Angry Planet - The Occult Ideologies Powering Modern Politics

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Things got weird in 2016. From meme magick to Alexander Dugin, from Kek to Chaos, occult ideas have become mainstream. Steve Bannon talked about occult fascist philosopher Julius Evola. U.S. President Donald Trump is an adherent of the Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking. Some in America’s burgeoning neo-Nazi movement see a cartoon frog as an avatar of an Egyptian chaos god.What the hell is going on?On a bonus episode of War College author Gary Lachman joins us to explain it all. It’s the topic of his new book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. It may sound strange, but even if you and I don’t believe it, people in power do.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. It's not a cold war about ideologies or in the sense of capitalism or communism. It's a cold war about the decadent hyper-liberal West and Russia, which is the upholder of traditional values. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello, and welcome to the War College Annex. I am your host, Matthew Galt. This episode comes with a disclaimer. We're trying something a little new here at War College, and in the future, we may release extra episodes during the month that deal with topics tangentially related to war and conflict. We're calling these the War College Annex. To be clear, this is an extra. You're still going to hear four episodes every month about topics that stick close to our original vision for the show. That said, I'm excited about today's topic. It deals directly with power and politics. We've attempted in our way to be a political on war college, but I ask listeners to remember their class of it's. War is the continuation of politics by other means.

If you're a long-time listener and you enjoyed our conversation with Annie Jacobson about the CIA's ESP program, my conversation with Douglas Rushkoff about the birth of brand recognition during World War II, or the episode with Peter Pomeranzev about Russia's postmodern dictatorship, this is an episode for you. Norman Vincent Peel and the power of positive thinking. Ein Rand and Pepe the Frog. Chaos magic, the alt-right, and the power of the occult as a political force in the modern era. The past few years of political life have been strange.

Some online fans of Donald Trump claim they used meme magic to will him into office. Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, often talked about occult philosophy. for Julius Evela. Alexander Dugan, a man some called Putin's prophet, flew a strange and mystical symbol behind him during lectures and speeches. These are not crackpot theories, but actual well-researched facts. Even if you and I don't believe in magic and the occult, and the power of positive thinking, it's clear that some people in high positions of political power across the world do.

That's the subject of a new book from Gary Lockman called Dark Star Rising, Magic and Power in the Age of Trump. Lockman is an author and lecturer whose previous works include Rudolf Steiner, an introduction to his life and work, and turn off your mind, the mystic 60s and the dark side of the age of Aquarius. Gary, thank you so much for joining this. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. All right, well, tell us about the book, and how does Trump factor in? The book is about a sort of a kind of a cult milieu, let's say, not necessarily immediately around Trump, but in some of his, well, in some cases, yes, but, you know, some of his fellow travelers. But with Trump himself, we know that he's been a lifelong devotee of Norman Vincent Peel,

who wrote a very, very popular book in the 1950s called The Power of Positive Thinking. And for many years, gave sermons at the Marble College at Church on Fifth Avenue in New York. And then Trump had attended his sermons. And also Trump's father was a fan as well. And the whole idea about positive thinking is this sort of sense of a kind of inner optimism and an affirmation and a refusal to allow sort of reality to kind of bully you in the way that most of us allow it to. We tend to think that reality isn't particularly wieldy and it doesn't really respond

to our requests immediately. But the power positive thinking, the idea is that through very vivid visualization and intense concentration and meditation on an achievable result, not something that's completely beyond belief, but something that is quite achievable that can be done. If you persist in this often enough and intensely enough, this will come about. And one of the central themes or maxims that Trump gleaned from Norman Vincent Peel was the idea that facts aren't important. It's our attitude toward the facts that are important. And it's what we think about reality rather than so-called reality itself that has its real effect upon us. And this goes back actually to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in ancient Greece. who said that it's not things so much as what we think of things that affects us.

And so this is something that has informed Trump, and if you've written any biographies about him, and so this is something that that's been known for a while. But the strange thing is that it turned out that some of Trump's supporters among the alt-right seem to have been using techniques of this kind of belief in order to actually help Trump. get into office. And this is, when I read about this in a blog by a new thought blogger named Harvey Bishop, I started looking up following it up because this was, you know, during the whole time Trump's campaign and then the election, when all this strange stuff was coming out,

when it seemed like reality was being turned inside out in a variety of different ways. And that's one of the themes that runs through the book at the same time that you can find, the sort of occult atmosphere milieu around sort of Trump's world and also as as you mentioned over in in Russia around Putin as well the whole sort of idea of reality has become very malleable you know we live in the post-truth alternative fact world and that's also linked to the whole sort of strange interaction between reality with the real the big are and its representation in either in television or the online world where reality TV is the most popular thing.

