Rasputins are returning. Anne Applbaum - about how anti -talented mysticism went to the service of autocracy

A wave of conspiracy and mysticism, which overwhelmed the world in recent years, rises higher. Supporters of various theories of conspiracies, adherents of quasiligip and obscurantist ideas win the elections, win more and more attention and support of people and occupy more and more influential posts around the world. In an article written on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump, the historian and correspondent of Atlantic Anne Applbaum describes this new anxious reality, and also recalls one example from Russian history, which is very reminiscent of modernity. Since the text has not lost its relevance even after the 47th President of the United States, Mediazona publishes its translation.

The frozen pines surround the ice lake. Snow falls, music comes from the beauty salon. On the shore there is a gray -haired man with a kind face. He begins to undress. And he explains what will now enter the water in order to demonstrate his faith in God and distrust of science, technology and modernity as such. “I don't need a facebook; I do not need the Internet; I do not need anyone. Only my heart, ”he says. Swiming along the lake and as if not noticing the cold, he continues: “I believe in my immune system because I completely trust its creator, the Lord God. My immunity is part of my sovereign self. ”

This is Kalin Georgkeka, a man who shocked compatriots with a victory in the first round of the presidential election in Romania on November 24. Until that moment, he practically did not appear in election hundreds of polls, and carried out his campaign almost exclusively in Tiktok. This platform supposedly has strict rules that limit political content, but for some reason they did not work in the case of Georges. But the tactics that the influenters usually use were used to notice them by the algorithm.

In some videos, the Georgeka put on the background tender and melancholy piano music, urging people to “vote in their souls”. In others, galloping subtitles, sharp lights, fluorescent colors, electronic music, calls for the “revival of the nation” and the exposure of secret forces that are trying to harm the Romanians were going on.

“The order to destroy our jobs came from outside,” he says in one of the videos. In another, he talks about “subliminal messages” and “control of consciousness”, accompanying all this with images of hands pulling puppets behind the thread. In the months preceding the elections, these videos gained more than a million views.

It would also seem to be a meek follower of New Eaga praised Jon Antonescu, the Romanian military dictator, the Nazi ally, who was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. And the Antonescu, and the pre -war leader of the Iron Guard, the cruel anti -Semitic movement, called the Georgesca national heroes. He also met with Alexander Dugin twice, the Russian fascist ideologist who wrote in X (later the post was deleted) that "Romania will be part of Russia."

At the same time, the George is extoling the spiritual qualities of water. “We do not know what water is,” he says. “H₂o does not mean anything ... The water has a memory, and, polluting it, we destroy her soul ... The water is alive, and it sends us signals, but we do not know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips "penetrating into us like a laptop." His wife Kristel posts in YouTube a video on the topic of healing, reinforcing his theories with terms like “lymphatic acidosis” and “calcium metabolism”.

The Georgesian spouses promote the idea of ​​“peace”, more precisely, some ghostly version of his, according to which Romania, apparently, should stop helping Ukraine in the fight against Russian invaders. “The war cannot be defeated by war,” Kristel Georgkeka wrote on her Instagram a few weeks before the election. “The war destroys not only physically, it destroys the hearts.” Neither she nor her husband say a word that Romania threatens in the event of Russia's victory in Ukraine: neither a direct danger, nor about financial losses, nor about the crisis of refugees, nor about the inevitable political instability.

An important detail: Kalin Georgsy claimed that he had not spent a penny on his presidential campaign, but the Romanian authorities report that someone illegally paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the promotion of his videos, and that the Georgshka actively supported tens of thousands of fake accounts, part From which they imitated government agencies. In addition, hackers, presumably Russian, made 85 thousand cyber attacks on the Romanian voting system. On December 6, according to the results of the government investigation of “aggressive” Russian attacks and in the fact of violation of the electoral law, the Romanian Constitutional Court canceled the elections and annulled the results of the first round.

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This is a strange combination-nostalgia for the Iron Guard, Russian trolls plus some healing nonsense in the spirit of Gwyneth Paltrow-that she tells us about the George? Who are they really? How to classify them? And although the great desire to call them “ultra -right”, this terminology is outdated and does not describe so well that or who is meant.

