The Izborsk Club was the intellectual hub of the new Russian nationalism. Its founder was fascist novelist Alexander Prokhanov, Vladimir Putin’s friend. The club was endorsed by Putin. Many of Russia’s fascist ideas grew out of that club. It was created in September 2012. Taking their lead from Ivan Ilyin, the club manifesto contained the claim that “actuality was a Western weapon against Russia.”  Or to put it another way: Truth is anti-Russian. 2 years later the little green men invaded Ukraine.

 The club believed that there was a deadly threat at the centre of Russia and this, of course, came from liberal values. This was part of the war of liberal values against traditional values and the fascists were on the side of tradition, just like their American conservative counterparts.  As Timothy Snyder explained in his book The Road to Unfreedom, they saw liberal values as

“the lethal ideological and transformational ‘machine’ that destroyed all the bases and values of the “White” Romanov empire and then destroyed all the foundations  of the “Red” Soviet empire. The result was chaos. The liberal machine was supported by social scientists, anthropologists, historians, economists, specialists in “chaos theory,” and importantly, “masters of information wars.”

In other words, they were as anti-intellectual as those conservatives in America so well described by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. With both American and Russian conservatives, anti-intellectualism paves the road to unfreedom. Or as Goya said, the sleep of reason brings forth monsters. The consequence of course, was the war on truth on both continents and both led by conservatives. As Timothy Snyder said,

“For the Eurasianists of the Izborsk Club, facts were the enemy, Ukraine was the enemy, and facts about Ukraine were the supreme enemy. An intellectual task of Izborsk Club was to produce narratives that transported any such facts toward oblivion. Indeed, the mission of the Izborsk Club was to serve as a barrier to factuality.”

Does that not sound exactly like the American Republican Party? Over and over again I am amazed at how Russian Christian Fascism is the twin of American Christian Fascism. In Russia it led to Ukraine. Where it will lead in the United States we can only speculate.