And right now we have a reality TV celebrity becoming president. So all these themes seem to come together once I started looking at it. And Trump is, he's sort of a character in a way who's been kind of carried along, both by his own efforts and those by people around him, to actually make the most use out of this whole time now when the whole notion of reality is very much up to grabs. And a lot of this stuff isn't super new, right? You mentioned new thought when you were talking.

Can you tell us just a little bit about what that is? Well, new thought is something that goes back to, well, you can say it goes back to sort of the mid-19th century America. And it has its roots, actually, in Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great American essayist. And he actually coined the phrase, New Thought, in one of his essays. And it is linked to this sort of optimistic, forward-looking, affirmative sensibility that was part of America then. And as you know, Emerson, his sort of central idea was that we don't need to stand by the traditions of Europe. You know, this is a new world, there's a new beginning.

we have our own destiny and self-sufficiency, self-reliance and things of that sort. So it's a very American idea. And then it was actually also picked up later by William James, who much like Emerson, have a similar kind of character, an optimistic, forward-looking sort of sensibility. And James himself got involved in what was called the Mind Cure School at the time. this is the late 19th century because he had used some of the techniques to cure himself or at least to treat some ailments that he had, depression, angina, and other sort of nervous ailments.

And he was so successful using some of these mind cure methods that he actually lobbied, I think is in Massachusetts, against this very severe legislation that was trying to get passed to limit the access. you know the access of two it's kind of mind mind cure sort of thing and what's mind cure well it's like like Christian science it's basically the idea that although we don't understand how this can can be the case and it doesn't immediately seem to be the case the mind the inner world the mental world actually can directly affect the you know the physical world the external world the world the world of the senses that we take to be the basic reality we tend to see things the other way around that what's really real is the physical sensory you know

quantifiable world that science tells us is the one reality. And anything going on inside our heads is just sort of a reflection of that in some way. But mental science, new thought, positive thinking, mind cure, all of these are all sort of practical applications of ideas that go back to Plato, basically, or the very, you know, the roots of Western thought. And in that tradition, it's basically the mind or consciousness that takes precedent. And the physical world is a sort of reflection of it. It's the other way around. And fundamentally, all this mind cure or a new thought, positive thinking is based on somehow eliciting in yourself a kind of real acceptance of that idea. That you really actually experience that that is true.

Not so much what you're just saying to yourself. It's not so much kind of, you know, cognitive assent is that you actually have an experience of this. And it's a sort of revelation. And fundamentally, what it is about is it's the idea that thoughts are causative. Thoughts can affect the world in some way directly. There's a variety of different schools about this. And initially it was used mostly for health, as you said, Christian science and a variety of other practitioners. And then gradually it shifted over to what's become known as the gospel or process.

prosperity, where not only can you sort of think yourself healthy, you can think yourself rich. You know, there's a famous book called Think and Grow Rich. And this is where it leads into, you know, something that most rational and critical people consider to be just, you know, just fraudsters and charlatans and so on and so on. But it has a long history, and it's something that's never quite gone away. It sort of had its heyday, you say, at the turn of the century in the early 20th century. But in recent times, it's been revived and repassion. packaged in different ways.

There was a book called The Secret. It was a film, too, I don't know, I think, in the 2000s at some point. That was very, very popular. It just basically reprocessed these same kinds of things. And what I tried to show in the book in the beginning is that, yes, if we first sort of think of it, the first thing we think is like, well, if only that was the case, if only reality was as amenable to our desires, as you say. But when you look into this and you realize that a variety of different people of, you know,

great genius and brilliance throughout history have in some way accepted some of the fundamental ideas associated with this. It becomes something that, at least for me, it was less easy to just dismiss. And then the idea that why it's important now is that somehow, for some reason, in the political world, these ideas have become very prominent. They're in Trump himself. They're in supporters of Trump and also across the planet. in Russia. You mentioned this fellow Alexander Dugin. And he's involved with something along these lines as well. It's not so much positive thinking as a kind of darker variant that is known as chaos magic, which has a whole story in itself. I guess I'm wondering how it made

the jump from self-help to politics. Do you put that at Alexander Dugan's feet? Or do you think it's somewhere else? Well, I think in a sense it's been there all along. I mean, you mentioned Mitch Harvitz's book. And in there he points out that Reagan, Ronald Reagan, was a devotee of this as well. He was also a devotee of Peel. He also read a great deal of an American occult and sort of mystical encyclopedias of Melanie P. Hall who lectured for many years in Los Angeles. And he had a book about the destiny of America. And again, it was a sort of mystical sense that the United to say it's had a kind of global destiny, not only in an economic or political way, but in a kind of messianic way almost.