The terms “right” and “left” came up with the time of the French Revolution, when to know, trying to preserve the status of a Quo, sat on the right side in the National Assembly of France, and revolutionaries, requiring democratic changes, sat on the left. These designations lost accuracy ten years ago, when some right, both in Europe and in the USA, began to advocate not for caution and conservatism, but for the destruction of the current democratic institutions. In their new form, the ultra -right rather resemble the former ultralery. And in some cases, both merge into a single whole.

When in 2017 I first wrote that we needed a new political terminology, it was difficult for me to figure out which one. But now the outlines of this modern popular political movement have become clearer, and it has nothing to do with the right or left. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose faith in the possibility of the existence of democratic states based on the leadership of the law, gave us both the American and French revolutions fought with what they themselves called obscurantism: with darkness, slurred, irrationality. The prophets of what we could now call new obscurantism offer this: magical means, aura of spirituality, superstition and cultivation of fear.

Among these prophets are healers and influents with political ambitions; fans of quasi-religious motion of Q-ANON and its pizzagate branches; Members of various political parties throughout Europe are pro -Russian anti -producers, which sometimes also preach mystical nationalism. The parallels can be traced in the most unexpected places. For example, both the left German politician Sarah Wagenknecht, and the Right Party of the Alternative for Germany sow doubts about the need to vaccinate and the existence of global warming, promote blood and soil nationalism and demand that Germany stop helping Ukraine. Throughout Central Europe, the charming of runes and folk magic merges both with right xenophobia and with left paganism. Spiritual leaders become political, and political figures are carried into occultism. Tucker Carlson, a former leader Fox News and an apologist for Russian aggression, said that he was attacked by a demon and left a “traces of claws” on his body.

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The new Obscurantism affected the highest political circles of the United States. Neither foreign nor American journalists and analysts can clearly describe the ideology of some future members of the Donald Trump administration, and this is not by chance.

Although Trump won the elections as a Republican, there is nothing traditionally “republican” as to offer Tulsey Gabbard for the post of head of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive democracy related to the institute of knowledge about identity, a sect, which was busted from the teachings of Krishna. Like Carlson, she admires both the brutal Russian dictator Putin and the recently overthrown Syrian dictator Assad, and more than once repeated their shameless lies.

There is also nothing “conservative” in Kasha Patel, whom Trump put forward to the directors of the FBI and who said that the current and former members of the government, including those who were part of the last Trump administration, would become the objects of his investigations. Completely in the spirit of new obscurantism, Patel promotes Warrior Essentials , a business built on the sale of antidotes from both Covid itself and anti -icing vaccines.

How can the follower of the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Bakli Jr. put to answer for the health care of the country of conspiracy the Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another fan of Putin, a former Democrat (moreover, a representative of the most famous democratic family of America) and the enemy of vaccinations and fluorine?

And certainly, not a single defender of “traditional” family values ​​would have proposed a man who was in prison as an ambassador to the United States in France for sending a prostitute to his sister’s husband to make a compromising video. Especially when you consider that this seat is the father of the president’s son -in -law.

Unlike conservatives, in the usual sense, these amazing people and their foreign colleagues profess a mixture of various ideologies, which began to form some time ago. Dietary supplements and non -state medicines from Covid are now rotating - and this is not by chance - in the circle of open supporters of Putin's Russia, especially those who mistakenly consider Putin the leader of the “white Christian world” (although in fact Russia is a multi -cultural, multinational and generally non -religious The country;

Admirers of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban-a shitty autocrat who brought his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, declining, but stuffing families and friends-united with the Americans who violated the law, sat in prison, robbed their own charity organizations And they harassed the women. And what is surprised here: in a world where the theories of conspiracy and invented medicines are popular, such concepts based on the idea of ​​evidence as wine and criminality quickly disappear.

