I have no standing to criticize people for changing their minds, given my well-known propensity for wild ideological shifts. Still, it can’t fail to be entertaining that it’s David Reaboi of all people who has published a book denouncing Russian propaganda. I love David but I had to mute his account on Twitter for a couple of years because he was putting out non-stop pro-Russian propaganda. I’m very glad he figured it out and abandoned the third-worldist, ultra-moronic side for which he is way too intelligent.
Reaboi’s new book The Epstein Conspiracy: How Russia Turned a Lie About Jeffrey Epstein into a Weapon Against America, Israel, and Jews reveals the mechanisms by which propagandistic concoctions of former KGB operatives are installed in the minds of well-meaning, if somewhat facile, Westerners. Reaboi uses the Epstein conspiracy theory to illustrate his point but you can see the same mechanism at work in any number of “America is uniquely evil” beliefs.
Only 1/3 of the book is David’s text. The rest is a translation of Dugin’s treatise on the usefulness of conspiracy theories. Given that Dugin is the only thinker Russia produced in a century, the text is worth reading. And yes, he’s not much of a thinker. Perú or Guatemala produce ten times the thinking in a year and of a much better quality. But we are all surrounded and depend on electorally on people whose entire worldview is mass-produced by Duginites, so it’s not a bad idea to know what the dude actually said.
I want to offer a quote from the Dugin part of the book because what the bearded guru of Russian exceptionalism says here is not untrue:
In some versions of political conspirology (for instance, in the USA) the very concept of “elite” is almost synonymous with “conspirators”: the deeply rooted democratic representation insists that in a liberal society “all are equal in their starting opportunities,” and so to discover traces of a stable elite with strict succession in matters of political power and economic might amounts, in this case, to the unmasking of a “conspiracy.”
Yes, this is one of the unfortunate consequences of the very American dislike of hierarchies.
Reaboi’s book dropped on Kindle Unlimited this morning, and already there’s an army of bots on social media who proffer the most unhinged threats against anybody who mentions it.
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