And again, it's there if you look for it and you don't really need conspiracy theories. Because the only conspiracy theories that show up in this book of mine are ones that people involved in the book, you know, except themselves. But there's no conspiracy going on with any of the sort of stuff I'm writing about, because it's just there if you look for it. And for some reason, in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, the stuff suddenly kind of, it kind of, the image that comes to me is it got sort of turned inside out. And I think from a variety of different perspectives, it's not so much the rise of the occult by itself is that the occult is profiting by the breakdown of our Western rational mindset that's going on in different ways. And the post-truth, alternative fact world is a symptom of that and also an agent of it.

And I tend to think of it as something like trickle-down metaphysics. I mean, not to get too highbrow. But I think in many ways, what's at work is what Nietzsche, philosopher Nietzsche, predicted or saw it was coming in the late 1880s when he saw this nihilism. This basically complete collapse of the Western notions of truth. And that came about by the very pursuit of truth. both the scientific and the religious pursuit of truth led Nietzsche said towards the end of the 19th century to the recognition that there's no truth of the capital T, you know, there's no absolute truth, there's only relative truths and so on and so on. And while this doesn't affect our sort of technological world, the utilitarian application of knowledge and truth, it does affect our, you know, sort of existential world in the sense that, well, what does it mean anymore, where are we going and what's real anymore and so on and so on. And while Nietzsche, you know, sort of saw this, and in a way you can kind of, if he wanted to be a bit sort of trendy, you can say he was a kind of shaman and he took on this illness that was coming and tried to overcome it himself.

But he saw that it was on its way. And we're sort of the inheritors of it now. And but it's not, it's not coming as some kind of existential crisis as it still was happening, say, in the mid-20th century. It's sort of, it's this kind of blasé postmodern acceptance of kind of, you know, well, nothing means anything, does it? or it means whatever you want it to mean. And then a kind of almost gleeful, you know, dismantling of the previous, you know, dominant worldview, which I guess from different perspectives is the patriarchy or it's Western Civ or whatever it is.

So the occult is, it had its own, you know, kind of argument against sort of rationalism and science and so on. And so it participates in the dismantling of it. But what's come out of that is not all the good stuff, let's say, you know, the spiritually oriented people that are interested in the occult, say, who, you know, were, they were, they felt hemmed in by the very, you know, constricting and constraints of, of logic and reason and science and so on and so on. But they expected something good to come from, you know, the release of those. But what's happened is that, you know, there aren't any angels that that arrive when, you know, things start to

get kind of exciting. So I think there's several different factors that are happening right now in which the fundamental idea is like what we understood to be reality has become kind of, as I said, folded inside out. And it's all sort of up for grabs now. And so the idea that, you know, some group or different groups of either disaffected online youth addicts or, you know, right-wing, far right extremists in some way somehow thought, you know, trump into office, that doesn't sound as strange when you see the other things that are going on at the same time. Explain this idea that Trump's online supporters wield him into office. How do they understand that?

How do they see that as happening? What's supposed to have been at work is something that's known as meme magic. And I guess I don't have to explain what a meme is, but it's Richard Dawkins' term for a kind of cultural gene. And meme magic is an outgrowth of a kind of variant of traditional magic that's known as chaos magic. and chaos magic started up sort of in the 70s it had kind of it had sort of previous incarnations

but not not as explicitly known as that and it kind of started up in London in the 70s around the same time as the punk seen the sex pistols and all that was happening and you can see it as a kind of DIY magic in the same way that the punk was a DIY rock and roll sort of thing

and easiest way to sort of differentiate it is say traditional magic you know you have the traditional weapons and tools and symbols and so on and so on. So you have the magic circle and you have your wand and you have the elements and you have to write out the name of the demon just right and there's, you know, you have to do it at a certain time and the astrological influences or amenable and so on and so on. But in chaos magic, you sort of say, forget all that and you just sort of make it up as you go along and you use whatever's available.