Among the followers of this latest political movement are the poorest layers of American society. And among the patrons are the richest. George O'Neill-the youngest, the heir to Rockefellers and a member of the board in the magazine American Conservation , appeared in the Trump Mars-a-halast estate after the election; The same O'Neill, who had close relations with Maria Butina, a Russian spy deported in 2019, which was one of the sponsors of the Gabbard presidential campaign in 2020 and the Kennedy campaign in 2024. Ilon Musk, an inventor-billionaire, who used the algorithms of his social network X to raise posts with knowingly false information, also managed to find a place for his new government.

Are o'nil, mask and cryptocurrencies around Trump, only for the sake of money? Or maybe they themselves believe in conspiracy, sometimes anti-American ideas that they proclaim? It can be true both at the same time. Their sincere motivation or selfish - it does not matter. And it is important what influence they have not only on the United States, but also on the rest of the world. To good or worse, America always becomes an example that everyone else follows. Even simply announcing his intention to appoint Kennedy, Trump infects the world with skepticism in relation to children's vaccinations, and he will spread more and more, possibly along with the diseases themselves. And the epidemics, as we recently convinced, scare people and - as a result - make them even more fallen on the idea of ​​magical healing.

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The current situation is not unique to human history. When in the 16th century their power went to the bottom, the Venetians were carried away by magic and methods of instant enrichment. Mysticism and occultism covered the Russian Empire on the eve of its fall. Peasant sects believed in exotic teachings and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation and self-scasral. The Moscow and St. Petersburg aristocrats seized on Theosophy, the national team of the world religions created by Elena Blavatsky, who then brought its Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-neoplatonic teaching to the United States. The same feverish excited atmosphere that gave the move to these currents, led Rasputin, a peasant holy fool who assured that he had the gift of healing, to the royal palace. Convincing Empress Alexander that he would heal her son from hemophilia, Rasputin eventually became a king of the king.

Rasputin’s influence resulted in an even more powerful wave of hysteria. By the beginning of the First World War, many in Russia were sure that some “dark forces” secretly control the country. “For everyone, these forces were something of their own: Jews, Germans, Masons, Alexandra, Rasputin, cunning courtiers,” writes Douglas Smith, one of the biographers of Rasputin. “But they accepted on faith that these people are the true gentlemen of Russia.” Russian theosophies in all seriousness wrote about the "detrimental emanations", which poisoned Russia with its enemies.

Replace the words “dark forces” with “shadow government”, and how will this story differ from the current one? Like Russians in 1917, we live in the era of sharp, sometimes not recognized changes: economic, political, demographic, educational, social and, most importantly, informational ones. We also exist in eternal cacophony, where the warring right and left ideas of varying degrees of truthfulness are tirelessly carried through our screens. Traditional religions gradually degenerate. International institutions lose trust. Techno-optimism has changed to techno-Pessimism-fear that technology will enslave us with an indescribable and unknown way. And in the hands of new obscurantists - constantly reminiscent of the fear of the disease, atomic war, death - horror and anxiety become a dangerous weapon.

For Americans, the merger of pseudo-spirituality and politicians shows the removal from our most important principles: a good state rests on logic and meaning; The debates based on facts lead to the choice of the right policy; It is better to lead in the light; Rules and laws (and not mystical charisma) are an integral part of the political order. People who adhere to new obscurantism also trained the ideals of the founding fathers, each of whom considered himself a man of education. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker, but a scientist and fearless supporter of smallpox vaccinations. George Washington was adamant in the abolition of the monarchy, establishing restrictions for the executive branch and ensuring the rule of law. The later political leaders of the United States - Lincoln, Roosevelt, King - quoted the Constitution and its authors to reinforce their arguments.

Now, on the contrary, an increasingly influential international elite creates something completely different: a society in which superstition defeats the argument and logic, transparency disappears, and the villainous acts of politicians are covered with fog of nonsense and distracting maneuvers. There cannot be a system of checks and counterweights in a world where only charisma is important, there can be no dominance of the law in a world where emotions win the arguments - or there can only be a hole that anyone who will be convincingly telling terrible fairy tales will be filled.

Author: Anne Applebaum

Original: The New Rasputins . Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy Around the Globe. The Atlantic, 7 January 2025.

Translation: P.Sh.