ADDED 05/19/2018

The fascist philosopher behind Vladimir Putin’s information warfare

FROM 05/19/2018 | Big Think

BY Timothy Snyder

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Some ideas lie dormant for decades, and such is the case with Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, whose anti-communist stance got him—along with about 160 other intellectuals—expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 aboard the ‘philosopher’s ship’. So who was Ilyin, and why has Russia’s President Vladimir Putin breathed new life into his writings more than 60 years after Ilyin’s death? Yale University’s Professor Timothy Snyder gives a crash course in three pillars of Ilyin’s philosophy of fascism and explains why this worldview is so appealing to Putin: it defines freedom as knowing your set place in society, asserts that democracy is a ritual and not a reality, and maintains that there are no facts in the world—Russian nationalism is the only truth. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this is how new technology—like Facebook—is turning old fascism into political warfare. “The fundamental way that Russia works in American politics is by transmitting the idea that’s nothing is real… What the fascist ideas do with the new technology is they drive [Americans] into a situation where we think the real stakes of politics are all emotional and all about enemies—usually enemies at home,” says Snyder. Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election in such a way that Americans couldn’t see where the trouble was coming from. “A lot of us are still having a lot of trouble seeing what was happening,” he says. Snyder’s most recent book is The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

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