And so when people were doing this in the 70s and 80s, they were just using any kind of pop sort of stuff that popular culture sort of items that were available so they're using sort of you know things like PJ Harvey albums and part of the whole this whole the symbol of chaos magic this eight pointed star comes from Michael Morcock he's a British sci-fi writer who he's written more than sci-fi but is the they've taken the symbol the chaos star from the series of novels of his dealing with the character called the eternal champion and there's this ongoing war between order and chaos and so it's the way you appropriate kind of, you know, items from popular culture or whatever is at hand and you turn them into magical things. And it's much along the same lines as kind of found art. You know, when you

pick up something on the street and you take it home and you put it in a frame or something, suddenly it's a, you know, it's a work of art. It just was a piece of rubbish in the street, but now it's the same sort of principle. But now it's, instead of art, it's a magical item. And you can charge it with sort of, you know, your imagination and your will and turn it into a talisman that has, you know, it's an object that has a, you know, it's an object that has a, a certain magical charge with it. And so the jump from that is what's most available now to people practicing or interested in this kind of stuff is stuff on the Internet.

If we think of the Internet as a kind of exteriorized imagination, what people are posting on the Internet is sort of along the same lines as when they are sort of visualizing some sort of magical symbol or sigil in their minds. So instead of visualize it in their minds, they're putting it up on the Internet. And people playing around with the internet or these online addicts who were posting things on 4chan, it seemed to them that things they were posting were having an effect in the real world. And the example that is given most often is that they were fascinated with the Dark Night Rises film. And they had a whole forum.

It was called Bain posting. And the opening of the film and Bain is on the plane. And he's supposed to be being taken. but he's actually in charge and so on and so on. So they posted lots of shots from that film. And then somebody noticed that after the horrible German wings, 9525 crash, that there were a lot of strange coincidences between the crash and the stuff and the things they were posting from the film.

And there's a town near the crash site is called Bain. You know, in the film, you know, Bain crashes the plane on purpose and that's what turned out to be the case. with the German wings flight, one of the pilots crashed it on purpose. One of the investigators was named Bruce Robin and Batman's secret identity is Bruce Wayne, and Robin is a sidekick and so on. So it seemed to be all these coincidences happening around this kind of thing. And people started to feel, my God, what's going on here?

This seems to be some kind of weird magic going on. And so it was christened synchromysticism, which is just sort of a techno-updating of CGU. Jung, the psychologist E. Jung's term, synchronicity, which is his term for a meaningful coincidence when something happening in your head, in your mind, and something happening in the outside world coincide. And they have an immediate, indubitable, direct, meaningful connection, but there's no causal connection. You know, there's no way that one cause the other. But they're related in this other way. He talks about a causal connectedness, which is sort of, you know,

strange way of trying to say a connection without a connection. But if you transfer that, something happening in the mind and the external world to something happening on the internet and the external world, this is what synchromysticism is about. And it was a similar sort of phenomenon around the whole slender man craze that was happening a bit a bit before this. And so the next ingredient in this strange story is this slacker amphibian named Pepe the Frog. Now Pepe was a creation of the cartoonist named Matt Fury. And he just was, I said, he was a slacker amphibian. And he originally first appears. He's basically urinating in public and, you know, someone walks by and says,

why are you doing that? And he says, oh, it feels good man. And so that meme of the urinating frog saying feels good man got picked up on the internet and just got spread, you know, and proliferated. And, you know, people like Katie Perry and Nikki Minaj and other sort of celebrities were, you know, cool to be seen with peppy and it seemed to be an okay thing but then what happened is that some of these four channers who were you know behind trump because they liked him because he was sort of like the ultimate internet troll he was sort of like the ultimate kind of spiteful creature that they themselves

both kind of seem to you know emulate and also you know seem to feel like the world deserved someone like trump they just got behind him because it was politically incorrect and it was you know the most radical you know thing they could do and you know whatever and one of the one of the one of the of them posted a picture of Pepe looking over the wall that Trump was supposed to be, you know, building or promised to build, you know, the wall between Mexico and the U.S. And then Trump supporters picked that up and they started using Pepe as well and all that. And so the idea is that somehow, somewhere along the line by just posting all of these, you know, images of Pepe, he's in the whole scene with the deplorables and, you know, with Trump's retinue and all that. And there's, you know, there's even, there's even some. There's some posts of Pepe looking like Trump and all that. By doing this sort of consciously, explicitly, they were going to sort of duplicate what already happened by chance. You know, sort of the Internet was going to have this effect on the real world. And alongside of this, all this weird mythology started to build up around the frog, around Pepe the Frog.

