What should we make of the esoteric philosophy Traditionalism?
Last August a bomb tore through a Toyota Land Cruiser outside Moscow killing its 29-year-old driver. Darya Dugina, a pro-war TV pundit, had been returning from a conservative literary festival where her father, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, had been giving a talk on tradition and history. Quite possibly he was the intended target. Alexander Dugin was called ‘Putin’s Brain’ by Foreign Affairs magazine and ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ by Breitbart. He had advocated conflict with the West and told Russians they should ‘kill, kill, kill’ Ukrainians. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attack. If you haven’t heard of Traditionalism, that’s not surprising, since it’s hardly devised to be generally understood One way of thinking
