Glazyev’s take on things and WW3

“The west declared a war against us… And now we are going to distribute nuclear weapons to anyone who can use it against the west” — Aleksandr Dugin 

The reaction in Russian government circles to the cluster bomb attack in Sevastopol last Sunday clearly shows that the Russians are losing patience with NATO’s direct involvement in Ukraine. Having resisted the temptation to rise to the bait of NATO’s increasing belligerence, will Putin now respond like with like, his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov having said that there will be consequences?

It is always a good idea to spend some time trying to understand how others see things. And nowhere is this more important today than in the misunderstandings between Russia and China on one side, and America and Europe on the other.

Looking for clues, this led me to read Sergei Glazyev’s book: The Last World War: The US to Move and Lose, published in Moscow in 2016. This is not a critique of that work as such, rather a commentary on our differences with Russia in the context of today’s geopolitical conflict. 

Events have moved on in the last eight years since the book was published. It followed the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, which we know from US statements and Wikileaks was backed by the US. In a sense, the book is prophetic, in that as the title suggests events in Ukraine were propelling us towards a new world war.

Glazyev is one of two leading Russian economists regularly contributing to the Izborsky Club, a conservative think-tank of which philosopher Aleksandr Dugin is a prominent member. The Club looks back to the days when Russia was great, with its writers supporting the state’s control of public morality. There appears to be little condemnation by the Club of Stalin’s methods of ideological control, the absence of which is also reflected in Glazyev’s book.

It is said that members of the Izborsky Club influence Putin’s thinking. And we certainly know that Glazyev, Dugin, and other names less familiar in the West are or have been in Putin’s inner circle. Therefore, we can probably assume that the ideologies of Glazyev and other Izborsky Club members are broadly shared with Putin.

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