And it really gets into some strange waters. For a while there was this whole craze about Keck. And whose Keck? Well, Keck is an ancient Egyptian god of chaos, who's actually a frog. He's a frog-headed god. You know, the Egyptians had animal-headed deities. So Pepe, the Frog, was being seen as an avatar of this ancient Egyptian god, Keck, who both of them are interested in chaos. They're both interested in this kind of chaos magic.

on chaos. And that was the whole idea too, was to disrupt everything. Again, it's this notion of breaking down the existing structures. And so Keck kind of announced the coming new age by first bringing on the chaos that would break down the old structures and turn everything into this kind of formlessness. And then the new age would emerge out of that. And so somehow Trump got associated with being the avatar of this, this, you know, ancient Egyptian god. And you have to say, if there's one word that characterizes Trump's presidency, it has to be chaos. You know, that's something that, you know, I think that would be the first word most people would bring to mind. And there were all these other strange coincidences happening too.

When you posted things on this site, 4chan, everything was anonymous. So, you know, you had no name. You could post whatever you wanted and, you know, you could get away with it. You didn't have to be responsible for anything. But your post got assigned an eight-digit number. And people started noticing that posts about Trump and about Pepe and about Keck were getting sort of what they called duplicates or triplicates or quads in the sense that, say, they would get two of the same number or three of the same number or four of the same number. And that seemed to happen more and more and more every time they were posting things either about Trump or Pepe or so on and so on. So it seemed to them that there was some kind of approval they were getting.

All these coincidences seemed to suggest that there was some weird approval happening. And perhaps they actually had tapped into some strange other world. And again, you could take it or leave it. And was it all a joke too? It was just something that people were just playing around with and it got caught on. And it was just a hoax that became a fad and a craze. But at the same time, as I point out in the book, there have been some actual results in the real world.

Was that just a coincidence? Well, I guess that's a $64,000 question. Let's hop across the Atlantic. Who's Alexander Dugan? Alexander Dugan is a rather interesting character in the Russian political scene today. And he has a fascinating career. He started out as 1980s sort of Soviet punk, teenage punk dissident. And he actually got arrested one.

by the KGB for singing an anti-Soviet song at a party. Because of that, they came down on him fairly heavily. And so he wasn't able to go to the better universities, and he couldn't get anything more than a sort of menial kind of jobs. And he moved into this weird late 80s, Beeknik, occult, hipster, counterculture, strange underworld. that was there in Russia at the time. And he became increasingly fascinated with national socialism and fascism.

And one of the books that was sort of like the Bible or a big influence on the scene that he found himself in was a book that came out in the early 60s called The Morning of the Magicians. It was first public in France where it was a huge bestseller. Then it was translated to English and it was a bestseller in the States and the UK as well. and it more or less kickstarted what's known as the occult revival of the 1960s. That's what my book, Turnoff Your Mind, is about. And one of the things that's talked about in the morning magicians is a fellow named René Gaynon, who was a French scholar and philosopher of esotericism and religion.

And he's known as the founder of what's called the traditionalist school of sort of esoteric philosophy. And traditionalism, its basic idea is that... In the dim past, there was a fundamental revelation about reality and about man's relation to the cosmos and to God. And this was at the heart of all the great religions. And that at some point, again, in the past, the religions sort of separated from this fundamental revelation and became the different religions, as we know today. And they sort of lost touch with the initial revelation, although at the heart of each religion, it's still there. this whole idea of an initial profound revelation about reality then sort of separating into the separate religions is also paralleled by the sort of historical sort of decline from a golden age down to like the age of silver age of bronze into the age of iron or in the Hindu tradition what's known as the Kali Yuga which is the dark age and it's basically it's a time in which mankind is the furthest the way from the truth furthest away from spiritual truth and the spiritual truth and the spiritual

reality and God and the divine and so on and Gainan believed that 20th century we got sort of the you know the worst part of this and he believed that only by you know going back to the fundamental basics of this this this this vision which is rooted in a kind of organic hierarchical theocratic view of society sort of like a caste system in the ancient Hindu tradition where everyone is sort of slotted into their proper place in society because that's where they belong because of their qualities or whatever their talents and abilities and so on so there isn't any kind of mobility you are where you are because you belong you're part of the body politic in a very literal sense

you're one you're a cell in this this organic civilization and what was wrong with the west what was wrong in modern times was the rise of democracy and liberalism and individualism and everybody you know pursuing what they want and the whole dismissal of notions of rank and hierarchy and tradition and so on. And Gainon was perfectly convinced that the West was going to collapse. It was going to, you know, just decline. It was on its way out. And he was happy just to sit on the sidelines and watch it go down. And he was writing his books about it and, you know, attacking it. But he wasn't actually taking an active part and sort of tearing things down. But a follower of his was the Italian esoteric philosopher Julius Evela. And in

