool like social media, of cyberwarriors, trolls, bots, influencers and on top of it all propaganda assets like Tucker Carlson who would all do Russia’s bidding.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.