In the Lenin Library in Moscow, a young Alexander Dugan, strange enough, came upon one of Evela's books just on the open shelves. And he was fascinated with it. And he translated it into Russian. And Evela had the same kind of vision, anti-modern, anti-West vision that Gainon had. But he had a much more militaristic approach. to things. And for him, the warrior was the most noble form of life rather than the priest or the sage. And he developed a kind of spiritual warrior ethic. Something along the lines of what people, some people ascribe to the Knights Templar back in the Crusades and in different

ways. Or depending on how you understand these things, and some people to describe to the SS, you know, during World War, too. But Evela wrote a book called Revolt Against the modern world which has to be one of the most you know blistering scathing attacks on on the west even you know it's it takes as its starting point spangler's decline of the west and so it goes from there and all this idea is about the modernity being just absolutely decadent and and you know the great spiritual traditions you know being corrupt and so on this really affected uh dugen and he adopted many of these kind of you know far-right ultra conservative ideas as well as the sort of esoteric ideas and he became kind of a magpie of sort of

political ideologies and he would take bits and pieces of you know national socialism and some Bolshevism and some of this and anything but liberalism which he you know believes is completely the worst and that's the bane of mankind you know that's that's that's why the west is going down but he he would put together these kind of Frankenstein monsters of ideology uh that was sort of like Lego bricks or Velcroing them together and then see what would come out of them. And strangely enough, you know, over the years, he gradually got closer and closer into the actual corridors of power. I mean, Evela wanted to influence people like Mussolini and he wanted to influence people

like Hitler. And he had some influence him, Mussolini. And he had an audience for a brief while with National Socialists, but in the end, they rejected his ideas. So he never really got to see much of his sort of political. ideas put into action. But Dugan has, strangely enough, is one of the strangest, and I've only mentioned a few things, strangest political careers, where it's like half kind of postmodern cynical joke

and half actual real-life, you know, neo-fascist right-wing kind of spectacle, you know, politics. He's actually got to a point where some of his ideas have got to Putin, basically, whether it's direct or through a third party or something, it's difficult to say because he himself has gone back and forth about, you know, whether how close he is and how he isn't and all that. And, you know, I talk about that in the book. But one of his central ideas is that the great motor of history is this ongoing war, much like I mentioned in the Michael Moorcock novels, this ongoing war between order and chaos.

And he sees it as his ongoing war between what he calls the Atlantisists. This is the seafaring nations. so the United States and the UK and, you know, basically NATO and such. And what he calls Eurasia. And Eurasia is the vast, you know, mother of all continents. It's the vast single, you know, the biggest landmass on the planet that stretches from Eastern Europe to all the way over to the other side of the world and all that. And although that term Eurasia has been around and used in different ways at different times, had very specific meaning just after the Bolshevik revolution because there were a group

of emigre Russians, white Russians basically, who didn't care for the Bolsheviks. But they believed that the revolution wouldn't last and they found themselves in Prague and in Paris and other places and they thought they were sitting the revolution out and what they believed was necessary to was to have a new idea about what who Russia was, what Russia was about, much the same as what Russia has been going through the last, you know, 20 years today, trying to redefine itself. And the idea was that Russia wasn't a kind of backward cousin of Europe,

but a completely new civilization. It was a new civilization. They accepted, they rejected the idea, the Enlightenment idea that there's sort of a linear, one linear history, you know, it started whatever, day one, and it just kept going in a straight line until today. and this gradual notion of progress and so on and so on. They took a more along the line of Oswald Spangler, I mentioned earlier,

his idea of civilizations being organic, that they're born, they grow, reach maturity, then they start to decline and die. And so they're sort of individual, you know, rather than being part of one line, they're sort of separate kind of entities that can occur next to each other or contiguous and one after the other and so on. But this whole idea was that Russia should forget about trying to keep up with Europe because the Western ideas never really take hold anyway. And again, that's something that seemed to have been proven again after the collapse of the USSR. And it should look instead to the east more of its roots.

And actually, the Mongol passed, the period in the, I guess what was the 11th, 12th century, when the Mongol hordes basically ruled what was, Keevan Rus then, the earliest form of Russia and what we know was sort of Ukraine today. And that's always traditionally seen as sort of this dark time in Russian history. But the Eurasianists are saying no, we're actually part of who we are, part of our culture, part of our identity is rooted in that. And it's a whole idea that it's a whole separate new civilization that doesn't have to play by the same rules as the West. and it's very kind of anti-West.

And what Putin is doing recently is sort of, it's not a cold war about ideologies or in the sense of capitalism or communism. It's a cold war about the decadent, hyper-liberal West, and Russia, which is the upholder of traditional values, the traditional social order and traditional religious orthodoxy. The whole idea of Russia is the third Rome,

Moscow is the third Rome after the fall of Constantinople, all these ideas are being kind of revived and kind of brought back into play an attempt to create a new sort of sense of identity for Russia. And Dugan's ideas about this Eurasia notion, I can't go into it in great detail, but in many ways they informed Putin's moves in Crimea and in the Ukraine because those lands are part of this Eurasian vision. And again, it plays into the notion of the idea that, you know, in some ways what he's trying to do is get back the territories that, you know, belong to the Soviet Union.

And where does Steve Bannon figure into this? You know, former chief strategist for Trump is also kind of a traditionalist in a vola fan. Well, yes, that was one of the things that, as I say in the book, struck me as like, this was the, This is certainly a sign that things have changed. There was a piece in the New York Times about a talk that Bannon gave to a select group of churchmen at the Vatican, very conservative group. And he was in the States, but it was via Skype. And during the talk, which he was giving his usual sort of anti-Islam and economic nationalism and so on and so on.

But he name checks Evela during the talk. And he name checks him in the context of referring to Dugan. And he was talking about Putin. He was sort of giving his kind of half praise and half kind of caginess about Putin saying, yes, he's very intelligent. But one of the things that he likes about him is that he's sort of sticking up for traditional values, traditional gender roles, traditional sexual roles, traditional sort of religious beliefs, and so on and so on and so on.

He says that Putin has in his sort of milieu around him, has in his kind of advisors, more or less around him, someone who reads Julius Evela. That's someone who reads Julius Evela is Dugin, is Alexander Dugan. But the fact that Evela's name even got mentioned in the New York Times, I mean, for people like myself who were, well, I write about this sort of thing, so I'm aware of it. If you're knowledgeable in the esoteric world and so on and so on, I mean, how often enough does New York Times say anything about any of that whatsoever? But to pick Evela, who's kind of like a black sheep in many ways within the esoteric world, precisely because of his far-right political views, that he got name-checked, not in any old kind of context, but as you say, in the context of someone who at that time had had, you know, know, direct contact with Trump and, you know, had his ear and was informing him and all that. And again, Bannon through Breitbart, he enabled, he provided a platform for the alt-right. And that was one of the places where they were posting a lot of the pepe stuff and so on and so on.

So he kind of, he gave them a portal, as it were, onto the, onto the collective exteriorized imagination of the internet. And so it was through that portal at Breitbart that, you know, some of this so-called magic, if indeed it took place, was going on. And, you know, Bannon, too, he has, you know, if you know, his films, read interviews, he has, he's voiced a very apocalyptic view of things, that whole idea of the fourth turning, this theory that every 80 years, the United States goes through some kind of convulsion. And so this was on its way. This too is something that Dugin is about. He's about some kind of big major thing. There's going to be some big bust up finally between the Atlantisists and the Eurasian worlds. They're going to have some kind of knocked down kind of thing.

But he firmly believes that the West is going to go down. And Russia, which should form ties with Turkey and Iran in order to make this new kind of Eurasian block over there. And he has his eyes on parts of Europe and so on. And also within Europe itself, the alt-right is very prominent in some places. And as we know, there's the far-right governments in Hungary, on Poland. The thing that kind of kick-started it for the sort of the new right or the alt-right to kind of come out and sort of present themselves basically, it's like here we are, we're not going to hide anymore.

Just here, we're just, this is who we are, was I guess. you know, Brexit. And that was sort of the, you know, the opening for, for Trump's election. And when he got elected,

then they must have felt like, well, you know, whatever we've been doing, it works. And so, you know, there's a,

it's global, you know, there's a global, again, it's not a conspiracy because these people meet up and it's, it's in the news and,

you know, and so on. But it's something that's there. And as I said, I think it seems part of this time when suddenly things have been turned inside out. I mean, in the book, I suggest that Trump, Trump being elected is the singularity. I don't know if you disphrase the singularity, people in different ways use it. In astrophysics, it's a black hole, you know, at some point where, you know, the usual laws of physics break down.

And something quite different is going on. and in kind of new age pop apocalypticism, it's this notion that some event is on its way, which is going to change things radically. The character of reality is going to be different. And it struck me that, well, isn't that exactly what happened after Trump got elected? Because the character of reality changed, not in the sense that solid things weren't solid, but what we understood to be reality had changed and what we understood to be true and false and how we could talk about truth and falsehood anymore.

and so on and so on. So it does seem to me that something did happen with that taking place. And, you know, it depends how far you want to allow the metaphor, you know, to go. But in a certain sense, the kind of chaos, I think, that people like Dugan and people like that and sort of looking toward is actually taking place. It feels as if now that there are political technologists to borrow a Russian frame, on either side that have become almost like gurus. And these gurus are pushing a base level idea that if you believe in something enough, you can make it true.

That feels politically dangerous to me as we're moving into this new era. Well, there you go. I mean, that's it. You know, reality is up for grabs. You can create your own reality. And I think rather than just dismiss that idea, as crazy and, you know, irrational and, you know, whatever, why don't we just, okay, let's say, okay, okay, yes, that's true. What can we do about that?

And if it is true that we create reality, I think we should be a bit more alert to what's happening because other people seem to, you know, not to hesitate about doing it. And as you say, yes, if you believe in something enough, that's more important than whether it's true or not. And this can be a good thing. This can be a liberating thing. You know, this can be something that, you know, gets someone out of some rut in which, you know, they've been stuck for a long time and, you know, their lives become boring and so on and lifeless. And somehow this conviction is born in them that, you know, they can do more and then they go and do. So that can be a good thing. But then I guess the other side, it can become too, you know, too focused on achieving your goals or your desires or dismissing.

any reality other than the one that you know you want but i mean that that's a very american thing you have to say i mean this is one reason like the in europe the kind of go get them you know positive thinking forward affirmative um sensibility that is behind a great deal of sort of positive thinking and prosperity gospel never really never really picked up here so much just like the hot gospel uh doesn't really pick up here i i think more than anything else, any of that kind of, not fanaticism, but I know what you want to call it, Cray's obsession, it's more political than anything else. But because the states very much, you know, that's part of the whole American culture and has been from the beginning very much. That's part of it there.

So you have advocates of positive thinking or a new thought as a good thing in the sense that it can be very motivating and, you know, stimulating and, you know, getting people to achieve more. but then obviously there's the caution about becoming too obsessed with that. And in political context, the whole idea – well, this is one of the points I make, and not to make the analogy too extreme and too close, but I referred to – there's a book about Hitler's dark charisma. Lawrence Reese, I think, is the author. And he says that national socialism wasn't really a political platform.

you know, it was, it was an emotional state. You know, people voted for Hitler not for, you know, rational reasons for the political, you know, ideas, whatever I said he was going to achieve, but for this kind of emotional state that he generated in them. And it was a movement. They got caught up in it. It was like a religious revival rather than, you know, a kind of thought-out political thing. And this was something also I referred to George Orwell who was in Europe at the time. and was writing about Hitler's rise

and how he recognized that, what the German people wanted of him was not only sort of short of working hours or the trains to run on time or to weed out corruption or all that, but they wanted some kind of sense of meaning, some kind of larger sense, some sort of sense of heroism

and grandeur and glory. And while Orwell was very critical of that, he recognized that, well, those things are real, you know, human beings on top of all the rational things we need, like food and, you know, drink and shelter and all that. We have these emotional, for sake of a better word, hunger for our lives to be part of something that's meaningful. This was something that Hitler could tap into, and Mussolini did as well. And, you know, I guess to some degree you can say Trump is doing that. And Trump is doing that and has been doing that. There's television shows and through his books,

not straightforwardly politically, but more, I guess, in terms of your prosperity, you know, you can become rich too and so on and so on. But still, he's appealing to a certain kind of sense of meaning. And that's if I think, you know, when you have political pundits and thinkers who don't take that into consideration and somehow think that, you know, we should be free of all that stuff and we're supposed to have been free since the Enlightenment. And as long as they try to understand the appeal of something like national socialism or other kind of fascist visions in terms of economics or some other reasonable, calculable factor, they're not going to understand what's really at work. The book is Dark Star Rising, Magic and Power in the Age of Trump. It is out in the States in June. Gary Lockman, thank you so much for coming on War College. talk to us.

Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you. All right, listeners, thank you for bearing with us as we try some new things here on War College. Again, this is a bonus episode. Next week, we are going to be running something about military AI, much more in line with our normal topics. But we appreciate you indulging us.

Did you like the episode? Did you hate the episode? Do you want us to do more things like this or just stay the course? Drop us a line. Let us know at War underscore College on Twitter or via Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. You can also find us online at warcollege.com. As always, thank you for listening.